Logical Genius

It was the first day of Grade five in his boarding school, and Ethan was walking silently towards the front gates of the school. He didn't get why people sometimes talked while walking. It wasted your energy, you could breathe in cold air, and sometimes talking distracted some people form focusing on where they walked, causing them to bump into things. No one in Ethan's family bumped into things. They were a logical family, they said. They didn't make fools of themselves. They did not make friends with other people, although they made sure everyone respected and was even a little scared of them; sometimes relationships are better motivated by fear than by love. Being logical was the first thing his family had ever taught Ethan. And he'd managed to mess that up.

On the first day of Ethan's last kindergarten, Ethan had been completely focused on being logical, just like his family had told him. He'd refused when a few boys told him to jump on the table. He'd tried to explain that tables were for putting things on. Not jumping on. He'd said again and again that you stood and jumped the floor, not a table. But they seemed not to understand. So Ethan told a teacher. The teacher didn't really care. He said as long as the table didn't break, it was none of his business.

Ethan argued that the boys standing on the table might cause it to break earlier than it normally would. But his teacher seemed not to understand. Ethan, therefore, concluded that since his teacher didn't understand, and if the boys stood on it longer, the table would be extremely likely to break early, he should go after the boys. He again politely asked the boys step off the table, They ignored him. He then calculated that using force might be even worse for the table. But if he didn't do anything, too much damage wouldn't be done if the boys got off before an hour passed. And since the boys seemed tired already, Ethan wasn't that worried.

So he walked away without a backwards glance. Maybe hanging out with the girls will be better, he thought.

There were ten girls in his class. Four of them were hanging out together, and the others just walked around looking lost. He decided to approach the four girls that were together.

When he approached, the girls giggled.

'Why are you giggling?' Ethan asked.

'You're a boy they said.' 'We can't be close to boys.'

Ethan was annoyed. wasn't there a single logical person in his school?

'If girls can't be close to boys, that would create a boundary between boys and girls. What if for example, there was a tomboy, she wanted to hang out with the boys, but because of the obvious boundary, she can't. Imagine if you weren't allowed to play with the people you wanted to, and the people you can play with are boring. That might even cause a child to become depressed, although I have to admit, that is a long shot.

At that point, the girls had just looked confused. 

'What does depressed mean?’ one of the girls asked

'It's when someone feels really sad' Ethan responded.

The rest of Ethan's day was just like the beginning of it. No one made sense, everyone was weird in their own way.

When he got home, Ethan's parents had already gotten a phone call.

I said that Ethan was like a grown-up, extremely mature, but most of the students in the school probably couldn't accept him and his way of thought; they were just too young.

That was it for Ethan's parents. They'd taught Ethan to be logical and smart, and now, he was too mature for his own good. They knew people whispered about Ethan behind his back. They knew people called him Mr Grammarly, and most of all, they knew it was their fault.

Ethan was a genius, he could speak five languages by kindergarten. And soon after, he'd mastered advanced algebra AND memorised the coordinates for every single country. If he wasn't so logical, he would have been socially accepted, and probably famous by then.

But Ethan's logic intimidated people. So much so, that even getting into contests were hard because even the interviewers were too annoyed by Ethan's clear superiority over them.

Same with Ethan's school, the administrations were so annoyed by Ethan, only the worst schools accepted him. The phone call was from the last school Ethan could get into. The only other place was...

When Ethan arrived home that day, his parents had told him to pack his things for school. They didn't tell him that he was probably going to stay in the "school" for the rest of his life. They never even gave him a clue that it was a psychiatric hospital.

He found that all out when he arrived. Ethan still couldn't help but point out all the illogical things everyone did. Soon he was diagnosed with a severe case of OCD.

But it wasn't the illogical things that he had imagined, it was his parents.

Ethan's actual parents had died in a car accident while he was in kindergarten, he'd lived for half a year with some distant relatives before getting transferred to the psychiatric hospital after reports of him being seen talking to strangers as if they were his parents, and acting like his mind was still trapped in the day his parents died.

When Ethan's mind finally cleared and he learned of his parents passing, he was devastated and wouldn't eat, or speak for three days. After that, he became quite an introverted person. He never told anyone about his past, and no one ever asked.

He grew up to become a successful author. He wrote about what he'd experienced when he was a child, but from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl. He wanted the world to have a better understanding of OCD and the emotional scars it leaves. His book soon became extremely popular. One of his fans, a woman who used to have OCD managed to meet him in person. It was love at first sight. They married two years after they met and had one child. His name was Bryan.

Bryan's parents had died in a car accident while he was in kindergarten...