What were some of Christopher's complements?

From the text:

In the third grade, after receiving a high score on a standardized achievement test, Chris was placed in an accelerated program for gifted students. “He wasn’t happy about it,” Billie remembers, “because it meant he had to do extra schoolwork.

‘Chris marches to a different drummer.’ She just shook her head.” “Even when we were little,” says Carine, who was born three years after Chris, “he was very to himself. He wasn’t antisocial— he always had friends, and everybody liked him—but he could go off and entertain himself for hours. He didn’t seem to need toys or friends. He could be alone without being lonely.”

Chris was a high achiever in almost everything that caught his fancy. Academically he brought home As with little effort.

Chris took up the guitar, piano, French horn. “It was strange to see in a kid his age,” says Walt, “but he loved Tony Bennett.

A gifted French-horn player, as a teen he was a member of the American University Symphony but quit, according to Walt, after objecting to rules imposed by a high school band leader.