Teen Angst? Naaah ... (2 page)

From ages nine to fourteen, Nintendo was my sole ambition, my prime motivation, and my best friend. I adopted a grueling schedule:

I even dreamed Nintendo. Sometimes I was Mega Man, clad in a blue jumpsuit, with a spherical helmet and a gun for a right arm. Other times, I was in Final Fantasy, the video role-playing game, slaying and getting slain by ogres. I was never Mario: Rebecca, the
prettiest girl in my class, had told me that Mario was “stubby,” and I learned early on that this was a bad thing.

Mario, of course, was the short, fat Italian guy who starred in countless Nintendo games. His mission was always to save The Princess, a blond girl with a pink dress and large breasts. She looked kind of like Rebecca. In fourth grade, I picked The Princess as “the girl I would go on a date with if I absolutely had to 'cause everyone else in the world was dead.” I spent hundreds of hours saving The Princess. All that time, head aching, palms sweating, butt falling asleep—I'm a little ashamed of it now.

But only a little. You see, childhood sucks. I'm young enough to remember that. Starting in first grade, there's pressure from all sides: to be smart, to make friends, to get teachers to like you. Kids develop different ways of coping with that pressure. Some find solace in books. Some play-act or play large and expensive musical instruments.
^*
Others draw, or sing, or do math. Some watch TV or sit and stare. I coped with childhood by playing Nintendo.

Now, it's been a few years since I've curled up with a jumbo toy catalog and drooled over the video games. When Nintendo 64 (the big next-generation
system) was released, I didn't even care. Still, I have this future scene all worked out: me, age forty-plus, fat,
^*
and balding, waiting at a bus stop or some other nondescript place. I start daydreaming and humming, and soon I'm whistling the theme to Super Mario Brothers. And the guy next to me, a lanky guy with a beard—he whistles, too.

T
here's a window of time, after you've shed the pathetic dreams of childhood but before the hormones kick in, when you really can do anything. The summer I was thirteen, I wasn't worried about sex or status or pimples. I was worried about the Specialized Science High School Admissions Test.

The test (SSHSAT for short) is a New York City
^*
phenomenon. Here's how it works: the NYC public school system has three “special” high schools for mathematically gifted students—Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and, in Manhattan, Stuyvesant. Parents and students alike covet admission to these schools, because they're free and they don't suck. To separate the gifted kids from the not-so-gifted, the school system issues the SSHSAT, a sort of mini SAT multiple-choice test, scored from 200 to 800. Each school has a different cutoff grade. If you score above the cutoff, you're in. Since Stuyvesant always has the
highest cutoff, it's the most desirable school. So the thousands of kids who take the SSHSAT each year call it “The Stuy Test.”

Anyway, in late May of seventh grade, my class gathered in the math room to hear an announcement from our principal, Mary. (It was a small private school. We called our teachers and administrators by their first names.)

“Now, everybody,” Mary addressed us. I was slouched at a table chewing a pencil; I liked the way it tasted. “Your seventh grade is almost over. It's time to start thinking about eighth grade. And when you think about eighth grade, you have to think about high school.”

High school. Geez. I chewed vigorously. I never thought I'd get to high school, but now that it was in sight, I started planning. I wanted to conquer high school the way I had conquered elementary school. I wanted to be the smartest student and get the highest grades, because I needed something to feel good about.

Mary continued. “High school is an important step in your life. You'll all be going to different schools, schools that reflect your interests.”

I chewed harder, flattening the eraser. Interests, whatever—I wanted to go to the
best
school.

“Getting into these schools is a complicated
process. What you have to do over the summer is think about where you'd like to go, why you'd like to go there, and how you can get yourself admitted. Yes, Josh?”

The questions began. Every kid had some request: where should I go if I like acting? art? movies? law? I had only one question. After class, I caught up with Mary in the hall.

“Mary, do you think I should take the Stuy Test?” I'd taken standardized tests before, and they'd all been easy. I always broke the ninety-eighth percentile; I never had to study. I wanted to know if the Stuy Test would be any different.

“Sure, Ned,” she said. “Buy a book on it. Take a look at it over the summer.”

I wrote on a piece of loose-leaf, “Buy Stuy book.”

“Ned,” Mary leaned in close. “You don't need a list, and you don't need to worry. You'll do fine.”

Those words weren't a comfort—they were a challenge. I thought I could do fine; Mary thought I could do fine; I'd damn well better do fine.

So began a summer singularly devoted to getting into Stuyvesant. It started with the book. That evening, I trotted into the living room and told my parents I needed it.

“The Stuy Test? Neddy, you'll do just fine. You don't need a book,” Mom said.

“He wants a book, I'll get him a book,” said Dad.

The following weekend, he took me to a mega-bookstore and we headed for the test-prep section. There it was, sitting low on a rotating display case, light gray with blue letters:
Preparing for the SSHSAT: 8 Practice Exams Included!

“That the one?” Dad asked.

“Yup.” I smiled, stowed the book under my prepubescent armpit, and walked to the cashier past some blurry-eyed high school kids scanning SAT books. “That's me in four years,” I thought.

I went home and cracked open the book, eager to start on the problems. I read the first one: “A circle with diameter 4 has an area of ? Use π = 3.14.” I reread it. Was this some kind of joke? I hadn't
done
pi before. I ran to show Mom.

“Mom! Mom! How do you do this?”

My ears were hot. My stomach was knotted around my throat.

“Calm down, Ned, calm down.”

She sat me down at the dining room table. “Ned, I saw this coming. Ever since you heard about this test, you have been
too worried
. Understand? You are
not allowed
to obsess about this test. Understand?”

“Yeah.”

But it was too late. I was already obsessed. The
test had offended me by giving me questions I couldn't answer. I intended to kill it.

“Now, as for this problem, it's just pi. Do you want me to show you how pi works?”

I nodded. She showed. I'm a fast learner.

I got some index cards and wrote on them in clear seventh-grade print: “Area = πr
²
” and “Circumference = 2πr.” I taped the cards to the wall near my bed. When I fell asleep that night, the cards were the last things I saw.

The second day, I worked on vocabulary.
Abject
and
knoll
were words I didn't know, so I dug up a book called
The Words You Should Know: 1,200 Essential Words Every Educated Person Should Be Able to Use and Define
and I started with
A
. I worked through
abnegate, abrogate, abstruse, amortize
. I put them on cards, too. I closed my bedroom door. Family was now ancillary to the test.

On the third day, I started making tables. Fractions and decimals. I made two little columns. One read from ½ to
^1/20
; the other, .5 to .05. For each fraction, including the weird ones like
^1/17
, I wrote the appropriate decimal. I hand-calculated everything in the warm air of my room.

It was mind-numbing work, but that was the point. Studying
is
mind-numbing. There's information on paper, and you shove it into your head. It
doesn't involve people, or feelings, or getting others to like you. As I continued to prepare for the Stuy Test, afternoon in, afternoon out, I realized that despite the propaganda, I
liked
studying. I didn't care about what TV told me, and I didn't care what my friends thought—studying was
fun
.

When I went to summer camp,
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I took the book. I spent four weeks with wanna-be teen rebels. I was a rebel, too, participating in routine camp activities but in the back of my mind thinking, “
^1/13
= 0.0769.” At night, if I wasn't too tired, I would turn on my flashlight and quietly test myself. Then I'd slip the book under my pillow, so the information would diffuse into my head overnight.

I worked on triangles, memorizing formulas for base and height. I thought, “Parallelogram, trapezoid, rhombus, rectangle.” I put myself far above my campmates, deciding smugly that I wasn't “confused” or “different.” I didn't listen to loud music or salivate over girls. I had a test to study for. I was focused on a single, attainable goal.

I left camp with some friends and some enemies, and carried the test-prep book home to the city. These were the worst two weeks of the summer, the real hot, soggy ones in late July. By now, I was up to the
Ds
in
The Words You Should Know. Deign, demagogue
,
dereliction, discomfit
. I started writing a little book that I never finished, offering advice for students taking the Stuy Test.
^*
Flash cards littered the house.

And all the time, I was getting smarter. I knew pi; I knew graphs. I knew mean, median, and mode. I knew
^1/12
= .0833. I knew the vocabulary through
E
. There is a movie called
Stand and Deliver
where an overachieving teacher shows underprivileged high school students calculus in six months. Whenever those students had to get some work done, you'd see clips of them improving, as pop music played in the background. My summer was like
Stand and Deliver
without the pop music.

I took the book with me to Lake George, in upstate New York, on our family vacation. A flubbery
^**
old woman was reading on the beach. The presence of me with a test book annoyed her. She glowered and said, “Whaddaya studying for? This is a beach! Enjoy yourself!”

I grinned. The information was flowing from the paper to my head. Life had never seemed so simple or so right.

When that test finally rolled around, it wasn't even an issue. I took it and got into Stuy. It was like building a sand castle—the work was the fun part; the end result was sort of a letdown. As a force of habit, I continued reading
The Words You Should Know
in my freshman year, eventually getting to
S
. I studied very hard throughout my four years at Stuy, but I never approached the superhuman weirdness of that summer.