Sophomoric Read Online Free

didn’t think sex would be a problem.
    During my brief stint as a space cadet, Clemens had been listing reasons that I could come talk to her. She had just reached the all-encompassing “…chat! I’m always here after classes.”
    “Definitely.” I tried to make my smile warm. It was nothing personal. Really.
    She smiled. “I think this is going to be a great year. One last question.” Of course. “We’re trying to compile a list of tutors within the dorm, in case people are having trouble with anything.”
    That request always came eventually: help the intellectually destitute. I hated it. “Yeah, sure. Put me down for something.” Hopefully, something no one would need. I still can’t stand trying to teach people things they don’t think they need or want to know. It’s even worse when I agree with them.
    “You’re in precalculus, right?”
    I nodded and took the offered escape. “Yeah, and I have a ton of homework for tomorrow. You know Hamilton.”
    She laughed. “Absolutely. Go ahead.”
    I grabbed my bag and fled as quickly as my feet would allow. It wasn’t exactly a lie that I had a ton of homework. I just wasn’t going to do all that homework. Or any. I could usually get enough done in class or at lunch.
    This was another one of those things that seemed like an acceptable lie.
    The first time it happened freshman year was history class. The teacher had asked and I had forgotten to place a filter between synapse and sentence before I answered. Everyone else in the class had no interest in hearing how I couldn’t help that I remembered this stuff from middle school. They were especially uninterested when it happened again: talking about something our teacher hadn’t covered in just a little too much detail.
    So maybe I was even a little bit interested. It’s hardly a crime. But lately it seemed to be, even to my teachers. Turns out, they often don’t like being put on the spot for information they don’t know, and often don’t want to admit they have no idea. In hindsight, I realize that’s not entirely unreasonable, but at the time all I could see was my supposedly certain allies standing back with their hands up, if not aligning themselves with the general feeling of dislike.
    Walking into math on the first day of freshman year had made it clear that in the caste system of high school, I was Super-Untouchable. There were only three girls in the class, of which I was the youngest. Of the other two, one was in thick-rimmed glasses and the other had the evidence of too many bags of Cheetos staining her fingers and muffin-topping over the waistband of her jeans. Neither one of them looked like they’d brushed their hair that day.
    I thought this was not an entirely insurmountable problem. Plus, sophomore and junior guys in my math class gave me the golden opportunity. That is, until I learned they didn’t have anything to say to me. That became even truer when I became the kid who screwed up the curve. It didn’t matter how little I studied, how much I dozed off in class. Somehow, my test grade was always the one making everyone else look bad and they didn’t really like it—or, by extension, me.
    With the way to new friends clearly not happening, I turned to the handful of girls I had been hanging out with since the beginning of middle school. The bonds formed among clandestine huddles in the girls’ bathroom were unique and, I thought, at the very least, relatively hardy.
    Wrong again.
    It all snowballed as a habit of sarcasm became the deadly sin of pride. The same friends who had punctuated newly learned vocabulary with giggles started turning those same words back against me. And by high school, rubber and glue didn’t suffice as a comeback anymore. To them, too, the kid who shut down conversation in class should shut the hell up. The fact that I never studied sealed my fate. It wasn’t exactly a combination designed to endear me to the rest of the student body, and I was wrong to