Note: Lately I have been writing a short fiction story every weekend. I am going to start sharing a few of them with you, while continuing my regular posts. This story is about a tortured and gifted 8 year old boy.
Be Human
They called him “Alf the Calf.”
But not for long, he hoped. Alf set his palms flat on his desk, careful not to touch the test until ordered to begin. The guidance counselor, standing in a cloud of perfume near the whiteboard, gave him a tight smile.
He tried to smile back, but smiling was hard for Alf. He always worried that his mouth would make the wrong expression. But he had always wanted this, to be someone. It was about time, too. He was eight, and so far his life had been unpromising. There was the matter of his sunken nose, a hollow, a dip, where the defining line of bone should be.
He was bow-legged, too, and his jeans never fit quite right, always baggy in places, and too tight in others. Hence, the nickname.
When he was around, frowns appeared, the kinds of scowls you would expect of someone who has just eaten a whole lemon in one bite.
But he was unable to tell himself that the rejections were due only to his looks. A boy in his class named Mack must have weighed 200 pounds, but he was always joking and everyone loved him.
But Alf was afraid to tell jokes. Afraid he would shut down, lose his train of thought mid-way. He was too conscious of his flaws, and always confused, especially by the doe-eyed girls with silken hair who seemed too pretty not to be nice, unless they had a good reason.
But now he had hope that he was not just a lemon. He had written a story that was, the teacher said, beyond his years.
He read a lot, books that were beyond the grasp of most kids his age. He lived in the library, seeking to escape into other worlds. Alf thought of books that way: like planets, each inhabited by a separate mind. The teachers said his use of metaphors indicated a talent for abstract thinking that eluded many seventh graders; and that his depth of emotional maturity was highly unusual for an eight-year-old.
There was talk of promoting him two grades ahead, where maybe his nose and legs would not matter anymore. The other kids would know he was smart and would like him. Best of all, he would have a reason now to snub those who had snubbed him.
But the rule was that, for him to be moved ahead, he had to score exceptionally high on the test. No one said the word “genius,” but Alf knew. Knew that everything pivoted on the number that went with that word.
He sat at the round table in the office of the guidance counselor, just her, him, and his dad. The best thing about his new status was how his father was treating him differently. His dad had always tolerated Alf like an old piece of furniture he had promised to never give away, but that had changed.
Alf suddenly found himself being showered in gifts: brand new books with crisp glossy pages, giant hardbacks with bright colorful photographs of animals; a junior chemistry set in a box the size of a small television, full of vials and magnets; a microscope; puzzles; and even an elaborate magic kit with trick boxes and two-faced cards.
His father and the counselor both were looking at him, eyes shining with approving expectation. Alf rested his forearms on the round pinewood table as he gripped his sharpened number 2 pencil, but like a worm it had a life of its own, trembling and squirming in his fingers.
What if he failed? What if he was not extraordinary? Not a genius? That word, genius, a word edged in gold leaf, a word that glowed with power and richness. If he was exposed notto be one, everything would go back to the way it was before.
He would return to Lemon-hood.
The more he thought about it, the more his worm of a pencil squirmed in his fist. He ordered it to relax and it almost did, until the guidance counselor pulled a large-faced watch from the pocket of her caramel hip-long cardigan and set the alarm.
Alf felt the muscles inside his forehead go painfully taut. He had not counted on time pressure. He hated being timed because his dad was always rushing him. It made Alf anxious, and when Alf reached the breaking point of anxiety, he sometimes fell asleep, which made his father angry. His father always blamed him but Alf knew there was a word for what he had: narcolepsy. Alf forced his eyes wide open and pleaded with his brain not to go to sleep during the test.
After a tense smile, the lady cleared her throat and became all business. “You will have 20 minutes to complete the test,” she said. All of her sunny warmth had slid into shadow. There was a forced formality in her tone, an authority that brooked no argument. “When I tell you to stop, you will lay down your pencil immediately, or the test will be invalid. Are you ready?”
Alf tried to nod, but his head was slow to budge. For a second, he was afraid his stomach would swallow his head, because his lower abdomen felt hollow, a churning black hole below his rib cage. Worse, his rib cage seemed to strain against his lungs. He struggled to yawn, to get a good breath, but his yawning muscles were out of order.
“You may begin,” the counselor said.
Alf imagined a gun going off, like in races. His impulse was to sprint instead of write. But he continued to sit.
The questions blurred into an inky mass, ran together like a group of runners on a track. He took a deep breath and ordered his eyes to focus, until the blurry edges sharpened into legibility. He could comprehend better now, so why did he feel like he was drowning?
He glanced at the clock. Two minutes had already passed but his trembling hand was slow to move. How had that happened? He could hear the clicking of heels and the breathing of the counselor as she paced behind and beside him, the floral smell of her like a smothering fog. Why did she have to pace? There was no one in the room to cheat from.
He looked at his father sitting in a chair beside the closed door. His father, who rarely smiled at anyone, smiled encouragingly, even proudly, at Alf.
The smile and the pride of his father’s eyes terrified Alf, because he could too easily imagine losing them. He had to do well. Ace this. He had to.
He glanced down at the sequences of shapes, the processions of numbers, and the made-up words like “sloom” or “gornack,” which were used for logic problems. He began to think them through, and write quickly.
He was going too fast, but he was painfully aware of the wall clock ticking out its damning rhythm. He tensed in his chair, because he knew his hands, and not his mind, were doing most of the work, and hands could never be trusted.
He looked at his father again, whose legs were crossed, one over the other, his large pale hands resting on the arms of the chair.
Alf tried to think harder. Instead, he wrote faster. He had the feeling that a hidden world of depth flourished beneath the text and symbols, but that he was not touching it.
In the next problem, he decided to reach the depth, if it was there to reach. He stared at it, a sequence of shapes to be completed: a parade of circles, squares, and triangles with four multiple choice answers. He slowed down in his mind, fell into a world of curves and straight lines, and the answers began to clarify themselves.
He could see how the test was a conversation or a game, where someone rolled a ball to you and you rolled it back, in just a certain way.
He forgot about the clock and the clicking heels and the cold cloud of perfume that reminded Alf more of funerals than pretty flowers. But his newfound concentration lasted only for a few problems.
“Stop.”
The clicking of heels snapped a final time, leaving a vacant silence, and for a moment Alf thought that the instructions must have been, not for him, but for the shoes.
“Put down your number 2 pencil and leave it at the top edge of your test.” Alf obeyed and the counselor swept up the test booklet. It bothered him that he had not gotten to finish the test. In class, he usually finished first.
“I am violating protocol,” she said, “but I feel comfortable doing it because you are such a special case. Normally, I would score this after you left. But,” she smiled, “given your track record, I am confident you will have a stellar score, and I can see that your father is anxious. For that matter, so am I.”
She sat down at her desk at the front of the room and smoothed her skirt over her knees. Alf watched her intently, the slightest impression of a smile still etched on her face.
He watched as the smile faded, then disappeared, observed how the muscles around her mouth tightened, and the way her forehead crumpled. With the next few beats of the clock, Alf wanted to fade too.
He could hear her pen skidding across the surface. Alf wanted to snatch the test back from her. She was working too hard, taking too long.
Her eyebrows were doing a strange dance. All at once, she laid down her pen, forced a smile at Alf, and turned her head away. He looked at her face for some sign of reassurance, but her eyes, lost in the glare of her bifocals, were avoiding his.
“Well done,” she told Alf, but there was no emotion in the words. She turned to his father, who looked back with eager eyes. “Mr. Tyler, may I talk to you alone for a minute?”
She pointed to a door behind the test room, leading into an office, where Alf could see the dark corner of a desk and a lily bending in a vase. His father rose and followed the trail of clicking heels. The counselor shut the door.
Alf could hear the surge of voices, a back and forth like a game of ping pong, a woman and a man paddling words back and forth. His father was clearly the most aggressive opponent, but it was hard for Alf to make out the words. He could make out only one: overachiever. When he heard the word, it sounded to him like the final slam of a coffin. As if to complete the image, Alf closed his eyes.
He tried to find the space that he retreated to whenever kids called him Alf the Calf. Instead, the room blurred and he fell into a kind of half sleep, lulled by the ping pong cadence of voices. The room he was in fell away behind his lids, and he suddenly found himself in another place.
For a dream, the detail around him was crisp and vibrant. He was standing in a brightly lit yard in front of a log cabin. He looked away from it and could see, far away, the jagged tips of mountains.
The splintered door was already opened, but he nudged it open wider and found a large muscular man asleep in a rocking chair, head back and mouth hanging open, his denim-clad legs sprawled. Below him a dark four-legged beast was chewing on something that looked like a chicken thigh.
The dog gazed up at him curiously, meat hanging from the corners of its mouth. Its eyes were an eerie red color. Alf began to back away and knocked over a fire poke leaning against the wall. He exited the room quickly, consoling himself that the dog already had what he wanted: the meat-covered bone.
Still, Alf was shaking as he fled across the yard. Hard to do since he had no idea where he was going. He fled toward the forest that lay in the shadow of the mountains, where it was dark and cool and mossy.
But as he went forward, he found himself blocked. It was the dog. No, not a dog; it was too big and feral-looking. A wolf. Alf could only stare at the creature, at its dull black fur and red eyes. The wolf was high enough to meet Alf at eye level.
Alf was too fascinated to do anything but stare at the beast and the red intensity of its eyes. “You were afraid of me,” the wolf said. “May I ask why?”
Alf stumbled back a little. “I thought you might want to eat me.”
“Would that have been so bad? You look so unhappy. Would I not have been doing you a favor?”
Alf seriously considered the question. Yes, sometimes he had wanted to die. He had. But right now he was too curious. “I want to live,” Alf said. “I just wish I could be someone else. I want to have a normal nose. And straight legs. But I can’t, so I want to be extraordinary. I want to be…a genius.”
“A genius? What is a genius?”
“Well, you take a test with puzzles in it. And if you solve enough of them in a certain time, it means you are a genius. Everyone is impressed with you. And if you have any terrible flaws, they stop mattering.”
“Ah,” the wolf said. “I know nothing of this test. But solving problems for a reward: that I understand. Perhaps what you mean is cunning.”
“Cunning? Well, I suppose.”
“Wolves have a lot of that.We have to. Cunning is the reason I waited until the man was asleep to steal his food. Sometimes we use it to corner our prey. Of course, cunning is not enough to make a wolf what it is.”
“No,” Alf said. “You have tails, pointed ears, and four legs.”
“No, more than that. Far more. A wolf must have courage.” The wolf turned to the side and Alf could see a patch of singed fur, with raw pink skin beneath. Alf stepped hesitantly forward, but the wolf emboldened Alf with a nod.
Alf reached out tremulously and ran his fingers along the rough scar. The wolf spoke again. “The first time I robbed the man you saw he burned me with a fire poke. I should have bitten him and grabbed the food. Instead I yowled and limped away. Two of my cubs starved. That day I was a coward. It was only much later that I returned, because I had to.”
“But I thought you said wolves were always courageous.”
“Wolves are lots of things, beyond cunning. We are vicious and kind. We eat and are eaten. We fight and retreat. The challenge for a wolf is to be a wolf, with all that it means. To know struggle and survive. For all that cunning is useful, but not enough to make a wolf a wolf, and especially not an extraordinary one.”
The wolf stared at Alf with dangerous eyes. “We corner. We persuade. We intimidate. And sometimes we are cowards, because sometimes we have to be. We are wolves. If you want to be extraordinary, if you want to be a genius, then stop trying. Instead, be human. Be human with all that it means, and never flinch from it. Be human, be cowardly, and be brave. Then be honest. As honest as you can possibly be. If you can do that, your kind will see you as a genius. And in every way that matters, you will be.”
Alf stood speechless, looking into the glare of earnest red eyes. Alf felt a burning flush, yet a shiver rippled through him from his neck to his spine. “Thank you,” Alf said. “I will try.”
“What will you try?” the wolf prompted.
At first Alf was confused, until he realized the wolf was testing him like his teachers did sometimes to make sure he understood. “I will be human. Always human. And then honest. But…tell me more. Help me understand.”
“You can start by looking out the window.”
“Huh? What window?”
“Behind you.”
Alf turned around and saw none of the grass and no mountains – only the large office picture window with its cracked mini-blinds and the sun winking through them. He turned back around and could see the round clock mounted to the wall, and hear the voices.
He wiped the bleary confusion from his eyes with his fists. The door cracked open a bit so he could make out what the woman said, though she was whispering. “Bear in mind, Mr. Tyler, I am not a licensed psychologist. It was only one test. The discrepancy tells me something else was going on with him. Please. Even if he is only an overachiever, you have every right be proud of him.”
Though the woman was defending him, the words that struck Alf the most was the phrase “only an overachiever,” confirming his impression that it was not what you did that defined you, but who the world said you were.
When his father emerged, Alf desperately searched his face for any vestige of the pride and approval he had seen the last few weeks. But his father kept his head down. His face was drawn and pale above the starched collar of his shirt, his tie askew.
His sudden pallor made the network of lines around his mouth look deeper. There was a look of pain in his blue eyes.
He looked so old and tired, Alf wanted to comfort, to hug, and reassure him. “I can take the test again,” Alf said, but his voice broke up on the last two words.
His father sighed wearily and shook his head. “Get your coat, Alf.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I can do better. Please, let me try again.”
“What did you do with the bags?”
“Huh?” Alf thought his father meant book bags, but Alf only had one of them, which was slung across his shoulder.
“The bags. The ones all your new brain toys came in, the ones I bought you. I need the receipts. All of them.”
The words burned like a fire poke inside Alf. They scorched and scraped his heart raw. And he thought about the dream wolf and the red power of its eyes, containing all the courage and cowardice of every wolf who had ever lived.
Alf remembered the jagged scar scorched into its flesh as if it were his own and felt again the rough warmth of furless skin against his fingertips.
And he remembered what the wolf had said. Be human.
Alf knew right then that the test was wrong; that the world behind his eyes went far and deep beyond what any test could ever tell. He imagined the fire poke sinking low and hot into his skin, the fire-heat burning away everything inside him that could be burned and illuminating everything he was or ever could be.
Never in his life had he felt so brilliantly burned; so raw and so defeated; so determined; so cowardly; and so courageous.
He had never felt so human.