they had unwittingly made themselves the butt of the joke, or so Teddy’s father maintained. Particularly hard to convince were the school’s athletes, who naturally identified with Brom Bones, who was strong and good-looking, cocky and cunning and dim-witted, and he ended up with the prettiest girl in town, just as they themselves did with the cheerleaders. Where was the satire in that? To them, the story was about natural selection. Even if it had been satirical, Teddy’s father—ridiculous-looking man that he was—was the wrong messenger. He deserved, the jocks believed, a fate not unlike Ichabod Crane’s.
Teddy’s mother was also tall and loose limbed and bony, and when she and her husband stood together, they were often mistaken for brother and sister, sometimes for twins. Her most pronounced feature was an exaggerated sternum that she was forever tapping, as if heartburn were her constant, chronic companion. Witnessing this, people often leaned away from her, lest whatever she was attempting to tamp down suddenly erupt. Worse than any of this, for Teddy, was that his parents appeared to see each other much as the world did, though Teddy’s very existence hinted that there must’ve been a time when this was not true. All too aware they were physically ungifted, they seemed to take whatever solace they could from their superior sensibilities, their ability to articulate with wonderful disdain their various strong opinions, alas the exact talent that had doomed poor Ichabod Crane.
From an early age Teddy sensed how different he was from other kids and accepted his lonely lot in life without complaint. “They don’t like you because you’re smart,” his parents explained, though he hadn’t told them that he was disliked, only that he felt odd, as if some kind of instructional handbook on boyhood had been distributed to all the other boys. Because he so often ended up getting hurt when he tried to act like one of them, he mostly stayed safely at home and read books, which pleased his parents, who were disinclined to chase after him or even to wonder where he might be. “He loves to read,” they always remarked to other parents, who marveled at Teddy’s straight A’s. Did he love to read? Teddy wasn’t sure. His parents were proud not to own a television, so in the absence of companions, what else was there to do? Sure, he preferred reading to spraining his ankles and breaking his fingers, but that hardly made reading a passion. His mother and father looked forward to the day when they could retire from teaching and grading papers and do nothing except read, whereas Teddy kept hoping that some new activity would present itself that would be enjoyable without resulting in injury. Until then, sure, he’d read.
His freshman year of high school, a strange thing happened: an unexpected growth spurt by which he shot up several inches and put on thirty pounds. Overnight, he was half a head taller, with far-broader shoulders, than his father. Even more astonishing, he discovered himself to be a fluid, graceful basketball player. By junior year he could dunk the ball—the only boy on the team who could—and he had a fadeaway jumper that at his height was virtually impossible to block. He made the varsity squad and was the leading scorer until word got around that he didn’t like to mix it up. When shoved, Teddy would back off, and a well-placed elbow to the ribs discouraged him from entering the paint, where, as a forward, he was told he belonged. All of this made his coach so livid he even derided as cowardly Teddy’s fadeaway jumper, which the team depended on for anywhere from twelve to fifteen points a game. “You have to bang with them,” he’d yell when Teddy hung around at the top of the key, waiting patiently for his shot. “Be a man, you damn sissy.” When Teddy still showed little inclination to bang, the coach tasked one of Teddy’s teammates to play him aggressively in practice in the hopes of toughening him up. Nelson was a head shorter but built like a tank, and he derived great satisfaction from sending Teddy sprawling when he knifed through the lane on designed plays. When Teddy complained that Nelson was fouling him, the coach snapped, “Foul him back!” Of course Teddy refused.
Indeed, Nelson so enjoyed his hardball duties that he also took to putting a shoulder into Teddy’s ribs in the corridors between classes, knocking him into