Bittersweet Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    Even though I had attended a fairly big school, as far as I knew, I was the only one at my grade school who had ever been formally labeled profoundly gifted after all sorts of testing. In fact, I had the impression that there had never been any student like me in the history of the entire school district, which included four other schools, as well as in the entire county. I used to wonder if one of the eleven others estimated in the state at the time were in Los Angeles, too, and what it would be like to meet one of them.
    Would we both just know? Could we look into each other’s eyes and see some rich pool of brilliance that only we and others like us could see? Were we truly like alien creatures that had been smuggled into the human population? I dreamed that someday we would all meet or maybe would deliberately be brought together by the government or some corporation. Everyone else would expect us to take over the world or do something significant.
    According to what I had been told and what I had read, I would meet some others who were somewhat, if not exactly, like me very soon at this new expensive private school that Julie thought was much more of a reward than a punishment. But this wasn’t exactly how I had imagined I would meet them. It felt like we were being herded together, corralled and contained.
    Anyway, I didn’t want to rule the world, especially this world. In my mind, despite how we could impress teachers and others and despite what they imagined we would invent or create or discover, we weren’t really welcomed. People could tolerate us for a short period, the way they might enjoy a magician, but who wanted someone pulling rabbits out of hats all the time?
    Maybe Julie would get her wish. Maybe my new school would turn out to be more of a prison, because in the end, what all these educators and other young people, even some parents, really wanted was to keep us apart, keep us away from their precious children, as if we could somehow ruin them with our intelligence. Maybe they thought we would teach them things that would make them more rebellious.
    I had started to get these ideas from the moment the grade-school psychologist, Mrs. Fishman (I called her Fish Face because of her Botox lips), started treating me like a rare diamond and took credit for the discovery. Like that was hard to do. Whenever she could, she had me perform for teachers and administrators, defining words, reading high-school textbooks aloud, solving difficult math problems in minutes, or simply reciting some fact that others would need to discover on an internet site. Sometimes I felt like I was doing a little ballet but with facts instead of ballet slippers. I felt like a monkey performing when a bell was rung.
    After I was diagnosed as being profoundly gifted, Mrs. Fishman brought my parents in to discuss what it meant. I remember overhearing my mother tell my father, “She’s so excited about Mayfair, I thought she was having an orgasm.”
    For quite a while, I struggled with the comparison. I didn’t have to ask my mother what orgasm meant. In fact, since I had become a good reader and an expert on my computer, I rarely asked her or my father questions or definitions of words. I’ve heard people say that computers and smartphones are running our lives now. For kids like me, unless your parents put some sort of lock on what you could see and read, nothing in the world was out-of-bounds or prohibited. I knew so many girls and boys who had gone to their computers to learn about sex. I bet you did. I bet you’re doing it now.
    Few did it when they were as young as I was at the time, of course.
    But remember, I was profoundly gifted. I was one in three million. Can you even picture three million other people? Can you imagine looking at sixty thousand or seventy thousand people in a stadium and thinking, There is no one here remotely as brilliant as I am ? And even if you did think that, can