Stephen was the smartest kid in his class, always, and the strangest. He was a nerd with a high nasal voice, and fine black hair floating above his scalp, long gibbon-y arms that were always in the air, the left one resting on its elbow, propping up the right one, during the lengthy period that the teacher stared around at the other students, waiting.

“I don’t want another answer from Stephen,” she would say to them ten times a day, and he’d reluctantly put the arm down. After another ten times, though, she’d have to give up, because even with the bar lowered, her students would stare at her, waiting for her to call on the Jew and get it over with.

In a precise and scathing voice she’d address Stephen without looking at him. “I guess you’re going to have to help us out.”

With that, he’d deliver the answer in an offhand staccato style.

Walking home at the end of the day, he was routinely attacked and pummeled by all manner of schoolchildren. His own classmates, weighty midwestern kids, thuggy older boys, giant girls with red fists. He had two semi-friends, wispy kids nobody else liked, who would whale on him as well, just for the sake of it, twisting his arms, kicking him in the shinbones, pulling on his thin foamy hair until he was flailing and grunting. But even as this was occurring—as they stormed him, as he helplessly tried to push and pinch his way out of it—the real Stephen was curled like a fetus inside the sheath of his body, waiting to be delivered.

“I don’t know how to help you,” his mother responded. “I suspect there’s nothing to be done.”

“But your own kid is being attacked!”

“You’re better than they are, Stephen,” she said firmly. “And that should be of some comfort to you.”

“How would you like somebody making fun of something about you?” he said under his breath.

“What do they make fun of?” she asked.

He remained silent for a moment, then spilled it. “My proboscis,” he said. She tilted her head back and looked at him steadily, the way she stared down at the toddlers while palpating their abdomens.

“Ignore them,” she said finally.

They had a Dutch au pair when they first moved to Champaign, an unhappy ruddy-cheeked dental student who once fell down the stairs with the vacuum cleaner, arriving at the bottom with the wind knocked completely out of her. Stephen saw it all, the struggle to get the heavy machine down the stairs, the uncooperative hose smacking her in the face as she lugged the canister along, the simultaneous tangling of the cord and barking of the ankle, the missed tread, the cartwheeling of girl and machine, the two distinct thuds—her and then the vacuum on top of her.