Angel Greenwood was strange from birth. She could walk when she was two months old and she could talk when she was a year old. She learned words without people teaching her them. When she was two years old, she used the word precarious to describe her poorly built doll house. Though her brain advanced at such an abnormal rate, her body grew just like any average girl. When Angel was five, her parents thought they should home-school her. They were startled when, as they told Angel their plan, she grimaced and asked,
“Do I have to? I mean I just don’t think this is preferable.”
They had thought she would have wanted to stay home because many children in her school had made fun of her for being a “know-it-all”.
After the uncomfortable conversation that followed where Angel had tried to fight for her right to stay home, her parents told her that she would have to be home-schooled whether she liked it or not. She stormed to her room and flopped on her bed. Her room was her secure shelter when she had nowhere else to go. She always fled to it in times of need. “Why should I have to stay home and be enclosed. I don’t need this. I’m so sick of them thinking they should control my life.” She thought savagely. She got up from her bed and sighed. “Why do people think I’m a know-it-all? It wasn’t my decision to be smart.”
Angel was home-schooled for eight years. On her 13th birthday her mother informed,
“Honey, we have decided to send you to a boarding school.”
Angel’s jaw dropped. To her, this was worse then home-schooling.
“No! I won’t!” she yelled angrily.
“Sweetie.”
“Don’t sweetie me! I am NOT going to one of those prisons!”
“It’s what’s best for you. I’ve noticed the ways the other kids on this block have been acting towards you.”
“I don’t care!” she shrieked
“Young lady, do NOT speak to me with that tone.”
“I will do what I want!” Angel yelled furiously. As she began to get angrier and angrier, something extraordinary happened. The antique lamp behind Angel’s mother cracked slowly and shattered into millions of miniscule pieces. Angel stood there, her shock overpowering her anger as a thousand thoughts and questions raced through her mind. She gazed at her parents. They looked just as surprised as she did if not more so. She bit her lip and ran outside. When her parents walked out, they saw her sitting cross-legged on the grass. She was pulling out clumps of grass and weeds; it was one of her habits that she always did when she was upset or worried. She turned her head up at the cloudless sky.
For the rest of the morning she sat there, looking up, trying desperately to find something logical to connect to that extraordinary happening.
“Maybe I have a strange mutated cousin of ESP or something.”
She knew it was hopeless, but she continued for several hours. When night finally fell, she got up, brushed all the dirt off of herself, and walked back into her home. She slid through the house, quiet as a shadow, to her room. As she sat on her bed, an idea entered her mind. She saw an ugly, old shirt that she had dressed herself in a year ago. She tried to gaze upon it with as much intensity as she did to the lamp. It didn’t budge. She sighed with disappointment. If she had a power, she wanted to be able to control it, but apparently she could not. Finally, she walked downstairs and heard her mother on the phone.
“Who were you talking to?” she inquired.
“I was speaking to a doctor.” Angel opened her mouth, but her mother interrupted, “Before you argue, think. Don’t you want to be normal?”
Angel closed her mouth and strode to the car with her mother. They drove for a little over an hour. They finally arrived at a dreary looking building that had a broken down sign that read: “Doctor Spechara’s Office” and underneath in smaller writing: “Appointments, checkups, and surgery.” Angel opened the door and entered the a dark waiting room. There was a 70 year old woman sitting at a desk writing slowly. Angel and her mother had to get as close as two feet away from her before she looked up.
“Name.”
“Greenwood.” she answered.
The woman snapped her head up hastily but instantly regretted it as she seemed to crick her neck. She picked up a phone and spoke into the receiver:
“Mrs. Spechara, Greenwood is here for you.”
A woman walked out of a small office and greeted them jovially. She took them out of the waiting room and into the checkup room.
“I’ll need to give her an x-ray.” the doctor stated.
She studied Angel’s brain for an expanded amount of time.
“Honestly,” Angel braced herself as Mrs. Spechara spoke, “I can’t find anything wrong.”
A few minutes later, Angel removed herself from the building with her mother feeling that that was the most pointless hour of her life.
Angel found herself having similar experiences where she would get overly emotional and something extremely abnormal would occur making her mother panic and they would travel to some doctor and he or she would find absolutely nothing wrong with Angel. It was tiring and strenuous. This had happened five times over the past two weeks. Angel seemed to be, after every visit to some doctor, more emotionally strained and weak. She mainly felt depressed. She kept repeating the same words over and over in her mind and sometimes she would mutter them out loud: “I just want to be normal.” She couldn’t stand the way her parents treated her now. It caused her to want to be isolated. She finally dissolved into tears in her room and, at the same time, made the window burst open. She was, again, in a waiting room. Her eyes were closed and she was whispering:
“I just want this to end. I want to be normal.”
“I know! I feel that Vermont’s trends are abnormal too! I thought I was the only one!” stated a five year old girl with pigtails that had been sitting by her. Angel ignored her. Soon she was called into the doctor’s office. This certain doctor had been publicized as one of the best in the country. Angel’s mother had the hardest time getting an appointment. She had to explain her situation to about ten different people. When she entered, the doctor had captivating news.
“You can be ‘cured’ if that’s what you want to call it. Your extraordinary brain growth came from a fluid in your brain tissue that was with you from birth. We can remove this with simple surgery. It’s fairly cheap and very fast. Your brain will cease to have such knowledge leaving you with only the education that you have received from books.”
Angel closed her eyes and sighed joyfully.
“Can we do it now? I want to get it done.” she asked.
“Yes.”
They used the anesthesia and in a short hour they had finished the process. Angel woke up and strode to the car. As they rode home she thought about how much harder she was going to have to work. She was not worried. She was just glad to finally be normal.
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