Family of Geniuses

FAMILY OF GENIUSES

Prologue

Hi! My name is Juliette Devereux (That’s French–my father was born just outside of Paris and my mother, the American, studied architecture in the City of Lights.) I’m fourteen years old and I’m in the ninth grade at the Select Seminary on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. That’s a private school–my parents don’t want me and my brothers and sister in public school, because of all the drug addicts and teen pregnancies and whatnot. The truth is though, my school doesn’t have any fewer druggies or girls who sleep around–it’s just that the kids who do drugs can afford cocaine instead of pot (a seriously middle-class drug), and the girls who get pregnant are sent away to relatives before they start to show, so that their families can avoid a scandal.

But to be fair, I like my school. It’s a really pretty old building that was one of the first private high schools built in New York City. It’s only a few blocks away from my family’s townhouse, and I have a lot of good friends there. Like I said, I like it. Well...I like it as much as anyone in my position can like whatever school they end up going to. Because you see, I, Juliette Christine Devereux, am a living travesty. I’m a disaster. I am practically a Greek tragedy. I am blessed to have a family of geniuses, and I am currently, as my teachers so often write on my report cards, “failing to meet expectations”. Let me explain my family for a bit, so that you can fully comprehend exactly why this is such a problem.

My mother, Anna Devereux, formerly Anna O’Donnell of the Staten Island O’Donnells, is an extremely talented architect, and she has designed buildings all around the world. Several of her designs have won her awards, acclaim, and last year, a featured article in Time Magazine. She graduated from Princeton with honors, and then went on to study at a school in Paris, which is where she met my father. She is beautiful, organized, creative, and charming, at once both a socialite and a down to earth mother. While she was not, as they say, to the manor born, she glides in and out of this glittering world with the greatest of ease. Although I am only fourteen years old, I am aware that this privileged life we lead is not The Real World, but rather something more akin to the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. My mother used to live in The Real World; she was born on Staten Island. But she was smart enough to get a full scholarship to Princeton, and before she knew it she was in a neighborhood full of old money, private schools, and American royalty. I can’t think of single thing wrong with her. I bet when she was a teenager, she didn’t even get pimples.

My father’s name is Jean-Luc Devereux. Daddy is often referred to as The Jean-Luc Devereux. This is largely because Daddy is the head chef at one of the five star restaurants in Manhattan. He studied the culinary arts back in Paris. Unlike Mother, Daddy’s family was wealthy growing up. He was well educated from the age of five, and went to all of the very best schools in France. But Grandmere and Grandpere, as we call them, sent Daddy away to boarding school for most of his young life. They just wanted him to get the best education, but it made Daddy sad that he never saw them. So Daddy always tries really hard to spend as much time with us kids as possible. Even when our parents were both really busy, and the idea of sending us away to school came up, Daddy shot it down right away. Daddy works a lot of hours at his restaurant, but he still makes us dinner three times a week, when our cook Rosmerta has the night off. And it’s always delicious! Daddy’s my favorite person in the world, because he’s a gentle soul, and he’s always very understanding when it comes to my grades. “You’re smart,” he tells me, with his sweet French accent, “very smart. You can do anything, anything you want, you just have to work hard for it. I believe in you. Always remember that.” And then he would kiss my forehead, and I wouldn’t feel so bad about not being good in school. I’m not at all afraid to admit it; I am very much a Daddy’s girl.

I have two brothers and a sister. My older brother Louis is 20 years old, and he’s going to school at Florida University on a basketball scholarship. Last year he was the only freshman on the varsity basketball roster, and he won an award for being a scholar-athlete, which basically just means that he made the Dean’s List while playing a varsity sport at the same time. He’s tall (freakishly tall, in my humble opinion...no, for real...I always tell him that if he didn’t get into college, he should have joined the circus) and a point guard. While logic tells me that means he guards the point, I’m not really sure what that actually means. What I do know is that he can beat anyone anywhere at any sport that involves a ball and some sports that don’t.

I have an older sister named Anouk, who is 17 years old and a senior at the same school I go to. She’s already been accepted to the Rhode Island School of Design, because she’s an amazing artist. Some of her artwork has been shown in several different Young Artist shows at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art, for you non-New Yorkers) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She’s a really talented painter, as well as regular drawing. And she’s not like one of those “modern” artists that sell a lot of paintings these days by splattering paint on a canvas angrily or painting a canvas one bold color and calling it art. My feeling about art has always been that if I can do it, it’s not real art. But Anouk can draw ANYTHING. And I mean anything. She can draw things that she’s seen, even if they aren’t in front of her, and she can even draw things that she’s only imagined. She doesn’t know what she wants to do for a career yet, but I think she might want to go the starving artist route, and try to make a living just selling her paintings (which she could do...I mean, they’re that good). I know that she’s also thinking about trying to have a career in design, which I think she’d be really good at. I mean, you can describe an outfit to her, something that you saw somewhere and really wanted to have, for example, and she’ll just pull out her sketchbook and make you a drawing of it. It’s amazing. The girl can do whatever she wants with her life. Her options are limitless. Anouk is a great sister, too. She takes after Daddy in a lot of respects. She’s very gentle and sensitive, and not at all stuck-up like a lot of artsy people. She always has time for me whenever I need to talk, and we’re really close.

I also have a younger brother. Remy. He’s twelve years old, and he’s a child prodigy. Personally, I think he’s a little dork. But that’s just me. To begin with, he has an IQ that is off the charts. He was tested when he was four years old, and a bunch of doctors wanted to send him off to some special school for gifted children so he can get “the attention he deserves”. Mother and Daddy are firm believers in raising their own children, though, so they didn’t go for that idea. Too bad for me. As it is, he’s already a freshman in high school. For those of you playing at home, that means that he’s in my grade. At my school. I don’t think many people in this world grasp the awkwardness of having your prepubescent brother in half of your classes, talking to all of your friends, and generally making of a nuisance of himself. And the only reason he’s still in the ninth grade is because Mother and Daddy didn’t want him to be “socially isolated”. They wanted him to be with kids at least a little bit closer to his own age. If he really wanted to, Remy could probably be done with college by now. He’s a genius, he can play the piano and the violin, and speak seven different languages fluently (If you were curious, those languages happen to be English, French, Spanish, Russian, Swahili, German, and Latin...why Latin? I don’t know...it’s a 2000 year old dead language. I tried telling him that once, but he called me something that I can’t pronounce, don’t know how to spell, and never got around to looking up in the dictionary. It was probably the word stupid in Latin or something dumb like that. God. It’s annoying enough to have a little brother, it’s even worse when he insists on insulting you in languages you don’t understand.) His goal is to be the youngest person to graduate from Harvard Medical School. Personally, I think that the only reason he hasn’t convinced our parents to let him skip some more grades is because Harvard refuses to accept applicants under the age of 16. Which is how old he’ll be when he graduates from high school.

And then there’s me. I’m just...well, average, I guess. I consider myself pretty enough. I have long, dark curly hair and hazel eyes. I’m tall for my age and pretty thin. I get decent grades, mostly Bs with the occasional C or A thrown in for variety (and if I’m telling you the complete truth, more than one D). I’m good at French, but then, I have no excuse not to be...I practically am French. I’m decent at English, ok with history, not great in science, and terrible at math.

If the matter is given enough thought, I think that the root of my problems can be traced back to math. The entire discipline is a symbol of my inadequacies. (I told you I’m good at English.) So with a genius brother, an artist sister, a brother who will probably be playing in the NBA someday, a mother who designs entire buildings, and a father who can cook anything known to man, where does that leave me? Don’t think I haven’t tried to see where my true talents lie, to see if any of the family genes were passed down to me. My drawings are crude at best. I’m the kind of cook that could mess up making toast. I don’t have a head for architecture. I attempted to give athletics a try in the seventh grade when I joined my school’s soccer team, until I realized that it conflicted with two of my core beliefs: 1. You shouldn’t have to run unless you’re being chased, and 2. Soccer uniforms are extremely unflattering. And I could never be a genius because (and this is the point of this little tirade) of math. I hate it. I’m not good at it. And I am presently failing it.

So what do you do when you’re the only normal person in a family that is brimming with success? What can you do, besides smiling glibly when all the good things happen to your siblings and you’re hiding a report card with an F in Math in your locker because you don’t want to see that disappointed look on your father’s face or hear another speech from your mother about applying yourself? There’s nothing you can do. Nothing that will measure up, that is. Just try to keep a low profile. But that’s hard, when every time you get a test back in Math Mr Patterson gives you that cold hard look that quite plainly says, “I had every one of your brothers and sisters, even your younger brother, and they all did well in my class. What’s wrong with you?” So that is, as they say, the $64,000 question. What’s wrong with me?

But you know what? Maybe Math does serve a purpose in my life. After all, there are a great deal of things that have happened to me that wouldn’t have happened without Math, some of them bad, but most of them good. An interesting chain of events began when I brought home a note from Mr Patterson telling my parents in some great detail that if certain things did not change I would be certain to fail his class, and be doomed to summer school, bringing shame and ridicule upon my poor, average self. It started when Mother suggested hiring a math tutor for me. That’s what I had originally intended to tell you about, dear readers. But I felt it extremely important for me to share with you the plain facts of my family life, so that you might know and understand exactly where I’m coming from. And if I am to be perfectly honest, I will be a teensy bit shocked if you don’t have some sympathy for me, after hearing about my average self raised by a group of rather extraordinary people.


CHAPTER ONE

I walked down the narrow hallway of Select Seminary, feeling a little bit as though as I was walking to the executioners block, or to a life in a tiny cell in the Bastille. I clasped my report card in my left hand, resisting all urges to crumble it up and throw it out, and in doing so buy myself a few weeks of immunity where I could lie to my parents and tell them that there was some clerical error that prevented me from getting my report card.

But I knew that such an excuse would only work for so long; eventually I would have to, as they say, face the music. Now, to be fair, my report card wasn’t all bad. Indeed, it wasn’t even mostly bad. I had gotten As in English and French, a B+ in History, and I had even managed to scrape up a B- in Chemistry. No, the real problem was the giant F in Math, glaring up at me accusingly, blaming me for all of my inherent inadequacies.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, this piece of paper with the power to condemn me was accompanied by another equally damning: a note from Mr Patterson, my math teacher. Just as I received my report card, he handed me a sealed envelope addressed to my parents. “Be sure to give this to your mother and father,” he had said. His tone was brisk, yet vaguely sympathetic. “Juliette can’t help being stupid, so there’s no sense in blaming her for it,” I could hear him think as I nodded and walked away. How could this happen? I had never been good at math, but how did I manage to do something so incompetent as to fail it outright?

There was hope, however. I had only failed one semester, not the entire year. If I could manage a decent grade next semester, I wouldn’t have to take it again, and no one would have to know that Juliette Devereux, the youngest daughter of Jean-Luc and Anna Devereux, had failed ninth grade math. I resolved immediately to work harder in the class. As much as I hated math in all of it’s forms, to be forced into a classroom during the hot New York summer with a group of juvenile delinquents would be worse than any math problem Mr Patterson could concoct.

And so it was with a heavy heart that I walked to my locker to grab the rest of my things and begin the short walk home. As I approached, an unwelcome sight greeted me: my little brother. Cursed by the system of alphabetical order, his locker was right next to mine, although luckily we rarely ran into each other, as we had very different schedules; his monopolized by honors classes, mine by core requirements and electives I had heard were easy. This was not one of those lucky times.

“Did you get your report card?” he asked in a high voice. I can’t wait until the day that his voice breaks and he speaks in an octave that doesn’t closely resemble the pitch of a dog whistle.

What kind of question was that? Remy is a genius. Surely he knew that everyone in the school had gotten their report cards today. Did he think that I was some special case, that the school had withheld my report card for tax reasons or something? Sometimes his questions made me doubt very much the validity of his IQ test. But I elected not to voice my frustrations, for I was not up for great conversation at this particular point in time.

“Yes,” I replied. I looked him in the eye, daring him to ask me how I had done.

“Oh,” he said. “I did too.”

“How exciting for you.” I said simply.

He nodded, and left to walk home alone. So he did have the sense not to ask me about my grades. Sometimes I feel bad for him, because he really doesn’t have any friends at the school. I’m often tempted to try and get him involved in something at school so that he might make some friends, but then he does or says something so completely and utterly Remy that I decide that he doesn’t deserve friends. One really can’t blame the people at my school for Remy’s lack of a social life. There aren’t a great deal of fourteen year olds who would voluntarily spend mass amounts of time with a twelve year old, even one who happens to be a genius and plays the piano and violin and speaks seven languages fluently.

But you know what? As much as I like to tease Remy and tell people that he’s not really my brother, that we found him wandering through the Amazon when he was two years old and decided to keep him because we’re such nice people, he’s really not that bad. He’s a cute kid, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and an easy smile. Sometimes Anouk says that she thinks that when Remy hits puberty, he’s going to be a heartbreaker. And I have to admit, she’s probably not wrong. Plus, even though he’s really smart, like crazy smart, he never tries to make other people feel bad for not knowing as much as he does. And if I ever get over the shame of being tempted to ask my baby brother to help me with my homework, I’m sure he would without giving me too much grief. I love him. But if you ever tell anyone I said that, I’ll kill you.

So as I was standing at my locker, contemplating the conversation with my parents that awaited me that night, my two best friends managed to sneak up on me. Gideon Harris III and Maria Jensen, respectively. Gideon grabbed the report card out of my hand and started reading it.

“A in English and in French! Nice.” he said.

That’s just one of the many reasons why I love Gideon. Even though there’s a huge F on that report card, he can’t help but notice the good things. Gideon has been my best friend since we were four years old and our mothers used to take us to the same playground around the corner from our townhouse. Gideon lives in an apartment four buildings away from me. We have a lot of other stuff in common, too. We both have three brothers and sisters, although he has a younger sister Elyse, who is 8, and a younger brother Jason, who is 13. His older sister Margot is the same age as my older sister, except that Margot is kind of mean and is one of those girls who thinks she’s a lot prettier than she is. She loves to party, she always has like eight boyfriends at once, and she wears way too much makeup. Now, God knows that I am no enemy of makeup, but I definitely believe that you reach a point when you stop looking pretty and you start looking like a coked up streetwalker. It’s a fine line, and Margot walks it with reckless abandon. Plus, she’s kind of a ho. But that is a bit off the point, isn’t it? I have to say in all honesty that Gideon is a pretty attractive boy. He has dark brown curly hair, and eyes so dark they’re almost black. He’s strong and firm, and he has really white teeth. I always used to say that if I hadn’t known Gideon since he was small and timid and, as they say, tied to his mother’s apron strings (Which is a bit of a joke in Gideon’s case, as his mother inherited the family fortune when she turned 21, and I not only know for a fact that she has never worn an apron in her life, I doubt very much that she even knows what one is.), well, I’d probably be in love with him.

I haven’t been friends with Maria for anywhere near as long, but we’re almost as close. Maria moved to my neighborhood from California when she was ten after her parents got divorced. There were a lot of people on my block who didn’t like her family when she first moved here. We have a lot of snobs in my neighborhood, and they think that if you had to make your fortune instead of inheriting it, you’re not good enough to associate with. For one, Maria and her mother are Hispanic, which the WASPy McWASPs in my neighborhood consider a cardinal sin. Her father is English, and he’s a really famous movie producer or director or something like that. And although her family has, as they say, more money than Midas, her father actually had to earn that money. They’re new money. That means they’re not as good as other rich people, I guess. At least that’s what the old money people think. My mother has expressed more than once her opinion that certain people who live in our wealthy neighborhood are what she calls “inbred, ignorant morons”. But she has to say that: she’s from Staten Island. But anyway, Maria is a really nice girl, even though I know she had a lot of problems adjusting at first, since her and her father were really close. She cried a lot at the beginning. But after a while, she got used to her new city, with a little help from me and Gideon. She’s pretty quiet before you get to know her, but once you do, she’s really confident and funny. Gorgeous too. She’s very tall and thin with long, straight black hair and absolutely perfect, tan skin. All the guys at my school are in love with her. She has two older brothers who are in college, so she doesn’t see them that much, but they’re still very close. The younger of the two is a year older than my brother, so I saw him sometimes when I was first friends with Maria. The older one I’ve only seen pictures of, but I have to say, he’s really cute. Of course I would never tell Maria that. Another one of Maria’s little quirks, which I consider endearing, is that she loves doing really touristy things. Like, she’s always suggesting that we go to Central Park or FAO Schwartz. I remember her first Christmas in New York. We walked down Fifth Avenue, and when she saw all the lights and decorations her big green eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger until they took up almost half of her face. That winter was the first time she ever saw snow, too, and I remember thinking how peculiar it was that a person could get to the grand old age of ten without ever having seen snow.

“Yeah, well, I’d love to see the look on my father’s face if I failed French.” I replied.

“Me too,” Gideon said. “He’d do that thing where he gets so upset he forgets how to speak English and just starts muttering in French, that’s always funny.”

“And I missed this?” Maria asked. “When’s the last time that happened?”

“When I got a C on my French midterm.” I answered.

Maria laughed. “How’d you manage that?”

“Well, I can speak French like a Frenchman’s daughter, I never said I could write it. I mean, the spelling and stuff, it’s not like it’s phonetic or anything, it’s confusing. If it was an oral test, I would have kicked it’s ass.” I explained. “But don’t worry, when I bring this report card home, you might get a chance to see Daddy swear in French.”

“Why, what happened?” Maria asked.

I held out the report card and showed her my grade in Math. I suppose I shouldn’t be so cavalier about my grades, I mean, have some shame, but honestly there’s no point in trying to hide things like that from my friends. They’d figure it out sooner and later. Especially if I end up retaking it in summer school. That is the kind of detail that my friends often fail to miss.

“Ooh, that’s going to be a tough one to explain.” Gideon said sympathetically. “Do you want me to come with you, like for moral support? Oh, and maybe they’d do that thing where they don’t yell as much because they don’t want to look like bad parents in front of your friends. I mean, for all they know I could tell my mom that they yell at you, and there’d probably be a rumor circulating that your parents beat you or something within a week. You know how gossip works with the parents in this neighborhood.”

“You’re practically their adopted son,” I argued. “They’re not going to care about looking like bad parents in front of you. Anyway, if you delay the anger outburst it’s just going to snowball and explode into a...giant exploding thing of anger once you leave. Thanks though. I’m better off doing this one solo.” I said, even though it would have made me feel a lot better to have back-up.

So the three of us gathered up our things and started to walk home. Maria lives in an apartment three streets over from me and Gideon, so we split up after about ten minutes. I waved goodbye to Maria and promised to call her later that night to tell her how the conversation with my parents went, assuming of course that I’d still be allowed to use the phone. As we got closer and closer to our street, the complete reality of the situation sunk deeper into my consciousness. Each step I took echoed in my mind, bringing me nearer to my doom. I was nervous, to be sure, but I wasn’t really that worried about being punished. I mean, I knew I would be, but in my heart I realized that my parents had every reason to punish me. I screwed up. No, the funny feeling in my stomach wasn’t about me being banned from the Internet for a week, or not being able to go out with my friends on weekends. It was about having to sit at my dinner table while Remy and Anouk showed my parents their stellar report cards, and my parents telling them how proud they were. And me, slumping lower and lower into my seat, thinking that maybe if I tried hard enough I could disappear entirely. Then I wouldn’t have to see that disappointed look on their faces, as once again Juliette Christine failed to meet expectations. I could picture the scene in my head.

“Juliette, honey, I just don’t understand this,” my mother would say as gently as she could. “How could you fail math? Did you not do the homework?”

“No, I did the homework,” I would say quietly, playing with my fork.

“Well, did you not understand the material?” she would press.

“I guess not,” I would respond.

As much as I knew that this was probably pretty close to what would happen, I couldn’t help but imagine a far harsher version of events, with my mother yelling at me and my father banishing me to an all-girl military school in Alaska or something. Remy and Anouk would laugh and point at me, and Mr Patterson would be there, for some reason, shaking his head in that infuriating manner, telling my parents that I was stupid and would never amount to anything in my life, but that it wasn’t my fault, because stupid people could hardly help being stupid, could they? And the twisted fantasy would end with me being chased away from my home and down the street by a giant, angry looking imaginary number, that only I could see.

That’s what I thought would happen. But the real version of things happened something like this.

“So, today is report card day, right kids?” Mother asked as we sat down to a meal made by our cook Rosmerta.

Anouk and Remy both looked at me before answering. They’re good siblings, and neither of them wanted to implicate me and my academic failure by responding. They wanted my permission before telling my parents that they had got their report cards that were just riddled with A’s.

“Yeah,” I said simply. There was no point in hiding it, it’s not like my parents wouldn’t find out about my scholastic disaster. That was too much to hope for.

“And? How’d we do?” Mother pressed.

“I got an A in English,” I replied truthfully. “And in French.” I looked at Daddy when I said this, because I knew it would please him.

“Wonderful, cherie. I’m so proud of you.” Daddy said. Even though he fathered three extremely American children, I suppose he always cherished the fantasy that we would all grow up speaking his mother tongue. When Louis, Anouk, and Remy all started speaking, their first words were in English, and I think that hurt my father just a little bit. But when I was fourteen months old, Daddy handed me a bottle, and I said, “Merci” (which for those of you who are completely linguistically impaired, means thank you in French). And although all my siblings now speak French as well as they speak English, I think that that one little thank you is what made me Daddy’s favorite, whether he knows it or not.

“Yes, that’s very good. How did you do in Math this semester?” My mother asked in what many would consider a casual tone, but I knew better. My mother was no fool, and I knew that she knew that I was trying to sidestep the issue.

“Hey Mom,” Remy interjected, quickly diverting the attention away from me. “I got an A in Physics, and Mrs Surdyk asked me if I would be her teaching assistant for next semester. Helping her grade papers, run labs, things like that. And I get half a credit for it. Isn’t that great?”

Nice one, Remy, I thought. Mom was distracted for a few minutes, asking him questions about the rest of his classes which, of course, he passed with flying colors. I thought for a minute that I might be off the hook, but then my mother gave me a glance that clearly said, “We will talk about this later.” Wonderful. I was so looking forward to that conversation.

We got through the rest of the dinner, toasting Remy and Anouk’s academic and artistic success. My parents learned that Anouk’s artwork was selected out of 10000 applicants to be featured in an Up-and-Coming article in the Arts section of the New York Times. While all this was going on, I made a mountain out of my potatoes. Then I decided to make it a volcano, with peas and string beans flowing out of it as a sort of green lava. I smiled. I was in the process of sculpting little pieces of carrots into doomed villagers running helplessly from the wrath of the volcano when my mother told me that food was for eating, not for playing with.

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Anna,” Daddy said, teasingly. “I’m a grown man, and I play with my food every day.” He winked at me and smiled. Did I mention how much I love my father?

After dinner was over, I began to walk upstairs to my room, my sanctuary. But before I could reach the door, my mother cut me off.

“Juliette, honey? Can we talk in the parlor?” she said in a gentle voice. I knew that she wasn’t mad at me, just disappointed. Sometimes that’s worse.

I stopped in my tracks, sighed, and turned around. “Sure.”

When I walked back downstairs into our parlor with my mother, my father was already seated on the sofa. This, in general, was never a good sign. It meant that they had already decided, through their magical powers of parental communication, to double team me and have a “mature discussion”.

“Juliette, your father and I want to talk to you about your grades,” my mother began. She always started slowly, gently, lulling me into a false sense of security, and then building steam until she was on an all-out tirade.

I decided (although, looking back, this may have been a mistake) to play innocent. “What about them?”

My father responded carefully and with great tact. “Juliette, you know that we’re very proud of you, and we know that you try very hard in all of your classes.”

“You did very well in English and French, and we did not fail to notice your improvement in History and Chemistry.” my mother added diplomatically. “But, well...I have to tell you quite frankly that I’m–we’re–a little bit disappointed about your grade in Math.”

“I know,” I said as sincerely as I could manage. “And I really am trying. I guess...I guess I just don’t get it.” I looked down at the ground as I said this, allowing a note of shame to creep into my voice. I’m not going to lie. I was going for pity. But when it comes to acting ashamed to soften my parents up, I have no shame.

“Are you going to fail the year?” My mother pressed. No pity. No such luck. “Because you know what will happen if you don’t pass math this year. Summer school. That means going to school while all the rest of your friends get to relax and have fun. Not to mention the fact that this sort of problem can seriously damage your grade point average. One F can make the difference between getting into NYU and getting into CUNY Queens.”

“Well, Mother, I have serious doubts that I’ll be attending NYU anytime soon as it is, so I doubt that this grade will have much of an effect on that.” Ouch. I should learn to keep my mouth shut. Saying things like that tends to ruin the pity angle. Not that I was getting much of that to begin with. But come on. NYU? Is she for real? First of all, I’m fourteen, I’m a freshman in high school, and second of all, has she noticed my grades for the past nine years? Not exactly NYU material. Not by a long shot. I mean, it’s not like I was one of those kids who had to repeat the first grade and ate paste or anything like that. There are just certain things that interest me and certain things that don’t, and unfortunately most of the things that don’t, well, tend to fall into the realm of schoolwork. What can I say? I’ve had senioritis since the third grade. I was the kid in school coloring the different regions of the New York State map saying, “Why am I doing this? What is coloring Western New York blue and Upstate New York red and the Hudson River Valley green possibly going to teach me about the world? This is dumb.” And then I got notes sent home from my teachers saying that I was bright but I had, as they say, an attitude problem. I think that means that I was asking too many questions. But that is a complete and total digression, and I apologize. Back to the painful and humiliating conversation with my parents.

“That kind of attitude,” (See? I told you everyone thinks I have an attitude problem.) “Is exactly the sort of thing that has always held you back academically. If you don’t believe you can succeed, how do you ever expect to do it?”

OK. Pause for a second. My mother, had she not been a gifted and some might say genius architect, really should have gone into a career as a motivational speaker. Actualizing Your Goals, or some crap like that. And I can’t help but note the paradox in her statement. I don’t believe I can succeed, therefore I have no intention of expecting to succeed. Believing and expecting are two mutually specific ideas. They have to be used together in order to make sense. You can’t not believe something and expect it at the same time. That just doesn’t make sense. Of course, that might have been the point my mother was trying to make. You can never tell with her.

“I’m sorry.” It’s always good to apologize, even if you don’t think you did anything wrong. “I don’t know what else to do. I do the homework, I study for the tests--” OK. To be fair, that’s a lie. But seriously, how do you study for math tests? Either you get it or you don’t. “And I still come out with a failing grade.”

“Maybe your brother could tutor you.” Mother suggested.

“Oh, Mother, no. You know how he is. He gets everything so quickly. He just figures it out in his head and sits there saying, ‘Don’t you get it? Don’t you get it?’” I argued. Not to mention the fact that it is humiliating on an almost supernatural level to have your twelve year old brother tutor you in 9th grade math. I’ve learned to deal with the psychological pain that comes along with knowing that my brother who hasn’t even hit puberty has already accomplished more that I probably will in my entire life. This additional blow might push me over the edge.

“Well, honey, there really aren’t a lot of options.” Mother said impatiently. “You need to pass Math. If we need to hire a private tutor, then we’ll hire a private tutor.”

“Fine. May I please be excused?” I asked in as polite a tone I could muster.

“Yes,” my mother responded. “We’ll let you know when the arrangements have been made.”

And just like that, my fate was sealed. The arrangements were being made. Not only would I be forced to study the abhorred mathematics in school, I would now have to waste valuable hanging out time drilling the stupid equations into my head like a railroad spike. And to make matters worse, my tutor would probably wind up being some pretentious preppy over-achieving kid who starting planning for Harvard in preschool. There are a lot of those types at my school. As a rule, I don’t talk to them, I don’t go near them, and, if at all possible, I avoid eye contact with them. They’re the kind of kids who would wear a suit and tie to school even if it wasn’t part of the uniform. They’d just want to make a “good impression”. They’re weird like that. God I hate them. And from now until the end of the semester, I’d probably be forced to spend three afternoons a week with one of them. I sincerely hoped that whatever had infected them to make them so peculiar was genetic and not contagious. There was no doubt in my mind that whatever these arrangements were, they were of a most disagreeable and unsettling nature.