Back From The Future : Two years ago, A.D. DeMello earned a math degree at UC Santa Cruz. Today, at 13, he graduates from junior high and arrives . . .

Talk about pressure. After warming the bench for five innings, the kid finally takes the field, and the very first batter hits him one of those high flys that seems to get lost up there in the time-space continuum.

Computing the ball’s trajectory as it carves a path through the blue sky, the boy positions himself with a few micro-second calculations.

He’s got it! It’s in his glove!

It bounces out.

Back in the dugout with his Little League teammates, 13-year-old Adragon De Mello slams down his glove in a typical scene of adolescent disgust.

Today, using an assumed name, Adragon will graduate from the Silicon Valley junior high school where he plays baseball. That too, he hopes, will be a typical adolescent scene. With luck, he says, no attention will be focused on the one thing that distinguishes him from his classmates: the fact that two years ago, at age 11, he graduated from the University of Santa Cruz with a degree in mathematics, earning himself a place in Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest university graduate in history.

Why Adragon would prefer not to make a big deal about this latest milestone is not hard to understand. Soon after earning his degree in 1988, Adragon found himself making national headlines, a whiz kid caught up in a particularly bizarre custody fight.

The boy’s story had become public long before his parents began open warfare. In 1986, Adragon (or “A.D.,” as his friends call him) wrote an article for California magazine in which he expressed his goal of earning a Nobel Prize in physics; at age 8 he enrolled in Cabrillo Community College in Santa Cruz and two years later entered the university. Along the way, “60 Minutes” dropped by to profile the boy, raising questions about the involvement of Agustin De Mello, the boy’s father, who had been orchestrating the boy’s life long before the 3-year-old Adragon supposedly voiced his first scientific observation: “electric chemicals make boys.”

Agustin De Mello, an unusual man with a colorful past, believes his son “may be the most intelligent child found so far in this world,” and after Adragon graduated from Santa Cruz, Agustin enrolled him in a graduate program at a Florida University.

Adragon’s mother, Cathy Gunn, a Silicon Valley technical writer, objected. Gunn, who had separated from the boy’s father when A.D. was at Cabrillo, argued that Agustin had emotionally abused the boy by pressuring him to excel academically, at one point subtly coercing him into taking twice the normal university course load. Her only desire, she says, was for her “bright, wonderful, good-natured boy” to salvage his childhood. She wanted her son, who at age 10 wrote a seemingly autobiographical screenplay called “Future Child,” to go back to his chronological place in junior high school.

The apex of Adragon’s celebrity came two months after he graduated from UC Santa Cruz, when, amid allegations of suicide pacts and intimidation of the boy’s professors, Santa Cruz police took his father into custody for psychiatric evaluation and the district attorney threatened to charge him with felony child endangerment--charges that were never filed.

Made a ward of the court and placed in a foster home, A.D. disappeared from sight. In January, 1989, in a decision that received less media attention than the previous custody battle, a court awarded Agustin De Mello and Cathy Gunn joint custody of the boy, with the stipulation that Adragon’s own wishes be given highest priority in determining how he would live.

Many who had followed the case from afar assumed this was the story’s unhappy ending, that the stresses of the bizarre conflict had in all likelihood shredded Adragon’s fragile young psyche beyond repair.

By all indications, they were wrong.

At Adragon’s Little League game, some parents shout advice, criticize the players, or taunt the ump with such vigor it seems that perhaps their own self-esteem is linked to the game.

Adragon’s mother and father, however, are models of decorum as they sit 10 feet apart in the bleachers, ignoring each other’s presence while quietly encouraging their son.

After the game, Adragon gives his mother--with whom he lives--a hug and leaves with his father for a nearby Arby’s: a familiar ritual now. After wolfing down a roast beef sandwich, two orders of fries and a root beer, A.D. talks about the matters that concern him most these days.

“You see the first one I fouled? Zerrrrooooom-kabiiiiing!” His tan and freckled face contorts with joyful intensity; his hands swing an imaginary bat, then trace the path of the ball he clipped down the right field line before earning a walk.

The Prince Valiant haircut that was his trademark throughout most of his youth is now a tousled All American Boy cut; the mortarboards he wears in so many old photographs have been replaced with an omnipresent baseball cap.

“And that first strike?” he chatters, his pale blue eyes glistening with enthusiasm. “I thought it was a fast ball, then it curved. . . .”

On the ride along Highway 17 to Santa Cruz, where he stays with his father every other weekend, A.D. probes the radio for his favorite stations, letting rap music flood the car. “That’s Cool-E . . . that’s Tone Loc,” he says with the assurance of someone who knows his way around the world of junior high hip.

But how does a boy who parted ways with his chronological peers back in the third grade make the seemingly impossible adjustment back to junior high?

Apparently in much the same way a beached trout adjusts to being tossed back into a stream. As A.D. describes it, there was a moment of disorientation, then he was off in an ecstatic shot.

“It’s been a lot of fun,’ he says.

When he enrolled in the school, he took a math placement test and earned a perfect score. So he skipped junior high math entirely, although he will take geometry next year when he goes to high school.

The rest of his schedule has been pretty standard: social studies, science, PE, English, cooking.

“I do real well in the classes I think are fun,” he says. “I think social studies is a lot of fun. If I don’t enjoy the class, I don’t do that well. Some of the teachers are just real boring, you know? Everyday it’s just blub blub blub .”

At UC Santa Cruz, A.D. worked on the sophisticated Unix computer system, writing programs in Pascal C. Now he’s working on an old Apple, programming in Basic. If he finds this change unchallenging, he doesn’t let on. “It’s different,” he says. “It’s interesting.”

Adragon entered school in the middle of the second quarter. The principal had a student show him around, and the boy became A.D.’s first new friend.

“I wasn’t used to being around a lot of other kids,” A.D. says, adding quickly: “I have a lot of other friends now.”

Most students don’t know that the kid they recognize by one name is the whiz kid who dominated the newscasts here in Northern California two years ago. For those that do, “it doesn’t matter that much,” Adragon says with a shrug. The same holds true for the teachers. Those who know his other identity “just forget about it,” he says.

In either case, he is no longer famous, and that’s how he likes it. “I got real sick of all the reporters, all the TV crewmen,” he says. “When you’re a kid, you think it will be great to be on TV. . . .”

But the media attention got old fast as his own situation turned sour.

Open and ebullient in talking about most subjects, Adragon’s defense system snaps on with an unconscious but not so subtle clunk when questions that touch on the public custody battle are raised. Suddenly his eyes lose their focus, his face slackens, a radio dial or a passing car distracts him. Within moments, the conversation has shifted back to his current life as an American teen-ager, where being from a broken home is as normal as falling off a skateboard.

That life seems to keep him busy. He plays trombone in the school band, and his after-school hours are burned up playing Nintendo or Dungeons and Dragons with friends. Sometimes he and friends will walk over to the local mall--they caught the premiere of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” there, for instance.

His favorite television shows are “Star Trek--The Next Generation” and “The Simpsons.” Adragon hadn’t heard of the controversy over Bart Simpson’s lackadaisical approach to academic life, but squabbling over a cartoon boy’s scholastic motivation strikes him as rather silly. “He’s pretty neat,” A.D. says of America’s most popular underachiever. “I think he’s funny.”

Returning to adolescence has not been painless for A.D. He broke his arm playing touch football last year, and he sprained a finger playing basketball, he says with the sort of stoic pride that is de rigueur among athletes.

But the focus of his life these days is another game.

“When I was in custody, the children of the foster parents I was with collected baseball cards,” he says, talking around a big wad of purple Bubblicious gum. “I got real interested in playing.”

Before that, he’d been too busy to pay much attention to anything non-academic, including baseball. “I never knew about it!”

He picked the game up quickly, though, and “last year I was the most improved player,” he says with a self-conscious chuckle.

Having already played or practiced ball for about five hours, the first thing the tall, lean teen does upon arriving at his father’s rented house in Santa Cruz is pull out a backpack full of balls and persuade his father to take him over to a lumpy field of ankle-high grass behind a local church.

In the course of a two-hour session, his father, the church pastor, the church custodian, a reporter and a photographer are all drawn into the game and summarily worn out.

Throwing curves, fastballs and a pitch he calls the “slinky,” Adragon whoops when one of his pitches suckers the batter. He is also generous in his praise when one doesn’t.

“Wow! You really got a piece of that one! Whoo! That one’s gone!,” he shouts.

Back at his father’s house, A.D.’s room looks exactly as it did two years ago. The shelves still sag under the weight of physics and math books. With photographs, diplomas and certificates from Mensa and the Guinness book on the walls, the living room is still something of a monument to the boy’s academic success.

But Adragon doesn’t have much time for theoretical physics these days. Instead, he plugs in a Nintendo game called “Bases Loaded II.”

“In two weeks I’ve played 57 games on this,” he says.

From his father’s house, the Santa Cruz Boardwalk is visible, the lights on its famous wooden roller coaster beckoning from just across the bay. Adragon says that he has ridden the roller coaster there “over 200 times,” but that he hasn’t been on it since the events of two years ago.

Arriving on the Boardwalk later that night, the gawky kid is like a colt loose in a pasture for the first time.

Romping through the rides and arcades, he hurls softballs into clown’s mouths, shoots baskets and blazes away with dart guns. When he finds a new skeeball game that seems to award more prize tickets than the others, he’s like a compulsive gambler who discovers a no-lose slot machine. “Come on Pop, keep playing! Look at those tickets!”

Climbing into the roller coaster car, Adragon grins in anticipation; as the car careers down the whip-lash inducing track, he rocks with laughter--perhaps because he’s forgotten what the ride’s like, or maybe he’s never ridden it with so little weight on his shoulders.

In fact, Adragon takes unusual delight in things that most people his age have become blase about. Earlier that evening, the act of dining in a restaurant seems filled with adventure: Adragon orders salmon, drenches it in lemon juice, coats it with pepper, then rhapsodizes about how good it tastes.

Then, after lecturing his father about the salt and fat in his diet, he ignores his broccoli and consumes two enormous helpings of chocolate mousse pie, pausing only to lean back and groan.

But the most interesting thing he reveals about himself over dinner is not his adolescent appetite, but rather his newfound adolescent assertiveness. His father, accused by many of obsession if not abuse in guiding his son’s academic career, seems at once impressed and taken aback.

For his part, the boy endures his eccentric parent as gracefully as a teen-ager can.

When his father begins to decry the boy’s present lack of intellectual stimulation, arguing that its a “total waste” for someone who took five college English classes to be taking English classes in junior high, Adragon again interrupts him.

“No it’s not Pop,” he says. “They’re not cinchy, they really aren’t.”

Asked about his career plans now, Adragon says he hasn’t thought much about them.

“He told me he wants to be an astrophysicist and a baseball player,” Agustin says.

“No I don’t Pop! I didn’t say that,” A.D. retorts. Mildly embarrassed, the father tugs his son’s cap over his eyes in a gentle reprimand. But his parental pride cannot be contained.

“While he was at Santa Cruz, he used the computer to break into the Lawrence Livermore laboratory computer--just like (the movie) ‘War Games,’ ” his father says, beaming.

“Pop, you’re exaggerating,” A.D. says. “It was no big deal.” Then with a mixture of irritation and affection, he adds: “You say weird things, Pop. Do you know that?”

About the time A.D. orders his fifth ginger ale of the evening, the waitress, who has been eyeing Adragon through the meal, finally approaches. “Don’t I know you? Weren’t you in my calculus class at Cabrillo College?” she asks.

Adragon lights up, and the two reminisce for a moment. The waitress, 21 now, says she is now studying math and computer science at San Jose State University.

“Are you going to go to a university?” she asks.

“I did,” A.D. says.

“What are you doing now?”

“He’s graduating from junior high school,” the father says. “Can you believe that?”

“Oh, that’s good,” the waitress says to Adragon. “It’s funner when you’re with kids your own age.”

Except for the time he spent on the big computer, his headlong rush to a bachelor’s degree really wasn’t much fun, Adragon concedes later. And he remains remarkably modest about his feat: “I think anyone could do it if they worked that hard,” he says.

In the meantime, Adragon knows he’s on the junior high honor roll--although he doesn’t have a clue what his grade point average is.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t really care.”

Ask him what his batting average is, though, and it’s a whole different story, a long and animated story: “It’s .280, pretty average. But I’ve got the most walks on the team, and. . . .”