Growing up Darwin

This is one of those prompts that left me thinking, "Uh...when have I NOT been challenged...?" And then the obvious: "Uh, right now? By 40 days and 40 writes, being challenged to show up every day and put...well, if not pen to paper, then fingers to keyboard?" Once again, just the beginning of something...

Darwin was always the target of the other kids' outbursts, their teasing, their cruel jokes, practical and otherwise. He was certain it was at least in part due to his name - he had never known anyone else named Darwin and while he'd been told he was named after Charles Darwin, when he tried to explain he'd been named after the the father of evolution, the other kids just asked why he was such a monkey, then? He did not have a good reply for this. It didn't help that while Darwin was undeniably one of the smartest children at his public school, he was also socially awkward to the point of being painfully shy around other children his age; he just did not know how to act around them, finding himself much more comfortable in the company of adults, with whom he could carry on an intelligent conversation and who never called him names or forced him into a bathroom stall and stuck his head in the toilet during recess. Unfortunately, Darwin's intelligence and the fact that he preferred the company of adults only served to fuel the cycle of bullying he experienced on a daily basis.

From a very early age Darwin was aware, at least at some level, he was not like other kids. He had developed a capacity for abstract thinking even before entering kindergarten, where his teacher - who had never really developed that capacity herself - would find him nearly as challenging as did his classmates. The constant questions. And she called him a "show off" just because he was already reading at 5th grade level and didn't care about Pete the Cat or mice with cookies (although his pet mouse, Geranium, did in fact like bits of cookie). No, given the choice, Darwin would have preferred to stay at home, curled up on the couch and watching reruns of classic shows on Nickelodeon, or The Great British Bake Off, while his mother sat next to him only half paying attention to the show while given her full attention to her assigned reading for her Ph.D. in psychology. Darwin loved his mother, who never talked down to him, and always told him he could be whatever he wanted to be, provided he was willing to work at it. He didn't know what he wanted to be, really - there were so many exciting possibilities, and new things - and so new jobs - were being invented all the time.

By the time Darwin was in third grade and he'd had the chance to read a few of the texts his mother had left lying around, he thought maybe he wanted to be a psychologist like her. By the time he reached sixth grade and was seeing a psychologist himself - sadly one who, unbeknownst to Darwin, wasn't really very good - he wasn't so sure about that any more, but thought maybe he wanted to be an actor. Or a tractor driver. Tractors were pretty cool machines, after all, and very big and powerful, all of which Darwin felt he himself was not. And even though he knew he was highly intelligent, Darwin still had a deeply seated inferiority complex for being so different from the other kids which, although he was not consciously aware of it, and which a better psychologist might have helped him realize, was one of his primary self-defense mechanisms. Because hey, if *he* understood something and he wasn't very smart, then they should be able to get it too, right? To the twisted logic of his young mind, it was thus much easier to blame himself for being bullied than stand up to the bullies.

In 7th grade things got a little better for Darwin - first, because he changed schools so even though he still felt very shy and alone, many of the kids who had treated him the worst were not at the new school. And then because he had met and somehow befriended Jesse. Jesse was a very big, very strong kid for his age - one who would go on to be a linebacker for his high school and college football teams. When they'd first met and shaken hands, Jesse had crushed Darwin's hand in his own ferocious grip, rolling Darwin's bones back and forth. Fortunately, Darwin had studied some of Harry Houdini's magic tricks, and knew how to dislocate the bones in his hands to escape from handcuffs - he'd even won a pair of real police handcuffs by betting he's father's friend, a detective on the city police force, that he could escape from the handcuffs in under a minute, claiming them as his prize for winning the bet. Jesse, who himself had often been teased for his size, found this amusing and took an instant liking to Darwin so soon, anyone who wanted to pick on Darwin had to deal with Jesse, and litte to no one wanted to face Jesse's anger. This made 7th and 8th grade relatively peaceful years for Darwin who, while still exasperating his teachers by not really paying attention in class and by asking very hard questions (which belied the reason he wasn't really paying attention in class), was at least not bothered nearly as much by his fellow classmates, and he even managed to develop a few friends among the other "outcasts" at the school.

By his sophomore year in high school, things had pretty much returned to normal for Darwin, if by normal you understood being extorted for his lunch money and/or being beaten up, and regularly being called names, which had evolved from mere childhood epithets to the truly derogatory and degrading. Which is not to say that by this point Darwin wasn't bringing some of it on himself. Like the incident with the pink socks, which began when Darwin's dad returned from a company trip to Hawaii with, among other company swag, a pair of pink men's golf socks he had "won" as the prize for the having the worst golf score. While Darwin's dad took it in stride to Darwin, this only proved that the teasing and bullying were just a normal part of life, even as an adult, so he'd better get used to it. Darwin also figured nobody ever really looked at or cared about someone’s socks, anyway; he couldn't even think of what color socks his friend Greg had worn that day. So the plan was hatched to conduct his own sociological experiment, stealing the socks from his dad's bureau drawer and wearing them to school on day. What poor Darwin had not counted on was that once one person noticed - which hadn't happened until third period, by the way - then word would spread like wildfire and he would find himself receiving some of the worst hazing of his fifteen years to date.

— Zachary