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hand for a while.

3
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    I WAS ON FIRM GROUND . The nights were calm, and those crazy flashes disappeared, and the end of the world was a fantasy. Things were fine.
    All through seventh and eighth grades, that most vulnerable time in a kid’s life, I carved out a comfortable slot for myself at the dead center of the Bell-Shaped Curve. I wore blue jeans and sneakers. I played shortstop for the Rural Electric Association Little League team; I batted a smooth .270—not great, but respectable. I was popular. People liked me. At school I pulled down solid grades, A’s and B’s, mostly B’s, which was exactly how I wanted it. I devoted long hours to the practice of a normal smile, a normal posture, a normal way of walking and talking. God knows, I worked at it. During the autumn of my freshman year, I hiked down to the junior high every Thursday night for dancing lessons—fox-trot and tango, the whole ballroom routine. I went out on hayrides with the Methodist Youth Fellowship. It didn’t matter that I hated hayrides, or that I wasn’t a Methodist, it was a question of locking in with the small-town conventions, hugging the happy medium.
    So what went wrong?
    Genetics, probably. Or a malfunction somewhere in the internal dynamics.
    The problem was this: I didn’t
fit
.
    It’s a hard thing to explain, but for some reason I felt different from all the others. Like an alien, sort of, an outsider. I couldn’t open up. I couldn’t tell jokes or clown around or slide gracefully into the usual banter and horseplay. At times I wondered if those midnight flashes hadn’t short-circuited the wiring that connected me to the rest of the world. I wasn’t shy, just skittish and tense; very tight inside; I couldn’t deal with girls; I avoided crowds; I had trouble figuring out when to laugh and where to put my hands and how to make simple conversations.
    I did have problems, obviously, but they weren’t the kind a shrink can solve. That’s the key point. They were
real
problems.
    I gave up dancing lessons.
    I also gave up hayrides and MYF.
    By the time I reached high school, 1960 or so, I’d turned into something of a loner. A tough skin, almost a shell. I steered clear of parties and pep rallies and all the rah-rah stuff. I zipped myself into a nice cozy cocoon, a private world, and that’s where I lived. Like a hermit: William Cowling, the Lone Ranger. On the surface it might’ve looked unwholesome, but I honestly preferred it that way. I was above it all. A little arrogant, a little belligerent. I despised the whole corrupt high school system: the phys-ed teachers, the jocks, the endless pranks and gossip, the teasing, the tight little self-serving cliques. Everything. Top to bottom—real hate.
    And who needed it?
    Who needed homecoming?
    Who needed cheerleaders and football and proms and giggly-ass majorettes?
    Who needed friends?
    I was well adjusted, actually, in a screwed-up sort of way. During the summers I’d hike up into the mountains above town, all alone, no tension or tightness, just enjoying the immense solitude of those purply cliffs and canyons, exploring, poking around, collecting chunks of quartz and feldspar and granite. I felt an affinity for rocks. They were safe; they never gave me any lip. In the evenings, locked in my bedroom, I’d spend hours polishing a single slice of mica, shaving away the imperfections, rubbing the tips ofmy fingers across those smooth, oily surfaces. There was something reassuring about it, just me and the elements.
    My parents, of course, didn’t see it that way.
    “Look,” my dad said one evening, “rocks are fine, but what about people? You can’t
talk
to rocks. Human contact, William, it’s important.” He stood nervously for a moment, jingling the loose change in his pockets. “Thing is, you seem cut off from the world. Maybe I’m way off base but I get the feeling that you’re—I don’t know. Unhappy.”
    I smiled at him. “No,” I said,