A PARABLE FOR SAVANTS
Robert Tulley, at first glance, was a genius. He calculated orbital mechanics in his head as easily as I calculated the cost of three burritos and a coke at Taco Prince. Semi-major axis, eccentricity, inclination and periapsis ran amok in his head like abstruse little monsters. He put his pencil down, sighed, and clapped his hands. He had just calculated the Space Shuttle’s launch window based on Mir’s orbital inclination of 51.6 degrees.
Almost as if in celebration, he picked his nose, rolling the sticky contents between his fingers.
“God Bobby!” I grabbed a tissue and marched over to his desk.
“My mom said Bobby is undignified.”
I handed him the tissue. “So is digging in your nose.”
Something was going to snap. I was in over my head, and I told her that I would sink like a rock. But Paige, good ol’ sickeningly optimistic girl that she is – sorta like Norman Vincent Peale with a set of tits – convinces me to ‘just give it another semester.’ What the hell did she see in me? Did my perfect SAT score qualify me to teach a room full of 8-year old geniuses that picked their nose? Did my 153 Stanford-Binet blind her to the fact that I was the wrong person for the job?
And I was pissed how I got suckered into it. My genius intellect, as potent as it may be, was trumped by pheromones, a few rounds of Guinness and her ample cleavage propped deliciously atop the bar. The timbre of her voice was laced with such a smoky luster that my brain disengaged and fell to its knees, groveling like a love sick boy. Yes you know I’ll help you don’t be silly I’d love to do a semester. God, I just wanted to bury my face in her chest and feel her fuzzy sweater tickle my nose, drawing in the deep scent of her skin mingled with whatever perfume she wore that drove me absolutely batshit.
I learned an important lesson that night at Hewson’s Ale House: boobs are evil.
“Mr. Anderson?”
Suzie Carroll’s little squeak of a voice shattered my daydream.
“ 
”
That little bitch knew I didn’t speak Japanese. No, she couldn’t ask me in Russian or German or Nynorsk or the six other languages that sat mothballed in my left hemisphere like those stupid Christmas presents you bury in a closet and forget about. So she wanted to lord it over me. I wanted to squeeze her little polyglot neck.
I needed to put things in perspective – Suzie, 8; Malcolm Anderson, 30. I’m the adult. I think. Even though my IQ clocked in at just seven notches lower than little miss linguist’s. I managed a cheery smile. My fingers twitched. “You know we don’t speak in languages that the rest of the class may not understand.”
Yes, Suzie was a smart girl. She would brandish her languages to land some posh gig at the U.N. And like Paige, she would be even smarter when she learned to wield her boobs against idiots like me and Bobby Tulley.
the end