Kiss Me, Genius Boy (No More Dreams #1)

2.5 The most arrogant person they had met, bar one

2.5 The most arrogant person they had met, bar one

Come the winter of 1992, I was twelve years old, and the pretension that I was a legend in waiting had long been my constant companion. I had driven it so deep into my heart, and nurtured it so fastidiously, that it would soon deliver me a brief, occult moment to taunt me all my life with the image of an impossible enchantment and grace.

I was about to receive a vision of the precise form of the greatness that awaited me.

It was one of those shrunken, gray-clouded days that trouble the seasonally depressed. On that day of prophecy, winter sadness had weakened me, and I was ready to succumb to one of the multitudinous germs that swarm across the surfaces of a school, borne from snot-nosed kid to sweater sleeve to tabletop and on again.

I was in year eight at the Catholic high school in Rosebud, Padua College, whose best feature was that it was not the nearby state school. Rosebud High was practically an oubliette: cast a child into it and you could practically guarantee that they would never go to university, never emerge from the cultural and economic deprivation of the Peninsula into the sunlight of urban life.

That morning, I was dazed and ill at ease. Roll call gave way to classes spent staring vacant-eyed out a window at the sombre sky. Lunchtime I spent with my back cooking against the grille of a gas-fired heater, roasting slowly as I read through the dreary cavern-bound adventures of The Tombs of Atuan.

The bell rang to signal lunch was over. Next, I had double maths. But before I could leave, Ms. Harper, carrying a green clipboard over her right hand as always, pushed into the midst of the students packing to leave the study area.

Tell someone often enough that they must inevitably be something, and they will be it. All through my childhood, Dad told me, “you can do anything you want to.” I took it as an affirmation of my talent and of my power to break rules, and I have run with it. On the other hand, nearly every teacher I met managed to insult me with some version of this warning, and it was just as powerful:

Don’t ever believe you’re better than other people, Joshua, because you’re not. You’re the same as everyone else. Everyone is equal. No one is better than anyone. You will have no special treatment, because your intelligence means you will always be okay, and for that, we will ignore you. We may even victimize you. Our lack of care for you will compensate everyone else, and if we crush you hard and there is any crack of weakness in you, we can smash you down to our level and will not have to compete with you anymore. If we break you, we will no longer have to face our mediocrity reflected in the steel of your gaze, or hear it in the sureness of your voice as you speak thoughts we cannot think, condemning us for failing to be you, and for poisoning your life with our envy of all the things you may be that we never will.

Okay, I got carried away at the end there. But it’s the truth of what was in their minds. Even that was a mixed message, and in it, the delicious news: you are different, Joshua, you are better than us, and for that, we hate and fear you. In such a way did teachers turn my heart against ordinary humans.

Ms. Harper hated people, too, not because of what she was—she had been born with no fingers on one hand—but because she was ashamed of it. As a child, she must have been taunted horribly, and I suppose her parents never found a way to show her she didn’t deserve it. Cruel children must have told her she was a worthless cripple, and by the time they knew better than to taunt her, she was telling herself they were right. Cripple she was named, and cripple she became, more in her mind than ever in her body. She lacked the mettle to make her club hand a permanent fist to be brandished in defiance of the odious and the wicked. She failed to counter deformity with vivaciousness and wit. Everywhere, she carried that cheap green clipboard, resting it on her fingerless hand which, forever shadowed, turned in the teen imagination to a festering, worm-ridden lump of corpse-flesh. The clipboard covered her deformity, and a love of punishing students’ misdemeanors covered her sense of inferiority. But the attempt at concealment made both these flaws plainer than the most brazen display could have.