Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

throw rocks. Because we don't like people standing there with the wrong kind of patches on their blue jeans reminding us that we're each alone and none of us is safe.

    I tried. I really did. I tried so hard it makes me sick to think about it. I did my jeans patches exactly like Bill Ebold who did everything right. I talked about baseball scores. I worked for the school paper for one term, because that was the one group that I could figure out how to get into. But none of it worked. I don't know why. Sometimes I wonder if introverts have a peculiar smell, which only extraverts are aware of.
    Some kids really don't have much Me at all. They truly are part of the group. But a lot of them just act—pretend—the way I tried to. Their heart isn't really in the groups, but still they get along, they get by. I wish I could. I honestly wish I could be a good hypocrite. It doesn't hurt anybody, and it sure makes life easier. But I never could fool anybody. They knew I wasn't interested in what interested them, and they despised me for it, and I despised them for despising me. But then I also despised the few kids who didn't try to go along. In ninth grade there was this tall kid who never brushed his teeth and wore a white sports coat to school, who wanted to make friends with me. I should have been delighted; I mean, nobody had ever wanted to make friends with me before. But he kept saying things like what a drip this person was and what a dolt that one was, and although I agreed with him I didn't want to talk about it all the time, and so I despised him for being a snob. And then I despised myself for despising everybody else. Oh, it's a really neat situation to be in. You know what I mean, if you've been there.

    Since I was trying hard not to be different, I didn't want to be a straight-
A
type; but that problem was always solved for me by gym. I wasn't any worse at gym than a lot of fellows, but I got D's because I cut it all the time because I couldn't take Mr. Thorpe. "If you can take your minds off Keats and Shelley for a while, Griffiths, you might at least stand around and
watch
how basketball is played." It was always Keats and Shelley—I heard him use exactly the same line to at least two other fellows. He said it with real hatred, hissing:
Keatsssnssshelhy, ssssss.
It was stupid applied to me, since math and science is where I am good, but that hatred curious I went back and read Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" in the freshman lit text. They didn't give us any Shelley, but I looked up his collected works at the city library and later on I bought it secondhand So it was Mr Thorpe teaching basketball who put me on to "Prometheus Unbound." I should be grateful. But it still didn't make third period with Mr. Thorpe any easier.

    But—this is important—I never talked back. I never said anything. I could have said, "Look, Mr. Thorpe, I don't want to take my mind off Keats and Shelley, or sines and cosines, so you just go ahead and bounce your little bouncyball, OK?" Some of the kids could do that. Back in elementary school once I heard a little black seventh-grade girl tell off our math teacher, "You just get your hands off my paper, if you don't like it the way I done it, you can just stuff it!" It was pure fight—the teacher hadn't done anything to deserve it, he was just trying to teach the kid some math—but still, it was pure fight, it was courage, and I admired it. I still do. But I can't do it. I haven't got it. I don't get into fights.
    I stand there and take it, till I can run. And then I run.

    Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry.
    When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.

    I T WAS FIVE DAYS after my birthday. I was seventeen and five days. Tuesday, November 25th. Raining. I took the bus because it was raining so hard when I got out of school. There was only one seat left. I sat down and