Excerpt:

Not that ‘Jackson Holmes’ was the most believable name he had ever heard. He recognized that people might have cause to mock him for it, and they certainly had done so over the years (adding it to the list of reasons, starting in boys’ school, and it wasn’t as if boys in schools needed much reason, but Jackson had been kind enough to over oblige them with a slew of mockable offenses: thick glasses, peculiar eating habits, even more peculiar parental units, and of course, he could not forget it, the stuttering).

The stuttering was not an involuntary thing for him. He feigned it to make himself even more mockworthy. It seemed only right. It was the role he had been born to play. He realized this with some peculiar sense of pride. As if it were something that meant he was better then them, in an ironic way. He was not one of the lucky ones. They were weak, they were lemmings, they were not content even to be in their positions of relative power, they constantly feared losing that so very much that they felt compelled to continuously, and brutally, cut down and deride the people that were already acceptant and complacent in the space beneath them.

In a way, it was a powerful position for Jackson to be in. His parents had inadvertently, he was sure, set him on this path with his name and his particular genetics, which predisposed him to the intellect that outsized his puny body, the thick lenses and the propensity to squinting, the asthma that required pills and inhalers and prevented him from participating in sports, which further diminished his capacity to relate to and bond with his classmates and, furthermore, contributed to the continued scrawniness of his frame and the feeble nature of his physical presence in the world.

No one understood the limitations of his corporeal body. They could see its insignificance, certainly, but they could not really know what it felt like to exist inside that damaged, fragile husk of boyhood, and later manhood. They could not know what it was like to hold an intellect so formidable inside a dried out cocoon, better left behind than held together with what seemed like the medical equivalent of duct tape and twine, but held together nonetheless because otherwise the mind inside would be lost forever.

Jackson's college girlfriend, Esme, was hale and sinewy. She was the rare kind of person who did not even bother to notice what people looked like as long as their brains engaged her (he often thought of her as the blind Laura Dern character in Mask, and had even described her in that way to subsequent girlfriends, or hopefuls to be, pointing out that Esme was far from blind, she also had perfect, twenty twenty vision, another thing she lorded over him although it was the farthest thing from her intention).

Esme had forced Jackson to admit that, just as she had no idea what it was like to be inside his presumably broken and agonizing form, nor did he have a clue what it felt like to be her, either. How did he know that life, existing, the very need to draw a breath was any more comfortable or easy or ‘natural’ for her? Esme had a way of putting things that made it impossible to disregard her, even the very things that he would be most inclined to disregard. In fact, such conversational topics made up the bulk of their communications during the six or seven months they were together, and formed the predominant argument with which he could no longer, after that duration, force himself to lose anymore. He had to leave her; she was giving him too much pause about being himself, and it was all he had to cling to, having no ability to rely on his parents or any strong bastion of friends. He was twenty and he was accustomed to being alone in the world.