“No, John, I’m not talking about avoiding self-pity. I’m talking about denying what’s going on in your life. The problem with denial is its finite… At some point you run out of it. Usually, by then, whatever you’re denying is bigger than you are.” She paused briefly and smiled at him. “I almost had what some people call a nervous breakdown when I found myself trying to juggle two tiny little boys,” she said quietly. “Two five-pounders…counting on me. I couldn’t give them a good life because I had no idea what a good life was. I didn’t even know what good was. So Jess came to L.A. to help me, and I went to a counselor—a wonderful counselor who helps kids with abnormally high IQs adapt socially. I was her first twenty-eight-year-old kid.”

John was quiet, and she wondered if he was able to understand, fully understand, the significance their relationship had held for her. But apparently he wasn’t. “I guess I never thought of your life as hard. I guess I never thought of you as not smart enough to know what to do.”

She chewed her lip a little. She should do a scholarly paper on this. She had felt—had been—a misfit. She never learned the eighth-grade boy-girl dynamic, because when other thirteen-year-old girls were finding out how to flirt, she was taking Physics II at the university as part of the gifted program. When other girls were crying because they didn’t get asked to the prom, Leigh was crying because she hadn’t been admitted to a master’s program to which she had applied. One of the neighbor girls flunked her driving test; Leigh lost out on a major grant. When she got her first period her classmate, a twenty-year-old coed who was wearing an IUD, told her to “Stay cool, doll face, and just pin this little puppy in your panties like so, and pretty soon you’ll graduate to tampons…”

“Ever have a friend face you with his envy?” she asked John. “With real hot jealousy? Like when you win a medal skiing, and you complain a little because your muscles hurt, your bank account is dried up, your best girl left you because she wasn’t getting enough attention while you trained, and you’re exhausted. I mean, you worked so hard for it! And the friend says something like, ‘Yeah, yeah, cry me a river…didja win or not?’…”