i am such a douchebag

[ohiknow]

Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the loathed.

Spring semester of my third year of college, I received an F on my first paper.
It was far from my first college F. In fact, I had earned thirteen credits worth of failure in my freshman year. But this F was different. The paper had not been late and it certainly had not been bad; I had carefully analyzed a particularly dense Adrienne Rich poem, identifying the significance of many of the numerous literary references and their relationship to the stereotypes of female behavior expressed in The Bell Jar and an excerpt from Betty Freidan’s “The Feminine Mystique.” I was proud of the paper - its coherence, its flow - and I was prepared to accept that A I had earned. I had decided to start the semester off well by turning in a well-written, well-researched paper on the due date, but Professor Covington had clearly had other plans.
It was such an unexpected grade that I didn’t really believe it. My friend Mark peered over my shoulder as I stared at the large F on the last page of the paper. It was enormous, ridiculously so, taking up a quarter of the blank half of the page. I felt it was tacky on Professor Covington’s part to have written such an ostentatious letter. At least she hadn’t used a red pen.
Mark brushed against me or made a noise, somehow alerting me to his presence at my side, and suddenly the weight of the F fully hit me. This was not just an absurdly large letter on a page; it was an absurdly large letter that represented my absurdly large failure. The sheer size of the letter seemed to increase its weight; it signified more of a failure than a smaller F would have meant. And it was on my paper. This was my grade and it was on my work and I did not deserve it.
But, just as it was not my first F, it was not the first F ever received at Rutgers, either. Many of my friends here at Rutgers have devoted themselves to exerting exactly enough effort to pull in straight C’s, no better and no worse, and I am certainly not alone in having failed out of school during my first semester. My failure is only worth mentioning because it marks how greatly I deviated from the path I began to pave during my years as a precocious pre-schooler.

I am a creature of great potential. I grew up bombarded by statements of what I “could be.”
“You could be so smart.”
“You could be so successful.”
“You could be something great.”
The “if” in these statements was implied but unspoken, for the time being, so I took from the could-bes the encouragement which they were surely meant to provide. There was a passive aggressiveness to the statements: the suggestion that I was not these things, that I needed to become these things. But I ignored it, or did not recognize it, or did not want to recognize it, and I translated the could-bes first in my mind, as encouraging words, and then into my life - I was so smart, so successful, so great.
I skipped half of kindergarten to enter first grade as the youngest student of the class. The year before my mother enrolled me in kindergarten, I had gone to a Montessori school where I was also the youngest. I had a history of developing early when it came to school, something my mother loves to reminisce about, though she tends to exaggerate.
“You started reading at two years!” she boasted when I called her to fill in the facts I couldn’t remember.
“Mom, come on. This is an autobiography. That means I have to tell the truth.”
“Okay,” she conceded. “It was more like two and a half years.” I laughed - that would mean that my brother Ricky, who is one year and some months older than I am, would have started reading at the same age I did. My mother ignored me and continued with her story. “You used to memorize the stories we read you - you know, Green Eggs and Ham, that sort of thing - and then we’d go to the library so Ricky could read and you’d ask for a book and you’d start telling the story. You even knew when to turn the pages because of the pictures, so it looked like you were actually reading. And then you were about one and a half, maybe two, so all the librarians and the parents were asking me ‘Oh, how did you teach her to read so young?’ And they all thought it was so clever that you were pretending. It wasn’t long until you started reading by yourself, clever girl.”
My father and Hans, my eldest brother, confirmed that, to the best of their knowledge, I was reading for myself at two and a half. According to them, an early reading age fit what was becoming the pattern of my life: I spoke my first words when I was six months old, and I was forming coherent sentences at nine months. I wasn’t prepared to take anyone’s word on that, but there is proof on film: the collection of home movies my father made by never turning off his camera features more than a few cassettes of me, clearly less than one year old, making demands and identifying every object in the room in a tiny but competent voice. With these premature developments under my belt, I was forging a path for myself and the next logical step was an early entrance into school.
My path was blocked, however, by the rules of Jefferson Elementary. Jefferson was the local K-5 school that my brothers and I would each attend, though I would have to wait a little bit longer for my turn. The school allowed children no younger than five years old to enroll in kindergarten, and they were not prepared to make an exception for me at four (technically, still three, because my birthday is in late October). My mother offered to have me tested to prove that my learning abilities were up to par despite my age, but the school declined. The principal requested that we wait a year and suggested pre-school as an alternative.
My mother enrolled me in a pre-school called Small Fry, where I was taught by Mrs. C and Mrs. Helen in the basement of the South Presbyterian Church of Bergenfield. I don’t remember much of my time at Small Fry, except that it encouraged a structure to learning that I did not appreciate. For one thing, books were for reading-time, not nap-time and not play-time.
“Why don’t you go have some fun?” Mrs. C would ask gently as she took away the book I had been reading on the steps outside. My classmates ran around screaming, an activity I thoroughly enjoyed, but, as I tried to explain to Mrs. C, I was in the mood for reading at the moment. Reading is fun, I would try to tell her, but Mrs. C would only smile and lead me to the yard where my classmates played, my book tucked far out of my reach in the armpit on the side opposite where I walked. “You can have it back at reading-time,” she’d say. “Go and have fun now.”
Small Fry also believed that everyone should learn at the same pace. I value this practice now, but it bored me nearly to tears having to sit through lessons days after I had mastered them. I wanted to learn new things always. When I was taught something new, excitement welled up inside of me until I could hardly breathe, whether it was how to pronounce a certain diphthong or how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Small Fry couldn’t keep up with my ever-growing appetite, so I sat in the corner and zoned out, telling myself stories to keep myself entertained.
It was my boredom that encouraged my mother to take me out of Small Fry and enroll me in a Montessori school. She was convinced that the largest threat to my academic achievements was the possibility that I would get bored. “If you were bored, you would stop paying attention, and then you’d fall behind. I didn’t want to let that happen.” It had happened at Small Fry, but Montessori school was far from dull. It was like day camp, but with more learning: I began to understand the concept of context clues, and I learned that I was never going to excel at math, which alone gave me a leg up on the kindergarten competition.
When she enrolled me in kindergarten, my mother engaged my teacher in espionage. She was instructed to keep an especially close eye on me and at the first sign of the dreaded boredom, she and my mother joined forces to bully the school into having me tested. After five days of writing words in both lower- and upper-case, identifying objects in pictures, and completing sentences with the best word from a list of choices, it was determined that I was fit for the first grade and would be moved up immediately.
Everyone in my first grade class had been in kindergarten together. They were all friends with each other, older than me, and hardly eager to accept a newcomer too smart for her own grade. So, I came out swinging, ready to prove myself not only smarter than my former kindergarten peers, but smarter than these mean older kids, as well. I read aloud every chance that presented itself, I asked questions, I answered questions, and not just the teacher’s. I did book reports on the things I read at home: my mother’s old anatomy textbook, an encyclopedia entry about exoskeletons, Reader’s Digest, anything I could get my hands on. I brought these reports in to discuss with my teacher, cutting into my recess time to present them to her. I analyzed; I inferred; I theorized; I was the most insufferable know-it-all in my class and my teacher regarded me as something eerie and fascinating, encouraging my extracurricular learning even when she couldn’t answer my questions. I earned top marks and my teacher filled the comments section of my report cards with praise. I was so smart; I was something great.
Not all of my elementary school teachers were as pleased with my ambition. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Grose, despised my intelligence. Rather than being praised for receiving the highest grades in class, I was criticized as a showoff with poor sportsmanship, sometimes an outright suck-up. Mrs. Grose scoffed at my unassigned book reports and refused to waste her time discussing them with me. She humiliated me by calling me up to the front of the class when I was caught reading a few lines of a book before lessons began after recess, but declared Jen Wong a kindred spirit when she was caught doing the same. Once, during the bi-monthly spelling bee that I always won, she tricked me into losing by asking me to spell “Sunday.”
“S-U-N-D-A-Y, Sunday,” I replied, eyeing her warily. It was easy. Too easy.
She narrowed her eyes at me and twisted her thin, wrinkly mouth into a mean smirk. “The ice cream, not the day. You’re out.”
I was absolutely disgusted with her. In letting her know how I felt about that sneaky move, she added insult to injury by sending me to the principal’s office. Mr. Montalba did his best to keep a straight face, but he clearly found the whole thing ridiculous. I couldn’t blame him: my third grade teacher, a fifty-plus-year-old woman with children in high school, had just played an immature, unfair, and plainly mean trick on an eight-year-old kid. I give him credit simply for not laughing in my face. He was much more serious when Mrs. Grose accused me of plagiarism, though.
We had been assigned to write a short story, a project I was excited about: writing is my favorite thing to do, next to reading. My favorite books at the time were The Chronicles of Narnia, and they inspired a tale of talking animals imprisoned in a zoo, forced to live like their mute cousins until a clever young girl liberated them. The rhino became a scientist and the flamingo a famous painter, but the shriveled old hag of a zookeeper became a bitter schoolteacher once her zoo closed down. The day after I proudly handed in my story, Mrs. Grose sent me home with a note for my mother. My mother read this note while I waited before her with mounting anticipation. Silently, she left the kitchen and left me staring desperately after her. My brothers came into the kitchen a moment later, having been evicted from the television room.
“What did you do now?” Ricky asked in his most exasperated tone. I was the troublemaker among my siblings - I was smart, but I knew how to have fun. But this time, I really had been good: I had done all my chores, I hadn’t watched more than my allotted amount of television, and I’d even done my math homework without changing the subtraction equations into addition problems. I had no idea what the note could be about, so I shrugged Ricky off and pretended not to be terrified.
The next day, I was still pretending not to be terrified as both of my parents walked me to school early. We went directly to the principal’s office, where Mrs. Grose was waiting for us. Mr. Montalba gestured us into seats across from him, where we sat to hear the charges leveled against me.
Mrs. Grose was accusing me of receiving outside help on my short story, either from my parents or one of my brothers. The language of the story was “too advanced” to be written independently by a third grader. Someone older, Mrs. Grose insisted, must have written the story for me, and I needed to learn that I could not go through life with other people doing my work to make me look good.

Professor Covington was teaching Feminist Literary Study the semester I got my F. She often used the class as an opportunity to voice her opinions on current events or reminisce about her radical feminist days. Her favorite subject was her Harvard education. She was fond of reminding the class repeatedly that she had attended Harvard, that Harvard was an Ivy League school and Rutgers was not, that an education at Harvard was incomparable to an education at Rutgers. She talked about Harvard as if challenging someone to contest her attendance, or her opinions on anything, which were obviously superior because they were formed by her Harvard-educated mind. This was one of the reasons the F was so surprising: one would think Covington would take pity on her poor, disadvantaged students who were only going to leave with a Rutgers education.
The other odd thing about Covington’s F was how incongruous a grade it was compared to her reactions to the paper. There were a few negative comments about organization and the balance of the three texts in one paper, but nothing to suggest failure. It was worth a B, at least, but the F glared at me from the last page, daring me to question its validity.
So, I did. I requested that Professor Covington let me rewrite the paper, keeping in mind her suggestions for improvement. She looked at me with the same cold, narrow-eyed glare the Mrs. Grose had fixed on me back in the third grade and I stifled a shudder. After a moment in which she regarded me silently, she demanded that I bring to her any notes I had made before writing the paper and dismissed me, completely ignoring my request to rewrite.
I rarely take notes before writing a paper, but I was willing to do whatever it took to get Covington to change my grade, so I fabricated some notes based on my observations in the paper. Occasionally, I lifted a line from the paper to use in my notes. I copied them over and over again until my hand was tired and my writing became sloppy. Before turning the notes over to Professor Covington, I crumpled the smooth, crisp sheets in my fist, twisting the paper to form the creases of well-worn notes. A few days later, she called out to me after class, smiling as I approached. The Mrs. Grose look was gone, replaced by a cheeriness that increased as she handed me my notes.
“I’m going to change your grade,” she said, and I began to smile. “Because I no longer think you have plagiarized.”
My mouth froze mid-smile and I stood snarling, staring. Plagiarized? “Plagiarized?”

“My daughter would never plagiarize her work,” my father told Mr. Montalba in a steady voice. My mother gripped my shoulder tightly and I knew she was outraged, but she kept quiet. This is what my parents had talked about the day before when they sent my brothers out of the room: they had agreed to remain calm, to appear in control. My father explained to Mr. Montalba and Mrs. Grose that I was not raised as a dishonest child and that he could assure them that no member of his family would ever do another family member’s work, and none of them would ever try to get credit for work they had not done. Mrs. Grose’s mouth was twisted into that contemptuous smirk again. Mr. Montalba nodded at my father and then asked me directly if anyone had written the story for me.
“No,” I said.
He asked me if I had written the story.
“Yes,” I said.
He asked me if I wrote stories often. I showed him the notebook I carried with me everyday, in which I scribbled half-formed ideas for stories or snatches of dialogue and description whenever the urge took me. Mr. Montalba flipped through my notebook, comparing pages of the book to the story I had handed in to Mrs. Grose. She watched the pages of my notebook closely while my mother fixed her with the coldest eyes she could manage. Those eyes had sliced right through the most cast-iron of my lies, and for a moment I almost felt bad for Mrs. Grose. It was a very brief moment.
We sat quietly while Mr. Montalba turned pages, paused and read, nodded, and turned pages again.
In the end, the language of the stories in my notebook matched the “advanced” story I handed in and Mrs. Grose had to accept that I had written the story and grade it accordingly. Mr. Montalba thanked my parents for their time and apologized to all three of us before sending us on our way. Mrs. Grose left quickly for the classroom before my mother could let her know what she thought about all this. She told me instead as I walked my parents to the front door.
“She thinks you’re not smart enough to write so well, but you are. She just can’t accept that you’re smart.”
By the time I was fifteen, I believed that everyone had accepted I was smart and competing in school was no longer of interest to me. Ricky, my number one opponent in academics, was free to be The Smart One as far as I was concerned. I was busy deciding who I was in the grand scheme of high school and whoever I was was definitely too intelligent for anything school tried to teach me. Or maybe I was bored, I told myself, diving headfirst into my mother’s nightmare, the ultimate academic pitfall. Hans had told me years ago that Einstein got bored in school and he was a genius, so I found myself in good company. My grades slipped, of course, but, despite the small panic attack I had when I received my first F on a chemistry quiz, I took that in stride. Einstein got F’s all the time. My mother and my teachers tried to awaken my dormant enthusiasm for learning with praise and encouragement, but every compliment or attempt at motivation only made me less likely to try.
Every one of my teachers pulled me aside or scribbled in the margins of a C+ test to tell me that I could do so much better if I only “applied” myself. What they meant by this statement was that I should apply myself and therefore do so much better. But what I heard was that I did not need to apply myself in order for my teachers to know that I could do better. They knew I was smart, and I knew I was smart, and that was so much better than busting my ass for an A. I took pride in this, feeling set apart from the students around me. Unlike those who slaved away for straight A’s, I did not have to work to prove my intelligence. My teachers knew it was there; I imagined it like a protective, palpable aura surrounding me, allowing me to transcend hard work and studying. I was not told that I was not smart and I needed to work harder; I was told that I was smart enough to be recognized as intelligent without doing the work.
This kind of twisted interpretation has always been a practice of mine: I turn things inside out or look at them backwards, translating them into my own special brand of sense. Even in third grade, as my parents led me out of Mr. Montalba’s office after clearing my name with Mrs. Grose, my mother muttering darkly about my teacher’s nerve, I thought that I should have been furious with Mrs. Grose and her assumption of my stupidity, but instead I was strangely proud. My mother said that Mrs. Grose thought I was not smart enough, but I knew that I was more than smart enough. In fact, I thought, I was so smart that my teacher could not even believe I could write so well. I was even smarter than she thought I could be.

I floated through high school, borne up by my aura of inherent intelligence. Each semester, I pulled in more C’s and fewer A’s and B’s, but my teachers never stopped assuring me that I didn’t need to try for them to believe in my intelligence. I took my aura for granted, sure everyone would know just by looking at me how smart I could be.
Unfortunately, my aura dissipated once I left high school. My first semester at Rutgers taught me that my professors could not glance around the lecture halls or classrooms and identify by some inexplicable radiance which students were smart. I took the whole semester to understand how different college and high school were, and I eventually learned it the hard way. I failed all four of my classes, landed myself on academic probation, stumbled listlessly through the next semester, just barely missed the GPA I needed to continue, and got expelled.
Rutgers, and my furious parents, were kind enough to offer me a second chance at college. I was required to take two summer classes and I earned an A and a B+, more than enough for Rutgers to welcome me back. But more than my readmission to college and my parents’ restored confidence in me, I had regained the voracious appetite for knowledge that had driven me as an overachieving toddler. I had learned during summer session, something I realized I had not done properly since the ninth grade. I felt like I had woken up from a long sleep and I was finally coming out of that foggy state of slow reaction times and cotton mouth. In high school, I had convinced myself that I working hard and getting A’s was all more trouble than I needed to take, but I realized as I racked up A’s in my summer classes that I had missed the chase for the highest grade, the exhilaration of learning something new, the praise showered on me with every good mark.
I threw myself into school again. I took full semesters during the fall and spring, expunging my failed classes to replace my F’s with A’s, and building up my GPA with new classes. I took summer sessions to accumulate the credits I would need for graduation and give my GPA an extra boost. I never once felt bored with school because I kept myself too busy. When my mother told me I was doing so great, I heard it just like that. I was really getting to enjoy working hard and doing well when Professor Covington blindsided me with that F.

I was horrified when the fact that I had failed fully registered. Rather than talking to Professor Covington then and there, I had fled the classroom without making eye contact, stepping on the feet of my classmates and colliding with a trashcan in the hallway in the haste of my exit. I hurried back to my dorm room and locked the door on me and my F and the terror rising in my throat. Maybe I was not really smart at all, I had panicked. Maybe I had a new aura now, a stupid aura, and Professor Covington had seen it and graded me accordingly without even reading my paper. Maybe, like I did not need to try to be smart in high school, no amount of effort would save me from stupidity in college. Maybe I deserved to fail.
I was afraid to tell anyone about the F, or the discovery that failure was my destiny. How could I break to my parents that the brilliant, brainy child they had known was doomed to underachieve? I only ever told my parents my grades; when classmates asked me how I had done on a test or paper, I said “Fine,” or “Alright,” rather than brag about an A. But in keeping the F a secret from my parents, I felt as if I carried a crushing weight that I longed to unburden. I swore myself to silence and sweated it out quietly, determined not to tell anyone about the F.
“Covington tried to fail me!” I told my roommate at the end of that week. As long as I believed I had earned the F, I felt it was my secret to keep at all costs. But once I learned that Professor Covington had thought I plagiarized, I was free to spread the news of her mistake. I wrote an email to the English department head about Professor Covington’s complete disregard for the proper procedure of dealing with plagiarism; I called my mother to complain about the professor’s recklessness; I showed everyone the last page of the paper, where Covington had scribbled out the ostentatious F, replaced it with an ostentatious misshapen blob, and scrawled a B+ even larger than the original letter.
I did silly but more or less accurate impressions of Covington’s Harvard talk and scoffed at how immature she had been to treat me coldly without even telling me what I had done wrong. “It was like she was saying: if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you!” I told my friends, rolling my eyes. Everyone laughed self-deprecatingly, remembering the time during which they had behaved the same way: seventh grade. “And she just kept going on about how the paper was just too good, too smart for any Rutgers student to have written.”
I laughed with everyone else, pretending the wide smile spreading across my face was from amusement at my crazy professor. Quietly, I relished the secret pride I took in having written such a good paper that I was even smarter than my Harvard-educated professor thought I could be.

it's official: i've forgotten how to write.
also: i am open to title suggestions. please suggest a title.