​
 

Quantum Mechanics

​

“Do you want to hear something really cool?”

It’s the middle of July, late in the afternoon. I don’t raise my head at the sound of my brother’s voice, nor do I acknowledge his question. He takes my noncommittal silence as a cue to walk over and does so, feet slapping against the wooden deck I lay on, water droplets scattering everywhere. I half-crack my eyes open and watch him over the top of my arm as he walks over, smiling down down at me. There’s a book in his hands, dog-eared and warped with water damage, the black of the cover standing out stark against the blue sky turned almost white from the disc of nuclear-fused hydrogen and plasma burning a hole through the universe behind him. I can’t read the title, nor do I really care. All I wanted to do then was watch the horizon line between the ocean and the water blur out of existence as I fell back asleep, free from any brothers armed with heavyset books and rhetorical questions; there was no doubt in my mind, then or now, that my brother’s question was only a formality; if he wanted to tell me something cool, he was going to do so whether I wanted to hear it or not.

“Do you want to hear something cool?” he repeats, stopping right in front of me. His board shorts are too big and patterned with little sharks all over them. Rivulets of water run down his legs, pooling around his feet, turning the wood beneath him almost black. 

“What?” I finally say, voice muffled into the crook of my arm. A part of me is already resigned to the fact that sleep is rapidly becoming out of the question now.

I can hear the grin in his voice as he responds, ends of his sentences pitching up with excitement. He sits down on the deck next to me, dropping his elbows on his knees and pulling the book open, launching into a tirade about a passage he had just read. It’s about quantum mechanics and Schrodinger and subatomic particles and hydrogen wave function, a continual stream of words and ideas that shoot over my head like SR-71s, disappearing into the sun-bleached sky in a haze. 

When I was nine years old, busy blowing my through the fourth book of the Harry Potter series and starting to record the first stories that had started to take shape in the back of my head on hotel notepads and napkins, my brother taught himself algebra. He was five years ahead of average fourth grade students. I was still struggling to do the times tables worksheets my teacher would give me without asking my mother for the answer to every other question.

The caliber of intellectual prowess in my family is high. I come from the type of people who bring books about quantum mechanics on summer holidays to the Mediterranian and actually understand what the words mean, who start Fortune 500 companies and then pass those companies down to their equally-capable sons to run for a decade or so, who can do the New York Times Sunday crossword in one sitting, who breeze through books of logic puzzles for fun, who graduate from Stanford in three and a half years, who can go to foreign countries and learn the language spoken there in its entirety in under nine months, who are mathematicians and businessmen, CEOs and chemical engineers, valedictorians and the best teenage chemists in England with a certificate to prove it. And then there is me. 

I liked reading at a young age. I liked doodling scenes from my favorite novel series—Warrior Cats was a particular favorite; my best friend from elementary school and I were virtually obsessed with those books—on sheets of paper, pen marks littering my hands, turning my fingertips blue and red and orange and black. I liked investigating the dinosaurs I believed were living in my backyard. I liked playing piano, or trying to, at least; I’m sure my rendition of Moonlight Sonata had Beethoven rolling in his grave. I liked writing. And I liked academics, too—or at least tried to—but I was never very good at them.

Even from a young age, the discrepancy between my academic achievements and those of the rest of my family seemed clear to me. While my brother went off to teach himself about algebra and quantum physics and blow all his birthday money on the new chemistry textbooks he could find hidden in the back aisles of the Bookstar, I was bringing home quizzes and tests and essays and report cards with letters circled in the upper right-hand corner, my acceptable-but-still-questionably-mediocre-and-nothing-if-not-disappointing grades on display for all the world to see in bright red ink. I would spend full weeks studying for exams, taking pages of meticulous, brightly-colored notes, talking to teachers, and staring at the review packets until the words seemed to melt off the page and drip onto the carpeted floor beneath me only to receive grades in the 60s and 70s. I would field my parents’ questions of “okay, but did you really try your hardest?” with my own responses that yes, I tried my hardest; yes, this is the best I can do; yes, I know it should probably be better but it’s not and I don’t know why and I’m sorry. 

The only subject that I really succeeded in during school was English. Reading and writing came easy, even if my handwriting resembled the marks a spider dipped in ink might leave on a page after having a full-body seizure. Spelling was easy for me, too; at the very least, I, in my particular breed of elementary schooler vindication, lost no time in reminding my brother that I was the one breezing through the advanced spelling packets while he was the one who kept spelling “apple” like “appel,” no matter how many times someone corrected him on it. But the real area I excelled in was writing. I would write about school: the time Spencer lost his tooth on the monkey bars and made me dig through the sand while he sat on the concrete, crying, blood dripping down his lip; my tenure as a sailor in the play Coming to America; Ian getting his ear slammed in the car door. I would write about my day, too, detailing what I had for lunch and who I played flag football with during recess or what I had for lunch that day or which boys I managed to outrun that day. I would stories where my brother and I would go off journeying to some far and distant land accompanied by fire breathing dragons or magic wands or ancient, indecipherable prophecies. I would write pure fiction, too; there was this one story about a boy named Miles who went off to a school for kid geniuses called Sollers Academy—in Latin, “sollers” means clever. I thought I was pretty clever for coming up with that one.  

I would show my parents these writings and see flickers of the pride they always seemed to look at my brother with cross their faces, fleeting over their features as their eyes scanned the papers crammed with my messy, sprawling writing, fingers curling around the edges crinkled from time stuffed in the front pocket of my backpack. I wanted to take the expression that crossed their faces and snap a photo of it, propping it up on my dresser, between the stacks of books I would work through and my half-abandoned set of watercolors, immortalizing it in a sheet of glossy, pigmented paper. I wanted nothing more than my parents looking at me like that constantly. I wanted nothing more than them regarding me in the same light I felt convinced they always held my brother in.  

So I started writing on my own time. After a few weeks of this, however, I stopped showing my parents the things I would produce. As far as I can recall, there was no definable reason for this; I simply wanted to start keeping the things I wrote private, tucked away in between the pages of the latest book I was reading, untouched corners of my closet, or plastic accordian folders stored on the bottom shelf of my bookcase labeled DO NOT OPEN. Writing was still my way of proving myself—to my parents, to my brother, to myself, to anyone who happened to be listening at the time—but now this act was silent, private, personal. I think, at some point during my move back to America, where I finally got a handle on academics and raised my grades out of the B-minus-average hole they’d dug themselves into and my parents finally had a cause to be proud of me like they were of my brother, the only person I was trying to prove myself to was myself. 

Because that was why, after a point, I started writing. To prove myself. To remind myself that, if nothing else, if I failed in every other aspect of my life, if every hobby I tried, ever new skill I attempted to pick up on went south, at least I could write. At least I can write became the silent repetition playing out in the back of my head like a broken VHS tape, repeated throughout the school year, throughout summer, throughout the eleven-hour-and-twenty-minute long plane ride back to America where my hand started shaking, fingers frozen in place from gripping my pen for too long, flat of my hand stained almost black with smudged graphite. At least I can write; a mantra for July’s spent trying to impress the girl with bleached-blonde hair and a smattering of freckles by running down auditorium steps and splitting my knees open on wooden benches, for biting the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t cry when my math teacher told me I was running the risk of failing his class, for the guilt-tinged happiness warring with sadness as my brother announced he wanted to go to boarding school the following year. I may not be able to do anything else, I seemed to say, the soundtrack to the near-failing grade I got on my Latin cumulative in seventh grade and the disappointment that seemed written into the very lines of my parents’ face as I told them, but I can write. I can write, I seemed to say, filling pages with private musings of the boy in my biology class with tortoiseshell-patterned glasses and the fifteen-letter last name, embittered accounts of lost lacrosse tournaments and screaming matches with friends in the middle of Hammersmith Tube Station, stories of girls shaving their heads and running off to go live in the woods, letters to my parents that I chickened out of slipping underneath their door while they were getting ready for bed each time, three-word long revelations about myself written down as the orange light from the lamp post outside my room pooled our across my bedroom floor and my next-door neighbors screamed themselves hoarse, simple declarations that I still did not—and probably never would—understand my brother when he talked about quantum mechanics. I can write.