08 | a genius hated by everyone

181 23 34
                                    

THE CHANCE OF HAVING AN IQ OF 166 WAS 99.9994583047%.

I happened to be the unlucky 0.0005416953% to be born with just that.

Contrary to popular belief, I never got to be a babbling infant.

By six months, I skipped crawling and jumped straight into walking. By ten months, I spoke in complete, grammatically correct sentences. By my first birthday, I was reading every book I could get my hands on. By the precocious age of six, I'd absorbed any and all knowledge equivalent to a college student.

Being an exceptionally gifted child should be celebrated. However, with a family as corrupted as mine, I had pretty much the opposite experience.

Instead of taking pride in my intelligence, my mom found me creepy. She had me admitted to psychiatric hospitals, where I had to endure hundreds of thousands of tests and old-fashioned doctors trying to diagnose what was wrong with me. Eventually, when my exceptional IQ came to light, she started signing me up for variety shows so she could exploit me for as much money as she could.

My dad was against it. Unlike my mom, he treated as a father treated his daughter. He carried up me on his shoulders, bought me dollhouses, gifted me pints of my favourite mint-chocolate ice cream. Despite the fact that I could read my own bedtime stories, he offered to read them for me anyway.

After years of being considered some artificial life form, I appreciated being thought of as just his little girl. I thought it to be genuine, too.

Until, of course, I walked in on the very guy accusing my mom of having some other man's child.

Yep. From the day I was brought home from the hospital, my dad didn't believe I was related to him. In fact, he was convinced I couldn't be his child.

He was going along with my whims out of pure courtesy, and not love. Because he was too polite to bring up the subject matter in front of me, so he chose to antagonize my mom in private instead.

It wasn't just my parents who alienated me, either. My brothers picked on me around the clock. Under their watch, I'd broken and injured multiple limbs, earned concussions, and had become their lifelong punching bag. Every day, they would also force me to do their homework for them, and every day, I was strapped to a desk for hours on end as they went out to hang out with their friends.

My family made it clear they'd rather I be average. Around the clock, they pressured me to stop being creepy—and to act my age.

Young as I was, I didn't quite understand why they were so hostile. I liked how fast my thoughts ran. I liked reading up on complex concepts and stringing information together as if it were one big puzzle. I liked how even the tiniest of details lingered in my memory, ready to draw upon at a moment's notice.

Sometime in the first grade, my homeroom class went on a field trip to Tokyo University. Since my brain worked differently from my classmates, we were often on different wavelengths. So, while all the girls and boys were huddled in their own little groups, I stayed in my respective corner, alone.

Even when I eventually wandered off on my own, nobody cared enough to notice.

I wound up in a gigantic lecture hall, filled with more seats than I could wrap my head around. In that silent hall stood a kind man who greeted me warmly.

"How did you get in here?" he'd chuckled. "Are you lost? I'd love to help you find your way, but I'm sort of in the middle of something."

Depicted on the whiteboard was a lengthy mathematical equation. Hundreds of textbooks and scraps of paper were strewn nearby.

Project Cupid | OngoingWhere stories live. Discover now