I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class by Josh Lieb Page B

it,” she said proudly.
     
    “Well, what do you know” he said. “Huh.” He sounded genuinely, almost kind of impressed. He got up and walked around the castle slowly, getting down on his knees to examine a particularly cunning parapet. “Good work, Ollie.” He turned to “Mom.” “Maybe he’ll grow up to be an architect. Sometimes the ones who have the worst verbal skills have the best spatial abilities.”
     
    “He has wonderful verbal skills,” said “Mom.” “He just doesn’t talk very much.”
     
    It is hard for me to describe the delighted tingle that was running through my body all through this conversation. Probably because it’s the only time in my life I’ve felt that tingle. God help me, it’s probably what Lollipop feels when I tell her, “Good dog.”
     
    How sick is that? I was five—way old enough to know better, and yet some small part of me still wanted to please this sunburned buffoon. I guess boys are hardwired to admire their fathers. But when I look back at this weakness in my five-year-old self, I get almost physically ill. Thank God, I’m over that .
     
    After making his proud noises, Daddy went back to his book. Then the tide started to come in, inching ever closer to my castle walls. So I got busy with my plastic shovel. I am not the first child who ever started digging a moat around his castle to try to save it from the oncoming waves.
     
    “Time to go, son,” said Daddy.
     
    “I’m not finished.”
    “You’re just digging holes.”
     
    I smiled up at him. “I’m keeping the water from wrecking my castle.”
     
    “Oh, Ollie,” said Mom. She looked heartbroken. “The ocean washes away everyone’s sand castles. I’m so sorry , honey.”
     
    But I kept digging. My father smiled at her and whispered, “Let him finish. It’s a good lesson for him to learn. There are some things he can’t control.”
     
    My mother rummaged in her bag to find me a cookie.
     
    It took me about ten more minutes to finish digging my network of trenches, pits, and grooves in the sand.
     
    Then we went back to Don’s house and ate corned-beef sandwiches for dinner.
     
     
    I woke up early the next day. I couldn’t wait to go back to the water. I wanted to feel that tingle again. 66
     
    When we got to the beach, Daddy spent a few minutes setting his chair up, laying his towel down, rubbing aloe vera on his shoulders. Then he finally looked around, surveying the shoreline like some all-powerful fairy-tale king. That’s when he noticed my castle, twenty yards away.
    It was pristine. Perfect. It had not been touched by a single wave.
     
    Mom was very happy for me and immediately suggested we add a giant tower to the center. But my eyes were on Daddy. He didn’t say anything for a while. He walked around the castle again, like he’d done the day before, examining it even more closely. Like he wanted to see if it was really the same castle.
     
    I suppose I was expecting him to say, “Wow, Ollie.” Or, “Good work, son.” I would have settled for “Good dog.”
     
    What he said was, “What the hell? . . . ” And when he finally looked at me, what I saw wasn’t justifiable paternal pride. His skinny little lips had gone transparent from the blood fleeing his face. His nostrils were wide as half-dollars, like a gorilla smelling gunpowder. His beady eyes were narrowed into greedy, suspicious slits.
     
    What I saw was fear. Horror. He was threatened by me.
     
    Here I had devised an entirely new system of hydraulic engineering—out of sand—a system that could easily keep the world’s coastlines safe from hurricanes, typhoons, and whatever other nonsense nature throws at us—and my father’s reaction was not only disbelief , it was disgust . Terror .
     
    He was scared I would somehow surpass him. As much as he might moan about what a disappointment his dumb son was, his ego couldn’t tolerate a son who might be better than him.
     
    That’s when I realized I was