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My high school was a specialized school for “students gifted in mathematics and the sciences.” To enroll, you took an entrance exam where you were quizzed about Archimedes’ principle, Schrödinger’s cat, and other such topics I don’t have a clue about now. The school attracted some of the country’s brightest young minds. This meant a cohort of bookish twelve-year-olds who knew twenty digits of Pi and were suspected of having Asperger’s at some point in their lives. During recess, my peers would work on multivariable calculus, and during Humanities class, they would catch up on sleep. Here, you could count on someone to have a Rubik’s cube and know how to solve it in ten seconds. By the end of our six years, a fifth of my classmates had been offered places at Oxbridge or the Ivy League schools. They were future researchers, mathematicians, doctors etc.—people who will have Wikipedia pages. I knew I did not work hard enough to be part of this statistic. Yet a tinge of bitterness, a longing for lost futures, peaks through during the obligatory “how are you” conversations with friends when they make their annual pilgrimage home from abroad.

The remaining four-fifths of us were ordinary. Medium-sized fish in a big pond. On solipsistic nights, after a failed day of job searching, I fantasize about having attended a mediocre high school. I would have felt cleverer, I would never have been depressed, I would have balanced more chemical equations, I would be in X University. So on and so forth until I end up with my own Wikipedia page.

Every cohort also has a few small fish. A few who never make it to graduation. I knew one of them well. She had no time for multivariable calculus or Rubik’s Cubes because she was in and out of the psychiatric ward so often. When she did come to school, we sat together and worked on the latest stack of algebra homework. We never made much progress since neither of us were that good at math. She didn’t want to go home, and so we stayed after school and acquainted ourselves with the empty classrooms. One day, she showed me her penknife collection and what she used it for. I did not understand why anyone could think of doing such a thing to themselves. Her face grew foreign, and I began to keep my distance. Soon, she came to school more and more infrequently, with more bandages on her arms each time. Nobody knew what to say, not the teachers, not the counselors, so we continued with class. There was learning to do.

On a morning like any other, we were told that she would not be coming back. The class moved on fast, as fourteen-year-olds typically do. I moved on too. I didn’t know it then, but I took on her grief. I could break off the tips of penknives so they stayed perfectly sharp.

When I graduated, I deleted many of my contacts from school, mostly as an act of self-preservation. I no longer wanted to know who went to what college, how well they were doing, their extracurriculars, their summer jobs. I feel disturbed that I once weighed my life on the decimal points of my GPA, that any child should believe anything besides the fragility of such numbers and institutions. I shed most of my memories from that time, to start anew. What I kept were the sharp reflections of the setting sun skittling across the empty classroom floor, the heaviness that settled in when it was past six and the school was silent, and the digits of Pi. I am still trying to forget the digits of Pi.