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better-brain half would put its hand over the lesser half’s mouth, and I’d say my watch was broken. Or I’d wear some numberless, handless, spinning-faced gadget on which no one with human eyes could tell time. The lies we construct to defend ourselves from humiliation are the strongest, refusing to be torn down. To this day, I’ve never met a clock that works properly. I think there’s something faulty with the way they make the hands these days. Something in the screws, maybe. But who needs a watch when you have a cell phone? Problem solved.
    By age twelve, I started wearing a bracelet on my left wrist so I could look down and associate it with that direction. At the age of sixteen, I discovered it would take me twice as long as my peers to drive anywhere. No matter what part of town I happened to find myself in, I was swinging past my house between destinations to reorient myself. The good news was that my visual memory became stronger. I could tell you what you wore two weeks ago. I could memorize the internal organs of a fetal pig. I could sketch the contents of my locker in accurate detail—I just couldn’t find it.
    Flunking more of my classes than not, I was placed in an all-grade after-school program called The Learning Center. Which was purposefully veiled in a maze of confusion by the school’s architects. “Center,” I will say, was totally misleading. Perpetually late, I usually found that the only seats available were next to a mute paraplegic girl whose hair was done in bows, or the prematurely sexualized kid who told our teacher he’d like to “bone the fuck” out of her. Each week I sat next to the girl and read for an hour, handing her colored pencils and waiting for someone to ask me if I needed help with my homework. I declined. I didn’t want to look stupid in front of the other kids.
    Around this time, a couple of teachers broached the possibility of my taking my SATs orally. Throughout high school, they had slyly allowed me to circle my answers on the tests themselves, forgoing the Scantron sheet. Being a teenager is hard enough without having people look over at your exam paper to see an insane pattern of misplaced carbon dots in the margins. You know who else does that? Disaffected psychopaths in laced boots and trench coats.
    But the SATs were bigger than high school. They plugged you into the rest of the nation. They ingrained a sense of patriotism that the chin-ups on the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge had failed to do. In suburban New York, your life began in earnest once you took the SATs. They were the first determining factor for the next four years, a canary into the mines of your future. A dead canary, and you were looking at a nail-polish-merchandising degree from Pump My Stomach State. So, the nightmare of having to think out loud in the midst of all that pressure, to change your mind, to search someone else’s face for signs of your rightness ... It was too much. Instead, I sat with my mother in the same spot where she had once found me stacking blocks, and we devised a plan. I would write each answer on a Post-it note. Then I would unstick the note from the test, stick it to the answer sheet, and reread it while I made the correct mark. Not permitted to bring outside materials into the exam room, I padded my bra with Post-it notes. The proctors were accustomed to no end of odd teenage behavior. They said nothing when I periodically scratched my strangely square breasts.
    This worked well enough to get me into college. But it couldn’t work every day. I was living in the movie Labyrinth, but without the evil-puppet factor. I have never outgrown that feeling of constant disorientation. Rather, the feeling has followed me around like a homing device.
    I finally came to terms with this when I was returning home from college the Thanksgiving of my freshman year. My father and I stopped off at a sprawling Connecticut market with curving aisles and outdoor spaces and