“Charlie, stop,” I say vehemently, my voice trembling with more emotion than I typically show.
It forces his feet to a complete and sudden halt. He stands directly in the center of the path, breathing heavily, still dressed in his prep school uniform: navy slacks, button-down, Dalton emblem and tie. I left work just to pick him up after the principal called.
I walk closer, only a few feet away.
And then he swings around. “Why didn’t you tell me?!” His reddened face pumps with fury. “Why didn’t you tell me it’d be like this?!” He grabs at his short brown hair, as though trying to reach for his brain and say take it back. I don’t want it anymore.
“Because you wouldn’t have wanted me to spoon-feed you. You would’ve rather drawn the conclusion yourself in time.”
He angrily chucks his backpack onto the grass. He usually has no trouble using words, but I know besides his own family, no one has been listening to him today, yesterday, and most days before that. He’s been treated like his age. The principal patronized him five minutes ago, and that’s what pushed him to rush out.
“You can talk to me. I’ll always listen.”
Charlie stares at the bright blue sky, quiet for a long moment. And then he says, “It takes them forever. To think, to solve the stupidest problem, to see what’s right in front of them.”
“People don’t think like you,” I say. “They can’t. They won’t—”
“They should!” he screams, vexed and irate. He points heatedly at the building behind me. “Annabelle hangs out with girls that hate her, but she actually believes they’re her friends. Mr. Crowder takes an extra five minutes calling attendance because he won’t say the first name only. And these dumb guys make fun of Beckett for going to ballet class after school.”
He takes one step near me. I stare calmly down at him.
“I’m surrounded by stupid people in a stupid world and everyone does stupid things, and it’s slow. It’s so slow.” He cringes in distaste, his face pained. “I’m stuck here, aren’t I, Dad?”
“What do you think?” I ask first.
“I think that if I left here.” He motions to the school. “People would never take me seriously. Oh, look at cute little Charlie Keating pretending to be so smart and old.” He lets out a short laugh, and his eyes flood with tears but he restrains that emotion.
“The world is frustrating,” I tell him. “When you know every answer and everyone else takes a thousand times longer than you, you just want to bang your head on the desk. You want to walk out. You want to help them solve the equation, but even if you did, they still would never be as fast as you.”
His lips part at the realization that I know exactly what he feels.
“You can’t make people think like you. You’re it, Charlie. The world will never go at your speed.”
He winces. “No, Dad.”
“Some people are illogical, irrational, and emotional, but people have to be free to fail, to fall, and yes, to do stupid things. I know it’s irritating. I know you want, so badly, to tell people which way to turn because you see that way is in their best interest, but you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because society doesn’t work like that. You can walk backwards while everyone walks forwards, but you can’t force everyone to walk backwards with you.”
I never used my intelligence to stop crime, to save the world, to help people—I used it for my own benefit: self-knowledge, self-growth. Esteem and power.
I’m immoral. I’m selfish and egotistical. But if you had the mind and the eyes that illuminated every facet of the world, that had the ideas and solutions to fix micro and macro problems—how maddening would it be to watch people do illogical, emotional things to their determent and others, knowing you hold all the tools but in the end, you’re powerless to stop them.
If I took that route, I would’ve gone insane. If Charlie takes that route, he will too.
We can’t fix what’s wrong with the entire world. I simply live by their rules and step outside when it suits me. When I need to feel free.
And I use my intelligence for me.
Charlie fights tears and shakes his head repeatedly. “If no one listens, if no one cares, if I can’t make them go my speed—what’s even the point?”
“You can do anything. You can be anything. There’ll be constraints everywhere you turn, but there’ll be none inside your mind, Charlie. You don’t need to bang your head on the desk because they can’t keep up. Think about ways in which you can go faster. Only look at you.”
I’m teaching my son how to be self-centered, so the slothful world he’s stuck inside won’t drive him mad.
Charlie understands, more realizations washing his face.
I notice a van in the far distance, driving through the opened school gates.
Paparazzi.
I pick up Charlie’s backpack. “You have to skip third and fourth grade.”
Charlie must’ve known I would propose this because he’s not surprised at all. “You didn’t skip.”
“You’re not me.”
He eyes me skeptically. “Weren’t you bored?”
“Every day, but I didn’t want to miss out on experiences that other people had. I wanted to relate to them. So I could blend in. It was useful, and I liked gaining useful skills. It was a self-interest.”
He thinks about this for a long moment.
The paparazzi van drives closer.
Charlie is so quiet as he processes a future that he tries to pave out. “I don’t want to leave him…” His chest collapses at the thought. If he skips grades, he’ll no longer be in the same classes as Beckett. He’ll go to high school and college before his twin brother.
Rose and I offered homeschool to Charlie once, but he rejected the idea. I want to stay in school with Beckett, he said. “Homeschooling is an option—”
“No.” Charlie frowns deeply. “I want to be in the same school.” He pauses. “I’m scared to leave him…”
“He knows how school is for you, Charlie.”
Beckett has asked us to do something twice before because he feels his brother’s frustration, his irritation, how upset and mad he becomes by the end of the day. He senses all of that pain, and he just wants him to feel okay.
“I can be like you,” Charlie tells me. “I can just…stay in third grade and think about myself.”
“You’re not me,” I repeat. “If you were, every time someone patronized you, you would’ve thought, I’m better than you, and moved on.” I was six when I realized what he’s realizing now, and I had no family that needed or wanted to be loved.
He does.
Charlie sees the incoming paparazzi van.
I put my hand on his shoulder, directing him towards the curb where my limo is parked. A cameraman jumps out of the van and starts asking questions. He stays about five feet away from us.
“What are you doing out of school, Charlie?” the cameraman asks.
Charlie unknots his tie. “Ruminating.”
I grin.
The truth: he told one of his teacher’s a more efficient way to teach 3rd grade math that would benefit the whole class. He argued his point until the teacher told him that it didn’t matter what he said because he was the student, “the child”—so Charlie walked out of class.
The teacher found him sitting alone in the empty cafeteria, reading a book from home, and he was then escorted to the principal’s office.
The rest is just history.
Charlie ignores the camera. He’s used to its presence, and he must not be concerned whether his next question is aired.
“You see more benefits in skipping to fifth grade when you didn’t even do it?” he asks me.
“For you, yes.”
He hesitates. “Why?”
“Do you want to blend in or do you want to walk backwards?” He knows that a sea of people will always walk forwards, but he can choose to move with them or against them. Where do his self
-interests lie? To learn to be fake or to learn to be real.
His eyes are no longer filled with tears. He holds this powerful understanding that pushes his carriage outward, pulls his shoulders back, lifts his head to greater heights. And he says, “Walk backwards.”
“That’s why.”
You’re not like me.
2027
“I believe the human brain is capable of great and terrible things. We’re dreadfully complicated creatures.”
- Jane Eleanor Cobalt, We Are Calloway (Season 9 Episode 01 – Tacos & Pastels)
January 2027
The Cobalt Estate
Philadelphia
RYKE MEADOWS
I’m fucking used to being surrounded by girls.
Just not these two.