Carrie Pilby. Caren Lissner
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current events at a party or in the dorm lounge. Some of the kids were okay, but some would go “whoosh” and cut their hands above their heads when I said something they deemed too intellectual. I also met people whose test scores were much lower than mine, and some of them had rich alumni parents or played lacrosse or dived really well and that’s probably why they got in. There were also plenty of beer-chuggers and bubbleheads and people who talked nonstop about sex, which one would think is odd for a school that everyone had to study like hell to get into, but I guess that’s why their gonads exploded as soon as they got fifty miles from home. I thought that by having an honors program, the students at Harvard who were actually smart could be together.
On rare occasions, I did encounter smart people in school. Once in a while, I’d end up at a mixer with the other prodigies, and we’d discuss the difficulties of being fifteen in a sea of twenty-one-year-old drinkers and Lotharios. I felt a kinship with the others, but they soon grew to love seeing how much they could get away with, while I didn’t.
That was around the point that Professor Harrison began to express a more-than-academic interest in me.
I fold Dean Nymczik’s letter and balance it in the alley between my computer and printer. Dean Nymczik doesn’t understand. Few people do. There are a great many people who believe themselves to be smart—in fact, I’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t—but none of them are smart enough.
And this is my father’s Big Lie.
The exact lie—let me see if I can remember it correctly—was this: “When you get to college, you’ll meet people who are just like you.”
He’d say, junior high is tough, high school is tough. In college, they’ll be just like you.
Just wait until you get to college.
They were not. And they are not. I went through four years, and now I’m out. On the rare occasions I meet people now, I find that they consider snowboarding a cultural activity and that their main reading material is TV Guide. And I don’t know how to respond to that.
So mostly I stay in bed.
Chapter Three
There’s a good reason that I don’t have any friends in the city. Most people’s friends are people they met at college. And most people they became friends with at college are people they met freshman year. And most people they met freshman year, they met during the first few weeks of school.
I did start off with a few friends freshman year. My roommate, Janie, was my friend. But she dropped out of school in November. Another friend I had was a girl named Nora, who was a prodigy, like me. The week before the start of classes, they kept having receptions for prodigies. At one of them, I was standing by the window, staring outside and holding a cup of 7UP, and Nora came over to me. “You look bored,” she said. “Do you know anyone here? I don’t.” Then she dragged me over to other groups of people and we stood next to them until we were included in the conversation. It took Nora only a little while to be the leader of the conversation. Unfortunately, the fact that she was so friendly meant she quickly became friendly with a lot of people. She started organizing all kinds of things, especially during the first few weeks of school. She’d get an idea for something to do, like walk around Boston or head to a movie, and she’d e-mail a bunch of people including me, and we’d meet up and go. But people like that never stay friends with me for long. They’re so outgoing and loud and popular that they get swept away by people who are more like them. I shrink in that kind of competition. Nora contacted me less and less. I think she also got a boyfriend. I saw them on campus together. At first, even after we stopped doing things together, when Nora and I would pass each other around Harvard, we would wave to each other. After a while, we just nodded. After another while, we started pretending we didn’t see each other. It’s weird how once you dip below a certain level with people, you’re no longer above the say-hello threshold and you have to pretend not to see them so that it’s not awkward. Maybe it happens because it starts getting too risky. You’re not sure they’ll say hello back, and if they don’t, you’ll feel embarrassed. I remember that it was also that way with certain professors on campus. Students in a huge lecture class would definitely know the professor, but we wouldn’t know if they really knew us. So saying hi to them on campus would put pressure on them to figure out who we were, but if they did recognize us and we didn’t say anything, they might think we were being snobby. It was a real quandary.
When I think back to Harvard, I get mixed feelings. I remember the beginning of each semester, when the air would turn cool and I’d look out my dorm window at all the students strolling in their hooded crimson sweatshirts through the fallen leaves. I’d get excited because there were new classes and new possibilities to come. But my hopes would fade quickly as the semester wore on. No one would talk to me in class. I’d eat alone in the dining hall, and I’d spend Saturday night looking out my window at everyone else, just like the previous semester. And it wasn’t that I wanted to be doing what they were doing, but that I wanted them to be doing things with me that I wanted to be doing. And what hurt most was that I was on a campus that students around the world would give their eyeteeth to be at, so I should have been absolutely thrilled, but instead, it seemed like it was everyone else’s place except mine.
And now I’m in New York, in a hip part of town that people around the world would give their eyeteeth to live in, and I feel exactly the same way.
The only period during which things were different was when I was with Professor Harrison.
I don’t remember thinking much of anything the first time I saw him. It was English 203, The Modernists, second semester of sophomore year. There were twelve of us in the class; they’d broken it into two sections. The other section just got a grad student, and mine got a full professor. We were lucky.
Harrison was average height, about forty years old, with brown hair that was starting to gray. He had a tendency to wear soft V-neck sweaters. He told us the first day that he didn’t want this to be a typical English class where we just read the novels and competed to give the best deconstruction. He said that, once or twice, he’d ask us to write our own modernist pieces. I was a little nervous because I’ve never been as good at writing as I am at other things. Most people like writing to be intimate and revealing, and I resent having to tell the most private details of my life in order to interest people. Plus, writing isn’t as exact as other subjects. In high school, I would sometimes start a creative writing assignment and feel like I was skating into the middle of the ice with nothing to hold on to. My best subjects were math and science. I was also pretty good in philosophy and literature, but not at writing my own literature.
Harrison went around the room and asked each of us to tell where we were from and what our major was. I found myself wishing that most professors did this, since people in many of my classes didn’t really get to know each other. This was my chance. I said that I loved reading and observing human behavior. When I finished, Harrison smiled, nodded and said, “Welcome to the class.”
We left that day with a writing assignment: to introduce ourselves and then talk about something we disliked about our personalities. Harrison said that plumbing one’s own flaws was a characteristic of modernist writing. I wanted to impress Harrison right away, so I had to do this properly. In my dorm room, I lay on my stomach on my bed, cooled by the chilly air that blew in through a crack in the window. I agonized for an hour over the opening line.
Eventually, I decided on, “Of the three grades I skipped, second grade seemed the most abrupt.”
There. I’d put the most salient thing about me first. And it was a little revealing. Surely he’d like that.
I added, “Suddenly, I’d gone from pencil to pen, from printing to script, from oral show-and-tells to oral reports, from running from boys to watching classmates chase them. Skipping fourth and eighth grades was a breeze.”
Yes, this was good.
I told some more about myself, but finding something I disliked about myself was hard. I thought of the first quasi-modernist book I’d read, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, when I was nine