Chicken Soup for the Soul: Boost Your Brain Power! by Marie Pasinski

Author:Marie Pasinski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, LLC

Slug Club

“Hey Christine, how’s it going?”

I looked up from my bubble of self-pity and let my soggy pizza slip back on the cafeteria tray. I found myself eye to eye with a high school sophomore, my age, wearing a pair of crooked green glasses that magnified his eyes.

“Fine,” I muttered, glancing nervously at the nearby table of “jocks” who had been my so-called friends. “What do you want?”

The boy, Brandon, who seemed to fit the labels of both “kind-of-cute” and “nerd” at the same time, thrust a flyer into my hand.

“Come join the IQ Elite at Junior Mensa Club,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “We meet every Tuesday, and we will prevent you from becoming just another teenaged mental slug. Did you know a baby octopus is about the size of a flea at birth?”

“Interesting,” I said, with as much enthusiasm as possible, hoping he would go away. “I’ll think about it.”

As he left I felt another wave of self-pity envelop me. Ever since my knee had been injured in a basketball game my sports had gone out the window — running, swimming, biking, basketball… everything. I was an outcast from my friends. An enraged outcast. And if even the nerds were taking sympathy on me, I was obviously falling pretty low on the social ladder.

I looked at the flyer.

“Come join Junior Mensa! To participate you must pass a basic IQ test, memorize 50 interesting facts, dedicate yourself to a minimum 15 minutes of classical music studies a day, and be taking a language course. We meet every Tuesday, but keep exercising your brain all week!”

I crumpled the flyer into a ball and put my head on the table. Sure, I might be a mental slug. I subscribed to the theory that intelligence was unhealthy in excess quantities. The most brain power I used was calculating my mile splits when running around the track.

Yet as we were dismissed from the cafeteria and I saw my friends receding in a tight group, I found myself unconsciously smoothing the flyer out again. In the rage I felt for being abandoned I suddenly saw Mensa as a challenge — just like any challenge in sports. Who was to say I couldn’t pass a stupid IQ test and memorize 50 facts? Who was to say I couldn’t learn a foreign language if I wanted to? Who was to say I couldn’t — at least until my knee got better — become a temporary “nerd”?

That evening I Googled everything I could think of related to improving mental prowess. I even made a list of my brain’s workout regime. Every afternoon I assigned myself the task of completing two puzzles and two crosswords in less than one hour. Afterward I was to listen to 30 minutes of Mozart while memorizing trivia from the Internet. Then I had to study all my textbooks.

Meanwhile, I was also going to have a strict lifestyle change. I had to limit my junk food intake (it restricts brain

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