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Every dad had one. Nobody bought one. It just accreted, next to the tape dispenser, one asparagus rubber band at a time, until it was the size of an orange and older than you were.

A wooden triangle. Fourteen golf tees. A hand-lettered sign that told you, in a phonetic country font, whether you were a GEE-NIUS or an EG-NO-RA-MOOSE. It was on every table in every Cracker Barrel in America and it was quietly the hardest thing at the restaurant.

A green LCD, a chunky bezel, and forty rubber buttons the size of a poppy seed. You could technically do long division on your wrist. You never did. You had one because it was, at eleven years old, the closest thing to a computer you could own.

The entire toy was engineered around a small, terrible noise. When you heard it, you lost. The name of the game was the sound of the game. That was the whole thing.

The red second hand and the last five minutes of school were locked in a personal grudge match, and the clock always won.

A perfect touchdown was a triangle of folded notebook paper sliding to a stop with one corner in mid-air. Getting there was a physics problem you had ninety seconds to solve.