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we should have sued National Lampoon’s Vacation for later copying, only to have her say in her creaky voice, “Y’all are just as fat as hogs!” She meant we looked well. Or at least well fed.
    No, I think Martha was just socially rusty. She was as much of a misfit as I was in that moment.
    As for my eerie intelligence, I later stopped reliably getting As and by high school had very solid but unspectacular grades. I don’t think I even made the Honor Society.
    And as an adult, when I took a test for Mensa, I did not receive an invite.
    But I’m not an idiot, and I’m smart enough to wonder if my mother pulled strings with her old classmate to get me into that gifted class. If so, it led to a wealth of stimulating experiences and it gave me reason to believe I had something that not everyone else had: a major shot in the arm for a kid who felt tractor-sized inadequacy in other areas.
    Did I mention my mother’s I.Q. was once tested when she was a secretary at G.M. and is significantly higher than what mine reportedly is?
    Chocolate is her favorite, too.

Being considered smart wasn’t going to be enough to truly distinguish myself since there were plenty of other eggheads in my subdivision—some of them even had the glasses to prove it—so I embarked on a new campaign for any kind of notoriety that would supersede my status as an object visible from space: I would become a literary wunderkind.
    I started by telling everyone I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, a goal that replaced my previously arbitrarily selected goal of optometry. I might actually be able to retire someday had I stuck to my guns and become an eye doctor but, ironically, I was blinded by the prospect of being as famous as Jane Austen or Edgar Allan Poe without looking too deeply into their unglamorous finances and failure to hit their mid-forties.
    To back up my goal of writing professionally, I began watching bad movies on TV and tried to copy their style in humorous script form. This didn’t work out too well when my mom and her sister came across one of my manuscripts, which had a scene in which a black butler (I saw Scatman Crothers in the part, but I would’ve left it to the casting director) giving his employer the finger. My mom was embarrassed and made me promise to stop writing R-rated things.
    Anyone’s mom might’ve felt that writing about giving someone the finger was too raw for a kid, but I literally got away with murder in my two most famous short stories from the era, broadly funny yet psychologically suspect tales for which I would have been expelled 10 times over if I were in school now.
    Case in point: In 1981, I wrote a short story with my pal Dan entitled “Murder In Room 304”. Our cool, creative teacher Mrs. Urnovitz—one of three Jewish people I was aware of in Springview, up from one at Elms—was on maternity leave, and we were torturing our fun substitute, Mrs. Plunkett, who had a slight weight problem and a husband with brain damage from a motorcycle accident. We knew this because Dan and I were inquisitive and because Mrs. Plunkett had a propensity to see precocious seventh-graders as a captive audience.
    The gist of the story we created was that someone was murdering our classmates and Dan and I—as characters in our own story—had to solve the mystery.
    The story is nonsense, very much like “Nancy Drew” trying to solve Friday the 13th , but the killings are brutal and graphically described:
    “Matt flips on the lights to see the gored face and body of their missing classmate, Lori Harris.”
    I liked Lori, but maybe the story was an odd way of working out aggression against my more popular peers, who might not have been aware that I was struggling internally with a major secret as well as with my more apparent external battle of the bulge. Popularette Pam Lingo didn’t fare much better:
    “‘I’m sorry…she’s dead,’ exclaimed the doctor solemnly. All of the onlookers, including Pam’s