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What Ever Happened to Daphne?

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The Maine Sunday Telegram, the state's largest newspaper, sent a reporter to follow Daphne around for a day. "Her I.Q. is 145, possibly higher, because she exceeded the test scale on some measures," the story reported. The story spoke of "her hungry mind, always changing and gyrating towards greater complexity." At age 15 she took the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) again and scored a near perfect 790 in math. Harvard University brought Daphne to Boston and assigned a student from Maine to show her the campus. In December of 1990 Parade magazine, with a circulation of 34 million, featured Daphne in a cover story on child prodigies. The photographer asked Daphne to remove her thick owlish glasses and stood her in a potato field, her head resting lightly on her mother's shoulder. "Daphne has put New Limerick on the map," people told Barbara. Ten years ago when she graduated first in her class of 63, Daphne's future stretched ahead with the same unblinking promise and optimism she expressed to Parade. "Some days now, Daphne wants to be a physicist," the story concluded. "Other days a writer ... By New Year's Eve, 1999, Daphne wants to be rich enough to throw a family party. She also intends to win a Nobel Prize. 'For literature or physics -- I don't know which,' she says. 'Maybe I'll be the first to win it for both.' "

I tore out the story about Daphne from Parade more than a decade ago, placed it in a box among other clippings, and forgot about it. Late one November night in 1999, while I sorted through piles of old papers, the story of Daphne caught my eye. "By New Year's Eve ... Nobel Prize." I called information and the telephone operator said there was one Brinkerhoff listed in New Limerick.

Barbara Brinkerhoff answered the phone.

I just found the Parade story, I said, and I wondered: What ever happened to Daphne? She was quiet for a moment. "A lot of people ask me that," she said. "I tell them Daphne lives in Portland."

Being special brings no joy with it. It's a great struggle to be at the top of the pile -- but get there, and it's still a pile. I was so good at everything as a kid, and all that gets you is people asking, "What next?" I wanted to be the best at everything, a Superkid. If I wasn't the best, I was nothing.

Maybe I should've flunked something early on. I failed at things: I never learned to swim or ride a bike, but I just devalued them. I made them "not-Daphne." "Daphne" was someone good at school, lousy at sports, alone, bookworm, nerd, ugly. Someone of the mind and not the body. Someone teachers liked and students hated. And then I did fail. It's thrown me for a loop. -- e-mail from Daphne

I met Daphne Brinkerhoff for the first time on a November afternoon at Portland's waterfront. We sit at a small table by a window in a cafe that's known for its chowder. She is 25 years old. She has lived in Portland for two months and she has just been suspended for four days from her $6-an-hour cashier's job at a Portland 7-Eleven located at a busy intersection two blocks from the house she shares with three roommates. Her transgression: selling beer to an underage woman. The woman had shown Daphne an ID card, but the woman in the ID wore glasses and the woman holding the beer did not. Daphne ignored the discrepancy.

I ask if she's been in trouble before; she says yes, during her sophomore year at the University of Maine in Orono. A lingering depression had set in and she stopped going to class. "I flunked everything," she says, "except chorus. I got an A in chorus." The university suspended her for a year and took away her full scholarship. She returned to New Limerick, moved in with her parents, and washed dishes at the Elm Tree Diner in Houlton.