The morning of the exam I limped to the testing center and sat in the drafty
hall. The test was in front of me. The problems were compliant, pliable; they
yielded to my manipulations, forming into solutions, one after the other. I
handed in my answer sheet, then stood in the frigid hallway, staring up at the
screen that would display my score. When it appeared, I blinked, and blinked
again. One hundred. A perfect score.
I was filled with an exquisite numbness. I felt drunk with it and wanted to
shout at the world: Here’s the proof: nothing touches me.
Buck’s Peak looked the way it always did at Christmas—a snowy spire,
adorned with evergreens—and my eyes, increasingly accustomed to brick
and concrete, were nearly blinded by the scale and clarity of it.
Richard was in the forklift as I drove up the hill, moving a stack of purlins
for the shop Dad was building in Franklin, near town. Richard was twenty-
two, and one of the smartest people I knew, but he lacked a high school
diploma. As I passed him in the drive, it occurred to me that he’d probably be
driving that forklift for the rest of his life.
I’d been home for only a few minutes when Tyler called. “I’m just
checking in,” he said. “To see if Richard is studying for the ACT.”
“He’s gonna take it?”
“I don’t know,” Tyler said. “Maybe. Dad and I have been working on
him.”
“Dad?”
Tyler laughed. “Yeah, Dad. He wants Richard to go to college.”
I thought Tyler was joking until an hour later when we sat down to dinner.
We’d only just started eating when Dad, his mouth full of potatoes, said,
“Richard, I’ll give you next week off, paid, if you’ll use it to study them
books.”
I waited for an explanation. It was not long in coming. “Richard is a
genius,” Dad told me a moment later, winking. “He’s five times smarter than
that Einstein was. He can disprove all them socialist theories and godless
speculations. He’s gonna get down there and blow up the whole damn
system.”
Dad continued with his raptures, oblivious to the effect he was having on
his listeners. Shawn slumped on a bench, his back against the wall, his face
tilted toward the floor. To look at him was to imagine a man cut from stone,
so heavy did he seem, so void of motion. Richard was the miracle son, the