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something brainy.
    “How come you know so many things,” his mother asked him, “and you don’t get better grades?”
    Lenny didn’t know. He shrugged his shoulders.
    “School is boring,” he said.
    It wasn’t exactly what he meant. But it was close.
    It was his father, Leon, who went down to the basement one day after work to take a shower and found Lenny sitting on the floor in a jumble of parts, with a screwdriver in his hand. He had taken apart an old vacuum cleaner.
    “What do you think you’re doing?” Leon asked him. “Put that back together.”
    He just said it. He didn’t really expect Lenny to put it back together. The amazing thing was that Lenny did. Even more amazing, when Lenny flipped the switch, the vacuum cleaner, which hadn’t worked for years, roared to life. Leon stared.
    “Who showed you how to do that?” asked Leon. “Did you just figure it out yourself?”
    “I read about it,” said Lenny. “In a book. About small motor repair.”
    “Same difference,” said Leon. “I could look at that book and it would look like Greek to me.”

     
    Leon told everyone about Lenny and the vacuum cleaner. He told everyone when Lenny fixed the toaster, too.
    Lenny felt the satisfaction of understanding something in his mind and making it become real with his own hands. Multiplied by the light and warmth of his father’s pride. He started fixing things right and left. His metamorphosis from bookworm to gearhead was swift and complete, and he didn’t look back.
    It could have gone another way. Some perceptive science teacher could have seen past Lenny’s shyness and how he was flustered by taking tests. But that didn’t happen.

     
    The junior high shop teacher saw his abilities and appreciated them. He steered Lenny toward the vocational-technical track.
    Debbie and Phil were sorted into academic, which led to college prep. Everyone assumed that whoever was doing the sorting knew what they were doing. It was all done scientifically, with grades and test scores.
    Maybe it was some kind of tragedy that no one spotted who Lenny could be. Or maybe it wasn’t. Lenny didn’t need someone to tell him who he was. A bird had flown inside his head. He knew how vacuum cleaners worked. And there were a lot of other things he knew.
    He had started down a separate path, though, another path than the one his old friends were taking. It was hard to tell how far apart the paths would eventually veer. There were already signs of veering. No one in academic, for example, pinched snuff. Lenny hadn’t thought about that before, but he saw it now. He saw that Debbie and Phil had other opinions about it than he did. Phil was hanging out of the passenger side window, and Debbie had her shirt pulled over her nose. Lenny considered this. He was a considerate person.
    “All right,” he said. He took the wad from his cheek and chucked it at the dirt around his mother’s petunias. But although he was stronger now, and more coordinated than he had been as a child, his aim was still lousy. The tobacco hit the side of the house with a wet, brown splat.

     
    “Rats,” he said. He looked around for a rag, found an old T-shirt, and got out of the truck to scrub it away before his mother saw it. Debbie and Phil got out, too.
    “I need your spit,” said Lenny. “Mine’s too brown.”
    They got down on their knees and took turns spitting at the brown stain on the concrete foundation block. In between Lenny rubbed with the old T-shirt until the small brown splat faded and spread to a large pale one that was hardly even noticeable in the spring twilight.

CHAPTER 8

Easy Basin Wrench, or

Debbie has a Mechanical

Moment, Too
     

     
    “Hello!” said Debbie.
    “What?” asked her father, from under the kitchen sink.
    “Hello!” she said again.
    “Hello,” he answered.
    “That’s the first thing it says in the instructions,” she said. “Then it says,
    Easy Basin Wrench with more quality and most quantity of