We walk up the stairs in two perfect lines. No teacher told us to do so, but we somehow naturally shape ourselves this way. Getting up to the classroom, we wait quietly along the wall until the teacher is ready to call us in. The other kids storm and surge up and down the other side of the hall. They climb up the lockers and hurl around books and backpacks.

When their teacher comes out, they laugh and wrestle themselves into the classroom. The door slams shut, trapping all of their noise inside it. Our teacher comes out and we enter our room, perfectly in order.

First, we have math. Unsurprisingly, we’re so far ahead from the rest of the grade in our books that the teacher thinks up random problems for us to solve to fill the time. As we sit in groups of four at our cream colored tables, we fly through the problems and get them all right- but we don’t tell our teacher. We say it feels weird to be so far ahead of everyone else.

Next, we have ELA. We sit up straight, criss-cross applesauce, hands folded in our laps along the edge of the navy alphabet- patterned rug in the corner of the room. For the first twenty minutes, we have time to read a book of our choice. In a rhythm of turning pages, our eyes glue to each word like gum stuck under a table.

We read a lot, even outside of school. The other kids tease us about it because “reading is for nerds” or whatever, but reading is fun, so we don’t care. For the next twenty minutes, we listen as our teacher reads a chapter from Wonder. Even though our parents made us read ahead in the book at home and we know everything that happens, our attention is fixed on our teacher’s voice all the same.

Soon enough, lunchtime comes. We bring our own lunch to school.  We don’t eat cafeteria food. At our usual table out by the window, the sun and glass meet and make perfect triangle patterns on our table. We only take up about half of the table, but we prefer to be like this, because we are basically one person. We talk more than we eat and watch the other kids around the lunch room.

Though we’ve noticeably strayed from our normal quiet, the others are still twenty times louder than we are. While we eat, they chase each other, giggling to each other when the teachers shout at them to sit down. When everyone finishes eating, we are called to go to recess first. As always, our table is spotless.

We scamper out onto the turf and place our lunch bags in a straight line in the shade of the tree near the benches. The other kids come rushing out from the cafeteria, throwing their bags aimlessly into a large pile near the exit. Like a jar of marbles being spilled, they scatter and spread and chase each other farther out into the playground. Now, we go ask to play dodgeball with the other kids. The turf, bright green and hot, leaves small rocks in our shoes as we run across it toward the court.

The game starts and we’re confident we will win. We do not. We are losing horribly: constantly dropping the ball, getting hit, getting no one out. Catch, throw, drop. Out. Catch, throw, drop. Out. We are utterly and completely inferior. Our perfect posture turns into a hopeless slouching. We pout and complain, “You cheated!” We know they didn’t, but the feeling of imperfection is much worse than feeling “weird” because of perfection.

Before the round ends, we quit the game. We are ten bowed heads, twenty stomping feet, walking back toward the bench in the shade. If we do everything perfectly, how could this go so wrong?