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Read the opening pages of The Show Outside.

Call me a gimpy six-foot-seven-inch one-armed orphan, although there must be a better word than orphan for someone who’s killed both his parents. Now, seven years after the accident, I own and run a foster home for three developmentally disabled residents, one of them my 21-year-old sister Zooey. Four adults living under one roof, each of us damaged in one way or another. The house itself—two stories, big gray front porch—was built almost a century ago on a quarter-acre lot just west of the Oregon State University campus, where it rises beneath the limbs of a huge black walnut tree, a popular hangout for the shifting constellations of squirrels and crows.

Today is the first Friday of spring and, despite the early hour, I already feel my anxiety creeping upward, not only because Roland Duffy and Thora McCracken are still arguing, but because in just over an hour I'll be conducting my first interview. Meanwhile, the old dishwasher’s still broken, so I'm once again washing the breakfast dishes by hand. I scrub a syrupy plate, trying, at the same time to keep it wedged in a corner, my thumb serving as a brace so the plate won't clunk around while I work the sponge. It clunks around anyway. Scrapes and clatters against the cracked bottom of the porcelain sink. Doing even a small load of dishes with one hand is a hassle. Same could be said, or worse, for a thousand other everyday tasks, like peeling and slicing an onion, or tying shoelaces. Or a necktie. Although the last time I actually wore a tie was almost seven years ago, when I still had two good arms and hands. Even then, I needed help tying the damn thing. Sportswriters around the state had voted me “Oregon Prep Athlete of the Year,” so, for the ceremony up in Portland, I wanted to look more duded up than usual: herringbone jacket, once-washed jeans, new Carolina-blue silk tie. Same color I knew I’d be wearing across the continent in a few months as a Tar Heel freshman hoopster. That afternoon, on the front porch, just before the four of us left for Portland, my father tied a perfect Windsor knot for me, patted it twice. “There!” he said. “And a free tie-tying lesson when we get home. Unless you’re planning to wear clip-ons the rest of your life.”

I rinse the last plate, set it in the dishwasher to drip dry, hunching over the sink so I can peer through the window into our backyard. My sister Zooey is out there as usual, zip-locked into her rain gear and sprawled bellyside-down in the crabgrass and weeds with a plastic container of unshelled peanuts at her side and five crows strutting about her. A sixth is perched on the back thigh of her rain pants, a seventh on the shoulder of her waterproof jacket. I rap at the glass, and the two crows playing passenger hop off of her with a lift of their big wings and join the others. Most of them squawking their annoyance, all edge and smack and bluster, like a gang of black-jacketed teens out of some old 50’s flick. The crow guys, Zooey calls them.

Now that I've gotten her attention with my window-banging, she twists to look back at me from beneath the brim of her rain hat. I flash a thumb's up, and she returns the gesture, grinning and wet-cheeked, blonde hair fanned out wet and crinkled over her shoulder blades and across her back. But even from here I see the scar running, strap-like, down her cheek and under her chin, feel that same old impulse to cover it up. Smooth and glossy as a polished sea shell, the scar always appears to be raw, almost moist, like something that should remain private, hidden by her hair for the sake of everyone’s comfort.

Zooey reaches for her plastic container. She pries off the lid, digs out a handful of peanuts, and, speaking to the crows as though they were her good pals, extends a cupped palm.

Meanwhile, at the far corner of the house in the small den where they play their video games, Roland Duffy and Thora McCracken are still squabbling. Only now, predictably, Thora's voice is growing more threatening, steadily amping up to boom mode, to cannon volume. "Come on you stupid Puff Duffy! You better get your damned bums in gear, right now, or we’ll miss it!"

I jerk open the small drawer beneath the kitchen countertop, grab a couple of T3's from the pill bottle stashed at the back—cap always off for easy access—slap them into my mouth, then wash them down with a cupped handful of water from the faucet, hoping to dull the nagging pain in my phantom arm. Actually, it’s my phantom hand that’s hurting now. It moves whenever I move, and I usually know its precise location. At the moment, it's hovering in front of my stomach, thumb straining to one side. How do you relax an appendage that isn’t there? You gulp codeine, two 30 milligram tabs, three times daily, PRN. The initials stand for three Latin words I can never remember. I know they’re supposed to mean “as needed”; but, for me, what PRN means is needed or not. Whatever it takes to stay ahead of my pain and forestall the next attack.

I’m aware, all at once, of an unsettling silence, followed by the sound of Thora’s big work boots clomping down the hallway. Shoving the codeine drawer shut with my hip, I turn in time to see her barreling right at me, metal lunch box clanging at her side, an untied lace whipping and snapping about the ankle of her boot. She comes to a halt maybe three feet from me, points back down the hall, then snarls, "You better do something about that stupid Puff Duffy! Because he isn't half as righteous as he thinks he is, or so high and mighty either."

Want to find out what happens next?

Continue Will's story in The Show Outside