Learning was, had always been, Conrad’s thing. From the very start, he was the one with the chemistry set, thinking up experiments for us to do as his scientist’s assistants. I remembered when he’d discovered the word “absurd,” and he went around saying it all the time. “That’s absurd,” he’d say. Or “numbskull,” his favorite insult—he said that a lot too. The summer he was ten, he tried to work his way through the Encyclopedia Britannica. When we came back the next summer, he was at Q.
what a fucking nerd
