For a long time our son ws a little boy with autism, which was a certain kind of challenge. Now that he's a teenager with autism - and a teenager who notices girls - we're faced with something else altogether.

No one's family is normal. Normalcy is a lie invented by advertising agencies to make the rest of us feel inferior.

I was isolated but not ostracized, ignored but not abused.

Everyone at Coral Tree Prep was good-looking. Really. Everyone. I didn't see a single fat or ugly kid all morning. Maybe they just locked them up at registration and didn't let them out again until graduation.

Juliana's a year older than me, but she sometimes seems younger - mostly because she's the opposite of cynical and I'm the opposite of the opposite of cynical.

Man, I hated not being able to figure someone out. And from the slightly uncertain look he gave me as we all went to class, I suspected he felt the same way.

He was wearing a plain white oxford unbuttoned over a T-shirt, but something about the way they fit made him look put together, like an Abercrombie model (well, like an Abercrombie model who had remembered to put on a shirt that morning).