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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 493January 3, 1957The simple truth was my schooling ran like clockwork. I was seventeen, a senior in high school, four years into the seminary, and able to speak Latin and German. Year after year, I traveled from Misericordia once at Christmas and once in June for the three-month summer vacation to test my strength wrestling worldliness.My return to my parents%u2019 home always reminded me the world was out of joint with my spiritual life, my emotional growth, and my intellectual awakening. I could translate ancient Greek and Latin and modern German, but I could not break the code of life. Unlike Telemachus, the boy in Homer%u2019s Odyssey who searched for his father, Ulysses, to learn how to live, I had to leave my family to learn my life.My little brother, Thommy, was fourteen, full of war movies, eager to join the Marine Corps Reserve as soon as he turned seventeen. Thommy was distant from my parents and cold miles away from me. %u201cYou%u2019re a fake,%u201d was all he said.I punched him on the shoulder. %u201cHow fake was that?%u201d I was seventeen going on eighteen going on twelve. We were Cain and Abel, like all the pairs of brothers in the movies where one wears Blue and the other wears Gray or one is a gangster and the other is a priest. We kept our distance.%u201cRyan,%u201d Dad said. He opened my bedroom door, tentatively, the way he always did at the end of my vacations. Brownie looked up at him with her big spaniel eyes, sighed, and put her old head down on my slippers. Dad moved some torn Christmas wrapping paper. %u201cMind if I sit here for a smoke while you pack?%u201dI pulled a stack of new T-shirts off my desk chair. My mother had sewed my laundry number in all my clothes. My number was 66 and the first day of every school year I had to introduce myself to the boy who was the new 99, because the freshmen boys who sorted our laundry, walking around and around wooden racks hung with five hundred laundry bags, rarely bothered to look at the red period dot sewed in after 66. Once a week, I had to meet with 99 to exchange clothes. There seemed to be a