Ronnie (as everyone called him, though he would have preferred R.J.—R.J. sounded like someone cool, someone strong, someone others looked up to; “Ronnie”, on the other hand, was the name of a sometimes-friend you called whenever your #1 friends were busy and there was no one else to call, but we’re getting off the point, which is that Ronnie) couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been the odd one, the strange one, the one the other kids always whispered about and from whom they stayed far away unless it was absolutely necessary they interact with him, like for a school project or if the others in their clique felt like terrorizing or beating up on him.

Had any of them known about Ronnie’s special talent, his unspoken facility, his—and let’s call it what it was—his particular power, they might have been much nicer to him.

Try as he did, Ronnie could never figure out why he was able to do the things he could do. He didn’t ask for it, this...ability he was born with. Most of the time he didn’t even understand it, not really, because every time he felt as if he were getting a grasp on what exactly this ability, this facility, this power could and couldn’t do, it would reveal a new facet to him, and leave him twice as confused as before.

Ronnie was never one-hundred percent certain how he came to possess this power, but one night he heard his mother talking on the phone to one of her friends—this was on a night that Daddy was out at the bars with his friends from work—and Mommy mentioned something about how Daddy had hit her “as usual” while she was pregnant with Ronnie and she’d fallen down the short flight of stairs that led from the back porch to the patio in the backyard. “I thought for sure I was going to lose the baby,” she said to her friend. “I landed right on my stomach. The other kids came running to help me, and all of them were so scared…”

Ronnie was the youngest of five children, the one who had to make do with hand-me-down clothes and toys, but he didn’t mind, not really. The only thing that he minded, the only thing that bored him to tears, were the trips he and Mommy had to make to the doctor four times a year. The doctor would make Ronnie take all these tests (Match the Wooden Shapes to the Proper Holes; What Does This Blotch on the Paper Look Like?; Name the Animal; Can You Recognize This Word?) and then ask him all sorts of questions about school and what he watched on television and could he add two and two and what about subtraction…geez, it was dumb; but Mommy seemed to feel better after these boring visits—well, if not better, exactly, then no worse, and that made Ronnie happy because he loved his Mommy.

Daddy…not so much. Daddy was greedy with his affection but generous with his fists, at least as far as Ronnie was concerned. The other kids, well, Daddy was real nice to them; but Ronnie, Ronnie he didn’t like, and after a few drinks never hesitated to tell him. “Never wanted you,” he’d say; “You were a fuckin mistake,” he’d say; “Damn, you little half-ree-tard, I wish you’d never been born,” he’d say. Ronnie learned to ignore it—especially after he discovered his special power.