Page 1 of The Surprise

1

Beth

Some people love school.

You read about that kind of person all the time. The poor, beleaguered little kid whose parents don’t appreciate her, but who effortlessly solves sums, who reads books for fun, and who is always tutoring other people as some kind of charity effort. Sometimes the rich guy, or the athletic guy, or the handsome frat boy they’re tutoring falls in love with them. Sometimes they have some major moral dilemma, because if they want to get what they need, they have to help someone else cheat.

But the heroine of every story is inevitably a brilliant student. A gifted inventor. An epic pianist or composer. Someone truly remarkable in every way. It didn’t take me long to realize that I’m not the kind of person people write stories about.

School is boring.

School is long.

School is full of memorization of boring facts I willneveruse again.

I made it more than ten years before I had to learn what akilojoulewas, and I’m quite sure that if I live to be a hundred, I’ll make it that long without ever needing to use what I learned about it.

The only exception to this rule is the girl-next-door heroine whose parents are always pressuring her to do better. Her heroic attempts to learn are never quite enough, no matter how hard she tries.

Unfortunately, that’s not me either.

My dad wasn’t really that interested in pursuing a formal education, and my parents never seemed too surprised or upset that I wasn’t high caliber either. They kind of took it for granted that I’m not the kind of person who raises her hand to answer a question voluntarily.

The only person in my life who ever even suggested that I should go to college was my brilliant aunt, who seemed to sort of assume that I would be a genius, like her. I’m pretty sure the only reason she even suggested I apply was that she’d been living in another state for most of my life and hadn’t heard much about my lackluster grades or my unenthusiastic performance at, well, at everything. Like everyone else, I just sort of assumed I’d be stuck here forever.

And it’s not because I’m some kind of small-town zealot.

When I first started high school, I desperately wanted to leave Manila, population four hundred. It’s one of those places where everyone knows everyone else and always has. I’ve memorized the outside of every house. If someone changed the color of the exterior from, say, blue, to yellow? It would be the talk of the town for weeks.

I’ve met the people who live in each residence down the main road, from my third grade teacher to the bus driver to the lady who runs the True Value. I even know all the ones everyone whispers about. The people who don’t paint their shutters when they’re peeling and who burn their trash because they can’t afford to pay for pickup. Everyone talks about that stuff, even when they’ve already been talking about it for years.

Because there’s literally nothing else to do.

Thanks to my consistently underwhelming grades for the past nine years, my parents just assumed that I wouldn’t bother with the SAT, and that I wouldn’t even apply to any decent colleges. So when I signed up for the SAT myself, and when my score was halfway decent, and when my grades came up enough to be acceptable, and when I told them I had applied to UCLA, they were absolutely floored. My mom always assumed that I’d do just what she did and marry someone who would take care of me. Even though Dad’s been a big disappointment, for some reason she still thought I’d put all my eggs in some guy’s basket and hope for the best.

When Dad heard I applied for UCLA , he assumed it because some guy I liked was going there. When I told him I meant to study photography and apply to work at National Geographic, or maybe become a photographer for an online magazine or publication, he laughed in my face.

So when our principal told us there was a college class we could take on exchange through a local online university that would transfer for credit, my hand was the first one to shoot up. Maybe if I took a college class and still managed to get a decent grade, my parents would finally believe that I could handle this. Which is how I wound up signing up for a psychology class.

About a week into courses, I learned something that seemed bizarre. It was a principle called the illusory truth effect, and it’s a psychological phenomenon that explains that humans are more likely to believe something, even something untrue, if they’ve heard it over and over. Even if it’s something the subjects knew was false at the outset, if they heard it enough, they’d change their beliefs.

It sounded wrong at first, frankly, but once I looked into the experiments behind it, it blew my mind. Apparently the conditioned response that changes a lie to truth in the human mind is just as effective with adults as it is with kids.

For instance, even if someone grew up in a cattle ranching town, and they have known their entire life that a baby cow’s called a calf, but they heard over and over for a few weeks that a babyhorsewas called a calf instead, when they were tested, they’d either be unsure which was right, or they’d have changed their mind to believe the horse definition.

I couldn’t help thinking about how that would impact children whose parents had nothing good to say about them.

If a girl’s parents acted, for her entire life, like she was a worthless piece of trash, she would eventually believe it. And then, even if someone else told her she was great, even if they told her several times, that girl probably wouldn’t be convinced. That actual truth would need alotof oomph to dislodge the illusory truth.

And when people think they’re worthless?

That’s also how they act.

Often those people who are dealing with situations like this, who believe they aren’t worth much, spend their entire lives looking for someone who thinks they’re special. They’ll cling to the person who tells them that, as if that person is the only person on earth who can save them.

Because they know it’s not true, but they wish terribly that it was.

Even kicked dogs want someone to pat their head. Even losers with bad grades and a difficult time focusing want a bright future. Deep down inside, we all want to be worthwhile.

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