Molly has told me that she never really believes that other people feel the way she does. She says she’s single now for the simple reason that she can tolerate loneliness better than boredom. She doesn’t seem to understand why most of her fellows make the other choice. She observes that she has friends who nightly sleep with an enemy; yet they consider themselves lucky because they are not alone. She shakes her head about that.

Everyone acts like they don’t want the best cookie on the plate, but Molly doesn’t believe them. She says “Don’t we all want the best cookie? Wouldn’t it be better if we were open about it?”

She detests being manipulated or managed. She is super-sensitive when it happens and she escapes as soon as she can. She loves all the special effects at Disneyland, but after a few hours there all she can see are the cordons and posters of subtle crowd control, and she’s repelled. No other visitors seem to mind. She’s put off by ritual and traditional observances – again because of the manipulation – yet she sees her fellows derive comfort from these occasions. The heavy-handed nature of new age seminars like EST and Landmark make Molly form anagrams from their polysyllabic buzzwords and tally the take from their lectures and run like a twelve year-old from their missionary efforts, yet these programs, and ads, and human interest stories, and Hallmark cards, are successful, popular, potent.

Molly describes herself as weird. She is a bit of a freak. Obviously she dwells on the spectrum, but she’s so high-functioning no one has made her get help. No one even offered, when she was growing up. Nowadays, with all the zero tolerance policies, I’m sure she would be forced into counseling. I’ve gotten benefits from therapy, and I recommend it to her when I can. But probably it would be about as effective as it was for her son. Not at all.

For some of us, rules just don’t work. Some don’t respond normally to authority. They’re not many, but they’re uncontrollable. Sometimes they avoid calling attention to themselves by following whatever the rules are, but that’s just a way to lay low and not be conspicuous. To Molly, it’s tiring being conspicuous.

She’s told me that she often wonders what it would be like to just slide a blade into someone. Or step out that window and let her body fall the twenty stories. And then she gets a panicky sense of the feeling that would follow immediately: that terrible moment when you realize you can’t take it back and you didn’t dream it.

When her babies were tiny and helpless Molly says she’d frequently notice an impulse to hold the infant by a foot and smash its head against a wall.

Of course she didn’t do it. She winced even thinking about it. She says the wince felt goofy but a little thrilling. And then she couldn’t resist thinking it again.

But following any of these black impulses? Not in a million years. Molly wants to like herself. That’s the biggest cookie on her plate.

I saw a geneticist on TV recently, who ran a lot of DNA sequences to see if he could isolate the gene that makes a psychopath. And he found the marker most decidedly in his own strand. And then of course he had to wonder.

His answer was “it’s complicated.” It’s not just the genes. There needs to be a trigger if you’re going to build a monster. The predisposition is required but also a large application of child abuse. That geneticist is known in his family for his temper and poor impulse control. But he got so much love and support as a kid that his evil never flared.

Is my bff like a serial murderer who never got triggered? Or like a CEO or a military leader?

I think not. That’s too extreme. But she resembles what I’ve heard about Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, or maybe someone described as an idiot savant. Brilliant, different, uncontrollable, and possibly unfit for normal human interaction.