Here I devote myself to the pursuit of a sort of aggressive normality—the result of that awful, lonely sixth-grade year, and my mother’s warning, my own sense of difference, and the advent of junior high, with its overwhelmingly social culture, its new emphasis on submerging individual life in the culture of the group. I don’t know how to be a normal kid, and since I am attempting to accomplish something I have absolutely no idea how to do, the result is simply nervousness, a constant sense of tension. I cannot relax into the sort of unself-consciousness that conveys normality: I must monitor my gestures, my appearance, my voice. And so I have achieved a sort of identity as a smart, nerdy boy, my movements as stiff as my hair, which I lacquer into place each day before school with my mother’s Aqua Net.

I obviously cannot be a Jock like Roger Woods and his blond friend Mike, who make fun of me on the bus ride home; I don’t know the rules, am uncoordinated, and have in essence detached my head from my body, that unreliable source of grief and trouble. I cannot be a Regular Guy like Ed Fernandez, who is distinguished by being a boy everyone likes, the result of his easy attitude of acceptance. (One day in PE we’re playing flag football, which I loathe; the rules are mysterious, and involve wearing a little strip of cloth attached to your shorts, which others try to pull off. We divide into two teams, Shirts and Skins; I am horrified that I am a skin, and I refuse to strip; I will not be seen by these boys. Ed Fernandez, who’s also pudgy, and also sprouting hair like me, is the only boy who doesn’t mock me. He says, “Hey, I’m fat too, it’s okay,” but I am too stiff and afraid to be grateful for his sanity.)

Of the available categories I choose Brain. I favor cardigan sweaters in argyle, and plaid shirts buttoned all the way to the collar, and am twice voted Most Likely to Succeed. My social studies report, an account of an imaginary journey to Europe, becomes a huge, overblown affair, involving hundreds of pictures cut from old National Geographics, and a narrative of almost obsessive tediousness describing the sights I’ve seen, its text like a fantastic, repetitive, and pointless novel written by a lunatic. I’ve typed it carefully, using the skills I’ve learned from a book I bought, Touch Typing in Ten Easy Lessons.