He hung motionless in the water. “Ghastek isn’t my real name. I grew up in Massachusetts, near Andover. I was smart and poor. Not crushingly poor. I’ve known children who were poorer. Poverty is when your parents get home from the first job and hurry up to eat their mac and cheese, because in five hours they have to get up for their second job and they want to catch some sleep. We weren’t quite that poor. We had food. We owned a house. I saw both of my parents at the dinner table at the same time.

“In eighth grade, there was a science tournament between the local schools. The local private preparatory academy was participating, primarily to demonstrate the vast superiority of its education over the public system. I won. The academy gave me a scholarship. I remember how happy my parents were for me. It was a Yale feeder school and they thought I now had a future. So the next school year, I started at the prep school. It was a forty-five-minute drive and every day my father would take me there in his work van. My father repaired gas lines. The van had a logo on it, written in large yellow letters: GasTek. The name of the company. Nobody was interested in learning my name. I became that Gastek kid, then Gastek, and then one of the class clowns thought it would be hilarious to slip an h in there. Ghastek. A not-so-subtle association with ‘ghastly.’ Ghastek or sometimes simply ‘the Creep.’ By the end of the year even the teachers didn’t call me by my name.”

I could hear the old bitterness in his voice. He’d come to terms with it, and it no longer hurt, but it was still there.

“I realized in that first year that I would never be accepted. It was understood by all that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how I brilliant I was, the best I could hope for was to work for one of my dumber classmates when we grew up. They would be the owners. I would be an employee. You see, it’s not enough to be smart. If you’re handsome or a good athlete, they might grant you some degree of acceptance, because adolescents are shallow. You might become a trophy for one of them, if you let yourself be used, but I was neither. Being rich would open the door a crack, but they would never let you in the whole way. They’ll spend your money and laugh at you behind your back. I’ve seen it. You see, money, brains, looks, none of it is enough. There is this thing called legacy. It wasn’t just about where you went to school or who with. It was about where your grandfather went to school and who his best friends were.”

“I take it the school wasn’t your favorite place.”