Читать книгу Epic - Kelly Wilson - Страница 2

I had always known that I was different. Not the “I have a third eye or an eleventh toe” different but, well…unique. I guess you could say that I never really fit in with other kids my age. By the time I was two, I was reading. Not ordinary picture books, but full-fledged newspaper articles. When I was five my mother bought me my first novel, Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, and from then on I was hooked. I read everything I could get my hands on, including a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica that Mom had bought from a travelling salesman whose main purpose was to fleece innocent housewives.

My mother always seemed to want to encourage my abilities, but at the same time she never thought that I should advance beyond my age. Perhaps that’s why she let me progress like a normal child through school, even though she knew that the content I was being taught was well below my true abilities. In spite of this, my extraordinary academic prowess managed to propel me through high school and I ended up skipping grades ten and eleven. I graduated first in my class with an A+ average and was valedictorian at my high school graduation. I accepted a scholarship from New York University, where I majored in anthropology. After my second year of undergraduate studies I was granted early acceptance into graduate school at Yale, and planned to develop my thesis around urban mythology and legends. Then I decided to defer my acceptance.

This decision was not easy. Mom thought I wanted to backpack through Europe in an attempt to “find myself”, and since she had never limited me in the past, she wasn’t going to start now. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the real reason I wanted to go: to find my father. I had never known him. According to Mom, he’d left before she had a chance to tell him she was pregnant. She explained it away by saying that he’d only been in Vancouver briefly on business and, while they’d had some torrid love affair, it had ended when he went back to London, England. Apparently, Mom didn’t even know his last name so she couldn’t track him down. However, if you knew my obsessive-compulsive mother, you would not believe this. I never told her, but while at home this past summer, I had come across a well-worn picture of my father and mother together, tucked inside one of my mother’s favorite novels: J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. I knew the man in the tear-stained picture was my father, not only because of the uncanny resemblance in our features, but also by the loving way my mother was looking at him and, for that matter, the way they were looking lovingly at each other. At that moment, I knew there was more to the story, and I felt compelled to find out. Luckily for me, my obsessive-compulsive mother had written both of their names on the back of the picture, so I at least had his first and last names.

I took one last look around the room in which I had spent most of my formative years. The microscope under which I had dissected spiders was still sitting on the window ledge. The periodic table was front and centre on my cork board and, of course, the 3D globe that I had made for my ninth-grade science project hung suspended from the ceiling over my desk. For the first time it became apparent to me how odd my room looked, and how truly anomalous I was.

The magnitude of this realization did not materialize until the summer I turned nineteen.