Here in Puerto Rico, if you’re smart you’re a nerd and if you’re a nerd then you must be trying to become the Teacher’s Pet. Even in college people rejected me for having good grades.

This is going to sound weird, but it’s true. At first in college people thought that since I’m pretty I must be doing something else to get good grades (like sleeping with a professor for example). The fact that I had once dated a 40-something-year-old District Attorney played into that image that they had of me. The fact of the matter was, though, that the grades were all my own and that the reason I had gone out with that D.A. was that he was one of few people that I had been able to sustain an intelligent conversation with.

When they figured out that I wasn’t “sleeping my way to the top” (sorry for putting it so crudely), the other students started asking me to drop out of certain courses. “You’re ruining the curve. We’ll never pass this course with you here. Can’t you drop it and repeat it next semester?” I’m not that brilliant, but I love to learn and I pay attention and take notes; a rarity here. It’s not really a difference of intellect, but of focus and study habits.

Hector has this look to him… He’s tall, well built, looks like the type of person that thinks with his fists. Back in middle and high school, he was friends with nearly everybody. As long as he didn’t let his grades top everyone else’s people thought he was a really cool guy (which he is). When he scored 800/800 in Math on that exam, all the teachers made a big deal out of it and he was embarrassed because he hadn’t wanted anyone to know. He didn’t want to be classified a nerd. I had a 777 in English that was the top score in the school, so I was allowed to tease him about the 800. “Now every time you screw up, I’m going to say ‘That’s 800 in Math for ya.'”