But they’re grown up now, like the rest of us, and their weird ideas have grown up too. Young Jem is an enlightened pessimist (her term). She’s been contemplating existence all her life and she has concluded that our species is toast. It was when she first tried to learn Spanish that this train of thought started chugging. She noticed that a tool like a broom or a saw could be used in “the” correct manner or in “an” incorrect way. Hmm, she thought. One correct path and an infinite number incorrect? Soon after she cracked us up by stating that there are an uncountable number of nonsequiturs to any statement but only one or few sequiturs. And then she was exposed to the concept of entropy. From her perspective, riding as she described it a planet that was racing away from its neighbors, sitting in a frantically expanding universe, she embraced the inevitable tide of disorganization. Jem has concluded that there are so many more wrong choices than right ones that it is statistically impossible for people as a group to choose the wise path.

Jude is worse, in a way. She’s negative too, but some folks accuse her of blasphemy along with heresy. What grabbed her about science, when she was 12, was DNA and photosynthesis and evolution. She learned the rungs-and-ladder components of genetic material, committed to memory the formula for converting oxygen, water and energy to sugar and CO2, and embraced the game theory of natural selection. She was bowled over by the elegance. Jude even built a learning “computer” out of matchboxes and jujubes. This was for our puny science fair, in eighth grade. She played tic-tac-toe with the boxes and, whenever they lost, she removed a candy from the box that made the losing move, which decreased the box’s ability to make that move. Within a couple of dozen games, the boxes couldn’t lose. The simple system of only letting the winner play the next round resulted in progress that looked exactly like learning, like intelligent design.

That was all okay. She won an Honorable Mention at the fair and would have taken a ribbon if she’d had a flashier display. But what got to rankling Jude was the type of winner that the evolutionary system favored. There is no payoff for wisdom or restraint or consideration. The slash-and-burn hero is the money-making children-producing prevailer. That’s the subject Jude wants to throw in God’s face. Nice system, Deity, but have you really thought this through? Hers is not a popular attitude, even among us peers.

Jane’s weirdness has become darkly humorous. She has chronic mouth disease. No one else in the family has had oral experiences like hers. When she first saw a dentist she was five. She had eight cavities. She refused the needle and endured the drilling and nerve exposure with clenched neck and tight fists. Forever after, the smell of hot tooth enamel has turned her stomach.

Her situation didn’t improve with age. Although she was scrupulous about brushing and even started flossing by seven, she continued to develop holes in her teeth that required packs of amalgam. She got over her novocaine aversion and accepted the needle after two years, but she has never relaxed in the chair.

By 11 she had fillings in most of her molars. She also had all of her molars, including the eruptions of (non-impacted) wisdom teeth. Again, strange. Her dentist even whispered the word “abnormal” at that exam. And he told Jane and her mother that the only ways to take care of the gap between her upper front teeth were surgery or orthodonture. They opted for a snip.

The dentist cut the ligament that ran between her front teeth. That didn’t hurt, but the shot of novocaine up into the front of the roof of her mouth was excruciating. If pain could be compared between others, Jane would know that that shot hurt more than delivering twins would pain Jude.

For months after the procedure, Jane followed the dentist’s instructions; whenever she was alone reading or otherwise quietly occupied, she’d use her fingers to push her front teeth toward each other. The gap disappeared within a year.