i'm going from broke, but i've got hope
That English story I posted a few paragraphs of the other day? Well, it's due tomorrow, so I figured I might as well post it. And I know that the ending is, well, you'll see, but it might help if you assume that there's some ~meaning behind it, not just that I had too many pages already.
Title from this e.e. cummings poem. (I'm not positive about the possessive - if you have any feelings, give me a shout.)
Feel free to critique it; I still have time to make changes.
The Best Gesture of Her Brain
Barley was just your regular, ordinary, average girl. Who knew everything. So maybe she wasn't that normal, but she was a girl.
Well, she had limits. She didn't know absolutely everything, but she came damn close. She knew all about the past and most things about the present. She had a really weird brain - something to do with fabulous genetics, and a little too many margaritas on her mum's part - that stored all of this information without Barley even having to learn it in the first place. Now, most people whose mothers downed alcohol when they were pregnant winded up with the opposite problem: their brains were smaller, slower, and less able to handle things. It was almost like Barley had gotten all of that extra brain-stuff that those kids would have had shoved into her tiny little fetus head. All of the best scientists in the world had given up researching cancer or discovering how to save the planet to poke around in Barley's cranium, trying to figure out why she was so different from everyone else, but they couldn't figure it out.
Sometimes, evolution is a crazy bitch.
~~~
Barley was in eighth grade. By all rights, she should have been in college or past that or something, but her parents clung to the hope that she could at least have a normal childhood. Of course, they were wrong, of course there was no way that she could have a normal life, but at least they tried. They were in denial. Every parent just wants their child to fit in, to be happy. On some level, the average parent wants their kid to be special, yes, but never that special. Never so special that they're unable to connect with people their own age, regardless of what that age is.
Even as a baby, as a little one year old, Barley was a bit different. She didn't cry as much, she didn't demand her bottle or her toys quite so frequently as other babies. She was passive-aggressive, which is an amazing feat for a baby. If her parents didn't realize that she wanted her blanket from the one plaintive moan and outstretched finger, she wouldn't make another sound. She would just stare at them, eyes wide and shimmering, and pull that special baby magic on them. Blinking was an issue, as it kind of ruined the whole stare-thing, but she was young, and couldn't quite control her desire to close her eyelids every once in a while.
When Barley was twenty-eight months old, she was already reading. Somewhere, in that crazy brain of hers, there was all of the information about reading a person could ever need. She knew how to use commas correctly, and semi-colons, and quotation marks, and every other punctuation mark in the English language. She knew what italics were and why they were used. She conceptually knew how to pronounce every English word, but her mouth just wasn't up for the challenge. She had the same problem with writing: she knew how to form letters, but she couldn't make her hand listen to her brain.
By the time she was four, her issues with writing and speaking were gone. Her brain was just starting to teach her Latin, obviously the most practical of languages, and she was having fun translating everything her parents said into it. Barley's parents were still clinging to the notion that their child was normal in some way, and so they spoke to her as if she had a normal four-year-old brain..
"Hey, Barley!" they would call at their child, diligently scribbling away on pieces of paper, no doubt attempting to write the Next Great American Novel. "What are you doing, kiddo?"
Salve, Barle! Quid facis, filia, she thoughy before answering. "I'm writing." Scribo.
"What's it about, sweetie?" her mum asked, bending low so she could see. Quid scribis, dulcis?
"It's about a girl, named Gertrude, who always wanted a pony," she said, looking up at her mother and smiling. Although Barley was vastly intelligent, she was still a four-year-old girl at heart, and all four-year-old girls want ponies. "And then one day, one day she got one!" Puella, nomine Gertruda, quae semper voluit mannulum. Tumque uno die illa accepit mannulum!
Her endearing childishness, perfectly logical for a person of her age, made it easy for her parents to treat her as if she was the same as everyone else, if a wee bit more advanced. When Barley started elementary school, however, it became much harder.
~~~
Barley was six, the same age as most of her classmates. She already knew how to read, she already knew her sums, and she already understood how to tie her shoes. There was nothing for her to do, so she branched out. She was bored, and she started thinking of exciting and slightly confusing ways to respond to simple questions. At first, she just stuck with translating everything into Latin.
"What is five plus five?" her teacher would ask.
"Decem," she would reply, staring questioningly at the ensuing blank stare.
"I'm ... sorry?"
"Decem. Quin et quin erit decem." The class would titter in confusion. They knew that Barley was somehow making a joke, they just didn't understand what it was about; they did, however, see the effect it had on their teacher, which only made them laugh louder. It was still hilarious to make a teacher uncomfortable at their age, as ethics hadn't entered the equation.
"I'm sorry, but I can't understand what you're saying," the teacher said. It was her first year teaching, and she was completely caught off guard by the Latin. She didn't even know that it was Latin, because she had never learned it in a class. "Is that some language you've made up?" Her high voice was almost imperceptible over the continuing laughter of the children.
"Actually, no," Barley said. "It's Latin. Maybe you've heard of it?" She was reaching the point in her life when she was starting to realize just how much she knew when compared to everyone else. And she was still young, and still immature - because no amount of compassion or wisdom came with all of those brains - and she was coming to understand that she could lord her intelligence over everyone else. She felt entitled to it; she was smart, they were not. She didn't grasp the ethical ramifications to her condescending attitude. She didn't even realize that she was being condescending in the first place. She was still six, and everything was still simple. She knew more, and they knew nothing at all.
Her teacher, shamed and confused, continued the lesson, making sure not to call on Barley again for the rest of the day. She did, however, write a note for Barley's parents, and handed it to them when they arrived to pick their child up from school.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hayden, the letter read.
Your daughter, Barley, is a remarkably intelligent child. But she seems to have an attitude problem we really need to work on. (Barley would later note that her teacher ended the sentence with a preposition, which was wrong.) I'd love to talk to both of you Friday after school. Let me know what times are the best for you.
- Ms. Cooper
~~~
After the meeting, Barley's parents had a long talk with her. They told her how her teacher felt about the obvious way in which Barley was showing her disdain for the rest of the class. They told her that her teacher was personally hurt by Barley's utter lack of respect for her and the other faculty members. They told her that her teacher told them that immediate action must be taken to nip Barley's attitude in the bud.
By the end of the next day, Barley was the same as she had been the previous day. She went in to school with the intent to be nicer. Once it was brought to her attention that other kids were feeling bad about themselves, she didn't want to act the same. She didn't want to hurt anyone: she was still sweet, still innocent and adorable. But her resolve weakened when she was faced with the sheer idiocy of her classmates. By the end of her final class, nothing had changed. People still felt inferior, her teacher still felt disrespected, and Barley still felt as though she had an inherent right to treat others poorly.
When Barley was a bit older, and a bit wiser, she looked back on this experience and used her teacher's utter inability to be effective as a reason to believe in her superiority. Her teacher had been useless, and should therefore have been treated as such.
~~~
Barley was ten and in the sixth grade. She still knew everything, still knew all of the answers, and still knew how to solve all of the problems presented to her. She was still bored out of her mind. Latin wouldn't cut it anymore. Some of her classmates were learning Latin, so they could translate her answers for her teacher. One of her teachers even replied in Latin once, so Barley had to stop. She switched from Latin to Hungarian, from Hungarian to Welsh, from Welsh to Mandarin, and from Mandarin to Finnish. None of them worked, none of them released stress like they had in the past. So she took out her frustrations on everyone around her, her classmates, her teachers, her bus-drivers, everyone. She pounced on every single mistake. She never let anything slide: no sentences ending with prepositions were allowed within earshot of her, no substituting 'good' for 'well' or 'then' for 'than.' She was especially militant with 'affect' and 'effect,' and caught at least one person a day using them incorrectly. She was never without a sneer, an arrogant eyebrow raise, and a condescending tone.
One day, after a particularly rude incident (a girl had written 'there' instead of 'their' on a paragraph Barley was correcting, and she tore into her classmate), a boy turned and glared at her. She looked at him in disbelief: why was he looking at her like that? Didn't he know who she was?
"What do you want?" she asked, venom dripping from every syllable.
"Stop being such a jerk," he said, and he turned back around, confident that his job had been done. Those were the last words he ever said to her, and they never had any more contact. He went back to being a nondescript boy in her school that she never thought of again after the day was over.
Nothing had changed. She was still a condescending, arrogant girl with a seemingly infinite store of cruelty and absolutely no patience for idiocy. She still believed that she was fundamentally better than everyone else, and she continued to act accordingly.
But once, in the hallway, a girl dropped her books, and Barley stopped to help her pick them up. She made snide comments the entire time, but she helped.
She didn't realize what she had done, not really. And it never happened again, and she never thought about it again, and she was still the same old Barley, but she did it.
And that was enough.
Title from this e.e. cummings poem. (I'm not positive about the possessive - if you have any feelings, give me a shout.)
Feel free to critique it; I still have time to make changes.
The Best Gesture of Her Brain
Barley was just your regular, ordinary, average girl. Who knew everything. So maybe she wasn't that normal, but she was a girl.
Well, she had limits. She didn't know absolutely everything, but she came damn close. She knew all about the past and most things about the present. She had a really weird brain - something to do with fabulous genetics, and a little too many margaritas on her mum's part - that stored all of this information without Barley even having to learn it in the first place. Now, most people whose mothers downed alcohol when they were pregnant winded up with the opposite problem: their brains were smaller, slower, and less able to handle things. It was almost like Barley had gotten all of that extra brain-stuff that those kids would have had shoved into her tiny little fetus head. All of the best scientists in the world had given up researching cancer or discovering how to save the planet to poke around in Barley's cranium, trying to figure out why she was so different from everyone else, but they couldn't figure it out.
Sometimes, evolution is a crazy bitch.
~~~
Barley was in eighth grade. By all rights, she should have been in college or past that or something, but her parents clung to the hope that she could at least have a normal childhood. Of course, they were wrong, of course there was no way that she could have a normal life, but at least they tried. They were in denial. Every parent just wants their child to fit in, to be happy. On some level, the average parent wants their kid to be special, yes, but never that special. Never so special that they're unable to connect with people their own age, regardless of what that age is.
Even as a baby, as a little one year old, Barley was a bit different. She didn't cry as much, she didn't demand her bottle or her toys quite so frequently as other babies. She was passive-aggressive, which is an amazing feat for a baby. If her parents didn't realize that she wanted her blanket from the one plaintive moan and outstretched finger, she wouldn't make another sound. She would just stare at them, eyes wide and shimmering, and pull that special baby magic on them. Blinking was an issue, as it kind of ruined the whole stare-thing, but she was young, and couldn't quite control her desire to close her eyelids every once in a while.
When Barley was twenty-eight months old, she was already reading. Somewhere, in that crazy brain of hers, there was all of the information about reading a person could ever need. She knew how to use commas correctly, and semi-colons, and quotation marks, and every other punctuation mark in the English language. She knew what italics were and why they were used. She conceptually knew how to pronounce every English word, but her mouth just wasn't up for the challenge. She had the same problem with writing: she knew how to form letters, but she couldn't make her hand listen to her brain.
By the time she was four, her issues with writing and speaking were gone. Her brain was just starting to teach her Latin, obviously the most practical of languages, and she was having fun translating everything her parents said into it. Barley's parents were still clinging to the notion that their child was normal in some way, and so they spoke to her as if she had a normal four-year-old brain..
"Hey, Barley!" they would call at their child, diligently scribbling away on pieces of paper, no doubt attempting to write the Next Great American Novel. "What are you doing, kiddo?"
Salve, Barle! Quid facis, filia, she thoughy before answering. "I'm writing." Scribo.
"What's it about, sweetie?" her mum asked, bending low so she could see. Quid scribis, dulcis?
"It's about a girl, named Gertrude, who always wanted a pony," she said, looking up at her mother and smiling. Although Barley was vastly intelligent, she was still a four-year-old girl at heart, and all four-year-old girls want ponies. "And then one day, one day she got one!" Puella, nomine Gertruda, quae semper voluit mannulum. Tumque uno die illa accepit mannulum!
Her endearing childishness, perfectly logical for a person of her age, made it easy for her parents to treat her as if she was the same as everyone else, if a wee bit more advanced. When Barley started elementary school, however, it became much harder.
~~~
Barley was six, the same age as most of her classmates. She already knew how to read, she already knew her sums, and she already understood how to tie her shoes. There was nothing for her to do, so she branched out. She was bored, and she started thinking of exciting and slightly confusing ways to respond to simple questions. At first, she just stuck with translating everything into Latin.
"What is five plus five?" her teacher would ask.
"Decem," she would reply, staring questioningly at the ensuing blank stare.
"I'm ... sorry?"
"Decem. Quin et quin erit decem." The class would titter in confusion. They knew that Barley was somehow making a joke, they just didn't understand what it was about; they did, however, see the effect it had on their teacher, which only made them laugh louder. It was still hilarious to make a teacher uncomfortable at their age, as ethics hadn't entered the equation.
"I'm sorry, but I can't understand what you're saying," the teacher said. It was her first year teaching, and she was completely caught off guard by the Latin. She didn't even know that it was Latin, because she had never learned it in a class. "Is that some language you've made up?" Her high voice was almost imperceptible over the continuing laughter of the children.
"Actually, no," Barley said. "It's Latin. Maybe you've heard of it?" She was reaching the point in her life when she was starting to realize just how much she knew when compared to everyone else. And she was still young, and still immature - because no amount of compassion or wisdom came with all of those brains - and she was coming to understand that she could lord her intelligence over everyone else. She felt entitled to it; she was smart, they were not. She didn't grasp the ethical ramifications to her condescending attitude. She didn't even realize that she was being condescending in the first place. She was still six, and everything was still simple. She knew more, and they knew nothing at all.
Her teacher, shamed and confused, continued the lesson, making sure not to call on Barley again for the rest of the day. She did, however, write a note for Barley's parents, and handed it to them when they arrived to pick their child up from school.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hayden, the letter read.
Your daughter, Barley, is a remarkably intelligent child. But she seems to have an attitude problem we really need to work on. (Barley would later note that her teacher ended the sentence with a preposition, which was wrong.) I'd love to talk to both of you Friday after school. Let me know what times are the best for you.
- Ms. Cooper
~~~
After the meeting, Barley's parents had a long talk with her. They told her how her teacher felt about the obvious way in which Barley was showing her disdain for the rest of the class. They told her that her teacher was personally hurt by Barley's utter lack of respect for her and the other faculty members. They told her that her teacher told them that immediate action must be taken to nip Barley's attitude in the bud.
By the end of the next day, Barley was the same as she had been the previous day. She went in to school with the intent to be nicer. Once it was brought to her attention that other kids were feeling bad about themselves, she didn't want to act the same. She didn't want to hurt anyone: she was still sweet, still innocent and adorable. But her resolve weakened when she was faced with the sheer idiocy of her classmates. By the end of her final class, nothing had changed. People still felt inferior, her teacher still felt disrespected, and Barley still felt as though she had an inherent right to treat others poorly.
When Barley was a bit older, and a bit wiser, she looked back on this experience and used her teacher's utter inability to be effective as a reason to believe in her superiority. Her teacher had been useless, and should therefore have been treated as such.
~~~
Barley was ten and in the sixth grade. She still knew everything, still knew all of the answers, and still knew how to solve all of the problems presented to her. She was still bored out of her mind. Latin wouldn't cut it anymore. Some of her classmates were learning Latin, so they could translate her answers for her teacher. One of her teachers even replied in Latin once, so Barley had to stop. She switched from Latin to Hungarian, from Hungarian to Welsh, from Welsh to Mandarin, and from Mandarin to Finnish. None of them worked, none of them released stress like they had in the past. So she took out her frustrations on everyone around her, her classmates, her teachers, her bus-drivers, everyone. She pounced on every single mistake. She never let anything slide: no sentences ending with prepositions were allowed within earshot of her, no substituting 'good' for 'well' or 'then' for 'than.' She was especially militant with 'affect' and 'effect,' and caught at least one person a day using them incorrectly. She was never without a sneer, an arrogant eyebrow raise, and a condescending tone.
One day, after a particularly rude incident (a girl had written 'there' instead of 'their' on a paragraph Barley was correcting, and she tore into her classmate), a boy turned and glared at her. She looked at him in disbelief: why was he looking at her like that? Didn't he know who she was?
"What do you want?" she asked, venom dripping from every syllable.
"Stop being such a jerk," he said, and he turned back around, confident that his job had been done. Those were the last words he ever said to her, and they never had any more contact. He went back to being a nondescript boy in her school that she never thought of again after the day was over.
Nothing had changed. She was still a condescending, arrogant girl with a seemingly infinite store of cruelty and absolutely no patience for idiocy. She still believed that she was fundamentally better than everyone else, and she continued to act accordingly.
But once, in the hallway, a girl dropped her books, and Barley stopped to help her pick them up. She made snide comments the entire time, but she helped.
She didn't realize what she had done, not really. And it never happened again, and she never thought about it again, and she was still the same old Barley, but she did it.
And that was enough.