I PROFESSOR NELSON can't get free of Stevens Creek, Virginia. Nine miles west of the Blue Ridge Parkway, marked on only the most detailed maps, it's a cluster of maybe a hundred houses, a store, and two filling stations. During her childhood, the hamlet had two or three times as many of its young men serving time in the penitentiary as it had students attending college. Hostility was part of its weather, but she was never that way. Quiet though she was, Suzanne always wanted to be close to somebody. Her two older sisters, Bonnie and Gail, turned cold toward her when they were little, though Suzanne still tries to be companionable to them. On their birthdays, she sends her sisters cards, but they forget hers every year. At Christmas she buys gifts for them and their kids, knowing that she will receive neither gifts nor thank-you notes.

Her parents are friendly, but in a superficial way. They're guarded in their dealings with her; when Suzanne calls them to chat, she senses how they maneuver to end the conversation. The estrangements hurt Suzanne. Distant as her life is from theirs, she's done nothing to warrant her sisters'unfriendliness, nor has she ever given her parents cause to be wary of her. How could she help being the freak of the family? She didn't realize that she was smarter -- a lot smarter -- than her sisters and her parents until she was in eighth grade. That's when she had to ride the school bus thirty-five miles a day, to and from the consolidated high school. The teachers there who'd taught Bonnie and Gail were so stunned by Suzanne's ability that they told her, compared with her sisters, she was a genius. Compared with most of the children who rode the bus in from Stevens Creek to Galax, Suzanne was a female Einstein.

Of course she's the only one in her family who doesn't have that mountain accent -- her intuition obliterated it, starting with her first day of eighth grade. People in Galax spoke a more sophisticated version of Appalachian English than did people in Stevens Creek. The way the town kids mocked the country kids was so ruthless that most of Suzanne's Stevens Creek school-bus acquaintances became predictably hostile and all the more determined to hold on to their mother tongue. Suzanne was the only one who began adapting. It was a talent she had -- listening, analyzing, imitating. By her sophomore year, the only ones mocking her way of speaking were a few of the more surly Stevens Creek kids, who took her Galaxized speech as a sign of betrayal. Mostly, though, the Stevens Creek kids thought of her as the one who could compete in that school, the one who had a chance of beating the Galax snobs at their own game. Nowadays Suzanne is pretty certain that the reason she changed her speech was to make friends among the smart kids.

It didn't work. She was popular. Again and again she found herself in groups of Galax girls; she was invited to spend the night at this girl's house and that one's. She made an effort to cultivate the friendship of several girls she admired, but intimacy never developed. She came to see how jokes and manners and the slangy small talk of the day were actually ways of pushing people away. Stevens Creek boys didn't ask her out because she was too smart; Galax boys didn't ask her out because she lived eighteen miles away. Her remembrance of that time in her life is like a nightmare, with her frantically running toward a familiar boy or girl who smiled and beckoned but who then was sucked backward through space, so that no matter how tirelessly she ran, she could never close the distance. There was, however, the Mute.

The.