He did well enough in school. That wasn't the problem. It was more that he didn't like sitting still being told what to do. The only thing he looked forward to each week was the Boy Scout meeting. He liked all the stuff they got to do. He liked the badges and the uniform too. They made him proud, even if other people were laughing at him. He didn't care He knew that in his Scout uniform he represented all that was right and good and honorable.
He liked the knots best. All the scouts acknowledged he was the best knot tier. Running bowline, half hitch - just mention one and he'd run it up for you in a minute. He had a lot of other badges, but knot tying was his favorite thing.
His parents got a bit worried. It just didn't seem normal. The boy was a connoisseur of knots. He had examples of every knot known to man and a few he had invented himself. He got on the net with a Mongolian who knew knots for staking out horses on treeless plains. He was familiar with every knot used on Elizabethan sailing ships.
One day his parents took him to the mall to get new running shoes. On their way home they passed a group of people staring into the river. A car had gone off the bridge and lay partially submerged. The driver was not moving.
The boy had six lengths of nylon rope with him. He always had at least a length or two with him to occupy his time. Quickly he knotted the lengths together then he waded into the river and tied his rope to the back axle of the car. He directed his parents' car to the river bank. His dad did serious damage to the transmission pulling on the submerged car. The rope stretched, but the knots all held. Slowly the car emerged from the water.
An ambulance arrived and shrieked away with the inert driver and the boy became a hero on the local media. His picture in his Boy Scout uniform was on the front page of the Sunday Family section of the paper. He said self deprecatingly modest things on TV. The boy was a media hero. For a while.
Until a ten year old accidentally shot a pizza delivery man with her father's hunting rifle.