When I was 15 I arrived home from school to find the police waiting there.
Someone had broken into our house.

The police were interviewing my Aunt and my Dad. They asked us to take an inventory of the house and let them know what was missing.

Downstairs they found a bag with a broken watch and junk jewelry from my grandfather’s dresser that had been left behind. My father was missing his baseball cap and an XL jean jacket. Next to my father’s ’41 Chevrolet, parked on the hillside in the backyard, the police found a pair of work gloves.

In my room there was a dollar missing that I had left under a small salt and flour mold of my handprint as a child. I had just done my laundry but I had left a lilac bra in the basket. It was gone. I walked down the hall and asked my aunt if she was missing any bras. She went back to her room to check. She was missing two.

Later the police found the man sitting at the college, a half-mile from our house, wearing my father’s hat and jacket. He was over six feet tall and mentally disabled.

Two weeks later, I was home alone after school when I heard someone come into the house. I said, “hello” as I walked down the hallway just in time to see a shadow disappear out the front door.

We had to start locking our doors.

That was the subject line in an email I received today. I couldn’t find the results from that IQ test, but apparently I’d taken one in 2005 that yielded a score of 129 earned me the title of Visual Mathematician. The email goaded me with “Think you’ve gotten smarter in the past year? Take the test again.” I followed the link and took the Super IQ Test. It’s been three years since my last test, this time I yielded a score of 147 and earned my new title of Intuitive Investigator.

If I truly am this smart, why do I keep misspelling the same words? Why do books like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow fill me with a sense of dread? Why can’t do math in my head or spell words out loud? Why do I accidentally call people with my butt?

I told my dad that I was working at a metal shop and he said “Call Pratt and tell them you want your money back.” Pratt is the art school I went to where I majored in painting.

I was grinding all day and not the good kind. Kim says, “I like it because it’s like going to the gym.” My response, “Who goes to the gym for nine and a half hours?”

I spent an entire day at a drill press imagining I was Bjork in Dancer in the Dark. Later, when I got home, I pulled five metal spurs out of the bottom of my foot. Apparently tucking you pants into your boots is an amateur mistake.

Kim calls the project manager B.D.A., Big Dumb Asshole.