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particularly witty or clever, which it often wasn’t.
    He shared an easy rapport with them that I could never quite muster. My parents, I knew, were mostly befuddled by my studied seriousness. How, I wanted to know, did anyone ever come up with the big bang theory to begin with? Where exactly was East Timor, and why were people there so angry? “Was the milkman a Nobel laureate?” my father often joked to my mother. My mother tried to turn every conversation back to things like why didn’t I grow my hair out or get my ears pierced. “Madame Librarian,” Danny oftensaid when I tried to start dinner table conversation, making my parents chuckle. And I would chuckle too. There was something soft in such jibes, as if he were poking me only as hard as he poked himself.
    But then the summer after his ninth grade we moved to Fairfield and he grew three inches and his voice dropped and he spent every day in his room lifting weights and panting through a series of ever-increasing sets of sit-ups and push-ups. The boxes weren’t even unpacked, and an unending stench of warm sweat wafted from his room. He drank powdery energy shakes for breakfast. He had three servings of whatever we ate for dinner. Dad was proud, talking to him about what to bench safely, when to use the help of a spotter. Mom was nervous but relieved; you could see it in her face, the searching way she would stare at him across the table, trying to figure out who this man-boy was. I would catch her smiling at him when he wasn’t looking. Danny started running a mile, then two, then three a day. He swam laps at the community pool.
    Mom and Dad set him up with a tutor, who came over three nights a week and Saturdays too, sitting at our kitchen table and trying to make Danny’s tongue wrap around words like
intriguing
and
thoroughfare
and
physiology.
Danny would press his fist to his temples and stomp his feet against the floor. Afterward he would stand in the doorway of my bedroom and tell me how lucky I was not to need a tutor. “The dude’s mouth smells like dog crap,” he’d say, “and he sits like one inch from me.” He would come up to me then, imitating his tutor, sticking his face right in my face and breathing heavily onto my nose, and I would laugh. “You so
smaht,”
he’d say in a fake Chinese accent, pulling the corners of his eyes back. “You so
rucky
cuz you so
smaht,
Rydia.” I would laugh and laugh, more than the comments merited. Those were long, lonely months. I was twelve and scared, in a new town, friendless. My parents were evenfurther away and fuzzier than usual, preoccupied by the wallpaper that had to come down from the bathroom and the ivy to be pulled from the yard. Danny was what I had.
    By the end of summer, he’d made a deal with my parents: he’d do ninth grade over if they’d take him out of special ed. My parents agreed. So by the time he started Franklin, he was big and new and full of the pent-up, vengeful charisma of someone who’d had to fight his way to it. The football coach took him as a late walk-on even though he’d missed summer practices, and his first girlfriend, the catlike and breathy Hindy Newman, followed shortly after. His dumbness hardly mattered anymore; it was muted by his repetition of ninth grade and, more important, almost expected of a standout athlete, which he quickly became, attacking opponents with praise-worthy viciousness.
    My entrance into the seventh grade made barely a blip, save for the girl in science who complained to the teacher that she wanted to be lab partners with one of her friends instead of “that new girl” and the three boys in PE who took to imitating the way I ran, their legs splaying out at their sides as if in need of stabilizing braces. Each night Danny would come home late after practice, sweeping past me up into his sweaty, dank room as if I were a museum piece, a relic of a forgotten era. One night after a particularly bruising day—no one would sit with me at