The Smartest Kids in the World (6 page)

“I’d like to live somewhere where people are curious.”

Kate listened and nodded. She was a woman of action. She worked a retail job, but on her days off, she liked to jump out of planes and explore caves. In her opinion, if Kim wanted to go away, she should think big.

“Why don’t you become an exchange student?”

“You mean like go to another country?” In her head, Kim imagined a kid with floppy hair and leather flip-flops, backpacking around Europe.

“Why not?”

Kim laughed. “Rich people do that. We don’t do that.”

It wasn’t until Kim went home to Sallisaw that she thought about the idea again. If Kate thought she could go to another country, maybe it wasn’t a totally absurd idea. She Googled “exchange programs” and spent an hour clicking on random countries, imagining herself in each one.

She learned that
one or two thousand American high school students went abroad each year. She found AFS, one of the largest exchange programs, by reading the blog of an American girl posted in Sweden. Kim liked the story of AFS. It had started out as the American Field Service, an ambulance convoy set up by American volunteers to help ferry wounded soldiers to safety during the World Wars. After liberating concentration camps at the end of World War II, the ambulance drivers were tired of carnage. They decided to reinvent the group, dedicating it to building trust between countries through cultural exchanges.

The more Kim read, the less ridiculous the whole idea sounded. She decided to bring the idea up to her mother. But, this time, she tried a new strategy.

“I am applying to go on an exchange program,” she said one evening, keeping her voice level and free from doubt. “I want to live in Egypt for a year.”

Charlotte looked up from her tea. “Wow, how exciting,” she said,
trying to act like this was not a completely insane notion. Kim had never left the country, and neither had she.

The obvious response was no, just like it was when Kim had asked to go to Shakespeare summer camp at Duke. But, this time, she tried a new approach.

Charlotte and Kim’s dad had gotten divorced not long before. It was a long time coming, and Kim said she was relieved by the split. Still, Charlotte was trying to handle her daughter with care. So, if Kim wanted to rebel by vowing to go far away, she would not stop her; she would just wear her out.

“Egypt sounds a little unsafe,” Charlotte said in her most reasonable voice. “Why don’t you pick another country and write me up a little report on why you want to go there?”

“Okay, fine,” Kim answered, with a tight smile. Then she got up and walked toward the extra bedroom, the one with the computer in it.

Charlotte felt a sliver of anxiety. What had she just done? “And, Kim,” she called out after her, “nowhere with sand!”

At the computer, Kim contemplated her remaining options. She didn’t want to go to France or Italy. She wanted to be original, so she started reading about places she knew nothing about, obscure countries with languages she’d never heard and food she’d never eaten.

One day, she read about Finland—a snow-castle country with white nights and strong coffee. She read that the Finns liked heavy metal music and had a dry sense of humor. Every year, the country hosted something called the Air Guitar World Championship. That sounded promising—a place that didn’t take itself too seriously.

Then she read that Finland had the smartest kids in the world. Could that be right?
Teenagers in Finland did less homework than Americans, but scored at the top of the world on international tests, which was weird, since Finland had been until fairly recently a largely illiterate farming and logging nation.

Nothing about it made much sense. Sure, Finland was a small country full of white people, but not even the smallest, whitest states
in America could compete with Finland’s education results.
Not even tiny New Hampshire, which was 96 percent white and had the highest median income in the nation and one of the lowest child poverty rates. Why hadn’t New Hampshire done what Finland had done? Apparently, every kid in Finland got a decent education, regardless of how much money their parents made. It sounded like upside-down world in every way.

Kim had found her destination. If Finland was the smartest country in the world, that’s where she wanted to go. She wrote up a report for her mom, as agreed. She emphasized the education angle; her mom was a teacher after all, so she would find this argument hard to refute. She added blurbs about the population (a little over 5 million), the religion (mostly Lutheran), and the food (fish, dark rye bread, and lots of berries with mystical names like arctic brambles and lingonberries).

One fall morning, she handed the Finland report to her mom. Charlotte took it and promised to read it. Then they left for Sallisaw High School, where Kim was now a freshman. Her mom dropped her off by the flagpole and watched as Kim walked slowly into the orange brick building.

Like many places in the United States, Oklahoma’s curriculum was not rigorous by international standards. The state’s science standards ranked
among the least challenging in the nation, especially at the high school level. The word
evolution
did not appear anywhere in the thirty-one-page document, for example. Kim was taking biology that year. She spent the class period that day copying terms and definitions into her notebook. She wasn’t sure why; maybe copying information from one piece of paper to another would help her memorize the information, maybe not. Whatever the case, the time passed slowly.

Kim’s favorite class was English, which Oklahoma and most states took more seriously. She was reading
Tuesdays with Morrie
, and she loved it. The best days were the days her teacher pushed the desks into a circle and everyone talked about the book.

Her most dreaded subject, by far, was math. After the misery of sixth grade, she had decided that math was not for her; she just wanted to get through the requirements that she needed to graduate.

When Kim walked into Algebra I that day, her teacher was talking to the football players in her class. They had a lot to talk about since he was also a football coach and a former star football player at the same school. He was a nice guy, but, like most everyone in Sallisaw, he seemed to care more about football than Kim did.

She stared out the window at the American flag waving in the breeze. She wondered if her Finnish teachers would be different. She had read that being a teacher in Finland was prestigious, like being a doctor here. That was hard to imagine. She wished her mom was treated like a doctor at the elementary school where she taught.

She knew Finland didn’t have American football; would they be obsessed with ice hockey instead? Would they spend so much class time on ESPN.com?

That afternoon, when her mom picked her up, Kim slid into the Hyundai Sonata’s passenger seat and tried to refrain from asking if she had read the Finland report yet.

“How was your day?” Charlotte asked.

“I feel bored out of my skull,” Kim answered, looking straight ahead.

Charlotte let that go. She had read the report, and she had an ultimatum for Kim.

“If you get all the papers filled out, and you raise all the money, then you can go to Finland.”

Kim turned toward her mom. “It costs ten thousand dollars.”

“I know.”

Kim posted the pictures of her flute on eBay and set the price at eighty-five dollars. It was after midnight in early October 2009, and her mom had long since gone to sleep. Kim had done this once before
with her old dresses from middle school; she’d gotten no bids at all. A humiliating defeat. This time, she tried not to get her hopes up. She stared at the screen for a while, unblinking, then made herself go to sleep.

Two days later, Kim logged into eBay. Her eyes widened. Offers had come in from around the world, including a top bid from the United Arab Emirates for $100. Her flute was wanted. She yelped and jumped up out of her chair, breaking into a little dance on the carpet. Her flute would travel farther than she ever had. She started looking for a box. Honestly, she couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

That fall, Kim spent all of her free time raising money for Finland. The rational part of her brain thought she would never get to $10,000, but the rest of her was desperate enough to try. She bought a case of beef jerky online and sold it door to door. Total profit: $400. Not bad.

She baked Rice Krispies Treats all night long and sold them at a table outside of Marvin’s grocery store. Profit: $100. At that rate, she’d have to hold a bake sale every three days to get to Finland.

She tried the Internet, which everyone knew was the best place to find easy money in twenty-first century America. She created a blog, asking strangers to sponsor her quest: “I understand our economy’s down right now, but I’ll gladly accept even the smallest amount of money,” she wrote. “I hope you’ll part with just a few dollars for some girl with a crazy dream.” To show people where Sallisaw was, she included a map of the I-40 corridor.

To her surprise, small donations started trickling in. They were all from relatives, who probably just felt sorry for her, but she took the money.

Still, she didn’t dare tell her grandfather about Finland; she was sure he’d think this was another one of her hippie-dippie plans, like the time she’d become a secret vegetarian for three months. How could she tell him she wanted to move to Europe for a year?
Europe.
As it was, he kept referring to President Obama as “Kim’s president.”

Kim was very close to her grandfather, a retired drilling superintendent for an oil company. They spent hours together, neither of them talking very much. He was an old-fashioned man with no desire to leave the countryside of Oklahoma. She feared he would never understand why anyone would want to move to Finland.

Meanwhile, all around Kim, the Oklahoma economy was coming apart. The Therma-Tru
door and window factory, citing the downturn in the housing market, announced plans to shut down its nearby manufacturing plant, taking 220 jobs with it. A horse-racing track called
Blue Ribbon Downs, one of Sallisaw’s larger attractions, also closed its doors. The unemployment rate hit 10 percent. For a brief period, the county jail ran out of money.

Even the good news came laced with anxiety: The Bama Companies, the Oklahoma-based supplier of McDonald’s apple pies, was expanding. The company already had four facilities in the state. That year, it opened another new factory—in Guangzhou, China.

To Kim, these headlines were like smoke signals, warning her to get out while she could. She sent in her AFS application and got tested for tuberculosis. She started teaching herself Finnish, watching videos of Finnish bands on YouTube, impressed that any language could deploy six syllables just to convey the word
pink
. She bought a hermit crab and named it Tarja, after the first female Finnish president.

Money wasn’t her only problem. AFS couldn’t find anyone in her area to do an in-home interview; apparently, she lived too far from civilization. Her mom was willing to drive her to Tulsa, but AFS insisted that the interviewer had to come to her home, to see Kim in her native living room. She waited and worried.

To distract herself, she wrote blog posts and tried to explain herself to the world. Sometimes she succeeded, hitting just the right note between self-aware and sincere. “Basically I’m just a walking contradiction. For example, on the outside I appear sarcastic and cold, but in actuality I’m a bleeding heart,” she wrote. “I get a little sad whenever
a spider is killed . . . [But] I think squirrels are pure evil (chased twice, bitten twice—three separate occasions by the way).”

In November, she mustered her courage and sat down with her grandparents to tell them about her plan; her grandmother interrupted her: “You mean your trip to Finland?” Kim was shocked. They had known for weeks, as it turned out. Kim’s grandmother was on Facebook and checked it daily.
Daily!
To Kim’s relief, they had no objections. Kim’s grandfather asked her if she knew the capital of Finland.
Helsinki.
He didn’t say much more about it, and Kim didn’t ask. She remembered then that he had traveled to oil wells in seven different countries as a younger man. He must have known that the world was a big place and worth seeing.

Just after Thanksgiving, Kim got a three-thousand-dollar scholarship. She wasn’t sure where the rest of the money would come from, but she noticed that her grandparents started talking about “when” Kim went to Finland, not “if.”

That December, she and her mom went to Walmart to get her passport photos taken. She didn’t want to jinx anything, but she was impatient for her life to start. Then she got lucky again, winning a two-thousand-dollar scholarship intended for someone from Arkansas. AFS officials decided Sallisaw was close enough.

Finally, AFS found someone to interview her. It took three months, and the woman had to drive for hours to get to Sallisaw. Kim and her mom tidied up the bathroom, set out some scented candles, and waited, nervously. When her interviewer arrived, Kim felt herself rambling. She heard herself criticizing her town, and she knew she’d made a mistake. The woman looked worried.

“You sound like you are trying to escape.”

Kim tried to reassure her; okay, yes, maybe she wanted to escape a little, but she also wanted to explore, to see what life was like somewhere else—what
she
was like somewhere else.

The letter arrived soon afterward. Despite the tortured interview, Kim had made it. She was officially an exchange-student-to-be.

Finally, just a couple of months before she was supposed to leave, Kim got one last donation—from her grandparents. She tried to refuse, but her grandmother wrote her the check and walked away.

With that, Kim had $10,000.

One thing led to another, and soon everything became tangible and specific. That summer, Kim was sitting on her grandfather’s recliner when the phone rang. She recognized the country code and jumped out of the chair. She pulled out her retainer and ran outside to get a better signal.