To the Rescue

Felix was my classmate from sixth through eighth and throughout high school in Cambridge. After seven years together, I regret to say that no student really liked Felix. Every day, he wore black pants and a light-colored business shirt. He kept to himself, never socialized or made friends. I don’t think any schoolmate ever had a real conversation with him. Frankly, we considered him weird. Who were we to say? 

We all had qualified for placement in the city’s Academically Talented program, A/T for short, meaning we were tracked throughout our entire grammar and secondary school experience. Such tracking is no longer practiced. Truthfully, we might be defined as nerds today. Other kids in high school were enrolled in the trades (like my Dad when he was a Cambridge high schooler decades earlier) or in the business program (i.e. training for office jobs). School for us “brainiacs” meant rigorous study and lots of homework. Math went right up to the boundaries of calculus. English classes consisted of writing essays and discussing literature, of which we read 50 pages each school night.