is a passage between earth and sky. Elm isn’t a great firewood, but it burns without too much persuasion. All his botched words turn perfect and vanish into the general black—first tree, then passage, then earth, then sky.
The science fair judges cure Adam Appich of any desire to keep a field notebook on anything at all. He outgrows ants. He puts the Golden Guides by the curb. The secret museum treasures hidden from his mother’s vacuum cleaner he now gladly trashes. Childish things.
High school is four dark years in the bunker. He’s not without friends or fun. In fact, there’s a surplus of both. Nights getting smashed and skinny-dipping in the reservoir above town. Entire weekends in basements pitching dice and arguing over esoteric role-playing rules with obese, anemic boy-men who tote suitcases full of collectible trading cards. The game’s monsters are like natural history gone wrong. Giant bugs. Killer trees. The point of the game is to extinguish them all.
“Testosterone,” his father explains. He’s now afraid of the hulking boy, and Adam knows it. “Storms of hormones, and no port in sight.”
Though Adam wants to hurt the man, his father is not wrong. There are girls, but they baffle him. They pretend to be stupid, by way of protective coloration. Passive, still, and cryptic. They say the opposite of what they mean, to test if you can see through them. Which they want. Then resent when you do.
He organizes raids on the neighboring high school, intricate nighttime operations involving miles of toilet paper tossed up in the branches of lindens. The strips dangle for months like giant white flowers. He passes under them on his mountain bike, feeling like a genius guerrilla artist.
He and a friend map the school, the supermarket, the branch bank. They plan what kind of hardware they’d need to make a heist. The plans get elaborate. They price weapons, just for grins. It’s a game for Adam: logistics, planning, resource management. For his friend, it’s one step away from religion. Adam watches the precarious boy, fascinated. A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel—root and stem—in great U-turns until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.
HE GROWS GOOD at figuring the absolute minimum work required to pass any class. No adult gets anything from him but what he’s required to give. The plummeting report cards baffle his mother. “What’s going on, Adam? You’re better than that!” But her voice is flat and defeated. Jean sees him going down. She scolds, jokes, and pleads. But then she heads to college, in Colorado. There’s no one left to make him answer for himself.
Leigh never comes back. Adam’s father’s search tapers off to nothing. His mother starts nursing quantities of codeine. Soon enough, she’s on a circuit of drugstores across many towns. She stops cooking and cleaning house. Adam’s lifestyle isn’t impacted. He adapts and evolves. Survival of those who survive.
A JOKE OFFER from a friend—Three bucks if you do my algebra—and he finds himself with easy pocket money. So easy, in fact, that he starts to advertise. Assignments completed in any subject except foreign languages, at any desired quality, as fast as you need them. It takes a while to find the right price point, but when he does, the clients fall in line. He experiments with volume discounts and pay-ahead plans. Soon he’s the proprietor of a successful small business. His parents are relieved to see him doing homework again, for hours each night. They love that he stops bugging them for cash. It’s like win-win-win. Morning in America, with the free market doing its thing, and Adam goes to bed each night thankful to have been born into an entrepreneurial culture.
He’s quick and conscientious. Every assignment is ready by deadline. Soon he has built the most reliable and respected cheating franchise at Harding High. The business makes him almost popular. He socks away most of the cash. There’s nothing he can spend it on that gives him more pleasure than looking at the balance accumulating in his passbook savings account and calculating dollars per duped educator.
Demanding work does requires sacrifice, however. He’s forced to learn all kinds of interesting things that shouldn’t interest him.
EARLY IN THE FALL of senior year, Adam’s in the public library cranking out a psychology paper for a classmate who understands the bipedal beast even less than he does. Cite at least two books.