“So what happens when you finish those? Do you plan to graduate early?”
I just shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know yet. That’s a possibility.”
The others all looked at me. My parents stared at me like I had grown a second head, Mrs. Bakkley like I was a new toy to play with, and Mrs. Rogers like a potential science experiment. Mr. Butterfield was the worst. He looked at me in contemptuous disdain. “What could possibly make you think you can do any of that?” he asked.
I returned his haughty look. “Because unlike you, I understand the meaning of the phrase ‘99.9th percentile’. I know what my IQ is, and I suspect it is considerably higher than yours.” As soon as I said it, I knew I had overstepped the bounds. “I apologize, that was rude of me.”
“How dare you! I absolutely forbid this! This meeting is over!” he yelled. “Get out!”
I stayed seated. “On what grounds? An inability to perform the course work? That is something which can be tested for, and failure to allow me to do this will only result in a legal challenge to the school board which you will most certainly lose. I have my lawyer’s card in my wallet. Should I call him?”
The reminder of my lawyer caused him to sputter incoherently. He turned to Mrs. Rogers and said, “This boy is nothing but a troublemaker! You should have nothing to do with him!”
She eyed me closely. She asked me, “In his day, the physics establishment considered Einstein a troublemaker, also. Are you a good troublemaker or a bad one?”
“Probably both, but I don’t presume to think of myself as an Einstein. That would be presumptuous even for me,” I said with a smile.
“Your teacher told me about your difficulties last week. I would be willing to work with you despite that.”
“Towson High will go along?”
She nodded. “It wouldn’t be the first time. We usually have a few students who have moved forward, and a few who end up taking classes their senior year over at Towson State. You have to mean it, though. The school will want you to do your best, but more importantly, so will I. I need a personal commitment from you, not your parents.”
“Done!” I held out my hand to her.
“Agreed, then.” She shook my hand. “I will be talking to you near the end of the year, to figure out our arrangements. Until then, Mrs. Bakkley will give you both years of Algebra, and monitor you in Geometry next year.”
She stood up. “My part in this is over. Carl, if you don’t give us one hundred percent, we’ll know it and the cooperation will end. If you do give us that one hundred percent, I promise we will, too.” She shook hands with my stunned parents and left.
Mr. Butterfield sputtered some more, but in the end agreed. Mentioning the lawyer had broken his spirit. Mrs. Bakkley told us she would develop a lesson plan to speed me along, and we left. Just like that I was on the road to a doctorate in mathematics.
It was a quiet ride home, but I could almost hear the wheels grinding in my parent’s heads. Once inside, they dragged me into their bedroom. “So, is that what you want to do? Become a mathematician?” asked my father.
“I think so,” I agreed. “I’ve been thinking about it since the beginning of the school year, actually. I guess I just got bored.”
“Well, what would you do? What do math people do? Do you want to become a school teacher?” asked Mom.
Dad and I just stared at her for a moment. Mom’s actually fairly bright, but she’s never been to college and she met Dad a couple of years after he got out. She simply doesn’t know what college is like. “Well, Mom, I might be able to get a job at the University of Pennsylvania teaching mechanical engineers how to do calculus,” I said blandly. That got a laughing snort out of my father, since that was his degree and college.
“Very funny, smarty-pants. I’m serious!”
I shrugged. “Lots of things, Mom. Even leaving aside teaching at the college level, maybe computers. That’s all math.”
“Isn’t that electrical engineering?” asked Dad.
“Well, maybe back in the dawn of time, you know, the Forties. It was run by dinosaurs, I heard.” The first electronic computer, ENIAC, had been built at the University of Pennsylvania back when Dad had been going there.
He made a rude gesture to me, eliciting a sharp rebuke of “Charlie!” from Mom. To me she said, “Don’t encourage him. What about what they asked? Do you want to graduate early?”
“Mom, I just don’t know yet. Maybe, but maybe not. If I go to school my senior year over at Towson State, who picks up the bill? I bet Towson High pays! I bet I can get a free year or more of college out of them.”
That got them both thinking. College wasn’t cheap, and at their income level, was going to result in a hefty chunk of change, even figuring in scholarships or loans. Dad asked the next question. “What did you mean by you knew what the 99.9th percentile was. What do you think it means?”
I looked him straight in the eye. “Low genius.”
“How do you know that?” he asked quietly. This was all supposed to be hush-hush, top secret. Children weren’t supposed to know the results of IQ tests; it would warp them or something.
“Dad, you’d be amazed what you can find out in the library,” was my only answer. Yes, the library and the Internet (when that was invented) and a couple of later standardized tests. Most tests pegged me at about 140, just at the bottom end of the genius rating. It didn’t warp me all that much knowing about it. Hamilton tested out even higher — I mean, have you ever actually met somebody who scored a perfect 1600 on their SAT? I lived with the little bastard! — but he was living proof that IQ doesn’t make you smart.
The final discussion was my insulting Mr. Butterfield. Despite the fact I had apologized, I was chewed out for pushing his buttons, and television was denied for the rest of the week. Well, it beat a beating, and I deserved it. Oh well.
Chapter 6: Financial Planning
Thursday, December 19, 1968
Surprisingly, not much was said about my testing out of Algebra 1. Those who noticed me skipping out on the classes basically assumed I was dropping out of the class, not burning ahead. It would probably be more noticeable in January, when I began sitting in on some of the Algebra 2 classes. Mrs. Bakkley’s plan was for me to skip out for about a month, studying on my own to catch up, and then to audit the class towards the end of the spring semester.
Otherwise things went along quietly. Eighth grade English and Social Studies were abysmally boring, as always. They had been before. We didn’t move ahead of the norms until we got to high school in those subjects. General Science was much like before, and Mr. Rodriguez was just as interesting. I still found chemistry to be interesting — after all, I had made it a career once before — but now had no burning desire to do so again.
Gym proved curious. Before, I had suffered from the same body anxiety and nervousness as any other little boy. I often tried to skip out on showers after gym, and my locker smelled unbearably atrocious. Now, I just didn’t care if anybody saw my scrawny little ass, and if anybody commented on the size of my pecker, I’d just ask them why they were looking. I also cleaned my shit out of the locker and took it home to be washed. The EPA would have approved, if there was an EPA at the time; it wouldn’t be invented until after Nixon took office.
My physical training program had begun paying some marginal dividends. I could run almost three miles now, and if I wasn’t the world’s fastest runner, I could do so without embarrassing myself or tossing my cookies all over the place. I decided it was time to learn self-defense.