Nathan Nathaniels was strange.

He'd always been strange. The day he was born he came out laughing. He didn't learn to speak until he was three, but he could sing at 6 months old. He always had a more than healthy curiosity, and he was in love with life. You could find noone quite as eccentric and free as Nathan was. Nathan was strange.

This never caused much distress in his parents. When he left to mold the dirt in his backyard into utensils, and then came back in to freeze them so he could arrange them into an art display, they merely encouraged his creativity. This was an intense phase of Nathan's at the age of four. And he was superb at making forks.

Then Nathan's parents had another child. At age five, when Nathan had just mastered advanced techniques using radians and trigonometry, Maybel was born. Nathan wrote her two novels, but he decided perhaps the dog would enjoy to read them instead. So, he glued dog food to the pages for incentive and arranged them atop a carefully arranged stack of newspapers so they looked like a German Shepherd. Ditzy, the very small but very energetic fox terrier, took the German Shepherd as a threat and proceeded to tear him into very small and very eatable pieces. Suffice to say, Maybel never got her novels.

However, Maybel would not have been able to have read the novel anyway. For every ounce of special and strange Nathan was, Maybel was every ounce normal. Perfectly and completely normal. She was not that creative, not that bright, not that pretty. She was as plain as paper, inside and out. At first Nathan attempted to install into her his passion and joy, but she simply did not take. She would much rather smoosh smashed peas in her bowl and make very silly sounds to indicate when she needed to potty. Nathan got very bored with her very fast.

As Nathan grew he became the smartest, most handsome boy around. Proportionately, he also became the strangest, albeit most creative, and weirdest boy anyone had ever encountered. Nathan did not make any friends. But this did not bother him one bit.

Maybel, Nathan's five year junior, on the other hand, just grew more normal. She had many, many friends. But Nathan was never jealous of her for this, just as she was not jealous of him for his many skills.

Nathan and Maybel did not talk to one another much, Nathan and Maybel never played together, Nathan and Maybel did not like the same foods. When Ditzy, the very small but very energetic fox terrier, passed, Nathan built her a shrine out of tree bark, nickels, and a very peculiar paste of which he refused to say anything about. Maybel just cried a little and bought a hamster. In her memory Nathan held a ceremonial dinner, where everyone was forced to eat while lying on their sides and could only use butter knives. Out of respect, of course. Maybel just put daisies on Ditzy's grave. Both had good intentions, but very very different minds. Nathan dreamt of running to the moon on a pathway built of paper. Maybel dreamt of becoming a dental assistant. Yet Mom and Dad loved them both equally and wholly.