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Hester shrugged. “We’ll see,” she said. I had not kissed her since Easter. In my summer visit to Sawyer Depot, we had been outdoors every waking minute and there’d been no suggestion to play “Last One Through the House Has to Kiss Hester.” I doubted we’d get to play that game over Thanksgiving, either, because my grandmother did not allow racing all over the house at 80 Front Street. So maybe I’ll have to wait until Christmas, I thought.

“Maybe your friend would like to kiss Hester,” Simon said.

“I decide who kisses me,” Hester said.

“Whoa!” Noah said.

“I think Owen will be a little timid around all of you,” I ventured.

“You’re saying he wouldn’t like to kiss me?” Hester asked.

“I’m just saying he might be a little shy—around all of you,” I said.

“You like kissing me,” Hester said.

“I don’t,” I lied.

“You do,” she said.

“Whoa!” said Noah.

“There’s no stopping Hester the Molester!” Simon said.

“Shut up!” Hester said.

And so the stage was set for Owen Meany.

That day after Thanksgiving, my cousins and I were making so much noise up in the attic that we didn’t hear Owen Meany creep up the attic stairs and open the trapdoor. I can imagine what Owen was thinking; he was probably waiting to be noticed so that he wouldn’t have to announce himself—so that the very first thing my cousins would know about him wouldn’t be that voice. On the other hand, the sight of how small and peculiar he was might have been an equal shock to my cousins. Owen must have been weighing these two ways of introducing himself: whether to speak up, which was always startling, or whether to wait until one of them saw him, which might be more than startling. Owen told me later that he just stood by the trapdoor—which he had closed loudly, on purpose, hoping that the door would get our attention. But we didn’t notice the trapdoor.

Simon had been pumping the foot pedals of the sewing machine so vigorously that the needle and bobbin were a blur of activity, and Noah had managed to shove Hester’s arm too close to the plunging needle and thread, so that the sleeve of Hester’s blouse had been stitched to the piece of sample cloth she’d been sewing, and it was necessary for her to take her blouse off—in order to free herself from the machine, which Simon, insanely, refused to stop pedaling. While Owen was watching us, Noah was whacking Simon about his ears, to make him stop with the foot pedals, and Hester was standing in her T-shirt, tensed and flushed, wailing about her only white blouse, from which she was trying to extract a very random pattern of purple thread. And I was saying that if we didn’t stop making such a racket, we could expect a ferocious lecture from Grandmother—regarding the resale value of her antique sewing machine.

All this time, Owen Meany was standing by the trapdoor, observing us—alternately getting up the nerve to introduce himself, and deciding to bolt for home before any of us noticed that he was there. At that moment, my cousins must have seemed even worse than his worst dreams about them. It was shocking how Simon loved to be beaten; I never saw a boy whose best defense against the beating routinely administered by an older brother was to adore being beaten. Just as much as he loved to roll down mountains and to be flung off sawdust piles and to ski so wildly that he struck glancing blows to trees, Simon thrived under a hail of Noah’s punches. It was almost always necessary for Noah to draw blood before Simon would beg for mercy—and if blood was drawn, somehow Simon had won; the shame was Noah’s then. Now Simon appeared committed to pedaling the sewing machine into destruction—both hands gripping the tabletop, his eyes squinted shut against Noah’s pounding fists, his knees pumping as furiously as if he were pedaling a bicycle in too-low a gear down a steep hill. The savagery with which Noah hit his brother could easily have misled any visitor regarding Noah’s truly relaxed disposition and steadily noble character; Noah had learned that striking his brother was a workout requiring patience, deliberation, and strategy—it was no good giving Simon a bloody nose in a hurry; better to hit him where it hurt, but where he didn’t bleed easily; better to wear him down.

But I suspect that Hester must have impressed Owen Meany most of all. In her T-shirt, there was little doubt that she would one day have an impressive bosom; its early blossoming was as apparent as her manly biceps. And the way she tore the thread out of her damaged blouse with her teeth—snarling and cursing in the process, as if she were eating her blouse—must have demonstrated to Owen the full potential of Hester’s dangerous mouth; at that moment, her basic rapaciousness was quite generously displayed.

Naturally, my pleas regarding the inevitable, grandmotherly reprimand were not only unheeded; they went as unnoticed as Owen Meany, who stood with his hands clasped behind his back, the sun from the attic skylight shining through his protrusive ears, which were a glowing pink—the sunlight so bright that the tiny veins and blood vessels in his ears appeared to be illuminated from within. The powerful morning sun struck Owen’s head from above, and from a little behind him, so that the light itself seemed to be presenting him. In exasperation with my unresponsive cousins, I looked up from the sewing machine and saw Owen standing there. With his hands clasped behind his back, he looked as armless as Watahantowet, and in that blaze of sunlight he looked like a gnome plucked fresh from a fire, with his ears still aflame. I drew in my breath, and Hester—with her raging mouth full of purple thread—looked up at that instant and saw Owen, too. She screamed.

“I didn’t think he was human,” she told me later. And from that moment of his introduction to my cousins, I would frequently consider the issue of exactly how human Owen Meany was; there is no doubt that, in the dazzling configurations of the sun that poured through the attic skylight, he looked like a descending angel—a tiny but fiery god, sent to adjudicate the errors of our ways.

When Hester screamed, she frightened Owen so much that he screamed back at her—and when Owen screamed, my cousins were not only introduced to his rare voice; their movements were suddenly arrested. Except for the hairs on the backs of their necks, they froze—as they would if they’d heard a cat being slowly run over by a car. And from deep in a distant part of the great house, my grandmother spoke out: “Merciful Heavens, it’s that boy again!”

I was trying to catch my breath, to say, “This is my best friend, the one I told you about,” because I had never seen my cousins gape at anyone with such open mouths—and, in Hester’s case, a mouth from which spilled much purple thread—but Owen was quicker.

“WELL, IT SEEMS I HAVE INTERRUPTED WHATEVER GAME THAT WAS YOU WERE PLAYING,” Owen said. “MY NAME IS OWEN MEANY AND I’M YOUR COUSIN’S BEST FRIEND. PERHAPS HE’S TOLD YOU ALL ABOUT ME. I’VE CERTAINLY HEARD ALL ABOUT YOU. YOU MUST BE NOAH, THE OLDEST,” Owen said; he held out his hand to Noah, who shook it mutely. “AND OF COURSE YOU’RE SIMON, THE NEXT OLDEST—BUT YOU’RE JUST AS BIG AND EVEN A LITTLE WILDER THAN YOUR BROTHER. HELLO, SIMON,” Owen said, holding out his hand to Simon, who was panting and sweating from his furious journey on the sewing machine, but who quickly took Owen’s hand and shook it. “AND OF COURSE YOU’RE HESTER,” Owen said, his eyes averted. “I’VE HEARD A LOT ABOUT YOU, AND YOU’RE JUST AS PRETTY AS I EXPECTED.”

“Thank you,” Hester mumbled, pulling thread out of her mouth, tucking her T-shirt into her blue jeans.

My cousins stared at him, and I feared the worst; but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar—you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace. My cousins were both small-towners and outsiders; they had not grown up with Owen Meany, who was so strange to them that he inspired awe—yet they were no more likely to fall upon him, or to devise ways to torture him, than it was likely for a herd of cattle to attack a cat. And in addition to the brightness of the sun that shone upon him, Owen’s face was blood-red—throbbing, I presumed, from his riding his bike into town; for a late November bike ride down Maiden Hill, given the prevailing wind off the Squamscott, was bitter cold. And even before Thanksgiving, the weather had been cold enough to freeze the freshwater part of the river; there was black ice all the way from Gravesend to Kensington Corners.

“WELL, I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT WHAT WE COULD DO,” Owen announced, and my unruly cousins gave him their complete attention. “THE RIVER IS FROZEN, SO THE SKATING IS VERY GOOD, AND I KNOW YOU ENJOY VERY ACTIVE THINGS LIKE THAT—THAT YOU ENJOY THINGS LIKE SPEED AND DANGER AND COLD WEATHER. SO SKATING IS ONE IDEA,” he said, “AND EVEN THOUGH THE RIVER IS FROZEN, I’M SURE THERE ARE CRACKS SOMEWHERE, AND EVEN PLACES WHERE THERE ARE HOLES OF OPEN WATER—I FELL IN ONE LAST YEAR. I’M NOT SUCH A GOOD SKATER, BUT I’D BE HAPPY TO GO WITH YOU, EVEN THOUGH I’M GETTING OVER A COLD, SO I SUPPOSE I SHOULDN’T BE OUTSIDE FOR LONG PERIODS OF TIME IN THIS WEATHER.”

“No!” Hester said. “If you’re getting over a cold, you should stay inside. We should play indoors. We don’t have to go skating. We go skating all the time.”

“Yes!” Noah agreed. “We should do something indoors, if Ow

en’s got a cold.”

“Indoors is best!” Simon said. “Owen should get over his cold.” Perhaps my cousins were all relieved to hear that Owen was “getting over a cold” because they thought this might partially explain the hypnotic awfulness of Owen’s voice; I could have told them that Owen’s voice was uninfluenced by his having a cold—and his “getting over a cold” was news to me—but I was so relieved to see my cousins behaving respectfully that I had no desire to undermine Owen’s effect on them.