Likewise, Mom didn’t go in for expensive clothes or jewelry. She didn’t wear a lot of makeup and was letting her dark brown hair go gray. She wore it really short, and she was dressed just like Dad. Her face was freckled from walking on the beach, and the only jewelry she wore was her wedding ring—a plain gold band. They looked like a nice middle-class couple—an accountant and his wife, maybe, who loved nothing more than spending an evening reading a good book with the television on for background noise.

No one would ever guess that they were so rich they couldn’t spend all their money if they tried. And they did try. They gave a lot of it away—but no matter how much they gave away, more came rolling in. They’d both grown up dirt poor and never forgot where they came from. They always tried to give back as a thanks to the universe for their great good fortune.

“Normal,” my dad mused, absently munching on a breadstick. “Normal is highly overrated.” He waved his breadstick before taking another bite. “If we were normal—”

“I want to have a normal college experience before I go to Harvard in a few years,” I said. It was pointless rehashing the argument. I’d won the debate and was enrolled at California State University–Polk—and he wasn’t going to talk me out of it. “You’ve always said, Dad, how growing up normal really prepared you for life, and you both want me to be normal.”

“But that’s just it, Jordy. You aren’t normal, son.” Dad finished the breadstick and reached for another one. Mom smacked his hand and he goggled at her ruefully. She raised a warning eyebrow and he meekly put his hands back in his lap, giving the bread basket a longing look. “You have a genius IQ, you speak four languages fluently, and you’ve never been in school with”—he paused for a moment, trying to find the right word—“regular people your own age.” He shrugged. “It can be rough. I just don’t want you to be hurt, son.”

“I know, Dad.” I grabbed the breadstick he’d been trying to get. “But I want to know what it’s like.” I took a bite and sighed. The Olive Garden’s breadsticks were awesome. “I mean, I want to experience it. Besides, I think it will make for an interesting anthropological study—the difference between a place like St. Bernard and a campus like Polk State—the relationships between students, students and the faculties, and so forth. It will make for a very interesting paper.”

He sighed. “But for the paper to be authentic scholastically, you have to be removed emotionally from the people you come into contact with. You can’t be friends with them, son. You have to remain objective.” He frowned. “I just worry, son.” He looked at Mom, who just patted his hand.

“I’ll be fine,” I insisted.

Dad made his money before I was born, so even though I’d heard the stories about what life had been like for them when they were poor, it was something I’d never experienced. I’d had tutors until I was ten, when I was old enough to go to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a private boarding school in the Swiss Alps.

I’d both loved and hated St. Bernard.

I loved that St. Bernard was an excellent place to learn, and the teachers pushed us to work hard. I have an excellent memory, and if I read something I never forget it. I rarely had to study for exams, and usually spent the time my schoolmates spent cramming and memorizing doing extra reading. I loved reading and learning. While my classmates were off skiing or skating or whatever outdoor activity caught their fancy, I was in my room reading.

I hated that my classmates, without exception, were the children of nobility or royalty. There was always a title somewhere in their family. And they were all snobs. Even though my parents probably had enough money to buy and sell theirs, the fact my parents couldn’t trace their descent back to Charlemagne or Saladin or some Roman emperor made me beneath their notice, but not beneath their contempt. I had a single room almost the entire eight years I was there, because no one would room with me. I wasn’t sure, but maybe they thought rooming with me would somehow make my common-ness rub off on them or something. They mocked me to my face, and who knows what horrible things they said about me behind my back. It hurt, and I hated them and hated being there. Every day was a struggle not to cry in front of them, but every night after lights out in the solitude of my room, I would cry until I fell asleep. There were times when I wished I would die so the cruelty would stop. And I counted the days until the Christmas break, when I could tell my parents face to face I wanted to go somewhere else.

I met them in Cairo that year, determined I wasn’t ever going back to St. Bernard. They met me at the airport, and when the time finally came when we were in our suite and I was going to tell them, my father preempted me. “We’re so proud of you,” my father said, his voice breaking. “The dean called me to tell me what an excellent student you are.”

I gulped.

“One of the best things about having all this money,” my mother said as she opened the blinds, exposing an amazing view of the pyramids in the distance, “is being able to make sure you get the best education in the world.”

“I know some of the other kids probably aren’t very friendly,” Dad went on. “Some of them are class snobs, right?” I nodded. “That makes absolutely no sense. As if being born into a certain family means you’re better than someone else born into a different one. It’s who you are, how smart you are, and what you can accomplish that really matters, am I right?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“So just ignore them.” He patted me on the leg. “Just focus on your education, and making the most of this opportunity.”

“Okay.”

So, I never told them the hell that St. Bernard was for me. I didn’t have a single friend in the eight years I was there. It was incredibly lonely, but I lost myself in the world of books—and the Internet. The Internet was a godsend. I could talk to kids back in the United States to alleviate my loneliness, and I kept as low a profile as I could around the school. But it wasn’t the real world—it wasn’t even remotely close. I envied the kids I talked to online—the ones who went to public schools and lived real lives. I wanted to have real friends. I wanted to go over to someone’s home after school and study with them. I wanted to go bowling and ride a bicycle.

I wanted a normal life.

And even though I was accepted into Harvard when I was fourteen—Dad was right about that St. Bernard pedigree—I decided I wanted to go to a state school for two years first. Maybe Harvard wouldn’t be as snobbish as St. Bernard, but I wanted to experience something more normal first. And the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. How could it possibly hurt me to go to another university, not as famous or expensive, for the first two years? How could it hurt for me to go to school with kids who didn’t spend their summers in palaces or on yachts or on islands in Greece?

It wouldn’t, I finally decided, and made up my mind once and for all.

And it would make a good paper.

I’d started doing research my junior year, and went through many Web sites and catalogues before I settled finally on CSU-Polk. The university wasn’t even one of the better universities in California—Stanford, Berkeley, USC, and UCLA—but it was adequate. It didn’t draw a lot of rich kids—its student base was primarily middle-class kids who often had to work at least part time. It seemed perfect, and was centrally located—almost equally distant from San Francisco as it was from Los Angeles. And Polk itself was a charming little city of a couple hundred thousand people in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley. A little on the conservative side, it is best known for raisins and grape production. It came down to CSUP, Kansas State, and the University of Tennessee—but I finally decided Kansas and Tennessee were probably a little bit too conservative. My decision made, I filled out the application and waited to hear back. I was pretty certain I’d be accepted—I’d already been accepted into Harvard, after all—and sure enough, after about a month the enrollment package arrived.