How did this obsession start? It started one day almost four years ago. Josh and I go to a public high school for kids who are upper middle-class; the kind of school where all the students dress well, have nice straight teeth and are completely and utterly boring. Naturally I had few friends because I was a bully -- the academic not tough fighter kind. I was blunt with a combative debate team way of talking, too busy issuing test warnings and reinforcing weak spots within the dumber masses to waste time with pleasantries.

That day it was just like any other normal recess period except this time everyone, and I mean everyone, was fondly reminiscing about some party on Saturday night. I was pretending to be aloof but feeling angry because it seemed to me that everyone had been invited but me. As I stood staring into my locker and sulking a couple caught my attention amongst the party-going throngs in the freshmen halls. One half of the pair was Josh -- the second place finisher of some science fairs I always won handily. He was a fat boy with big, thickly lashed eyes the color, I remember thinking at that moment, of a Siamese cat's. He was walking with one of the coolest kids in the school, Drake, therefore the incongruity of the nerd/hip partnership made me to continue to watch them. Not only did these two live in this completely separate metaphysical realities of the high school caste system, their physical difference made me chuckle. Drake was a handsome slender boy with pale freckled skin unflawed by nary a blemish. He was constantly surrounded by the pretty leggy girls whose endless anointment of praise and adulation gave him part of his Titanic sense of entitlement, the other part I suppose he was just born with. Clearly he was smack in the middle of the prime of life, because with a "D" average what was there to look forward to after high school? Oh I hated him. That finesse and swagger of a boy twice his size didn't square with my academic view of the world, it still doesn't. In comparison Josh was perpetually insecure and girl-less carrying a glutaeus that challenged most seating furniture; he was also in all my honor classes as my only distant rival for valedictorian.

Drake was trying to ignore his companion, as he did with most kids he deemed unworthy, but our rotund boy matched his stride with a childlike expression full of hope. Drake with his perpetual wiseacre's half grin finally said "Not now Josh!" and abruptly left his fat companion standing alone. Perhaps because of my non-party invitation loneliness I was overwhelmed with an emphatic sympathy only one loser can feel for another. I walked up to Josh and stood close enough smell something floral and sweet coming from his pale doughy skin reminding me of my Great Aunt Bethe. Then, in a rare expression of nerd solidarity, I told him, "Oh let Drake go. You know anyone that talks to him automatically loses 2 IQ points per minute." Drake was a rocker and I always suspected that some heavy musical amp or prop had fallen on his head to make him so stupid.

Josh's smile seemed genuine, grateful even for the attention. I immediately sensed was goodness in this kid, how could there not be? He was the most nonthreatening boy. There was something reassuring about the way his fly was not zipped up, about the comfortable mound of his stomach -- a soft round belly that seemed not created as a typical fat boy shield against the cruel world ruled by only the fit and beautiful, but a happy Hotei Buddha belly that reached out to embrace everyone. "It's OK Mindy! That's my brother!" he replied with such sincerely felt enthusiasm and unfiltered openness I felt sorry for him.

We must have looked like a human number 10 standing next to each other, Josh and I, the extremes sorry shapes -- I being the stick thin number 1 and he the O. I knew then that we were two of a kind, two bodies that grabbed the wrong double helices for life's beauty contest, two misfits in a world that started at brutal in the kindergarten schoolyard and went downhill from there. We were eye to eye then -- who knew that in a few years he would grow another five inches in height and completely transform the prepubescent squeaky rotund kid into a erect and powerfully carved man? But his beautiful eyes and pouty lips are still the same, so perfectly full and shaped mouth then as it is today with the new strong voice that pours from it. I must digress --- I saw him first that day. I liked him then, perhaps not romantically but I saw the potential diamond. And even I was wrong because this wasn't the analogy of a rock stuck in the dirt and under the force of heat and pressure would become gem-like, Josh was already a gem we just didn't notice it yet. I'll be damned if I let anyone take him away from me today, not any those girls that notice him finally, not even his ever present now loving brother. Especially not Drake. It won't happen, I have a plan.

"Well, sue that doctor that switched kids on your mom, you guys are nothing alike." I told him and sauntered off before he could explain further. Thinking back, I was not much nicer to him that day than Drake was.

I later learned he and Drake were new stepbrothers, not brothers, though in all the time I've known them I have never heard them add the "step" part when referring to each other; it was and always remains "my brother". In reality, however, Drake and Josh seemed more like the incarnation of some long ago classic comedy duo they were so mismatched. It was clear Josh deferred to Drake out of love. The poor kid had such an instinct for devotion and was so easily swept off his feet by his brother. And Drake used his power in imaginative ways and always and got them into more trouble than he had pennies. I admit he wasn't cruel to Josh, however so overly concerned for his own well-being he was reckless to that of his brother's. And although I told myself I had merely anthropological interest in the pair, I could never see them together without feeling a little excited about whatever was going to happen. Because for all their lunacy and mishaps, their life together was a grand adventure.

But watching them also left me with the feeling of having been an amusement park without going on any of the rides. Nothing grand was ever happening to me, I was a mere observer. They reminded me of my own isolation: how I was cutoff from most of my own family and too busy winning and collecting academic trophies to forge friendly relationships. So perhaps I was just jealous of Drake & Josh. I hated Drake because of what he symbolized in the shallow world of high school popularity, and I just didn't know how to be friends to his sweeter hopelessly unpopular brother. If I couldn't make other friends, then maybe even little fat boy would like me either.

And as much as resented them and my classmates I also hated those teachers who were too proud to admit my knowledge was far superior to theirs -- the classic struggle of the misunderstood genius. I might not had been good at much, not sports, not boys, and may have never had enduring friendship in all of my life, but I was good at academics; I was more than good I was the BEST. And the worst petty tyrant teacher was Mrs. Hayfer who treated us students equally as though each and everyone of us were morons depriving her of her vital years, and as revenge she unanimously marked our so scores low to prove herself superior. She gave me my first and strictly undeserved B. My 4.0 was shattered. It didn't matter that everything I wrote for her was original, concise, incisive, cogent, well researched, well supported, and well argued, she would not give me an A because she did not like me as the smarter person. She only liked Josh. He was serious about his schoolwork and well mannered with a pleasant smile therefore always a favorite among the teachers in the school, and his eagerness to help other classmates, like his stepbrother, could only have helped earn even more endearments. These were things that I did not do, and, yes, I resented him for achieving that affection from teachers that I could not.

So I devised a devious genius scheme. It wasn't as hard as people thought it would be, to disassemble a car and reassemble in another place, this place being a Mrs. Hayfer's classroom and the car belonging to her. Most of the parts -- the electrical wiring harness, the air intake system, the exhaust system, starter motor, charging and ignitions systems can be removed as units and then you pluck through the rest. Heavy items were moved with the hoist and three desperate day laborers from the Home Depot parking lot. A good mechanic would worry about reassembling everything in reverse order, tightening bolts in a proper sequence and exactly to the car's specifications. Since I cared very little about the car and owner, I put everything back together loosely, if at all. I was just looking for the final effect, the "up yours" message. The final cherry on top was throwing Drake's jacket in the car. Humiliated two deadbeat birds with a one ton-capacity air hoist.

Take this advice, the destruction that you want to unleash on your enemies ends up turning on your own self. I am sure you heard the details, I was caught. Here I had played a big joke on an unpopular teacher, and tried to bring down a popular boy that probably thumbed his nose to half of the lesser humans at our school, but instead of being loved, instead of being revered as a hero to nerds and lessors alike, I was hated for it. Just hated. What a strange and insular life high school was. It was comprised of its own rules of conduct I just couldn't decode. I looked at my classmates incredulously at their inexorably herd-like psyches, all I could do is uselessly shake a clenched fist at them. Why are people as so eager become slaves to the high school cliques and exclusions? It was unbelievable.

I was too smart and my scores too high to be expelled permanently, but too disrespectful and dishonorable not be suspended temporarily. So that is how I found myself sitting on a couch under the glow of a natural light watt bulb in a Mental Rehabilitation Clinic with do-good therapist trying to pry out of me my "feelings". I would not talk to her. I did not smile or nod or acknowledged her existence. Even the authorities like Freud, Jung and his collective subconscious or one of the latter-day theoreticians like Fromm or Becker would have concurred that no mere therapist could tell how I could adapt to the infantile public playground that refused to recognize my superiority. And what could I tell therapist anyway? I didn't feel depressed, instead I felt detached from them all. I tried to feel something like sorry or pity or anger for what I tried to do to Drake but could only summon up a little guilt for feeling none of these things.

I was lost.