The smartest kid in my class in the USSR was (as I know now but had no way of knowing back then) autistic. He was a very weird boy who spent half the class time sitting under a desk and quietly singing strange songs of his own making. Then he’d emerge from under the desk and stun the teacher into complete silence by delivering a mini-lecture on logarithms or something equally obscure.
This was a small, scrawny kid with a perpetually runny nose who would hang off a bar in gym, unable to do a single push-up. He was the last to enter puberty long after the other boys started shaving and talked in deep voices.
But the funny thing is that the other boys worshipped this kid. He was invited to every birthday party. He was never bullied. Once a hulking dudebro type from a neighboring trade school tried picking on this kid at the stadium where we all went for PE and all our boys rushed the dudebro in a stampede to protect the tiny, weird classmate.
He didn’t seem to need people much but the other boys always flocked to him. I’d see them smoking and drinking beer behind the school building while the weird kid talked about his logarithms, and they were all listening to him in grim but respectful silence.
Ours was a weird school. We had kids from the families of the Soviet elite who were ultra privileged and wealthy. We had students from the most prole area of town, children of alcoholics and convicts. And we had people like me, from the educated but perennially poor intelligentsia. Breaking these class barriers within the school was utterly impossible. Except for the autistic boy who was loved by every social group.
This boy was legit a genius. He became the director of the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at a ridiculously young age. Last I heard, he was pulling huge research grants and had many patents for his inventions.
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