Usually the waves kind of hypnotize me, one crash-landing after another—so do the shorebirds that zigzag like little gray robots near the waterline. Today, I just stare out to sea. Horizon knife-sharp. You can see why they used to believe you could fall off the edge.

The gulls are screaming Floyd’s name.

The reason I can’t get away from him is because he’s taken up residence. Birds of a feather, that’s Floyd and me.

Fidgety as the surf, keeping my shirt on so my bruises won’t frighten the tourists, I help Cassie build a sand castle decorated with dried seaweed and clamshells. Kendra used to take the older kids to the beach on sunny days in summer, all of us linked together by a fat yellow rope we clutched in our left hands. She’d build big towers of sand with a walled track around the outside so you could roll a ball from the peak to the moat, where it would plop into the water. I loved doing that.

Cassie’s happy with the castle we’ve built. Then I notice two of the Donovans, Lucas and his younger brother Samson, flying a kite near the dunes.

If I could rip that kite out of their hands, send it sailing over the ocean—or, better still, plunging into the waves, struts broken, string tangled—I’d feel better.

My anxiety would plunge along with the kite.

An acronym drops into my mind neat as can be. AQ. Anxiety Quotient. My brain runs with it.

ASSIGNMENT 1: draw a graph.

Horizontal Axis: number of days since Floyd laid into me

Vertical Axis: AQ

Result: straight line angled upward at 45°.

ASSIGNMENT 2: correlate AQ with bullying.

Result: 0 bullying until AQ hits the mid-range (unless there's a golden opportunity, such opportunity often related to Glenn Semple), and then 1 or 2 episodes ASAP.

Keep It Simple, Stupid. Pressure builds as I wait for Floyd to make his move. Bullying lets off pressure. Save graph paper. Be good to the environment.

The beach comes back into focus. Don’t know why it took me so long to figure all this out; my IQ’s well up the scale for a guy from the backwoods, and I’ve always been good at math. Too bad my AQ’s high as well. Still, Anxiety Quotient sounds classier than Fear Quotient.

Poor Brick, he’s feeling anxious today ... Maybe all I’m doing is making excuses for being a bully. And if the thought of turning into Floyd terrifies me more than Floyd himself, then I should be ignoring the Donovans’ kite.