Young, Gifted and Skipping High School

Aside from demonstrating academic prowess, applicants must show readiness and a desire to be away from home. The girls write essays, submit recommendations and visit the campus overnight. They are interviewed with their parents and on their own. Tuition, room and board cost $29,200, but pegs receive scholarships of $11,000 to $13,000.

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Karyn Robson, a Montessori teacher, said that one of the earliest signs of her daughter's brainpower was her interest in books. As little girls, Jackie and her older sister, Katie, were obsessive readers. "They'd read on the train. They'd read when they were leaving the train. They'd read on the escalator," the mother recalled. "That was the worst punishment: No more reading." Her husband's work with the Army and the Defense Department kept the Robsons on the move, to Maryland, Arizona and Tokyo. Jackie landed in Fairfax for the eighth grade.

During a spring visit to the Mary Baldwin campus, Jackie recalled, she hunkered down in the car with "Watership Down," unsure whether she wanted to leave home. She enjoyed a night in the dorm, particularly an ice cream run. But a discussion about elections and ethnicity in a government class sold her.

"Everybody started raising their hands and saying, 'I've been wondering about this or that,' " she recalled. "As we were leaving, I was like, 'Mom, I want to go here.' " On her first day of college, she was 13.

Professor Ivy Arbulu said that pegs thrive in her Spanish language classes. Their youth, though, makes it harder to tackle literature.

"They compensate by reading more," Arbulu said. "They connect. They start drawing from philosophy. They start drawing from art history. They start drawing from music. You see them grow."

For some, it's the first time that lessons aren't easy. Emily Hunt, 17, who came to Baldwin at 14, keeps a tattered slip in her wallet. It's a French quiz from her freshman year with a hard-earned A-plus.

On her first quiz, she stumbled. "It was the first time I had not instantaneously done fantastic," she said. "I was like, 'I have to work at this.' " And she did.

Kim Gabriel, 25, became a peg two weeks shy of her 15th birthday. After graduating, she became the youngest in her class at Columbia Law School. Then she worked for a music magazine in a job that allowed her to see bands such as the Flaming Lips and Iron and Wine. Now she's a New York lawyer.

Jackie is still settling in. She calls home each Friday at 7 p.m. to talk to her parents and sister Madeleine, 10, and check on her new baby sister, Liliane. She chats by e-mail with Katie, 16, who's at a Swiss boarding school. She dropped an algebra class, deciding to wait until she completes an online geometry course she started last summer. Mary Baldwin, she said, "is a good fit."

One night in October, Jackie and a dozen or so pajama-clad pegs settled in the common room of their dorm for popcorn, a screening of "Little Man Tate" and a discussion about the portrayal of gifted people in the 1991 film and in popular culture. Prompted by an instructor, they shouted out stereotypes about people like them:

"Bad sense of style!" "Lack of friends!" "Unathletic!" "Unhygienic!" "All good at chess!" "Not good at anything other than school!"

In this crowd, though, it's cool to be smart.