It was so comical that I couldn't help laughing. What was even funnier is that most of them started asking whether I was all right, even though there I was, sitting on the couch rise, reading a book.

"Nobody better mess with my roommate," said Ruby, acting fierce. "Or they'll have to deal with me!"

Giggles and guffaws broke out among the girls at that. Well, at least the shock-and-awe mood that the newscast had created was broken. The other girls congratulated me on my victory and related horror stories about girls who had been raped or beaten by gang members. Which meant black gang members, but they were careful not to name the race of the perpetrators. It wasn't the first time I'd noticed that people were unwilling to discuss the socially significant differences between the races in a candid manner. Although it seemed such a simple thing to do, nearly everyone had been strongly conditioned to avoid it.

Although I wasn't familiar with the techniques of military brainwashing, I didn't think that psychological conditioning of any sort could be stronger than that which had instilled within so many people a reluctance to talk honestly about racial differences.

An 11th grade girl named Patricia Greenwood excused herself, saying that she had to go study in a less noisy place. I suspected that she wanted to be the one to bear the first gossip about my fight downtown because, on her way out of the lobby exit to the east wing, she told me "It's nice to see the good people win for a change!" Perhaps she meant the white people. It had been a while since we were winners, hadn't it?

About a hundred years.

Survival is the greatest school, and Death is its best teacher. But no living thing graduates, ever. The beneficiaries of nature's lessons aren't individuals, but races, which endure so long as they pass the tests and which prosper by how high they score. The white race had gotten itself into trouble partly by being too generous, and, in its generosity, making itself vulnerable. Other races had been quick to take advantage of that vulnerability. They infiltrated white countries, seeking out key positions of control, of supervision, of decision-making, and of power, which, once they had them, they used to benefit their own people at the expense of white people. Non-whites of every stripe had become favored above whites, and, being favored, they received rewards even when there were white people who deserved them more.

My fight could, conceivably, have landed me in jail. Or it could have imposed on my parents a legal obligation to pay fines and the hospital expenses of those gang members. The reason that didn't happen was that I'm only eleven years old—a little kid—and a girl, and have no prior record of mischief of any sort. All of those things added up to a degree of favor that outweighed the favor that those gang members had just for being black, once their prior records for trouble-making had been subtracted. Or, rather, my favor exceeded my opponents' favor this time. If I had to fight again, especially against blacks, that earlier fight would weigh against me, even if I were as justified next time as I'd been before.

To be sure, I could have outrun those blacks. I hadn't admitted that to the police because, in their opinion, it would have put blameworthiness upon me. Why didn't I just outrun them? Because the next little girl who happened to walk down that street, past that alley, would not have had my advantages. She'd have been robbed, beaten, raped, and probably murdered by those black youths. It was morally necessary that I deprive those gang members of their ability to harm someone who actually was an ordinary child, someone like whom I only appeared to be.

And there was one other reason as well. There is no idea more obscene than that decent people should be expected to give ground or right-of-way to vile predators. Good should roar so that evil trembles, not the other way around.

Those five black youths would recover. But would they reform? Had I taught them a lesson that would change their predatory behavior? No. They'd return to their previous lives, maybe a little more cautious than they were before. But sooner or later they would attack another innocent victim.

The conviction was growing in me that I'd made a mistake by not killing them. It was a mistake that I'd made before, in my old neighborhood in Druid Hills, when I had defeated four teenage blacks who had attacked me. By letting them live, I'd made the violent deaths of some number of other people probable. Though it hadn't occurred to me at the time, I'd chosen between the lives of those gang members and the lives of whomever it was they would someday murder, and I'd chosen wrongly.

And now that my fighting skill was known, I wouldn't be presumptively excluded from suspicion if gang members began turning up dead. I could no longer afford to do what was right. My moral weakness, which had made me reluctant to kill when killing was proper, had cost me that much.

.

I was jogging to the college campus the next day when Vanessa Emory's white Mercedes caught up with me, horn beeping. There wasn't much traffic. I stopped. So did she, leaning over to roll down the passenger side window.

"Get in here," she told me.

I did. In a few seconds we were both heading down the street toward Brookstone College.

"I heard last night's newscast," said Ms. Emory. "We don't want a repeat of what happened Monday."

"I'm not especially worried about gang members," I said.

Ms. Emory nodded.

"Your safety is a concern, nonetheless. However, that is only part of it." She turned right at the intersection, just past where I'd been attacked. "Another consideration is that Brookstone might become liable for any injuries you inflict on the upstanding gentlemen of the Krack gang during any future repetition of those curbside negotiations that you had with them yesterday."

I recalled that one of Brookstone's deans was my legal guardian at the moment. I nodded.

"I expect you've already figured out the rest," she said.

I thought that I had.

"I might not avoid legal consequences next time," I said.

"That's part of it. The police granted you favor because you're a preteen who has never been in a fight before, whereas those punks you beat up have lengthy criminal records for assault, robbery, drug dealing, and violations of the gun laws. But if you get into more fights, the police will notice that one name keeps popping up regularly in police reports. Yours. And then you might be presumed to be at fault, even if you are never the one to instigate violence."

I knew about the fallacy. Whether they are police officers, judges, or administrators, the majority of people in authority have difficulty distinguishing between the cause of problems and the focus of problems. That confusion is what enables much of that destructive phenomenon known as "office politics." It happens among students in grade school, too. If several kids don't like a certain other kid, they each will contrive to have a problem with him, and report it to the teachers or to the principal. The school officials don't know that the complaints are orchestrated by conspiracy, and they incorrectly presume that they just have this one problem kid to deal with. And, most of the time, the conspiracy achieves its purpose. But Ms. Emory had hinted that there was more.

"What did I miss?"

"You should have guessed. Owing to the stupidity of the media for mentioning your name on television, the Kracks know who you are and, approximately, where you live. And they have a history of vendetta."

I knew I should have killed them. I could have. No one would have suspected me of doing the deed. And because I did not, the girls in my dorm were in danger. As if she were reading my mind, Ms. Emory spoke.

"Not even you can be in two places at once. We will speak again after your classes are finished."

.

Dr. Roper had set a fast pace, as Ms. Emory predicted he would. Already he was treating higher-order derivatives and their meaning during the first half of class, and presenting different methods for integration during the latter half. He'd given homework, some of which tried to confuse his students about which order of derivative to set equal to zero in order to find a local extreme of the next lower order. Other problems involved integration, which would have been devilishly convoluted for someone without experience in knowing when to use a trigonometric substitution, when to integrate by parts, and when to have a peek in The CRC Handbook of Standard Mathematical Tables and then reverse-engineer the logic behind an integral identity.

So far, my experience had enabled me to surf the class without having to exert myself much. I'd earned the gratitude of a few students one day by dropping by a study hall frequented by math and science majors, and correcting a few of my fellow college freshmen who had neglected to transform the differential dx to its new space, f(u) du, after making a substitution.

Yes, Brookstone College considered me a freshman, even though Brookstone GS called me a sixth-grader.

Dr. Roper had assigned a homework problem in which we were to find the analytic solution to an indefinite integral. The integral looked difficult, but it was not. You started with a trigonometric substitution, x equals the tangent of u, and you worked out the trigonometry until you obtained the transformed integral in its simplest form. Then you used integration by parts, grouped terms, applied a couple of trig relations, and did some factoring. But in the study room, when my older classmates asked me for help, I went to the blackboard and wrote:

∫ [ (7x Arctan x) / (1+x²)² ] dx

(A miracle occurs here.)

= (7/4) [ x + (x²−1) Arctan x ] / (x²+1) + K

The amusement that greeted my abbreviated demonstration was loud enough to bring Ms. van Neepen, a math teacher who treasured peace and quiet, out of her office to tell us students to hush. Then I had to get to my next class. I heard voices tapering in decrescendo behind me.

"How'd she do it?"

"Solved it in her head on the way down the hall."

"Damn!"

"I know. I can barely chew gum and walk."

Physics 101 wasn't nearly as challenging. It was almost like high school physics, with a little calculus thrown in. Our hardest homework problem so far had been to derive the formula by which one would calculate the horizontal range of a projectile on a flat, airless world having a gravity field that did not vary with altitude, as a function of its initial velocity. I turned in the ridiculously easy homework assignments and tried to hide my boredom. When would the really good stuff begin?

I'd kept thinking about Vanessa Emory's words "not even you," as if she were Lois Lane reminding Superman that even he had his limitations, through my calculus and physics classes. Since first meeting her on the bus in Atlanta, Ms. Emory had shown an interest in me that had been very unusual for such a highly placed executive, not to mention someone whose aging father owned most of the school I attended. At first, I'd thought that she was shepherding me because my famous IQ-test results made me a feather in Brookstone School's cap, but lately I'd begun thinking that her interest was even greater than that could account for.

After class, I was coming down the stairs to the exit of the building that was nearest the street that led back to the grade school campus. Ms. Emory was waiting near the exit, and apparently had been waiting the whole time I was in class. Thinking about that gave me the creeps. She was nice, and she had been very helpful to me, but just what the hell was going on here? A vice president of Brookstone School wouldn't wait two hours in the corridor of a class building just to play chauffeur to a student, no matter how promising the student might be.

"Are you all done?"

"With class? Yes. Where are we going now?"