It’s dinnertime, and I’m rolling my synthesized peas around on my plate with my knife. It’s a technique I’ve been working on for a couple weeks now. When no one is looking, I bat a pea or two onto the floor for Lightyear to gobble up. Then it’s a carrot. So far, so good. I’m about to test my luck with the synthesized meat loaf when I notice Mom looking at me.

“So, Kelvin, it looks like you and Bula will be schoolmates starting next week.”

“Schoolmates? But Bula’s preschool is over here on the space station.”

“She won’t be in preschool next week. They’re moving her up to the second grade. Isn’t it exciting?”

“Wait… what?” I nearly fall off my chair. “Second grade? But she’s only four. On our trip out here she didn’t even know what eighteen divided by three was.”

“Well,” Mom says, “the people who tested her said her geniusness must have… now, what was the term they used… oh, yes—kicked in at some point in the past week or so.”

Kicked in? I was right! That is how it happens!

“They also said it’s possible she could advance three or four grades a year for the next few years.”

Okay. Now I actually do fall off my chair. And I land right on the carrot that Lightyear was slow to get around to.

“But that means we could be in the same class by tenth grade!”

This. Cannot. Be. Happening. I get back on my feet and brush the fake carrot off my pants.

“This isn’t fair! I’m supposed to be the Mighty Mega Supergenius, and Bula is supposed to have a hamster wheel for a brain. Everybody’s already calling me Genius because I’m not one. Now my little sister is going to pass me up in school? When is it my turn? When is my increased brainpower going to kick in?”

Bula still has that annoying grin on her face. “Maybe it already did. Maybe that’s how you got up to average.”

I throw a synthesized pea at Bula. I miss, of course, so I guess being known as the guy with the great pea-throwing arm is out.

Mom gives me that you-did-not-really-just-throw-a-pea look. “Actually, Kelvin, I asked about that very thing. They said it could happen any time now. Maybe. They said that yours might kick in at some point soon. Possibly.”

“Maybe? Might? Possibly? Where’s the ‘will’? The ‘definitely’? The ‘certainly, positively, without a doubt’?”

“Well, Kelvin,” Dad chimes in, “you just never know with these things. Not everyone is a genius, you know.”

No, but everybody in my family is. Except me.