of them with pimply chins and wet lips and hair as lank as seaweed—you cannot see any triumph in him at all. He seems clearly to have lost, to be lost, to be a loser; because anybody knows that in the challenge you were given when you skipped a grade, social success—modest social success, to be sure, but still—was half the battle. When Frederica Beattie invites you to join her birthday party—a sail on her father’s boat, with six other girls, two of whom are from the most popular set—you feel pity for Josh, who will never taste such nectar.
But wait: nobody ever pointed out that Josh, in his obliviousness, was utterly happy. He’d already taught himself the quadratic formula; he wouldn’t be stymied in any area of academic advancement. In fact, he would go on to MIT and eventually become a neurobiologist with a lab largely funded by the NIH and a vast budget at his disposal. He would marry a perfectly attractive, if rather knock-kneed, woman and spawn several knock-kneed, bespectacled nerds, replicas of himself. It will all work out more than fine for him, and he will never for a second suspect that it could have been otherwise. He will not know there was a social test; he will not know that he failed it. No, a sail on Frederica Beattie’s father’s boat was an honor that he dreamed not of; and his yen for society, such as it was, was perfectly satisfied by his old clan, now a year behind him. He could no more have fashioned a mask than flown to the moon; and so he remained who he was forevermore. Femininity as masquerade, indeed.
It was in high school that I decided—or, as I would have had it, that I realized—that I would become an artist. Having discovered a set of sympathetic friends who reveled, precisely, in our not-grown-up-ness, a handful of girls and boys who liked to jump in puddles during downpours, or gather on the playground at dusk, as much to swing on the swings as to smoke pot behind the cupola, I found that our group loitered increasingly in the art room after school, with the head art teacher’s tacit blessing. He was a stocky fellow in knee-high hunting boots and leather jerkins, with luxuriant shoulder-length locks and a pointy red goatee: he looked like a refugee from a community theater Shakespeare production, and his name, most wonderfully, was Dominic Crace.
Although the premises were officially closed, he left out supplies for us, cupboards unlocked, paints and brushes by the sink, and even, sometimes, on the worktable, the key for the darkroom. It was within its red gloom that, as an anxious junior, I suffered my first real kiss, a wet-tongued clinch with a senior named Alf, whose many-zippered leather jacket was the most splendid thing about him. I’d long thought him cool, but he proved—it was a surprise to realize this was possible—as awkward as I was, the upshot of which was that the kiss was neither repeated nor ever again mentioned. Our friendship, such as it was—something along the lines of extended family—remained unchanged; it was simply as if the kiss had never happened; and at times, afterward, I’d wonder whether it had.
Thinking ourselves subversive, pining for the decades of adventure that we had, in our belated births, so narrowly missed, we stayed in the room until nightfall and painted posters and slogans on large sheets of construction paper, and taped them up around the hallways. REVOLT, they read, in bursts of primary color, and SHUN COMPLACENCY, and DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR SOUL IS?, and FIGHT MONEY! KISS AN ANARCHIST!
If Dominic Crace was on our side, the janitors were, ironically, in a useful revolutionary lesson, the enemy: they roamed the halls at night charged with tearing down our unauthorized posters before the next morning’s assembly. Our game was to post the best ones in corners where the janitors wouldn’t find them, or not, at least, until they’d been widely appreciated. We thrilled to paint them, thrilled to hang them, thrilled, the next day, to scout for the survivors: LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF, with the cerulean blue outline of a couple embracing, lasted three days on the inside of the back door to the biology lab; THEY F—— YOU UP, YOUR MUM AND DAD, which was, as a quotation, a contribution from my mother, made it a whole week inside the cupboard door in the gym where the basketballs were