Free Somebody Else's Daughter by Elizabeth Brundage Page B

evidence of a child’s brilliance. If the child tested in the average range, which was usually the case, the parents maintained that the numbers were simply an arbitrary consequence of the child’s mood that day. So what good was any of it? Under the giant umbrella of dysfunction, the parents found ways to rationalize their children’s myriad issues: the ADD and dysgraphia, the dyslexia and processing disorders, the names of which, in the age of euphemism and rationalization, anointed their children as unlikely warriors, members of an underdog class of students whose brilliance was so dynamic and extreme—akin to Einstein’s—that no ordinary high school teacher could recognize or identify it. Many of their students took drugs, not just one prescription but sometimes two or three—the school nurse had a lengthy list on file and dutifully dispensed them as instructed. There were drugs for sleeping, drugs for waking. Drugs that quelled depression. Drugs that made the kids more focused or more alert or more relaxed or more able to demonstrate self-control. In most cases, Maggie didn’t approve of giving drugs to children, she didn’t care what the doctors said, but she kept her opinions to herself, it wasn’t her place to judge. But she did judge, she couldn’t help it. In her mind, the drugs said more about the parents than the children. Over the past ten years there’d been a marked rise in the routine dispensing of drugs like Prozac and Ritalin, yet Maggie wasn’t always impressed by the results they promised. To some degree she could understand the parents’ anxiety—nobody wanted to hear that their kid was lacking in the brain department— but instead of facing up to the fact that their kids weren’t destined for Harvard, the parents squirmed around the reality and turned it into something else. Over the years, during interviews with these sorts of parents, Maggie had observed a growing phenomenon among the applicants to Pioneer. They were all geniuses.
    But Jack looked at things differently. Jack was a businessman.
    When she’d mentioned the boy’s reading and writing difficulties to him one afternoon, waving a stack of papers in his face, Jack had shrugged and said, “How is he doing in math?”
    â€œAll right,” she admitted, “but look at these, Jack. They’re unacceptable. He needs help.”
    Jack glanced at the papers and tossed them down on the desk, irritably. “What’s happened to you, Maggie?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWhere’s your ‘I can teach anyone’ attitude?”
    â€œThis is different. We aren’t equipped to deal with his issues.”
    â€œYou don’t get it, do you?” He took hold of her shoulders and directed her toward the window. “You see that building? Whose name is on that building, Maggie?”
    She looked out at the Squire Gymnasium. “He doesn’t belong here,” she insisted. “And you know it.”
    â€œI’m sure the boy has other strengths. Find out what they are.”
    She shrugged him off and started toward the door, but he caught her wrist and held it harder than necessary. “You don’t seem like yourself these days.”
    She looked up at his benign face, his sea-glass eyes. “I’m fine.” “Could have fooled me.”
    â€œI just want the best for the boy.”
    â€œSure you do,” he said, letting go of her. “Get him a tutor.”
    Something was happening to her and Jack. It had been happening for a long time. She couldn’t discuss it with anyone—she didn’t dare. She didn’t have any friends, really, and the only person she might confide in, her sister, Tess, was off in Africa somewhere with the Peace Corps. Instead, she focused on routine, the predictable unfolding of her days. Mornings, she got up, made breakfast, put in a load of laundry, and the three of them went