Maybe I was hopeless when it came to making friends or having a good time. Sometimes I felt that way about myself. There was no doubt I was a type of poison to them, killing them with reality and truth.
“So if she’s so hopeless, why are we hanging in this girls’ room so long and trying to get her to do some X with us?” Terri Morris asked.
They looked at her as if she had said the most brilliant thing of all.
“Good question. This is a waste of my time,” Lily said. She popped her pill and smiled at me. “Go back out there and hold hands with Jackson Marshall. Corliss here hangs with him, but now if you want, Aggie, you can instead.”
“If he washed those hands properly,” Aggie said.
“Jackson will always wash properly. His mommy makes him and checks behind his ears ’fore she lets him out of the house.”
The laughter carried them out of the girls’ room and left me staring at the door. Their laughter lingered and echoed in my mind. I hated feeling so defeated, especially by them. My IQ was at least fifty points higher than that of the most intelligent of their group, and their prospects for any sort of success in life were practically nil. And yet I felt depressed, like I was the one with an indistinct future.
Nevertheless, I gazed with a little regret at the door. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that a part of me wanted to go out with them, to do what they did and be with them, be accepted by them. They ran the school. Other students stepped aside when they marched through the halls. There were plenty of times, more lately, maybe, when I wanted to break out and have a wild time, if simply to get out from under the label pasted on my forehead: Miss Goody Two-Shoes, the A-Plus-Plus Girl Wonder. Was I someone’s lab experiment? I was off the charts when it came to intelligence tests. And the whole school knew it. Even my teachers were intimidated. I deliberately answered questions wrong sometimes. But they knew when I did. Everyone knew.
It was almost as if I were double-jointed or something and could twist my arms and legs around myself. I really did have nightmares about ending up in some circus in a glass cage, doing math sums faster than an accompanying computer or babbling facts about anything in the world. People would pay to ask me any questions and try to stump me.
But there were other, more important things to worry about. Financial problems seemed to be raining down on us these days. My mother had to return to the Korean laundry on Venice Boulevard in West LA, where she had worked washing and ironing and occasionally doing some tailoring. She was very good at that and was one of the most responsible workers they’d ever had, so when she asked for her old job back, they were eager to have her.
However, I felt bad for my mom. She had been hoping to be more of a mother and more of a wife. It was the life she had chosen, and she didn’t like pawning off her responsibilities on someone else, even if that someone else was me. For her, family was more important than fame or developing a career. Her face would brighten with Christmas-tree lights when she talked about my father, me, or my brother and sister. Everyone assumed I’d be something like a nuclear physicist, but I feared that even if I won the Nobel Prize, I’d never feel the joy I knew she felt in her heart by doing what was simply expected of her as a wife and mother. How could she be so satisfied with only the smiles of her children and the appreciation of her husband? Where was the magic in that, the secret formula for such contentment? You don’t study for it; you don’t need a degree. That was a secret no one would even think to solve. It wasn’t important enough and paled next to the pursuit of stem cells or even a better furniture polish.
On the other hand, who knew me well enough to see what turmoil was in my heart or even expected there would be any for a genius like me? How could someone so brilliant that she knew more than her teachers be unhappy? I certainly didn’t want my parents to feel sorry for me. I was out there like a high-flying kite, catching the wind of their dreams.
My father was the head of security at Ram Studios in Burbank. He made a good salary, but with my ten-year-old brother, Randall, and my eight-year-old sister, Andrea, needing more and more, along with the rise in insurance and house maintenance, our costs had grown exponentially in the bad financial times. I hated to see my parents agonizing over every dollar spent.
My mother going back to work meant that I had to take on more responsibilities at home. I didn’t mind that so much, and it certainly didn’t have the slightest effect on my schoolwork. Probably nothing could.
Although neither of my parents talked about it very much, especially now, I had been diagnosed as a gifted child when I was in the first grade. My teacher, Mrs. Cardin, thought she was seeing and hearing things when I spoke or wrote. I was so far advanced in my thinking. I believe I enjoyed the constant amazement on her face more than anything else when I read from books used in high school and did math problems that were beyond most junior high students.
She would put me off in a corner of the classroom to work on the more difficult materials she had borrowed from the junior and senior high school teachers. Even then, I was separated from my
classmates, who peered at me with confusion and wonder. What made me so special? Practically every day, the grade-school principal, Mrs. Greene, brought someone in from some other school or even, I heard later, from a college to witness me performing these astonishing educational feats that I thought were easy.
I also remember my parents, especially my father, looking stunned when Mrs. Greene brought in the high school psychologist, Dr. Fromer, to evaluate me and then had a meeting with my parents and me. My father kept looking at me as Dr. Fromer went over the testing and the results. It made me feel funny, made me feel as if my own father were looking at me for the first time ever. Dr. Fromer was suggesting that I could be another Albert Einstein.
“I knew she was smart,” my father said. “She’s done lots of things that made us take note, but we never thought she was as smart as you’re saying. Gifted, huh?”
“That’s a technical description based on her scores. She’s very special.” Dr. Fromer explained how they measured IQ and what my numbers meant. “We’ll do the best we can for her, but she’s very special,” he repeated, with more emphasis. He made it clearly sound like they couldn’t do enough. I was already beyond what they could provide.
My parents were impressed, but I thought he made me sound too strange. I really did wonder if I would end up in a circus or on some television show in which professors threw questions at me from every angle and some bell rang with each of my answers. Defeat the young genius and win a trip to Paris or something.
“I’m not particularly smart,” my father said. “But I’m no dummy. I graduated easily from high school, and so did Mary.” He nodded at my mother. “But we never had anyone like her in either of our families, right, Mary?”
“Not that I recall,” my mother said. She always dressed up when she was going to the school, and because she did, my father made sure to put on his best sports jacket and a tie. She smiled at me. “We’d be proud of her no matter what. We have no famous people in our families, but we have no fools, either.”
“Well, no one really can tell you why someone like Corliss comes about. It has something to do with the mystery of genetics, I suppose. The point is, we have to recognize that she’s special,” Dr. Fromer stressed. I was beginning to hate the word. “But,” he quickly added, maybe because he saw the expression on my face, “don’t make her feel odd. I see enough of that with ordinary brilliant students.” He shrugged and smiled at me. “As intelligent as anyone who’s been through this school may have been, Corliss is at least ten times as intelligent, Mr. Simon.”
“You don’t say.” My father looked at me strangely again. His eyes widened, and the skin on his forehead tightened with his new concentration. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “Well, that’s something.”
I don’t think my father ever looked at me the same way since that meeting. Sometimes I wish we had never had it. I knew, later on when I was older, that both my parents felt bad about not being able to provide more opportunities for me, the least of which was a private high school with extra attention. It wasn’t a big secret that the public school I attended was barely keeping its head above state requirements. The classes were very large, the building in disrepair, and the teachers generally discouraged because of the lack of support and the discipline problems.
I also knew that I was something of an educational oasis for all my teachers. Navigating through the desert of students who were disinterested, tired from staying up too late, and otherwise unmotivated, my teachers sometimes clung to me in embarrassing ways. Many times, during my English and history classes in particular, my teachers would act as if there were only two people in the room, they and I. I knew how much the other students resented me because of that. Even though they showed little interest in the subject being discussed, they hated being ignored.
There was nothing worse than being treated as though you were invisible. Many saw that enough in their own homes. I knew that was why they acted out so much, but one thing I tried to avoid was diagnosing the behavior of my classmates in front of them. Even a side remark would result in my being called “Dr. Corliss.” They’d chant it after me in the hallways or write it in lipstick on my hall locker.
Over time, my classmates came up with all sorts of terrible names for me, born of their resentment of all the attention I got. Maybe I was merely a living reminder of how they were becoming failures. If you consistently received fifties or even forties on tests, you didn’t want to confront someone who never received anything less than a hundred.
“Egghead” wasn’t a satisfactory name for me. Instead, they would call me “Suck-Up” or “Bun Kisser,” even though I didn’t have to do anything extra to win my teachers’ respect.