The Boy Wonder

Kindergarten - I show up for my first day of school at the Madeleine, a small Dominican Catholic school. I find my friends Paul and Benton. I try to introduce them: “Well, Paul, this is Benton. Benton, this is Paul.” They already know each other and are actually better friends with each other than I am with either of them. Embarrassment sets in. Two weeks later, Benton’s mother, Vicky, will give me a ride to school, and we will arrive late. This will be my first and last tardy arrival at the Madeleine. Twelve years later I will tell Benton that I see his sister on Solano all the time, and he will, in a display of mental leaps even more impressive than the literal leaps I used to take in my ballet class at the Albany Community Center, interpret this as my implying that she is promiscuous. I will hear of this from Sophie Darragh-Nguyen, who won’t join our class until first grade, and whose name I am almost certainly misspelling. Paul and I will be on again off again friends over the next nine years, before finally settling for off after the end of eighth grade.

Our teachers are Ms. Ramer and Mr. Dean. Ms. Ramer is young and invites the entire class over to her house to make gingerbread houses sans gingerbread, using milk cartons as a structural base. Her house is huge and up in the hills. It is surrounded by a sloping hill about a foot deep in ivy. Mr. Dean has white hair and seems indescribably old, but is actually somewhere in his early forties, and plays his guitar for us, capoing it off to better suit it to his oddly high voice. He is big, but not fat. He has a beard. This is not an excuse to compare him to Santa Claus. Maybe it is.

First grade - I come home and matter of factly say to my mother “You know, I probably know the most about dinosaurs of anybody in my class.” I know next to nothing about dinosaurs and really don’t care very much at all about them, but that day, having discussed the topic with my classmates, I discover that that really doesn’t matter; I can know more than other people about a topic without being fully invested in it. This will initially give me confidence in widening my spheres of interest to all sorts of information, mostly mathematical and scientific. This will later give me too much confidence in the ignorance of others in the face of confidence at the next family Thanksgiving celebration at my aunt’s house in Yuba City.

Second Grade - Now entirely confident in my intellectual abilities, and confident in my ability to fake my way through what I don’t actually know, I take my rightful place as That Know It All Kid in the class. I become especially good at math, although I coast on reputation in all other areas.

I learn how to insincerely say what I think the teacher wants me to say, which given my place in Mrs. Skinner’s peace loving, Vatican II style, multi-culturally appreciating classroom, leads to some of the more banal statements ever to leave my mouth. “Maybe,” I say one day, “extraordinary is really just what anybody can do if they set their mind to it; it’s really just extra ordinary!” I won’t realize until an embarrassing amount of years later that that kind of insincerity feels terrible.

Third grade - Mrs. Velardi has a curly near-afro of gray hair and is of some ambiguous level of Italian origin. She, at the very least, visits every summer. Maybe she was born there? I think her husband is Italian. She explains division and jury duty to us. We cut planaria in half, and they die, halves and three quarters of ex-flatworms cluttering the bottoms of petri dishes. I think they would have died anyway - they didn’t seem too lively even before the razor blades.

One day in math class, which is held in the science lab, as she hands out a multiplication drill sheet, she begins to muse to the class. “You know, once I had this student who was probably the fastest at doing math I’ve ever seen. I would be handing out a worksheet, and she would be done before everyone even had the paper in their hand.”

She continues passing them out, and as she drops my sheet in front of me, I go into mathematical overdrive. I make Fibonacci look like Fabio. I make calculus look like Candyland. I do four problems and look up. Everyone is sitting, papers in front of them, staring at the gray faux-marble countertops, or, if they’re lucky in the distractions department, idly fiddling with the handles to the sinks at the end of each table. I look down at the unfinished lines of problems. I make sure that everybody has their papers. They do. I finish the worksheet, but it takes me about five minutes. It is unclear what kind of God would allow this to happen, but at the very least it’s a vengeful Old Testament version. At worst, He’s essentially Snidely Whiplash with better facial hair and omnipotence on his side.

Fourth Grade - Mrs. Ramos is an ex-nun with a facial twitch and very little patience. Her short cropped spiky black hair and considerable work ethic make her unpopular with most of the class, but I don’t really have a problem with her. She doesn’t seem to care much if I read in class, and when I pass spelling pre-tests with perfect scores, she lets me skip the official test and hang out in the hallway.

I enter the school wide Accelerated Reader competition, in which I take computerized multiple choice tests about books, most of which I’ve read, many of which I haven’t, and gain points for high levels of reading comprehension. I get a lot of free dress passes, freeing me from the relatively strict white shirt and khaki pants uniform of the school. Although I won’t reach my Hawaiian shirt with a bowl cut, birkenstocks, and long socks phase, a phase that will cause Lillian Maheu to tell me I look like a lesbian, until eighth grade, the freedom to express myself through the art form that is fashion doesn’t score me too many style points. In the last week of school, some eighth grader takes all of the Accelerated Reader tests and wins the competition, thus robbing me of my rightful place as The Most Accelerated of Readers.

Fifth Grade - Ms. Provost is from Albany but seems like she should be from Texas. She is in her mid twenties and has a towering crest of hair that seems to shift colors about once a week. We aren’t very nice to her, and we make her cry by repeatedly making fun of her for dating the P.E. teacher, George. She clearly isn’t very smart, but this isn’t really an excuse for how disdainfully I treat her lesson plans. I spend the entire year behaving like that guy in every science class you’ve ever taken who is fully convinced that he knows more about the class than the teacher. Even when he does, which he usually doesn’t, his questions tend not to be of the most endearing variety.

We go on an overnight boat trip on the Thayer, which is moored next the Ghiradelli plaza. I am installed as the leader of my group, which is good because I don’t want to have to get instructions from some idiot kid who doesn’t know Moby Dick from Moby Grape. (1) I lose my voice just before the boat trip and spend the entire trip in a hoarse silence that I wish would be stoic but strikes me more as tragic. I don’t regain the use of my vocal chords for a week or two. My voice will come and go for the next three years. An ear, nose, and throat doctor will inform me that this is because I have calluses on my vocal chords.

Sixth grade - My teacher, Brent Rowe doesn’t have a beard yet, but he will next year. This will visually age him from twenty-six to thirty-four years old. My mathematical mind thus places him at an average age of about thirty. My intuitive mind places him at about twenty-eight. He dates the fourth grade teacher, Ms. Voltattorney. He doesn’t get anywhere near the trouble from our class that Ms. Provost got. For this, you can blame either an increased maturity or a sexual double standard.

On the first day of class, Mr. Rowe gives us a speech. “If my past classes could use any one word to describe me, they would simply say: ‘strict.’” Whether this is true or not is ambiguous to us. Later it will become clear that it’s not true at all. He’s pretty middle of the road as teachers go. Still, on the first day he makes it very clear that he wants to make an impression on us. As the speech winds down, I turn to my friend Charlie to make some remark that I can’t remember. What I can remember is the complete silence following Mr. Rowe’s last word, and my voice alone filling the room, inexplicably with the phrase “Venn Diagram.” Mr. Rowe makes me walk across the room and turn the little green card underneath my name over, exposing a yellow facet. He makes it clear that I am just two more reprimands away from detention. It is apparent in this moment that this will not be a year that reaffirms my superiority.

Seventh grade: Ms. Richards is an ex-deadhead with reddish purple hair. I will have physics with her daughter, Zoe, in five years. This will make “Yo Mama” jokes awkward. This year, the class is divided into “abstract” and “concrete” groups, based on mathematical aptitude. The abstract group learns basic algebra. The concrete group doesn’t learn much at all. In addition, because of their newly discovered abilities to be hugely bitchy, the entire female half of the class spends most of their math and science classes with the school counselor, whose apparent eating disorder either overqualifies her or detract from her credibility, depending on your perspective. (2) Because of this, really the only part of the class to do anything in Junior High is the smarter half of the male members of the class. Since the class is such a mess, people start leaving for King Middle School. Our class size dwindles from a spacious thirty-five to a “hate-everybody-here-guaranteed-by-graduation” twenty-three. I spend a lot of time thinking about the stupidity of others in the face of my overwhelming intellect. I listen to a lot of watered down punk music, but consistent Sugar Ray replays undermine the credibility of my music collection.

Eighth grade - Mrs. Gooding has some sort of relationship with the Principal, Mr. Calegari. This super uncomfortable fact remains relatively safely in the land of vague rumors until after graduation, at least for me. I’m bored in class a lot, and I finish projects early, so I’m contracted out to various administrators to put up and take down bulletin boards and hallway displays of student art.

As graduation draws close, I become more and more alienated from my remaining classmates. I stop talking to most of them. I have grades of over 100% in most of my classes, and, realizing that I’ll get an A in each of them no matter what I do, I stop really caring about school either. Graduation rolls around, and after the first three school sponsored graduation events –from the graduation mass, to the graduation brunch, up to the graduation ceremony itself– I’m not invited to the graduation party. This doesn’t really bother me. This still doesn’t really bother me. Even if I was kind of a jerk, even if an obnoxious superior affect directed me into that situation, no matter what went on in the past, no matter what happens in the future, those people were dumb.