Autumn Street by Lois Lowry

sniffed. I didn't know what a psychiatrist was, but Grandmother's sniff indicated that it was something tasteless, something in the same category as Baptists, comic books, or lipstick.
    "And the psychiatrist told her," Mama went on, "that the reason Noah is having so many problems is partly because of being a twin, and partly because of the father leaving."
    "Hugo Hoffman was German," said Grandmother meaningfully.
    "Yes, well, that may be. But it must be very difficult for a little boy to have an identical twin brother, and no other male relatives around."
    "The father simply disappeared, at the beginning of the war," said Grandmother. "He was German."
    "I believe he was second generation," said Grandfather quietly from the blue wing chair, "and that there was, ah, another woman involved."
    "German is German," said Grandmother. And sniffed again.
    I told Jessica later what I had heard Mama say. She raised her eyebrows briefly. "I'm not going to play with them anyway," Jess said. "I don't like boys. And especially I don't like Noah."
    "Are you scared of him?"
    "A seven-year-old? Of course not. I just don't like him."
    I was afraid of Noah. So was Charles, though he said he wasn't. But Charles and I had watched Noah kill the cat.
    Noah and Nathaniel looked spookily alike: tall for their age, thin, and blond. But it was easy to tell them apart. Noah never looked at you. His eyes darted back and forth. And he was never still. He moved constantly, tapping his feet, fluttering his fingers. He fell, and never cried; he broke things, and didn't care. He caused bad things to happen.
    I had been in their yard one day in the spring when Noah smashed a rotten log with his fist. It crumbled, revealing swarms of lethargic yellow jackets. Dislodged, they began to hum and move. Some flew toward Noah and attached themselves to his jacket and pants. He ran to the back porch, and called his mother, and Mrs. Hoffman quickly pulled off his clothes and took him inside.
    But he was unstung. I could hear through the open window that he was playing in his room.
    And on the porch, slowly, the yellow jackets came out of his discarded clothes. Nathaniel had been sitting there all along, by the wicker chairs, playing quietly with a train he had made from oatmeal boxes; suddenly he looked up, startled, and began to cry. The bees were on his face.
    The next day Noah announced, in an odd, triumphant fashion, "Look at my brother." Nathaniel's eyes were swollen closed, and he looked like the stretched face on a squeezed balloon. Even distorted as he was, he still looked gentle and puzzled, as always, while Noah taunted and jeered.
    Later, when it was warmer and we could leave our jackets at home, I saw Nathaniel's scar for the first time. It was like a vaccination on his lower arm: perfectly round, deep pink, and formed of concentric circles, smaller and smaller until the center of the scar was just a pink dot.
    "Noah did it," Nathaniel told me, in his soft, questioning voice, when I asked what it was. "He held the cigarette lighter from the car on my arm."
    So there was good reason to be frightened of Noah, even before he killed the cat.
    I didn't go through the hedge into their yard any more by late spring. Nathaniel's scar scared me; but more than that, Noah had begun to seem more and more malevolent as the weather became warmer. If
he saw me at the hedge, where I sometimes stood, lonely in Grandfather's yard, he lunged at me without warning, using his mother's clothespole as a lance. Behind him, Mrs. Hoffman's wash would fall and drag ignobly on the hard brown grass.
    But Charles and I were accomplished at hiding. We watched the Hoffman boys often from hidden places in the hedge or along the fence. We saw Noah one evening after supper, alone in his yard, tease the cat, Pixie, until she playfully leapt into his lap. Then we watched as he carefully twisted her neck with his small hands until she was limp. He left her there by his wagon when his mother