(Atlanta, 2020, and there is one girl who explains everything to everyone and answers all the questions.)

"Who are you to question?"

Clarissa looks up from her notebook, looks back down at her notes, and answers.

"Who are you to answer with a question? Theory is not fact, and the Bible was compiled from four sources. In fact, the Old and New Testaments were written centuries apart, and the most current translation was written in the 1600s by King James."

"Where did you learn such blasphemy?"

Clarissa answers, "About the King James? It says so on the front cover. "'King...James...Bible'."

The teacher looks down and sees that she is right. Since this answer is not in the Teacher's edition, and the first rule of education is if you have a question you cannot answer change the subject, everyone's browser skips to a map of the world. Clarissa looks around and at China and raises her hand again.

"Clarissa, I KNOW you KNOW!"

"But how CAN an army of a million beat an army of a billion? In math I learned that a billion is a thousand times a million. And how can we only spend 50 billion when the war costs a trillion?" Clarissa asks.

"Math does not explain the will of the Lord to do what is right. You must remember that history is about what is right, and math is about what things are."

"But if things do not add up...but history is about what is right, that means that things must not be right."

"Clarissa! Who determines right and wrong?"

"God and Jesus."

"And who creates math?"

"Man."

"So the will of God is stronger than the will of man, and hence American greatness can never be explained by math or science."

"Then why is the answer to life 42?"

"The Yale equation for happiness: Ten Commandments multlipled by the trinity plus the 12 apostles."

Clarissa accepts this, looks back down at her computer and reads ahead in the lesson, already knowing what she's been told. She daydreams about the good-looking football player in front of her, then buries herself in her work just like everyone else in class. She does this the rest of the school day, then goes home to turn on Channel 9, where she proudly answers every question posed to Ken, the Smartest Man in America, correctly. Clarissa is the head of her class, 17 years old and she looks like she's in her 30s with her navy blue skirtsuit, but her badly matching white tennis shoes with her glasses are much more suited to her age. She is like her friends; they all dress the same way, watch the same shows, and have the same goofy crushes and grins, but Clarissa is smarter than anyone else. She questions things but she is always right. Even the smart girls at school are jealous of her, so she is alone as she eats her O'Reilly burger while staring at another lecture about american history, as spellbound as the average American is by the half-naked actors and actresses. She smiles and giggles through her day, watches TV with her parents, changes into her pajamas and rolls into bed...and this is when she wakes up for the day. Ever since she was 14, she has never been able to sleep at night. She may close her eyes briefly but by midnight she is wide awake. At first she panicked and turned on any channel she could to go back to sleep, but then she found that these only made her more antsy and awake.

She analyzed the problem. She was eight when her parents took all the books out of the house and into the boxes in the basement, except for the Bible of course and instead plopped her in between them in front of the TV every night, as did all her friends' parents, as did everyone in her town. She would find the programming very boring, but they said it would help her in school, so she watched, and she would always fall asleep before the first hour was done, her brain scrambling to live the tales told to her at a younger age. It was like this until now. She has been going to a computer-based school since 3rd grade, where she became a good girl who always got straight As despite not studying, not even thinking about what was going on. And then she turned 14 and she suddenly felt her eyes jump wide open at 2 in the morning. She felt herself thirsting for knowledge and not getting it at school. So she snuck down to the basement and found the box that was still there, unopened and untouched, and she found a book that was not a newspaper or the Bible. Instead it was a glorious tale of freedom and happiness, of a magical land where no one was a slave to another and people were created equal, where those who weren't free fought the evil King to become free, and then expanded westward. She smiled at its title, U.S. History, for it was nothing that she was taught in history. And then before she knew it it was 7, and she was exhausted. She went to school anyway, told everyone what she learned in History class, then went to sleep, to awaken at 2 in the morning again.

She is 17 now, a senior and applying to Harvard and Yale and accepted already into Stanford and Berkley. Her insomnia still has not let her go and once again she finds herself wide awake at 2am and again she sneaks down to the basement to find another book. She has gone through 5 boxes already and now she picks up a copy of Julius Caesar. It is shorter than most of the books she's read in the basement, but the language is almost foreign to her, and she finds herself struggling to finish before she has to go upstairs at 7. She then puts on her clothes and gets ready for school. She never listens to music, thinking it wiser to mind her brother as he watches the empty cartoons that would always remind her of her weariness. Again she goes to history class...and the cycle begins again: show off her new knowledge until the teacher found something she could accept, go to sleep and dream of the good-looking quarterback in front of her, wake up again at 2am.

She meets her friends after school as always to talk before watching the quiz shows. But today is different.

"Where's Allison?" Clarissa asks.

Her friends just giggle.

"She found...a MAN!!" one replies. "She is soooo lucky!"

"No single man could be as important as all the stars. Especally not for Allison, Molly."

Molly looks up and answers, "But he's going to Georgia Tech! Isn't that wonderful? He's a golfer, he's gonna be so rich! That's what we need! Why work when we can marry a rich man?"

"Love and money are correlated, but correlation does not equal causation," Clarissa replies. "And Georgia Tech is a lot worse than Princeton."

"I would rather have God give me a man than a scholarship," Molly replies and Clarissa suddenly feels awake again, like the past was a dream and now she is back in reality.

"The fault is not in the stars but in ourselves, Molly," Clarissa replies and Molly scratches her head and then replies.

"Of couse, like DUH! Only the flawed and the gypsy thieves believe in astrology. God teaches us all."

"By teaching us nothing, that is the beauty of the Bible, It is up to us to determine right and wrong, the Bible just tells us the facts, it is us to put the facts into use."

Molly is even further confused. Clarissa realizes her lack of intelligence and goes home to watches her quiz shows alone, but she gets almost everything wrong, realizing the hypocrisy and being angered by it. After dinner she reads another book but cannot understand completely what is happening. So she goes to bed, and wakes up the next morning half-asleep at 7:30.

"It's ok, that happens once a month to girls. Do you need to stay home from school to rest it off?" her father says and Clarissa glares at him, knowing it was nothing physical that kept her from waking up, and genuinely feeling tired and cranky.

"I'm fine, Dad...and for the record I was not raped and do not feel like holding back the river!"

Her dad shrugs and her mother just giggles while her brother plays with his stuffed whale. It has a stuffed Jonah inside who pops out every time he squeezes it.

"I thought Jonah had to live the rest of his life in there," she says.

"God frees him! God frees everybody!" her brother replies.

The months go by and she finds herself reading more and more, and finally she gets called down to her guidance counselor.

"Your grades are awful this marking period. What is wrong with you? You need to graduate high school!"

"God will free me from here, won't he? God frees everybody!" Clarissa replies, making the counselor think she has rebelled and ask about channel 8.

"Dissent is not disloyalty," Clarissa replies.

"where did you learn that?" the counselor demands.

"In the basement. Isn't this history textbook from this school? I see our school's stamp on it."

"We use school computers and approved, safe, family friendly web sites here. We do not use subversive speech here!"

"Make no law abridging the freedom of speech, expression, or religion?" Clarissa asks.

"The Lord expects freedom with known restraint from temptation to deliver us from evil. Bless you so we may keep you from the evil that is obviously taking over your mind."

"I like Shakespeare, not you, relax."

"I question God's way with you, you have eaten from the forbidden tree of knowledge."

"So knowledge IS evil?" Clarissa replies.

"No, it is..."

"Forbidden, you said so yourself. Oh, now you are thinking. Be careful. God doesn't like to be questioned."

"Clarissa! I am not questioning God, I am questioning your..."

"If something is forbidden it is evil, so my knowledge is evil. I am the devil."

"You are not! You are special, you have a lot of room for Jesus to teach, that is all," the counselor rationalizes.

"So Jesus was a teacher, not the son of God? He was a prophet, the next to last one before the terrorist god?"

"WHAT? How dare you...where did you read that?"

"For a terrorist handbook, the Koran has a lot of Jesus' speech, does that make Jesus a terrorist?"

With the mention of the word Koran the fire alarm rings and everyone evacuates for fear of a bomb. Clarissa just laughs and manipulates the situation as the police come in.

"You don't know when I can explode, do you? Let me go and I won't," Clarissa says, fingering her belt as if it was a detonator.

She walks out, leaving her bookbag behind, and doubling the fear that has now crippled her town. She drives away without anyone thinking until she gets to the airport, where she is met by a woman dressed like her except her skin is black. She notices Clarissa's belt is unbuckled and laughs.

"Did you act like a suicide bomber to get out of school for this visit?" the woman asks.

"Yes, and I left my bookbag behind. My guidance counselor cornered me once I could no longer repeat their lies on the test."

"You DORK!!! I'm Janice, director of admissions at Columbia- we spoke on the phone? From what you've done, I think I don't even need to process your application, but still...the answer to life is 42 because?"

Clarissa smiles. "It's what the computer told us the answer to life was, hence why we need to learn more without the computer to blind us to our ignorance and chain us to stupid entertainment to deliver us from our mission of truth."

Janice smiles and then says, "You see me because?"

"My time is now."

Janice laughs and takes her to her car which drives off toward New York for her to study.

It is summer now and she sees Molly in Times Square, now dressed in the tight jeans and mindless blonde face of everyone else visiting, she only can tell it's her by the fact that she is clinging to the football captain who used to lull her into the mindless sleep of American conformity. She laughs at this and then gets to her work.

"How can someone be dead in a war and then murdered by her student?"

Molly recoginizes Clarissa and clings tighter to her mate. But that night at 2am Clarissa gets a call on her phone- Molly, calling from her hotel.

"Do you have anything to make me sleep?" Molly asks.

"No," says Clarissa, "but Julius Caesar will wake you up much better than anything else you can use."

"The fault is in ourselves after all."

"Computers do not build themselves," Clarissa says before going to bed, her genius boyfriend by her side.