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What Ever Happened to Daphne?

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(page 4 of 8)

They were poor, and behind her back kids made fun of Daphne's lack of grooming. But from the day Daphne entered kindergarten she became a star. Teachers had heard of the child who inhaled books and arithmetic. While other kindergartners learned to read, Daphne went to the library to pore over books with Mrs. Tidd, the librarian. At six she learned to program her father's homemade computer. "She was programming in machine language," recalls her mother, "a series of hexadecimal symbols. It was beyond me." Teachers said they had never seen such a student in their district. By fourth grade the school placed her with eighth-graders for prealgebra, and she stayed with the older kids for language arts. "When I went through puberty it was a problem," she says. "I'd get crushes on these guys who'd never look at me.

"I wasn't popular," she says. "The other kids thought I was a snob, but I was totally shy and terrified that people wouldn't like me. When I was in seventh grade kids called me 'AIDS,' like I was a disease. I'd play this game: Which would I pick, being beautiful and popular, or being smart? Popular kids always had someone to sit with at lunch. I'd choose smart. It was kind of like a pep talk."

Her fourth-grade teacher wrote on Daphne's report card: "Daphne is the dream of every classroom teacher." She added this cautionary note: "We must be careful to remember that she is still a ten-year-old. We must include her in as many group activities as possible to ensure she does not become a loner."

In academic competitions, she became the target. "Everyone wanted me to lose in spelling bees," she says. One day in seventh grade she raced from an Odyssey of the Mind competition in the morning to the state spelling-bee championship at Colby College. "I got there late," she says. She was furious when she missed "noisome." That year she went to Washington, D.C., as the youngest and only female on the Maine Math Counts team. She remembers competing for a spot on the four-person state team and sitting in a hallway when "a boy came up to me. He said, 'You're Daphne Brinkerhoff? I'm going to beat you.' "

In Washington Daphne found herself matched against the brightest math students in the country. "I saw these kids on the stage doing equations, solving problems, while I was still trying to figure out what the problem was. I remember thinking, 'So this is the end of the whole genius thing. There are people out there so much smarter.' "

She had one friend, a boy named Christopher. They shared fantasy fiction books and played Dungeons & Dragons on the playground, inventing worlds only the two of them could inhabit. Then Christopher moved away. Daphne would imagine that she was walking around a world full of enemies and she would not let them see her pain. She wrote for hours in her journal, her one constant friend. She had academic medals and trophies and ribbons and report cards filled with only A's, but the smartest girl in Maine may also have been the loneliest.

Everyone assumed Daphne would attend Harvard or Yale, both of which accepted her eagerly. But Daphne never filled out the final papers to attend. "I think I was afraid," she says. "I knew I lacked discipline. It didn't matter at Hodgdon. The teachers knew I was smart. I got the A's. At Harvard I would have felt I had to do well. I didn't know if I could. There was this mystique: Harvard -- the hardest school in the country. My guidance counselor said to me, 'Harvard called. They wanted to know why you turned them down. I told them you're thinking of transferring later.' " The University of Maine seemed like a pool of warm, shallow water, and a boyfriend she had her senior year would also be attending.