It would have been right around my ninth birthday. I was getting an Atari XE game system, which I knew because we had an unfinished room that was just used as an attic, and my occasional snooping among the old shit we had stashed there — including, for some reason, a small plow that would be a coin flip between decor-only and usable vegetable-garden implement — was the entire stash of presents my parents had clearly overextended themselves for. At that age, my final excuse for believing was that they would never get us that many presents since they were extremely price sensitive all year.

My brother is seven years older than me and caught me coming out. He threatened to tell our parents, so I kicked him in the nuts and ran away.