The primary challenge of attending kindergarten when you had the cognitive capacity of a graduate student and the knowledge base of someone who had spent twenty-six years professionally interested in mythology, history, and theoretical combat systems was, Kael had decided, not the content.
It was the performance.
He could not do things too fast. He could not use vocabulary that no five-year-old would use naturally. He could not answer every question before it was finished being asked. He could not look bored in the way of someone who was genuinely bored and was not performing engagement, because genuine boredom in a five-year-old read differently than the serene, faraway boredom of someone who was mentally categorizing Greek mythological genealogies in their head.
He had to be, in short, convincingly five.
This was the hardest acting job of either of his lives, and he had once had to present his mythology thesis to a panel of professors who had not been expecting quite so strong an opinion about Achilles' psychological profile.
He developed a system. He answered every third question when he knew the answer, allowing classmates to answer the others. He made the deliberate errors of someone who was bright but still learning — not too many, not too few. He expressed enthusiasm at things five-year-olds found exciting: the class hamster (legitimately enjoyable, hamsters were objectively charming), finger painting (less so, though the process was meditative in a useful way), recess (genuinely good, he had discovered that running in the afternoon heat of Louisiana was better than any meditation practice Jason Park had attempted).
He made friends carefully.
The performance had its rewards. Nobody watched him too closely. Nobody brought him to the attention of specialists or researchers. He moved through kindergarten as a bright, quietly unusual child — his teachers noted that he was 'advanced for his age' and 'shows exceptional emotional maturity,' which was true, though they attributed it to his parents' approach to parenting rather than to two decades of previous life experience.
Reading was the hardest part. He loved books in the way that people who have spent their lives with books love them — with a physical pleasure and an ease of absorption that was difficult to fake as a beginner. His mother had been reading to him since before he was born, which she told him meant since before he could hear, and he had been reading to himself since before he started school. He had asked her once, at four, to bring home books from the university library. She had — cautiously, watching his face as he processed them.
'You like to read,' she said, not as a question.
'I really do,' he said. This was perhaps the most fully honest thing he had told her so far.
At school he read at a level he estimated at about three years above grade and made sure his reading scores on assessments came back 'advanced but not anomalously so.' He had practiced this calibration. He had a genuine appreciation for calibration as a skill.
The mythology sections of the social studies curriculum were nearly impossible to get through without incident. His teacher introduced the Greek gods in November — Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, a brief and sanitized tour through Olympus — and he sat in the back row and made his face do the thing that faces do when encountering information for the first time.
'Can anyone tell me what Poseidon is the god of?'
Three hands went up. His was not one of them. He was writing 'Poseidon — sea, earthquakes, horses, storms, father of Percy Jackson [NOT YET]' in the margin of his notebook and then crossing out the last part because that kind of annotation was not explainable.
✦ ✦ ✦
He met Cece Moreau in September of his first year of school, at the corner of their street where the school bus stopped. She was six years old and wearing a dress that was printed with crawfish, which Kael immediately respected as a fashion choice, and she looked at him with the direct, appraising attention of someone who had been raised to look carefully at the world and was doing so.
'You're the new kid,' she said.
'I live two blocks over,' he said. 'My family's been there four years. I'm not new.'
'You're new at the bus stop.' She sat down next to him on the bench. 'I'm Celestine Moreau. I go by Cece because nobody calls me Celestine except my grandmère and she does it to be intimidating.'
'Kael Alexander,' he said.
'What kind of name is Kael?'
'My parents liked it.'
She considered this with the thoroughness of a six-year-old who had strong opinions about names. Then: 'It's okay. Not as good as Celestine but okay.' She looked at him for a moment. 'My mama says the Alexander boy sees things other people don't see. She said it to her friend but I heard.'
He was quiet for a moment. He thought: this one is going to be interesting.
'What kind of things?' he said.
'She didn't say exactly. But she said it like it was a fact, not gossip.' She looked at him again with those careful eyes. 'Do you?'
'Sometimes,' he said.
She nodded, as though this confirmed something. 'My mama sees things too,' she said. 'She says it's because of the Loa. They show her things.' She paused. 'Do you know what the Loa are?'
He did. He had, in fact, spent considerable time during his first year of life adding Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo to his mythological taxonomy, because he had been born in New Orleans and had enough sense to understand that the divine world here was not going to be purely Greek. The Loa were spirits — powerful, ancient, deeply present in the culture of this city. Baron Samedi was the Loa of death and resurrection, among other things. Maman Brigitte was his wife. They were real, in the same sense that Zeus was real, and they moved through the spiritual geography of New Orleans with the comfort of long habitation.
'I know a little,' he said, which was technically true if 'a little' was understood to mean 'more than most adults.'
'You should come to our house,' Cece said. 'Mama makes red beans on Mondays and she doesn't mind if I bring friends. She'll want to look at you. She looks at everyone who sees things.'
He thought: this is how you make a genuine ally. Not strategically, not because she will be useful, but because she is real and perceptive and her family has a relationship with the divine world from a completely different angle and you have spent most of your life reading about traditions in books rather than knowing the people who practice them.
'Okay,' he said. 'Monday?'
'Monday,' she said.
The bus arrived. They got on it. He sat by the window and watched his neighborhood pass — the oaks, the shotgun houses, the corner stores with their hand-painted signs — and thought: I am five years old and I am making my first real friend in this life and it feels like exactly the right thing.