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1
“Calm down. What are you getting so mad about?” Greg Rosario asked under his breath.
He leaned toward me, hoping to keep the others from hearing. I got a whiff of his cologne, which I always liked because of its coconut scent. It brought back memories of Acapulco, when I was four and my father took my mother and me to visit his uncle.
I knew I shouldn’t have sat at Mateo and Greg’s table. I preferred to eat alone or, at most, with Twyla Cross and Meg Adams at what had become known as the “Gray Matter Table” because they were both 4.0 students. My teachers didn’t bother to give me grades anymore. Most of the time, I was doing independent study and simply checked in with my required classes to take exams. They made me do it solely for the benefit of the administration and state laws. I had yet to get less than a hundred percent on any of them.
“She’s just naturally feisty, chico,” Mateo Flores had just said, with that cat-that-ate-the-canary grin on his face. He was a tall, lanky boy, with hair as dark as black licorice and eyes of a similar shade. “But I hear that makes Latinas better lovers, better even than Frenchwomen.”
His eyes brightened with sexual excitement. The others laughed, even the girls.
I refused to stoop to his level. “And you’re still an idiot,” I said.
He pulled back, feigning great indignation, but I knew my negative comments rolled off him like water off a duck’s back.
“Oooooooh,” he moaned. “Does that mean there’s no chance we’ll hook up this weekend?”
Everyone but Greg laughed.
“No. It means there’s no chance we’ll hook up ever,” I said.
Mateo finally stopped smiling and looked away. Greg peered at me a little mournfully. He was always trying to get me to be friendlier to his friends, the girls as well as the boys. He thought I needed more friends, especially these, but I never liked confining myself to what Mateo called the Latinos in our school. Of course, they blamed my independence first on my superior intelligence, which everyone, not just they, claimed made me a snob, and second on the fact that my mother wasn’t Hispanic but Irish. Many times, I was accused of thinking I was better than any Latino because I had a white mother. That was also a stupid misconception. There were many Latinos who were not of dark or even tan complexion.
Life for minorities was harder because we had to navigate all these prejudices and distortions. Who could blame me for trying to avoid it, even in a school forty miles from San Diego, whose population was mostly Latinos? Most of the inhabitants, including my father, a pharmacist for a privately owned drugstore, worked in or very close to the city. My mother was a hairstylist at a local salon and increased her time there when my little brother, Mickey, entered first grade. He was now in fifth, and although he was not the intellectual phenomenon I was, he was one of the brightest in his class.
Like me, Mickey was a good reader, but unlike me, he was also a good athlete, enjoying soccer and baseball especially. He was the starting third baseman on the Little League team. Also unlike me, he had no problems with his Hispanic heritage and got along with everyone. He enjoyed being bilingual. I rarely spoke in Spanish, even though I was quite fluent, in both it and French. Lately, I was studying Greek and reading Plato and Socrates in Greek, something that made me even weirder to most who knew me or knew of me, those even my mother occasionally slipped and referred to as “normal students.”
The implication, however unspoken, was that I was abnormal.
Some of my mother’s friends went so far as to pity her, and for what? For having a daughter who was so brilliant that the usually accepted methods of measuring intelligence couldn’t do her justice. Because of what I thought was a failure to classify me properly, they called me gifted. According to the guidance counselor and any teachers who came into contact with me, my horizons were limitless. I gathered new information, facts, and statistics so rapidly and processed them so completely that educators compared my mind to a giant sponge and said that what I did was more like osmosis. My absorption of new data had that sort of speed.
Games and sports never interested me, perhaps because I could outsmart my opponents so easily. Forget about playing cards with me if you ever wanted to win. I could instantly imagine the odds of my opponent getting another jack or queen, and once I studied how my opponent thought, I knew exactly what he or she would do. People don’t realize how predictable they are. The same was true for me in one-on-one basketball and tennis, even Ping-Pong, not that I was that skilled. I never lost simply because I anticipated exactly what my opponent would do. It was boring for me and depressing for them. Eventually, the school had excused me from all physical education classes.
I didn’t ask for that specifically. My PE teachers complained about my constant questions and my clever ways of avoiding participation. All my other teachers were able to keep from having to confront me daily. Some were afraid of my correcting them; most admitted they were holding me back from making any progress. I think my PE teacher was simply jealous. I didn’t mind being excused, even though I knew it contributed to the negative view most of the other students had of me.
I was very fond of Greg, however. I took a lot of flak to please him. Lately, he was making more of an effort to start something romantic between us. I didn’t make it easy for him. I knew that a significant reason for the disapproval from my schoolmates resulted from what people viewed as my seeming asexuality. When it came to clothes, makeup, even my hairstyle, I was so indifferent that it even created a wider chasm between my mother and me. Any mother would want her daughter to be more like her, especially mine, who was so attractive and aware of every beauty product and technique. Underneath it all was her suspicion that I might just be gay. What confused her was that I had no interest in other girls, either.
“She’ll get interested in those things when she’s older,” my father used to assure her, but even he was no longer reinforcing that idea.
I felt sorry for them both. Who wants to have a child you can’t understand? It’s natural to wonder what responsibility you bear and what you could have done or still could do to make a difference and get her to be “normal.”
What would become of me, a girl so intelligent that ordinary measurements didn’t do her justice? A girl who was always smarter than her teachers? A girl whose school administration threw up their hands and let her be and do whatever she wanted because they couldn’t keep up? They eventually provided me with an adviser, Mr. Feldman, who did his best to structure some form of study, but he readily admitted that he was incapable of designing anything that would satisfy my needs. I was a wild card, a force unto myself. What college would have a program good enough? Where should I aim my efforts? Would I invent things, go into medicine, teach?
Honestly, I had no idea, either. Knowledge, information, problems in both math and science, new languages, all were like mines from which I accumulated more and more facts, but I was like Midas, rich beyond any purpose. I could buy anything; therefore, I bought nothing.
What did I really have to offer anyone right now, especially when it came to a school social life?
Maybe that was why Greg’s interest in me pricked my attention. Was it simply sexual? Was I some sort of challenge? Or could he actually l
