Diesel chuckled ruefully. “No, but he gave it his best effort. He sent me to an all-boy Catholic school. But it wasn’t what you think,” he added when Michael blanched. “There may have been bad priests at the school and the parish, but I never knew any. After the doctor, the priests were like a vacation. I got decent grades. As and Bs without cracking a book. They’d tell me that I could be so successful if I’d just apply myself.”

“I get that, too,” Michael said glumly.

“Well, they were right about me, even though I hate to admit it. I didn’t get serious about school until I’d almost graduated. I was a high school senior.”

“What changed?”

Diesel smiled. “My chemistry teacher changed everything. His name was Father Walter Dyson. At the beginning of the school year, he thought I was a thug. I’d hit my growth spurt the year before and was huge. My grandfather would complain about me going through shoes like sticks of gum, which was fair.”

“Just because you were big didn’t mean you were a thug,” Michael protested.

“It was because I acted up in his class. I wasn’t nice. I didn’t even know why. I was a thug, outside of school. When I got some size, I stomped on some of the kids who’d bullied me when I first moved to my grandfather’s. I’m still not sorry for that. They deserved to be stomped. But I got carried away and made some unfortunate friends. I have no doubt that I would have ended up in jail, because every single one of those guys did—a few of them for murder. Father Dyson saved my life.”

Michael was leaning forward, into the story now. “What did he do?”

“He sat me down one day and asked me why I hated him so much. I didn’t know what to say. He said he’d talked to my other teachers and they said that I didn’t make trouble in their classes. And then he asked for my forgiveness. He didn’t know what he’d done, but he was sorry for it. No one had ever asked for my forgiveness before. He said that he didn’t want my future to be messed up because I got a bad grade in his class or I got expelled for ‘thuggery.’” Diesel finger-spelled the word. “I’d never heard the word before or since.” He smiled at the memory. “I didn’t know how to react, but I was . . . hyper inside. I was always hyper inside when I was in his class. Nobody else’s. But Father Dyson was pretty smart. He could read chemical formulas and people. He stood up and took off his white lab coat, balled it up, and put it in a drawer, out of sight. Immediately, I calmed down.”

“The white coat?” Michael asked. “Why?”