Odd One Young

I understand the ambiguity my dad felt in his footsteps on that first day his second skipped year. A senior at 15; a radical, a genius, a visionary they all called him. He integrated into the excellence washing over him, and as his pencil got shorter, his fingertips grew longer, stretching out into the depths of humanity with only a high standard as armor. My problem is this: I have only a fraction of that time to reach and explode with inches on all sides. I have one period everyday to pry open the souls of a few consistently bored ninth graders baring Spanish to English translation apps and t-shirts they grew into over borrowed summers. Sometimes they do not see me there. Sometimes they say that no sits in the third seat of the third row; they look over my head and call to an unseen comrade out of my league.

Everything was so different last year. I had C2, the vibrantly confident and somewhat tiny fluent Argentinian who surprisingly remembered my name. Even though we hardly conversed in the beginning, he set the precedent for a bright, worthy disciple for our elders to obtain, and they stopped thinking of me as "the frizzy hair seven" and started calling me by name. I had A, and I had A2, and A3, and they blanketed me in experience, advice, and dirty jokes I didn't understand. And now what do I have? I have a too tall cut-up, an underwear-boasting sports fan, and their contemporaries. My fingertips are stunted in their glove.