After an hour of questions, the woman said, “I want to thank you for your extraordinary patience, Colin. You’re a very special person.”
You’re a very special person. Colin would hear this a lot, and yet—somehow—he could never hear it enough.
The horn-rimmed-glasses woman brought his mom into the office. As the professor told Mrs. Singleton that Colin was brilliant, was a very special boy, Colin played with wooden alphabet blocks. He gave himself a splinter rearranging p-o-t-s into s-t-o-p—the first anagram he remembered making.
The professor told Mrs. Singleton that Colin’s gifts must be encouraged but not pushed, and she warned, “You shouldn’t have unreasonable expectations. Children like Colin process information very quickly. They show a remarkable ability to focus on tasks. But he’s no more likely to win a Nobel Prize than any other reasonably intelligent child.”
• • •
That night at home his father brought him a new book—The Missing Piece by Shel Silverstein. Colin sat down on the couch beside his dad and his small hands flipped through the big pages as he read it quickly, pausing only to ask whether “lookin”’ was the same as “looking.” Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading.
“Did you like it?” his dad asked.
“Yup,” Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.
“What was it about?” his dad asked.
Colin placed the book in his dad’s lap and said, “This circle is missing a piece. The missing piece is shaped like a pizza.”
“Like a pizza or a pizza slice?” Smiling, his dad placed his big hands on top of Colin’s head.
“Right, Daddy. A slice. So the circle goes looking for his piece. He finds a lot of wrong pieces. Then he finds the right piece. But then he leaves it behind. Then it ends.”
“Do you sometimes feel like a circle missing a piece?” his dad wondered.
“Daddy, I am not a circle. I am a boy.”
And his dad’s smile faded just a bit—the prodigy could read, but he could not see. And if only Colin had known that he was missing a piece, that his inability to see himself in the story of a circle was an unfixable problem, he might have known that the rest of the world would catch up with him as time passed. To borrow from another story he memorized but didn’t really get: if only he’d known that the story of the tortoise and the hare is about more than a tortoise and a hare, he might have saved himself considerable trouble.
Three years later, he enrolled in first grade—for free, because his mom taught there—at the Kalman School, merely one year younger than most of his classmates. His dad pushed him to study more and harder, but he wasn’t the kind of prodigy who goes to college at eleven. Both Colin’s parents believed in keeping him on a semi-normal educational track for the sake of what they referred to as his “sociological well-being.”
But his sociological being was never all that well. Colin didn’t excel at making friends. He and his classmates just didn’t enjoy similar activities. His favorite thing to do during recess, for instance, was to pretend to be a robot. He’d walk up to Robert Caseman with a knees-locked gait, his arms swinging stiffly. In a monotone voice, Colin would say, “I AM A ROBOT. I CAN ANSWER ANY QUESTION. DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO THE FOURTEENTH PRESIDENT WAS?”
“Okay,” said Robert. “My question is, Why are you such a tard, Colon Cancer?” Even though Colin’s name was pronounced like call in, Robert Caseman’s favorite game in first grade was calling Colin “Colon Cancer” until Colin cried, which usually didn’t take very long, because Colin was what his mother called “sensitive.” He just wanted to play robot, for God’s sake. Was that so wrong?
In second grade, Robert Caseman and his ilk matured a bit. Finally recognizing that words can never hurt, but sticks and stones can sure break bones, they invented the Abdominal Snowman.10 They would order him to lie on the ground (and for some reason he’d agree), and then four guys would take a limb apiece and pull. It was a kind of drawing-and-quartering, but with seven-year-olds tugging it wasn’t fatal, just embarrassing and dumb. It made him feel like no one liked him, which, in fact, no one did. His single consolation was that one day, he would matter. He’d be famous. And none of them ever would. That’s why, his mom said, they made fun of him in the first place. “They’re just jealous,” she said. But Colin knew better. They weren’t jealous. He just wasn’t likable. Sometimes it’s that simple.