The LaMacchia kids were kind of jerks and destined to have unsuccessful mustaches

but the older one was a decent Dungeon Master when working theatrically from a module, where he’d surprise us with a lonely kobold lit up by a cursed opal, or some other member of a humanoid underclass who got their GED in oiling crossbow traps and pissing on the corpses of improbably-encumbered adventurers with 50 yards of rope and 1,000 gold in pocket change.

Never mind that I, like every other persecuted tween with a courtly bowl cut and aqua turtleneck, chose to be a half-elven ranger with blank parents killed by slavers. The past was unoriginal pain and the future nothing but the economics of treasure chests and the punctuation of poison needle traps.

He was generous with the magical artifacts, especially the Wand of Wonder, which could spit forth a fireball or make your target grow leaves, depending on what the dice determined with the glitter of their constructivist solar system.

We tended to be fairly ugly because we put our character points into Dexterity or Strength, but were all equal in the gray embrace of its mathematics. We loved it because the action was subterranean, below the curvaceous commentary of the barmaids who were too tart for us, and town magistrates illustrating just how much feudalism sucks.

But we should have paid more attention to what the LaMacchias were like in the world beyond the beige living room with its scratched graph paper waiting under golden lamps, where their favorite universe began with the prison planet of an M-80 rattling inside a pink can of sickly Tab, and the funniest thing was when we hucked puffball mushrooms at each other and someone got hit in the mouth with a cloud of bad ideas.

It’s not a fallen world until fifth grade when puffy stickers are no longer enough

and you get handcuffed to a playground rail because you answer a Zen koan of cruelty wrong: Do you try really hard or does being a loser just come naturally? Your book report on troop movements in The Lord of the Rings might as well be on Lafcadio Hearn’s hatred of conventional dreariness and ugliness and dirty austerities and long faces and Jesuitry.

After your grandmother kindly comments that you really shouldn’t have cut off your T-shirt sleeves because people who show their armpits are just white trash, you soothe yourself to sleep by imagining the electrical line banging against the weathered shingles, snapping into a treble clef of flame, and reducing you and all these unspoken rules to a meaningless proof.

There are four channels on the black and white TV which seem swept from the cosmic corners of an emptiness you’re learning about in school, along with Sex Ed and its ragged chalkboard diagrams of ungainly organs deployed with all the dignity of trying to smuggle accordions across state lines.

Your mother comes back bitter from answering phones at the paper company, her face slotted like blinds as she stalks away across the lawn after a fight with your father, like a detective at a croquet massacre. Every afternoon, she futilely sweetens your vegetable smoothies so that forever after, apple juice tastes laced with fluorescent celery.

Your body feels like a bad mechanic took it all apart and now there are some extra bits that don’t fit back, and every school project inevitably results in the stapler sending a red theorem into your thumb, attaching tangible evidence of the nothing you’d like to become.