Enigmatic

"As a child, I was exceptionally curious. I remember always being fascinated by the way things worked; as soon as I had learned how to read, I used to spend countless hours in my school library, devouring as many books as I could, preferably from the science section. Machines, plants, animals – they especially interested me. Though my mother used to read a lot of fiction to me when I was little which I did enjoy, I soon developed a preference for non-fiction. When I was older, I almost exclusively read academic books about my favourite topics – naturally, many of them were beyond my comprehension as a child. I was perfectly happy living in my own world, in my own head, discovering things on my own. However, though I had far greater knowledge about scientific subjects at a rather young age compared to my peers, in contrast to them, I was quite undeveloped in the social realm. I never found it particularly pleasing to play with the other children; they quickly bored me and I tended to withdraw into solitude. This was only a minor issue until I was sent to a boarding school at age ten, quite far away from my home. There, I was virtually forced to incessantly interact with my peers, which I found quite unnerving. Needless to say, I didn't have many friends. In fact, the only person I associated with was a girl named Esther, the only one capable of understanding, or rather, tolerating me and my idiosyncrasies. Everyone else stayed away from me, and I from them. What use was it to me, after all, to waste time conversing with a bunch of dunces who were absolutely disinterested in anything other than sports, games and fun?

"Additionally, to make things worse, I excelled in school at most subjects that involved more intellectual than practical skills, without needing to study excessively. In fact, I always thought of myself as a bit of a sloth, since I rarely took out many of my schoolbooks – save the science ones – in my spare time to study. Despite that, I always did well on my exams. As you may have guessed, being the strange and unsociable mouse that I was, coupled with my good grades which I didn't obtain by sacrificing much free time, made me quite the unpopular person at school. I would not have minded that in the least, had some of my classmates not enjoyed ridiculing me for my ways to the extent that they often did. But I was consoled by reminding myself that they were below my level of intelligence, not to mention, appallingly ignorant – for example, I remember asking some of my peers whether they knew that solar activity was finite, and that one day in the distant future, the sun would cease to shine – and they laughed at me and said, "Who cares?", only because this piece of information did not affect their own petty lives.

"One day, when I was in my third form of secondary school, it chanced that a first-year girl had her diary taken from her by some malicious student. The culprit was unknown, and two weeks later, she discovered her diary in her bag. At first relieved at having it back again, she screamed in horror as she opened it and found that someone had scribbled obscenities over the pages onto which she had disclosed her most personal thoughts. But the worst of all was that some pages had been torn out, and she feared that they were being shown around to people who should rather not be reading her writings. The girl didn't stop crying for the entire day, and the teachers were naturally extremely infuriated that one of their students should commit so vicious a deed. Nobody knew who was behind it, until, two days later, a student was called into the headmaster's office, who allegedly was the offender, according to a few of his so-called friends who told on him. He denied the accusation so vehemently, that the entire building could hear him yelling. However, he was being honest about his innocence, as I found out; and as I knew the defendant quite a bit – he was a rather quiet, unassuming child, in my opinion an unlikely candidate for a wicked act – I decided to make it my mission to seek out the real evildoer and make the headmaster discharge the innocent from his penalty, which was to be expelled.

"I spent many hours trying to get to the bottom of all this, as I believed that no innocent person should suffer because of another's cruel intentions. However, looking back… I'm not so certain to what extent I actually sought to reveal the truth in order to help the unjustly accused, who was merely an acquaintance, and apart from that, meant little to me, but as rather to prove myself capable of solving a little crime with my observation skills. I won't go into detail about how I discovered the true delinquent, who had blamed the wrong person in order to revenge himself for a petty dispute he once had with him, but I will say that most students were impressed with, the others jealous of my achievement. The teachers were impressed most, and praised me for my perseverance and sense of justice, which, understandably, did my at the time still rather fluctuant self-confidence much good. However, I could have done without their kind words, for I had proven myself capable to myself, which was what mattered most to me.