THE SUMMER ROAD from Atlanta to Bloomington was green and humid; promise and pressure were chased from the car by air conditioning. Sitting in the back of their Pontiac Grand Am, Timothy flicked at the pocket behind the driver’s seat, the atlas nestled inside it, as road signs marking miles, Waffle Houses, and KOA campgrounds rushed by. The distance between humiliation and redemption was 516 miles, a full day of driving. Timothy wasn’t allowed pen or paper to entertain himself, only the coming year’s math, English, and history textbooks. (His parents wanted him to be ahead of the other kids at his new school.) Every forty-five miles, his father quizzed him on the rules of their new home.

“When someone asks you why we moved, what do you say?”

“My parents are teaching at the university,” Timothy said, his head lowered with the weight of the knowledge that they were moving because of him, because of his drawings.

“I can’t hear you with your head buried in your chest,” Douglas said.

“I said, ‘My parents are teaching at the university!’”

“Watch your tone. And most importantly?”

“No drawing,” Timothy whispered.

“What was that?”

“I said, ‘No drawing.’” He didn’t shout this time. Instead, he muttered the sentence softly, as though it were a forgotten fantasy vanishing.

“Timothy,” his mother said, “your father and I have given up everything so you can go to a school where people don’t know what you’ve done. You have a fresh start. Promise us you won’t draw any more of those horrible pictures.”

“I promise,” Timothy said. As they crossed from Georgia into Tennessee, the trees flanking I-75 deflected the wind, bending as though waving goodbye.

They arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, just after eight o’clock in the evening. The June twilight was warm; the stifling July air was still thirty days away. The movers had already unloaded the boxes and furniture. Timothy’s family spent the rest of the month settling into their new house. No matter how much time they spent placing family photos or arranging lamps and vases, trying to make the wooden box on East Thomas Drive cozy, for Timothy it never felt like home.

He spent his summer days sitting on his bed with his door open—always open. His new room was sparse. No posters on the walls. His desk, a place where he could do his homework, had been set up in the kitchen. His bookshelf was in the basement storage room, cardboard boxes on its shelves. The only furniture in the room was his bed and dresser. This was intentional. His parents told him he could have his furniture once he’d proven he could be trusted not to draw any more pictures of alien women.

Outside, neighborhood children ran to the nearest swimming pool or rode bikes at dusk, cruising the neighborhoods because that’s what kids did in small towns in the late 1980s, their only responsibility to enjoy another summer. When they rode by, laughing and screaming, Timothy would watch from his window. Observing him, one would think Timothy was too shy to introduce himself to new kids, but after being expelled from Georgia, he just wanted to be alone.

“Have you checked on Timothy lately?” Rita asked one evening as she and Douglas cleaned up after dinner. “He sits on his bed staring at a blank wall.”

“What were we supposed to do?” Douglas asked. “If we hadn’t moved, this would have followed him for the rest of his life. All through high school, he’d be known as the kid who drew aliens having sex. No college would accept him with that on his permanent record. It would have ruined his life.”

“He seems so heartbroken.”

“He’s young. Kids are resilient. He’ll survive. When school starts, he’ll make some friends, and everything will be okay.”

“It’s two months until school starts. I want him to survive the summer.”

The next evening, Timothy’s father returned with a gift. A Nintendo Entertainment System—a console with two controllers. He didn’t buy the full package with the gun and robot accessories. He didn’t want Timothy to play with toy guns, and he worried his son would be sexually aroused by the robot.

“I know this move hasn’t been easy,” Timothy’s father said as he set up the Nintendo. “But I hope this helps.”

Timothy held the controller, his thumbs moving the arrow pad and pressing the two buttons, unsure about the game system. But as soon as he slid the cartridge into the console and turned it on, he found the cartoonish soundtrack and sixteen-bit graphics rapturous. For the first time in months, Timothy smiled. His recent life had been chaotic: being labeled a deviant, having to relocate, the pressure to not repeat his past. Video games redirected his attention toward a digital narrative he could control.

The games also gave him something else—something to be good at. Timothy had been an overweight child, awkward and clumsy. On the playground of his Atlanta elementary school, he had always been picked last for teams at recess. He was ungainly and lumbering, and the team captains considered him a liability. But with video games, he excelled. The motor skills he lacked on the court were exercised by tiny, sixteen-bit characters running and jumping and defeating level bosses. The only problem was he couldn’t show anyone this prowess. Video games were a solitary pursuit, except at the arcade, where teenagers gathered around the latest games to watch players defeat hordes of enemies—a place his parents refused to take him.

It was Tuesday, September 2, 1986, when Mrs. Ferris introduced Timothy—the new kid—to Harry’s fifth-grade class at Ambrose Burnside Middle School. Ambrose Burnside Middle School was one of two middle schools in town, the other being Larry Bird Middle School; both schools were grades five through eight. Harry sat in the back row. All morning, the school buzzed with the news of a new arrival. New arrivals were common in middle school. Since small elementary schools often combined into larger classes, the friendships formed over four years were tested by new faces in adjacent desks. Being the new kid was especially hard for kids from other towns. They didn’t have the safety net of thirty-odd kids they’d gone through elementary school with and bonded with over games of red rover and dirty magazines found in the bushes bordering the run-down house everyone said was haunted. When Mrs. Ferris introduced Timothy to her class, her hands on his shoulders, everyone whispered about the chunky Black kid in a faded Cape Canaveral T-shirt.

“Um, my name is Timothy.” He looked down at his tennis shoes, their zippered pouches holding his milk money. “We just moved here from Atlanta. My dad teaches chemistry at the college.”

“Thank you, Timothy. You may take your seat,” Mrs. Ferris said, pointing to an empty desk in the front row. “I know all of us will be sure to make Timothy feel welcome, won’t we, class?”

The class’s unison response sounded like a stutter, and Timothy could feel them glaring at the back of his head.

At recess Timothy sat on a bench watching the other kids play. Groups of boys and girls lined up next to the four square courts, the same four kids dominating the game.

A skinny kid with shaggy hair approached him. “You’re new, right?” He stuck out his hand like a businessman—stiff, no bend in the elbow. “I’m Harry. I like your shirt.” Harry pointed to the faded image, the show’s logo zooming off, Kennedy Space Center floating in the cotton void.

“My dad got it for me in Atlanta,” Timothy said, staring into his hands in his lap. “Right before we moved.”

“Oh,” Harry said, deflated. “I was hoping you got it at Sports Galaxy. They have a bunch of iron-ons they sell that they’ll put on a shirt for you.”

“I know who you are,” Timothy said. “I heard some of the kids talking about you at lunch. They weren’t saying nice things about you.” Timothy ran his fingers along the deep grooves of a name carved into the bench. “That’s rude of me. Sorry. I’m always speaking without thinking. My mom always tells me to speak before I think—I mean, think before I speak.”

“That’s okay.” Harry sat down next to him. “These kids are jerks. I used to be friends with most of them back at Steve McQueen Elementary, but once we got to fifth grade, they changed, like I wasn’t cool enough to hang out with them.”

“The kids at my last school were jerks too.”

Timothy fell as silent as the thick, white clouds that drifted through the blue sky. Sitting next to Harry made him nervous. Harry was the first person to talk to him since he moved to town, and Timothy bit his lip, fearful he’d mention his illustrations and Harry would walk away appalled.

Harry pointed at the four square court and asked, “You’re not standing in line to play?”

“Nah—I mean, no,” Timothy said. “My mom also says I shouldn’t slur my speech, that I need to speak more precisely.”

“You don’t want to play anyway. The game’s rigged. Those four on the court—they’ll be in those same positions all year. The king, that’s Mike Partridge, he makes the rules: five thousand bounce-outs, popcorn, no English. He came up with this rule ‘repeats,’ so they’ll get the same spots again the next day.”

“Then why is everyone waiting in line to play?”

“This is fifth grade. Everyone wants to hang out with the popular kids.”

“Why don’t you just change the rules?”

“We had a four square court at Steve McQueen. End of last year, I worked my butt off to be king. Jim Delvin—he’s the queen—was king that day and forgot to declare a bounce-out number. I was in the queen spot and got him out and was promoted to king. The first thing I did was declare no special rules. Mike got me out in the next move. That’s when he came up with the repeats rule.”

“That sucks,” Timothy said. “Sorry—I mean, stinks. I’m not supposed to swear.”

“It’s just the way it is,” Harry said. “So I stopped playing. Why try to compete in a rigged system? I’d rather spend my time on something else.”

The bell rang. Harry and Timothy reluctantly jogged across the campus. A couple of kids with the sleeves cut from their T-shirts watched them join the flock returning to their classrooms.

AB Middle, as it was known among Bloomington preteens, had a reputation for being a rougher school. Fights were frequent, either caused by boys who didn’t know how to process the anger they felt at witnessing their fathers’ failures or racism. (In the mid-1980s, racism in Bloomington took many forms, from the blatant to the institutionalized, from the occasional epithets being shouted from a moving pickup truck decorated with Confederate flags, to the cashier at the Pharm-O-Rama asking to see Timothy’s mom’s ID when she used her credit card yet neglecting to ask for the IDs of white shoppers.) While Timothy wasn’t the only Black kid at Ambrose Burnside, he was the only Black student in Mrs. Ferris’s class. Add to this his quiet nature, his portly frame, and his newness, and Timothy was a target for kids who were looking to hurt someone for being different.

Walking through the school’s parking lot after his first day, his backpack heavy on his shoulders, Timothy passed two kids sitting on the trunk of a car. Both kids had sparse hairs on their upper lips and sported mullets, long in the back and spiked on top. One kid wore a T-shirt with the logo for a heavy metal band on it; the other wore a denim vest with a band’s logo stitched on the back.

“Hey, Eddie, look at this piece of shit,” the one in the vest said. “Where you going with all those books, you fat fuck? You think those books make you special? You people—always thinking you’re better than everyone.”

His name was Kevin McCallister. (He would later be mocked ruthlessly when Home Alone came out; kids would suggest the reason Kevin was home alone was because his dad was in jail and his mom was turning tricks at a motel by I-45.) Kevin was born into poverty. His family subsisted on food stamps and unemployment checks. They blamed their financial situation on Black people, liberals, and government assistance—the same government assistance the McCallister family relied on. The McCallister family had never heard of irony.

Timothy swallowed and kept walking, his head lowered, hoping the kids would leave him alone if he ignored them.

“Hey, kid,” Kevin said, “I’m talking to you.” Kevin hopped off the car and walked toward Timothy. “You deaf?”

He shoved Timothy. Kevin was six inches taller than him, lean from a diet of lemon-lime soft drinks and beef jerky, and mean from his older brothers beating on him for the crime of being born.

“I asked you what’s up with all the fucking books?” Kevin grabbed Timothy’s book bag and tossed it to the ground.

Timothy’s eyes watered. “I just want to go home.”

“Are you going to cry?” Kevin laughed. “Hey, Eddie, can you believe this piece of shit is gonna start crying on me?” Kevin turned back to Timothy, made a fist, and raised it. In a serious voice, he said, “I’ll give you something to cry about.” (Kevin had heard this phrase most of his life.)

“Hey, Kevin,” a girl behind Timothy said, “didn’t Hector Gonzalez beat the shit out of you last week for saying racist shit?”

“This kid ain’t gonna fight me, are you, kid?”

“But my brother might,” Keanna Smith, a tall Black girl in a denim jacket, said. Harry stood next to her. She dropped her backpack and crossed her arms. “Kwame might be real interested in your thoughts on our people.”

Keanna Smith was a seventh grader. Her brother, Kwame, was the captain of the high school wrestling team. Harry and Keanna had lived on the same block since they were three. Their moms worked together and were friends. As children, Harry and Keanna had spent their summers in Keanna’s backyard, running in the grass, then flinging themselves onto the Slip ’N Slide or at Harry’s watching 1970s science fiction TV shows. Keanna possessed Bloomington’s largest collection of science fiction literature. Harry used to spend hours looking at the futuristic cities on the book covers, imagining himself in their utopias.

“You…you, uh, think I’m scared—scared of that, um, of your brother?”

“Look at you,” Keanna said. “You can’t even speak without shaking. If I ever hear you talking to this kid—”

“Timothy,” Harry said.

“If you ever talk to Timothy like that again,” Keanna said, “I’ll make sure Kwame is out here waiting for you.” (This was a bluff. Keanna’s brother had much better things to do than beat up racist middle school kids. But Kevin and Eddie, like most eleven-year-olds whose less than nuanced understanding of race in the United States came from their uneducated and unemployable parents’ drunken diatribes, didn’t know this.)

“Man, we should bail,” Eddie said to Kevin. “You know how they all stick together.”

“Fuck you, Erickson!” Kevin said, avoiding looking at Keanna. “You white trash piece of shit.”

“My dad has two jobs!” Harry shouted. “That’s two more than yours, Kevin.”

Kevin and Eddie rode off on undersized dirt bikes that looked like they had been stolen from an elementary school.

“Are you all right?” Keanna asked Timothy as he brushed off his backpack. “I’m Keanna. Welcome to Bloomington.” She didn’t say this like she was greeting Timothy as he departed a plane. She said it like someone who’d spent years dealing with the Kevin McCallisters of the town and wanted to prepare him for the worst.

“Ignore those guys.” Harry patted Timothy on the shoulder.

“Forget that!” Keanna said. “That kid is an asshole and will always be one. If he bothers you again, let me know.”

Timothy focused on the pebbles at his feet.

“Hey, what are you doing now?” Keanna asked. “We’re going to go over to my house to watch Cape Canaveral. It’s on PBS, so there aren’t any commercials.”

“You like Cape Canaveral?” Timothy asked Keanna, looking into her brown eyes behind the red frames of her glasses.

“Uh, yeah,” she said, pointing to a patch for the 45th Space Wing sewn onto her denim jacket.

“Keanna wants to be a writer when she grows up,” Harry said.

“Really?” Timothy said.

“Tell the world, why don’t you?” Keanna hit Harry’s shoulder. “Science fiction’s the best. You can make worlds where people like Kevin don’t exist, or you can show them being racist pricks, then have them get eaten by giant worms. It’s great.”

“So are you coming over to Keanna’s?” Harry asked.

“I don’t know,” Timothy said. “We just moved here. My parents would be worried.”

“Maybe next time,” Keanna said.

The September sun, still high, beat on Timothy’s neck, making him sweat. Keanna and Harry walked through the parking lot toward the street, talking and laughing. As they walked away, Timothy wanted to grab the sun and keep it in the sky to extend the summer, the three months where children ruled.

“Wait,” Timothy said. “My dad just got me—I mean, my dad just gave me a Nintendo for moving here. Would you like to come over and play it? It only comes with two controllers, so we’ll have to take turns playing. It might not be very fun.”

“Are you kidding?” Harry said. “I’ve never even seen a Nintendo.”

“Do you have the robot?” Keanna asked.

“No. My dad thought… No. I don’t have it.”

“That’s okay. I wouldn’t have known how to use it. I was just going to pretend like it was going to eat you guys. Let’s go.”

Elementary school friendships were matters of convenience; kids were friends with their entire class. In middle school, the pool of possible associates multiplied, and a student could select their companions based on mutual interests, such as Hoosier basketball, one’s favorite member of New Kids on the Block, or a desire to look older by talking about alcohol. In Timothy’s basement, Timothy, Harry, and Keanna bonded over their love of science fiction. While giving Timothy his friendship, without realizing it, Harry gave him something else. Harry was terrible at video games, and whenever they would play, Timothy always won, restoring the confidence he’d left in Atlanta. Harry didn’t really care about video games, didn’t keep track of who saved the princess the most or scored a hat trick in vs. Hockey. Harry was just happy to have a friend who didn’t care about the politics of four square.

Keanna gave Timothy something as well: a buffer. When Harry walked into Timothy’s home, Rita was unsure about the child standing in her living room, with his secondhand coat, his jeans with faded knees, his homemade haircut. She worried Harry’s poverty would rub off on her son, but when Keanna stepped out from behind them and introduced herself, Rita almost cried. Her son had brought home a girl. A real girl.

In the basement, Keanna introduced Timothy to science fiction literature, prompting the trio to start a book club. Whenever Timothy brought home a new book, his parents were immediately concerned about the sci-fi cover and the implications it held for his fetish. But Timothy would simply say Keanna had lent it to him, and his mother would instantly approve.

Despite having these close friendships, as Timothy approached adolescence—announced by his cracking voice and newfound need for deodorant—there was still a dark part of himself he hid, the part that had caused his family to relocate to Bloomington.

It also kept Timothy from relating to the other boys at AB Middle. He would eavesdrop as they discussed their limited priorities over square slices of public school pizza and goopy mounds of apple sauce, and feel this divide.

“Dude,” Eric P. said, “I’m definitely having sex by the time I’m a senior.”

“Me too,” said Eric A.

“Fuck that,” Jeff said. “I’m having sex by the time I’m fifteen.”

Timothy thought it lamentable that this was the extent of their aspirations—to lose their virginity at race-like speeds. He felt sad for them, because this goal was predicated on the belief that losing one’s virginity was an entitlement, something that was preordained the minute they were launched from the womb. Timothy knew this wasn’t the case. From studying Cape Canaveral, he knew sex was used for political intrigue. There just wasn’t any political intrigue in Bloomington, Indiana.

“You’re a pussy,” Matt said to Jeff. “I’m having sex when I’m fourteen. I don’t care who it’s with. I just know I’m getting laid.”

Timothy was terrified they’d lean across the collapsible lunch table and ask him at what age he hoped to lose his virginity. He didn’t know how to answer. He could never tell them, or anyone, the truth: it didn’t matter when he lost his virginity; he’d never find love. There was only one type of woman who could satisfy him deep in his neglected essence, and she existed in his imagined construction of the cosmos. Unless he were to be transported to the distant side of the Milky Way, Timothy was condemned by extraterrestrialphilia to remain alone, and that was an answer his lunch table would never understand.