I knew Alice Drop when we were kids, she was four years my senior, and I viewed her as a role model. Alice was smart and deductive, always bored in class, the ‘genius’ most of her classmates envied and all of the teachers loved. Her unique capabilities and high intelligence were noticed when she was very young, and her education had always been ‘the best of the best’, as her mother, Carrie, took pride in mentioning.
Alice changed schools quite often, as her mother was always looking for something challenging enough for her little girl. Carrie loved her daughter, but she had always had a bit of an obsession with keeping Alice on a straight path to success, always afraid that her daughter would lose that talent she clearly possessed. I remember when I was five and desperately wanted to hang out with my then role model, but never could, as she was always in her room, up in the attic, with a workbook for children three years older than her, chewing away pencil after pencil.
I asked her one time, on her tenth birthday, if the wood on her pencil tasted good. It was unusual for me to joke around with her, I usually just tried to copy whatever she was doing, like an annoying little sister. She smiled down at me and told me that one day I’d grow up and learn about stress. I didn’t understand what she meant, but never asked. Instead, I watched her blow in the candles and open the presents: books, pencil cases and one perfectly white shirt. She looked happy. Later that day we ate ice-cream and she told me all about what her new school was like and about everything she had to do. I smiled and then went home. It was one of the last times I saw her.
Slowly, I grew out of my obsession with her, and she grew tired of me always asking about the reason why she had to study all that nonsense. After I moved, we never spoke.
Ten years later, as I once went back to the town I spent my childhood in, I decided to see how she was doing. I was curious about the genius I once idolized. I went to her house and her mother answered the door. When I asked about Alice, she looked down, bursting into tears. She gave me an address and told me it’s too hard for her to come along.
It led me to an asylum. I went in and asked for Alice Drop. She lady smiled, asked if I was a childhood friend, the one that left town. She told me I was one of the few things Alice remembered. She took me to her room, but instead of a young 20 year old, a morbidly skinny girl with bags under her eyes and grey hairs looked back and smiled. I asked the nurse what had happened to the once tall, brilliant brunette I knew. She told me that simply too much pressure made her collapse. I looked back at Alice, comparing the damaged young but aged woman in front of me with the teenager I had last seen her as. Everything was different, except for the eyes, they were still as kind and calm, but the mind behind them was way more tangled.