Katherine (Excerpt 2)

Katherine Corrigan preferred to be called Bootsy. God only knows why. She made this explicitly clear when when we first met. I had just arrived from Korea with my adoptive parents, and they were introducing me to my new siblings: their other adopted son, Jason (12, from China), and their biological children, Paul (6), Gary (8), Anthony (11), fraternal twins Stella and Jessica (12), Michael (14), and Katherine -- sorry, Bootsy (16). I understood no English, but when Bootsy flicked my forehead hard, tapped her clavicle with her index finger and said, "Me, Bootsy," I got the point.

My new mother let out an exasperated sigh. My father said nothing. This, I would learn, was nothing new from Bootsy.

The house was big, but even so I had to share a room with Paul and Gary. Paul and I slept in a bunk bed, me on top. Gary, as seniority rules dictated, had a single bed against the opposite wall. Bootsy was the only one of us kids who had her own room, and it was right next to ours. I often heard her singing off key to a cassette tape of Indian music.

To say that Bootsy was eccentric would be an understatement. I was convinced -- hell, sometimes I still am -- that she was not of this planet. Her clothes were always mismatched. A pair of lime-green socks clashed with violet jogging pants; an oversized Hawaiian shirt covered her denim shorts so that she appeared to be nude from the waist down save for a pair of tan velvet boots. Her hair was always messy, and she dyed it every color in the spectrum. She had piercings seemingly everywhere on her body but her ears, and she applied makeup like Jackson Pollock painted.

I found it curious that our conservative -- puritanical, some might say -- parents put up with Bootsy's odd appearance and even odder behavior. I think they let it slide because Bootsy's style never rubbed off on the rest of us. My father only once reprimanded her for her outfit, and that was because Bootsy had liberated a polyester dress shirt from the back of his closet and cut off the sleeves with a pair of scissors. Other than that, Bootsy was pretty much left to her own devices.