The Wiz

"Is your number even?" Steve asks, trying to pin down the number of questions Elizabeth got right.

"No."

"Is it a prime?"

"No."

"Is it a perfect square?"

"No."

"Aaggh," he says, realizing she had to have gotten a 15, knowing that he got less.

"Aaggh," she says back, knowing that they had classified the bet as "modest," which means the quiz was considered so negligible that the lower score wins, as opposed to "immodest," which means the higher score wins. She looks at his expression and realizes the M&M's are his.

"It's not competitive," Elizabeth says later, but anyone who knows Elizabeth and Steve would say that it isn't anything else. "It's just sort of joking around," Elizabeth says, but both she and Steve know there's more to it than that, that what began as an essay with a smiley face scribbled on it has developed into a complicated relationship that gets toward the heart of Elizabeth's unease.

"Do you know what the Kellogg-Briand Pact is?" Steve asks one day. "It was signed in, I think, August 1928 between 62 nations, and it basically outlawed war. Well, Elizabeth and I have had so many arguments, we actually signed our own Kellogg-Briand Pact."

There was a period when the arguments might have been about books or music, but over time they edged toward being about Elizabeth herself and how much attention she seems to receive. Steve too was a Westinghouse finalist, finishing one place higher than Elizabeth. He too was a member of the SuperQuest team. And yet, as he knows so well, she gets written about in the paper, she gets interviewed on TV, she gets the attention of teachers, she even got to go to Russia as part of the American Regions Math League exchange program even though his test scores were at least equal to hers. She got to go to Russia, and he got to stay home. He was so bothered by this, by the thought that gender rather than raw score might play a role in the selection, he began wearing a T-shirt that read, "The National Science Foundation uses quotas to send females and minorities to the Soviet Union on the ARML Soviet exchange program, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." He wore it, and he got in trouble for it, and she went to Russia, and she never gets in trouble for anything.

Those who know Steve would say that his complaints aren't rooted in jealousy -- that he and Elizabeth are too close for that -- but in the belief that preferential treatment of any type is fundamentally unfair. He is known to his friends as a moralist, and also, just as applicable here, as a feminist. In the classes he and Elizabeth take together, the two of them always look at each other and exchange half-smiles whenever someone uses a male pronoun, rueful acknowledgment of how narrow the modern world remains. He wants things to be equal, nothing more, nothing less, which is why it gnaws at him that Elizabeth gets treated as if her achievements are that much more remarkable because she's a female. "If you look at what's happened to Elizabeth in her four years in the magnet, there isn't one example of her being disadvantaged," he says. "I have a hard time complaining. I've gotten a lot out of the magnet program. But no one has gotten as much out of it as she has. Let me make it clear. Nobody has gotten as much attention out of the program as her.

"I'm not the only person who feels this way," he adds.

And he isn't.

"No one dislikes her, because she's not dislikable, but I think there's a lot of resentment," says Elizabeth's closest friend, Valerie Wang.

"I think she continually underestimates the depth of resentment there is," says Steve. Nonetheless, she is aware it exists, he says, has to be, no doubt about it, because of a phone conversation they had last school year around the time of the SuperQuest competition.

That was the competition in which Steve, Elizabeth and two other Blair students went to Alabama for three weeks to compete against several other schools. That was when Elizabeth ended up spending a good part of her time with a boy from a Louisiana school, and at the end of the three weeks sat with him on the plane to Atlanta, and only after he got on a different plane, to Louisiana, did she sit with Steve, who thought she had behaved in a way that was "not intellectual." Even "goofy."

The phone conversation, though, wasn't about that. It was about the perception that Elizabeth, in preparing her entry for the competition, had gotten an inequitable amount of assistance from Mary Ellen Verona, the computer teacher. That they had worked side by side for hours on end to the exclusion of other students who wanted Verona's help. That Verona had actually done some of Elizabeth's work. "Nonsense," Verona says, but such was the word around school, and Steve felt it was his moral duty to call Elizabeth and tell her.

So he did. And when word came that her entry had been chosen as one of the winners -- a truly remarkable achievement -- she was of course happy, but she also felt a little diminished. "It was partially jarring," she says of Steve's call, "because I guess I didn't realize there was that resentment. I guess I was pretty disturbed." She said nothing about it, though. It's not her way. And that might have been the end of it except for another phone call a few months later, this one from Josh Weitz.

Josh is the one who sits to Elizabeth's left in the third period physics class, the salutatorian, who, like Elizabeth and Steve, is in the stratosphere of high school students. He is also the boyfriend of Kristen Ault, one of Elizabeth's closest friends, and although he doesn't talk to Elizabeth as much as Steve does, he and Kristen talk about the same kinds of things. For instance, there was a discussion about the role of gender in the way people behave in class. "Like in Complex Analysis," Josh says of one math class he and Kristen take together. "She hadn't raised a point all year, and after I had gone through an explanation one day, she said she'd had that down, and I asked her why she didn't say anything, and she said, well, she just wasn't sure about it. I said, 'Well, there's no reason not to speak up.' " And so a day or two later, Kristen did speak up. Except, says Josh, what she said was "slightly off. And I corrected her." Which of course embarrassed her, although Josh, who is the one always going back and forth with Steve, correcting and being corrected as if both things are as rudimentary as blinking, didn't realize this until later when Kristen told him.

This, then, is who called Elizabeth when everyone was getting applications ready for the Westinghouse competition. He asked if she could bring a printout of the project she had done, along with her entry application, to school the next day. He said he just wanted to see it, that's all, but what he really wanted to know was whether she had listed Verona as her adviser, a role that suggests general help, or as her mentor, which suggests help at a higher level of involvement. "I didn't realize what he was asking," Elizabeth says. "I sort of hung up, and then as soon as I hung up, it was just this trembling, this 'What is he asking, and why?' " So there was a second conversation in which Josh said he wanted to know how Verona had been listed, and Elizabeth said as adviser, and Josh zeroed in on her from there, asking if she was really satisfied with that designation, if it really explained Verona's role. "What I really wanted by calling her was for her to think about it," he says now, "because sometimes the problem of getting a lot of help is you get so used to it you don't acknowledge it."

That may have been his intent, but what happened was that Elizabeth became terribly upset, and the conversation was concluded, and out of 1,600 entries Josh went on to finish in the top 300, and Elizabeth went on to finish in the top 10, and once again, even though she had achieved something truly remarkable, she felt somewhat diminished.

Which makes Carolyn, her mother, incensed. "It would be one thing if she had come out of nowhere and ended up in the top 10 of Westinghouse, but look at her resume since seventh grade. Go back to fourth grade," she says. "She is succeeding at every level of what males traditionally have been good at.

"You know what it is?" she continues. "You can't any longer say she got it because she's a girl, which is what they think, so they say, 'Well, she got it because she got extra help because she's a girl.' It's just another way of saying, 'She's a girl.' "

Elizabeth thinks her mother is "probably" right about this. Once again, however, she said little about the conversation to anyone, not even to Verona, who would have assured her that "adviser" was indeed the appropriate designation. Instead, she kept all of her thoughts, including some rising doubts, to herself.

And that might have been the end of it except for one more thing, a final contest, the Montgomery Area Science Fair, which would start off with 350 students competing against one another and come down to Elizabeth, Josh and Steve.

The contest, a weekend affair, is always held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It is a vast complex in Gaithersburg with polished hallways and endless laboratories, and also a portrait gallery of 78 distinguished alumni, 76 of whom are men. Elizabeth was here once before, on a field trip, and found the windowless laboratories so dulling that she went home wondering whether a life in science was really for her. But here she is, back again, competing against such projects as "Fluoride, Schmloride?!" "Development of a Helical Shunt for Use in Heart Bypass," and "The Confused Digger Wasp."

Her project's title: "A Parallel Implementation of the Wavelet Transform."

"This project implements a wavelet transform on a massively parallel computer, the nCUBE 2," her summary says. "{It} develops the algorithms required to parallelize the wavelet transform, performs a transform on an nCUBE 2 supercomputer, and shows that with an optimum number of processors, the parallel transform can indeed be performed more quickly than the preexisting recursive algorithm."

This is the project with which she won SuperQuest and Westinghouse. It is not only a paper, but also an actual computer program that she worked on for more than year, using a hookup to a university supercomputer to refine it. The program is on display, as is her research paper, as is her summary, as is a journal she kept of the daily progress of her work. "Oh horrors," is the entry one day, early on, when things seemed to be falling apart. "Hey, this is slick!" she penciled in a few months later, when she finally got the program to work.

Steve too is here with his Westinghouse project, a mathematical computation called "Multi-Dimensional Extension of Wythoff's Game," while Josh has come with something completely new, begun after the Westinghouse competition ended. Its title is "Particle Displacement Velocimetry Analysis," but more interesting to Elizabeth is that it's a computer-science project. His other project would have been entered in the physics category of the fair; his new one is in the same category as hers. Not only that, but the physical setup puts them just around the corner from each other. Standing by her project, she can't see Josh, but she can hear everything he says.

Now, here come the first judges, and Elizabeth hears Josh explaining his project in that engaging, barge-ahead way of his, pausing at one point to say, "Stop me if you have any questions." He waits, hears no questions, plunges on. Elizabeth, meanwhile, starts twirling an amethyst ring that her parents gave her for her 17th birthday, and is slipping one foot in and out of a shoe when the judges round the corner and stop in front of her. "Hi," she says, smiling, trying to get her foot back in the shoe, and then, in that polite way of hers, the way that turns answers into questions, she begins telling them about what she has done.

"You start with one mother wave?" she says. "And break down the frequency of it by dilating it? And . . ."

And this is how it goes all morning long. There are two types of judges circulating -- the judges for the fair, who will choose a winner from each category to compete for a few Grand Awards, and the judges representing several dozen companies and organizations, who will be giving out certificates, prizes and cash. The group that Elizabeth is talking to is from TRW; not far behind is NASA; and the American Nuclear Society; and the CIA; and then comes Richard Gonchar, the first of the category judges for computer science.

"Tell me about it," he says to Elizabeth, and as she does, the second of the category judges, David Hillman, approaches Josh and asks the same thing. For a time, the two of them are talking at once.

"My project is the 'Particle Displacement Velocimetry Analysis' . . ." Josh says.

". . . the wavelet transform . . ." says Elizabeth.

". . . do you have any questions? . . ." says Josh.

". . . right, right. Yeah. Yeah . . ." says Elizabeth.

This goes on for several minutes. Then Gonchar makes his way toward Josh, and Hillman makes his way toward Elizabeth, and the whole thing starts again, except that this time, before Elizabeth can get going, Hillman says to her, "I've seen you somewhere before."

"Oh?" she says.

"Were you here last year?" he asks.

"No."

He thinks about this while she stands in silence, hands clasped, feet together, ankles almost touching, waiting. He shakes his head, and she continues to wait. Perhaps there is an urge to tell him that he might have seen her picture in the paper, that she was in the paper after winning Westinghouse, that she finished ninth in Westinghouse, ninth out of 1,600 students, students not just from Montgomery County but from the entire country, the Westinghouse! But Elizabeth would never say anything like that. Never. Patiently, she waits until finally he shrugs, and then she goes on explaining her project.

"Any practical applications?" he asks.

"Okay. Yes," she says. "Cardiology . . ."

"I know," he interrupts. "I talked to you last year when you were trying to find somebody to talk to about the wavelet transform."

"Oh," she says, suddenly remembering too.

"Who'd you find?" he asks.

"Well, no one," she says.

"And you went ahead anyway?"

"Yes."

"Well," he says. "I'm impressed."

She smiles and unclasps her hands, and he asks a few more questions and moves on to the next display. There are a few more judges from some of the various organizations still floating around, but the judging for her category is done, and at noon the decision is announced.

Elizabeth wins first place.

And so does Josh.

A tie.

Kristen -- Elizabeth's friend and Josh's girlfriend -- is there with a camera and asks the two of them to stand side by side. "Look friendly," she says. They move a little closer. "Look chummy," she says, and for a moment they both smile. She takes one picture, just one, and they separate and go on to the next level of competition, the Grand Award level in which they'll be judged not only against each other, but also against the other category winners, including the winner of the math category, Steve.

For this, a new batch of judges is engaged. They come to Elizabeth first, spending about five minutes asking questions before moving around the corner to Josh.

Where they spend six minutes. Maybe seven.

Then they move down the hall to Steve. He is too far away for Elizabeth or Josh to hear what is being said, but after five minutes they can see he is still talking, and after 10 minutes they can see he is still talking, and after 15 minutes not only is he still talking but the judges are now sitting in chairs, leaning forward and appearing in no particular hurry to leave.

So it surprises no one when, the next day, at the awards ceremony, after the special awards have been given out and Elizabeth, Josh and Steve have won an assortment of certificates and savings bonds and calculators, it is announced that one of the two Grand Award winners for physical science is Steve.

"Yessss!" he says when he hears his name. He pounds his fist on his leg and runs up on stage, grinning all the way, where he joins the other Grand Award winner, who also is grinning:

Josh.

They are the winners, and Elizabeth is named the first runner-up. They will go on to the International Science Fair, and Elizabeth won't. They come offstage and are surrounded by their families and friends, and Elizabeth walks over to them with their other prizes, which she has thought to gather up from under their seats. "Thanks," says Josh, taking his things from her. He is still smiling. So is Steve. So is Elizabeth, but then she isn't. She is not quite happy and not quite sad, and she walks out of the auditorium by herself, nearly bumping into one of her teachers as she goes through the door.

"Whoops," she says.

"Congratulations, Elizabeth," the teacher says.

"Thank you," she says.

"It hasn't been a bad year for you."

"Thanks."

"It's only the beginning."

"Thanks."

Politely then, Elizabeth's last high school competition comes to an end. Soon she will be on to Harvard; followed, she imagines, by graduate school; followed, she imagines further, by a full life in which, one day, a line will be crossed, and all of the breathless moments that once were at the heart of her four-page resume will be far gone. But not forgotten. "I think I'll recognize that this year was pretty hard," is how she supposes this time will one day look. "I think the first three years were relatively good ones. I learned a lot. I've had a lot of opportunities. But I guess this winter and spring will always be pretty painful."

It is nearly the end of high school when she says this, only a matter of weeks until graduation. It's a time when most seniors are in their final slide, but for Elizabeth everything is the same as ever. At home, as usual, she is the first awake and the last to bed, working until all hours on whatever is left to do. And at school, in third period physics, she is back to trying to a get a word in edgewise, back to being caught in every way between Josh and Steve.

"It was nice not only to get the grand prize, but to beat her," Josh is honest enough to say of the science fair.

Steve, meanwhile, decides it's time to give Elizabeth another call.

They have been doing well. Their Kellogg-Briand Pact has been working. Instead of arguing, they have been talking about "intellectual" things, as Steve describes them, "arcane things . . . poetry, and music, and books," but this time the conversation becomes personal, and, as they will later remember it, Elizabeth says she's going to go to Harvard, and Steve says he's going to go there too, and Elizabeth says, "I'm living in your shadow," and Steve says, "I'm living in your shadow," and suddenly, to Steve's astonishment, Elizabeth begins to cry.

"You're the genius," she says. "I'm a teacher's pet."

"How can you say that?" he says.

"Well, look at our projects," she says. "You had a brilliant project, and I had help from Ms. Verona."

"I don't think I've proven anything here to teachers," he says.

"Well, at least you don't feel like you haven't proven anything to yourself," she says.

On it goes, into the night, and the next day Steve is still thinking about it, still replaying it, still surprised. "Because on the outside, Elizabeth is the cheeriest person you'll ever see. On the outside, Elizabeth is always confident," he says. "Maybe it was the harshness of what she said, the brutality of the extremes. It was so blunt. I mean, I'm not a genius, and she's not a teacher's pet. I mean, it never really occurred to me that she had any doubts about herself."

But everyone has doubts, even Steve, even Josh, and , even the smartest girl of all, who on the day after Steve's call is sitting outside of her house, idly making wishes. They are the wishes of someone who is brilliant, and someone who is a girl, and is as yet unsure how to be both.

"I wish I had beautiful hair," she says.

"I wish I were better at physics and math than I am."

"I wish I could stay awake 24 hours a day."

"I wish I had a car."

"I wish I could figure out why I've lost so much respect from Josh, and what I could do about it, and what I'm doing wrong."

"I wish teachers wouldn't single out people."

"I wish I could be respected for my mind and yet liked as a person regardless of what my mind is like."

"I wish, well, this is a hard one. I wish people knew about my insecurities, so they wouldn't think I'm conceited, as apparently they do."

She says this knowing that someone does know now, someone who has known her for nearly six years and yet didn't seem to realize until their phone call that being the smart girl, being Elizabeth, can be difficult; realized this not so much because of what she said, or because of what has been said to her, but because for a few minutes one night he heard her cry.

And that brings Elizabeth to her last wish.

"I wish he didn't know," she says. "Because now my secret's out."