For good?

      At the age of six, Mika Kline realized for the first time that people were not telling the truth.       Not because they lie on purpose — but because they often didn't see what she saw.       For example, Mrs. Harper, an elementary school teacher, said: "All children are special." But when Mica read her third-grade math textbook one night and corrected it on the blackboard the next day, Mrs. Harper suddenly froze, as if she'd seen a ghost. Then she quickly erased the correct solution and said in a shaky voice: "Let's not show off, okay?"       Since then, Mika has learned to do two things: keep quiet and make mistakes.       It was easier at home. Her mother, a biochemist by training, sometimes allowed her to leaf through her scientific journals-though laughing that "it's too early for you." Dad, the engineer, looked at her drawings of mechanisms (which she drew instead of bedtime stories) and frowned: "Genius is a diagnosis, baby. Try not to advertise it."       She didn't understand why it was bad to know more than others. But she'd seen her parents look at each other when she was five and recited the Periodic table by heart. I saw my grandmother cross herself, as if there was something unclean in her.       So Mika invented the rules of survival: 1. Never raise your hand first. 2. Sometimes make stupid mistakes. 3. Say "I don't know" even when you do.       But once the rules failed.       In third grade, Tommy Larsen, a redheaded bully, caught a stray puppy in the yard and decided to "experiment" by tying a jar of rocks to its tail. The other kids were laughing. Mika doesn't.       She went over to Tommy and said softly, out of earshot of the others: "If you don't let him go, I'll tell everyone what you wrote off in the last test. And I'll show you your diary, where you corrected the two to a four. I see things like this."       Tommy's eyes widened. He released the puppy.       And the next day, the whole class was whispering that "Kline is a snitch and a psychopath."       Mica wasn't crying. She just realized another truth: even good things are punished here.       Now she saved unnoticed. I threw correct answers to the laggards. I fixed broken toys and put them back in there before anyone saw them. And one night I climbed out of the window to take the same puppy to the vet — he had a broken paw. "You're weird," Vadim would tell her years later, when she turned down the olympiades for the hundredth time, but helped him with an impossible physics problem. "I just don't like attention," she would have answered.       But the truth was different.       She was afraid that if the world saw her for real — it would shatter her like brittle glass.