Maybe she would wait tables.

Roch was different. He never had any ambitions that Amelie could figure out. When he was real little he would follow her around as singlemindedly as a duckling; she would tow him down St. Catherine’s Street on sunny summer days, buy Cokes and hot dogs and spend the afternoon watching the Types from the steps of Christ Church Cathedral.

Roch had needed the company. He never had friends. He took a long time learning to talk and he wasn’t reading with any facility until he was in fifth grade. Roch, it turned out, was slow. Not stupid—Amelie made this important distinction—just slow. When Roch learned something, he hung on to it fiercely. But he took his time. And in that school, in that place, taking your time was a bad thing. It made you look stupid. Not clever-stupid or sullen-stupid or anything dignified; it made you look dog-dumb, especially if you were also small and ugly and fat. Amelie had been bruised a few times defending Roch in the schoolyard. And that was when she bothered to stand up for him. A thirteen-year-old girl sometimes doesn’t want to know when her idiot brother is catching flack. She thought of him that way, too—her idiot brother—at least sometimes.

But Rochwasn’t stupid, Amelie knew, and he learned a lot.

He learned not to trust anybody. He learned that you could do what you wanted, if you were big enough and strong enough.

And he learned to get mad. He had a real talent for getting mad. Pointlessly, agonizingly mad; skin-tearing mad; going home and vomiting mad.

And then, eventually, he learned something else: he learned that if you grow up a little bit, and put on some muscle, then you can inspire fear in other people—and oh, what an intoxicating discovery that must have been.