Winning the Award for "Most Outstanding Geometry Student" in 1987

Few things have ever been more gratifying to me in my life than winning the award for "Most Outstanding Geometry Student" at the end of my tenth grade year, which was announced among the other major competitive ones during the outing of the Math Club at Pizza Hut. That is because of the fun drama that went into the competition at so many levels. One of the main competitors for it was a guy who had been condescending and rude to me and arrogant about his math success in Algebra I the year before. My success and comeback in geometry was shocking and unsettling to him, and he became so desperate at one point that he did a complete turnabout and even tried to sweetalk me and started having lunch at my lunch table daily. No success or victory in life has ever given me a feeling compared to how I felt the day I got that award in Pizza Hut that day when I was 15, and it is one of the achievements that I have most valued in my life, honestly my all-time favorite. For years, I wondered why it was so important to me and why nothing else has ever come close to meaning as much. Even earning my Ph.D. and publishing my first book did not give me as much gratification and feeling of victory as winning this award.

The competition in that class, the smallest and most advanced geometry class that year, was stiff, but other than this guy, I counted the other students, three of whom were my male friends, as good friends and would have been glad if any one of them had won. I think I loved it in general because it was a fight to the finish. We'd go over the regular assigned homework in class, and then quickly rush to the "challenge problems," where we preferred spending class time. The competition was so stiff that although on test days, most students finished their tests about twenty minutes before the class period ended, we would keep our papers and go over them again and again (and again!) until the end of the period for one simple reason: no one wanted to be the first person to get up and turn in their paper. It might send the message of being a slacker. We turned in our completed tests at the same time at the end of class, when the bell rang. The quiet intensity during those twenty loose minutes at the end of every test day was palpable, as people looked over their papers and rechecked their answers again and again, and periodically, straight ahead at the clock. No one could have paid me to be the first person to turn my paper in on one of those days, or anyone else in the class.

I had all A's and one B on my tests for the entire year. The day the aforementioned guy got an A higher than my A, he was ecstatic, exclaiming, "I beat you, I beat you!" These were the first words that he had ever spoken to me directly in high school, from the time that ninth grade began, and we were now in tenth! I was both amused and surprised, for I didn't even know he'd been monitoring my progress or looking at my tests. I presumed I was totally invisible to him, and so had just ignored him, too. I was actually very happy for him and pleasantly surprised and gratified if defeating me had meant so much to him, since I didn't know I'd been in a contest with him in the first place. I had just been enjoying geometry all year.

And then, after I had absent for a day from school, and returned, he'd changed his seat to the one beside mine. He began asking me stupid and confusing questions like "If I come over to your lunch table, can I have some of your french fries?" He got my phone number and called me and asked at one point, "When you get your license, do you want to go skating?" I was astonished by all of this new attention from him and did not know what to think of it. It felt weird that I'd gone from being so hated by him to a skating invitation. I had stayed away from him and not said anything to him for all of ninth grade and up to that point in that class, because I felt that he disliked me vehemently. For example, in the first or second week of the year when the ninth grade English teacher used me as an example one day in a sentence by saying "Riche' is a pretty girl," he was sitting in a seat in the aisle across from me, and so I heard him clearly when he remarked contemptuously under his breath that "She looks like a cockroach," while giving me a dirty look in the process. He was held up as a kind of "great hope" from his Catholic elementary school, and my classmates from St. John had also invested a lot of confidence in me, and talked me up a lot around the school, so it seemed as if he was invested in tearing me down. He had the arrogance of Goliath and saw me as someone unworthy of his respect, someone to just gobble up, I guess. I also remember that during ninth grade retreat, while standing outside with some others, I saw him go off walking on a trail alone and thought to myself that I would never be caught in a woody area with him alone for I felt that he hated me enough to push me off a cliff.

The first day he came and sat at my lunch table was really perplexing. Most boys in my class sat at the table in the center of the lunch room, packed together like sardines with their trays, which is where he also sat ordinarily. The first day that he broke rank and came and sat across from me at the lunch table with my friends and me, I got the distinct feeling that I was being watched. I was. For when I looked up, every boy at that long table was looking straight back at him and me. Every one! The ones facing us were all motionless and looking at us. And the ones facing them at the table and with their backs turned to us were all looking back at us-and over the SAME shoulder. And worse, since we wore uniforms, they were also all dressed alike, in white shirts, ties and gray pants. It almost felt synchronized. I thought I was imagining things and, shocked by the intensity of their stares, instinctively looked down. Seconds later, when I, thinking that it was safe, furtively checked again, they were STILL immobilized, staring at us. This scene would have been a perfect and priceless to film for a movie. It was the last straw for me. I immediately took action.

That night, I called and asked a firend of mine who was sitting at that table what was up with that. He told me that "They think you all are 'talking.'" Talk about miscommunication! I guess they were as confused as I was by the attention that this guy was suddenly giving me. I was thinking, "Why are you being so nice? You hate me, rememember?" I was utterly surprised and confused and asked one of his friends why he'd changed so much. At one point, I sternly and suspiciously asked, "Is he trying to steal my academic secrets?" I worried if he was so desperate to beat me in geometry that he was actually planning to try to romance me or butter up to me do it. Well, I wasn't having it. He ate lunch at the table with us for the rest of the year.

I will say, tongue in cheek, that that whole experience may have been like the gratification that a hunter might get by the head of a moose on a wall. He didn't return to St. Jude the next year, and the fact is, maybe he couldn't. The memory of my winning the gold in geometry was too unbearable for him.

As scenes such as the one in the cafeteria that I mention suggest, this is a fun story with many twists, even more fun than some of those chronicled in "Don't Tell Me That You Love Me." I'll be sure to write this story in more detail when I get a chance.