I WENT TO a high school filled with smart kids. Kids who had been specially selected because their brains were somehow advanced. But they were only smart in the way they could read books and do tricky things with numbers in their heads. Many of them had no social skills; others were suffering from things that at the time had names like ‘attention deficit disorder’; and lots of them popped small pills to calm them down, or speed them up, depending on the time of day and what their parents demanded of them.

Wet weather seemed to bring out the feral in some of these kids. They became excited as the damp approached on the easterly winds, and something would click in their eyes as the rain began to beat down. Most of their pranks were petty and annoying, things like chucking stationary at the classroom fans, or throwing each other’s bags onto the roofs and spending the rest of the day devising plans to bring them down.