My Little Genius

Rebecca Johnson

The author at nine years old

Word Count 698

In sixth grade, I was struggling in math. My teacher, an oleaginous fellow with bulbous eyes and a balding head, asked me to stay after class one day. I watched my fellow classmates leave with a sinking heart. This was not a man with whom you wanted to be alone. Think Paul Giamatti in “The Holdovers.”

“I read your folder,” he peered at me, while perched on the edge of his desk.

I didn’t know what a “folder” was, but it seemed to hold secrets about one’s inner self that were only available to adults.

“Did you know you’re a genius?” he leaned in, a gleeful leer on his face.

This was not technically true. According to him, my IQ score was 159, which put me one point away from genius. Nevertheless, if 159 was my actual score (to this day, I don’t quite believe it), I ranked near the top .01 of the population.

We both stared at each other, mystified. I was good in English, but my performance in math class in no way indicated any kind of superior intelligence. He concluded by calling me “his little genius” and saying he expected great things of me. (If he’s alive, he’s waiting still!)

When I got home, I asked my mother about the score. As a teacher herself, she had seen plenty of dim kids with high scores so she was unimpressed. Moreover, she had married a man who tested off the charts on this sort of thing. My dad, the son of an Amarillo, Texas gas station owner, had left high school early to attend Yale on a full scholarship from the Ford Foundation. It’s not an exaggeration to say he peaked at the age of 17. When he died, unshaven and ill kempt, fifty years later on a sun bleached sidewalk outside the Los Angeles apartment his children paid for, the man who found him thought he was homeless.

Nevertheless, I took the news of my so-called intelligence and quietly slipped it into my pocket where it radiated an invisible power that has stayed with me to this day. At twelve-years-old, I went to the Memphis public library and asked the reference librarian for a copy of The Guide to Secondary Schools in America, a musty hard cover book with tiny type, smeary black and white pictures of leafy quads and descriptions of sports I had never heard of (field hockey, squash, crew) along with tantalizing numbers like a faculty to student ratio of 8:1. It was a far cry from my public school in Memphis where my science teacher would read straight from the textbook while the box fan next to him distorted the air waves so all we could hear was an indistinct vocal fry. Ahhhsmowsissss isssss mooooovement frrrooom hiiiiigh to looooww.

I concentrated on the schools that seemed likely to have the money for a scholarship—Andover, Exeter, Groton—and was rejected by them all. If I hadn’t had that secret knowledge about my IQ in my pocket, I probably would have slunk away in embarrassment, but that number –159—glowed inside me like the neon signs of Pottersville in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” My mother, God bless her, scraped up the money to send me to a private school for one year and I applied to another round of schools. This time, I got into one, which is all you need. From there, it was easy to get into a so-called elite college, another badge of honor which I would need to shore up my fragile ego in a harsh male world that often seemed bent on belittling a young woman eager to leave her mark.

I can barely recall any of my teachers in elementary school but I can still remember what that math teacher was wearing the day he revealed my score. It seemed so inappropriate and, yet, so momentous.

To be honest, I don’t feel very smart. The world bewilders me. I am mystified by human behavior. I went into journalism because I was hoping someone could explain things to me, but it was a false promise. Nobody knows anything. As far as I can tell, the smarter you are, the more clearly you see this.

Rebecca is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications including (alphabetically) Elle, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Salon, Vogue (contributing editor 1999-2020). Johnson is the author of the novel And Sometimes Why. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.