In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D’Amato Read Free Book Online

horrible—deprived of mainstream TV and video games, they’d relax by torturing small animals—but of course the parents thought they were God’s chosen cherubs.

Needless to say, I never converted to the LDS. Or got “helped to understand,” as they put it. That is, made to realize that one had been a Latter-Day Saint all along. According to the program they weren’t supposed to do that to you until you were a little bit older, and by then I was beginning to realize that baptizing your long-dead ancestors and laying on hands and wearing Masonic long johns wasn’t entirely normal behavior, even in El Norte. They even took me to a Catholic church once or twice, but it didn’t have the right smell or the right saints in it or offering bottles all over the floor, like in Guatemala, so I said don’t bother. They were cool enough about it, in their way. In fact I still call Ma and Pa Ø every once in a while, even though I can’t bear them. When I ask about my stepbrothers they’ve always each just sired another brace of twins. What with the combination of ideology and fertility drugs down there, they multiply like brine shrimp.

As an alternative to becoming a living saint, I got steered onto the extracurricular-activities track. I started with the Chess Team and the Monopoly Team. The folks at Nephi K-12 forced me to play the cello, the orchestra’s most humiliating instrument. I wasn’t good. I thought music was math dumbed down. I hid in the library a lot, taking mental pictures of dictionary pages for later retrieval. I learned to read English by memorizing H. P. Love-craft, and now people say I talk that way. I politely refused to bob for apples at the school Halloween party—well, actually I dashed crying out of the multipurpose room—because I thought I was about to get waterboarded. I got involved with the Programming Team, the Computer Games Team, and the Strategy Games Team. You’d think that someone on that many teams would have had to talk with the other students, but I didn’t. Most of the time I got to stay out of real PE because of the hæmo thing. Instead they made me and the other cripples sit on mats and pretend to stretch and lift weights. The only sport I was ever really good at was target shooting. The family were all gun nuts and I went along with it. I joined the Math Team, even though I thought it was silly to think of math as a team sport. It’s like having a masturbation team. One time my math coach gave me a stack of topology quizzes and was surprised that I aced them. He and another teacher tested me a bit and said I was a calendrical savant and that I calculated each date at the time, unlike some who memorized them, although I could have just told them that myself. It’s not really a marketable skill, though. It’s something about one in ten thousand people can do, like being able to lick your own genitals. Around that same time I got involved with the Tropical Fish Team. I built my first few tank systems out of garden hoses and old Tupperware. I decided that when I grew up I’d be a professional chess player. I wore my skateboard helmet on the bus. I decided that when I grew up I’d be a professional Sonic the Hedgehog player. I appeared, as “J,” in a study in Medical Hypotheses called “Hyper-numeric Savant Skills in Juvenile PTS Patients.” I decided that instead of learning to play the cello, I’d learn to build cellos. I listened to the Cocteau Twins instead of Mötley Crüe. I made my first thousand buying and selling Magic cards. I acquired a hillbilly nickname. I did Ecstasy alone.

New treatments got my hæmophilia under control, but in the meantime I’d been diagnosed as having “posttraumatic-stress-disorder-related emotional-development issues,” along with “sporadic eidetic memory.” Supposedly PTSD can present like Asperger’s. But I wasn’t autistic in all the usual ways, like for instance, I liked learning new languages and I didn’t mind