Ungifted (14 page)

The bloodcurdling shriek was barely human. We all looked up to see Noah Youkilis, poised atop the deejay's giant speaker tower, muscles flexed—at least, they would have been if he'd had any. The bizarre pose left no room for interpretation. It was a ridiculous time to notice it, but I finally understood what his outfit was supposed to be. He was a WWE wrestler, just like the ones he'd seen on YouTube, only fifty times skinnier.

And before everybody's horrified eyes, he did exactly what they do on
SmackDown
. He launched himself off the tower in a spectacular dive into the fray. I figured he was dead meat. But his fall was broken by the people he landed on. The crowd swayed, absorbing his impact. Many figures went down. Tin Man was one of them.

Oz looked like he wanted to tear himself in half. I'm pretty sure he couldn't decide whether he should rush to the aid of his fallen student or his fallen robot.

And then, for the first time all night, something intelligent happened. The fire alarm went off. At first I was kind of surprised it wasn't me who did it. It was very much my style. But when I looked over at the wall, the culprit was standing there, still holding on to the lever.

Dr. Schultz. I guess when you're the superintendent, you don't have to worry about getting in trouble.

In the blink of an eye, several hundred kids swarmed the gym door. Hey, I knew an exit strategy when I saw one. I was gone before Schultz could even glance in my direction.

F
or all the eight hundred million videos on YouTube, you had to figure there were at least another eight hundred million that never got filmed.

YouTube had its conundrums too:

Me being the hero of the Valentine Dance, for instance.

One day it might be possible to hardwire a person's optic nerve to a tiny memory chip implanted in the base of the skull. You'd just need a simple internet connection to upload the images to YouTube.

With our best minds focused on curing diseases and stuff like that, I wasn't holding my breath.

Speaking of the dance, Friday night had not been kind to Tin Man. Oh, the scratches could be buffed out, the dents repaired, and the broken forklift arm reattached again. But the motor that ran the lift mechanism had suffered permanent damage, and Oz said our budget for new materials was exhausted.

Abigail was distraught. “But if we don't have a lift mechanism, we'll have to withdraw from the competition!”

This prospect had Jacey so stressed out that she started talking about South American butterfly migrations. If anyone knew more random facts than me, it was Jacey.

But today it was getting on my nerves. “My blunt-trauma anterior epistaxis is better, thank you very much!”

“Who cares about your dumb bloody nose?” Abigail snapped.

“
I
care!” I shot back. “It
really
hurt! I didn't see any of you guys single-handedly rescuing Tin Man in the riot.” For some reason, I was getting no credit at all for sacrificing my body. If it isn't on YouTube, it might as well have never happened.

“More like you
caused
the riot,” put in Latrell sourly. “When you jumped on everybody from the top of the deejay booth.”

“It wasn't a jump,” I explained through clenched teeth. “It was a takedown. It was a textbook wrestling move.”

Chloe turned to Donovan. “Your two friends named Daniel—why did they do that? Why would they want to mess with our robot?”

Donovan shrugged. “A lot of kids have an attitude about the gifted program. And those guys definitely have an attitude now that I'm in it. Look at this place—Hardcastle's an ancient ruin compared to here. They've got about a sixteenth of the stuff we do. They may call us nerds, but it's pretty cool having your own robot.”

I didn't agree. A robot wasn't cool; it was just complicated. Like the LEGO Star Wars Imperial Snow Walker. (
Consumer Reports
said that not even a genius could put one together. They were wrong. I'd already assembled six.)

In my opinion, having a robot was a lot less interesting than having a riot. Riots were unforeseeable and chaotic—very YouTube-like.

Oz tried everything to get money for a new motor. He requested funds from the athletic budget, but he couldn't convince them that Tin Man was more important than badminton. He even took apart his own lawnmower in the hope that the engine would be the right size. It wasn't—and now the lawnmower won't go back together again. Latrell has to go to his house to fix it.

“Couldn't we raise the money?” Chloe pleaded. “Sell candy bars or something? We can't drop out!”

Oz shrugged unhappily. “There's simply not enough time to set up something like that. The robotics meet is in three weeks.”

Donovan was even quieter than usual during the entire class. Tin Man's outer shell was completely covered with graphics by now, so there was nothing for him to do but drive. And with the lift system inoperable, there was no sense driving the robot anywhere.

Finally, when the period was over, he gathered us in the hall. “I think I've found us a spare motor.”

Abigail began jumping up and down. “What? What?
Where?
”

“In the custodial office,” he explained. “It runs one of the floor polishers. You'd know better than me, but I'm pretty sure it'll fit Tin Man.”

“How did you reach that conclusion?” I inquired. “Did you measure the unit itself, or are you thinking of the size and location of the key components and connections?”

“I guessed,” he admitted a little sheepishly.

We stared at him in amazement. After all,
we
were the ones who had created Tin Man, not Donovan. It had taken design, programming, electronics, hydraulics, pneumatics, and mechanical engineering. No guessing.

Donovan explained. “There are two ways it can go. It can either fit or not fit.”

“A probability analysis?” I mused.

He shrugged. “I can't say for sure it'll work. But I
guarantee
that if we don't at least try, that bucket of bolts will have no lift motor. What have we got to lose?”

Chloe had a practical question. “And the custodians are letting us have it? They're always so crabby.”

Donovan grinned. “They're really great guys.”

He insisted that we had to pick the engine up immediately, even before going to the cafeteria to eat. We'd all learned to trust Donovan for one reason or another, so we went along with it. But when we arrived at the custodial office, it was deserted.

“Where is everybody?” I asked.

“At lunch,” Donovan replied.

“But where's the motor?” Abigail persisted.

“It's in the floor polisher,” Donovan explained, producing a screwdriver. “Where else?”

It was all beginning to make sense. The custodians weren't
giving
us anything. We were
taking
.

Abigail was furious. “We can't steal their motor!”

“It's not
their
motor,” Donovan lectured. “It's the school's motor. It's also the school's robot.”

I'd seen things like this on YouTube, but never could I have imagined being a part of it in real life. It took Latrell several tense minutes to dismantle the polisher and remove the engine.

“Put the cover back on,” Donovan instructed. “We don't want them to see it's missing.”

Abigail was practically hysterical. “Don't you think they're going to notice when they try to polish the floor?”

I was the lookout. It was my job to give the code word if I saw one of the custodians coming.

“Pythagoras!” I hissed.

Donovan yanked the screwdriver out of Latrell's hand and tossed it out of view while kicking the floor polisher under a workbench. In the same motion, he herded everybody into the supply closet, jammed in after them, and slammed the door. I'd never seen anybody move so fast.

“It's okay,” I called. “I was just testing.”

Donovan came out of the closet and fixed me with twin lasers. “Do that again and they'll be watching your funeral on YouTube.”

I admired Donovan, but he scared me sometimes.

Sneaking back to the robotics lab with our prize was the most exciting experience I could remember, even better than my big takedown at the dance. I knew a lot about the effects of adrenaline on the human body, but that was different than actually feeling my heart pounding against my rib cage. Fear mixed with exhilaration, plus the notion that, at any second, we could get caught. It was almost as if I hadn't really been alive until Donovan showed up at the Academy.

Oz was ecstatic. “Where did you guys get this?”

It didn't bother him at all that nobody answered.

The polisher's motor was a little bit bigger than the broken one. “We'll have to reconfigure it to run on battery power,” Oz advised. “And the extra weight might slow us down a little.”

“But we'll have a lot more juice,” Donovan put in.

“We don't need more juice,” Abigail pointed out. “The task is to pick up inflatable rings that weigh practically nothing.”

Oz had a different opinion. “We had a real problem, and we found a way to solve it. That's what the robotics program is all about.”

The next day the floor looked a little dull and neglected. But Tin Man was back online.

The rumor started with Kevin Amari, who dropped the bomb in the cafeteria.

“I overheard Oz telling Mr. Del Rio that they're going to retest Donovan for the Academy.”

Chloe choked on a celery stalk. “What? Why?”

“You're kidding, right?” Abigail said flatly. “It's obvious to everybody he isn't gifted. They gave him a few weeks to prove himself, and he didn't.”

“He's proved himself a million different ways,” Chloe argued.

“Because he stole a motor?” she retorted.

“Maybe,” I said defiantly. “If you give the robotics team a motor, we can do anything with it. But if you ask us to
get
a motor, we'd all be dead in the water.”

“And what about Human Growth and Development?” Chloe demanded.

“It doesn't matter,” Abigail insisted. “They can't just keep on letting him flunk.”

“They do it with me,” I muttered. “I'd love to be retested. I'd show them the true meaning of
flunk
.”

Abigail stared me down. “Come on. You can't seriously be saying that you don't see any difference between Donovan's situation and your personal weirdness. Your IQ is higher than his by at least a whole person.”

“We
need
him,” I insisted. “He's more important than any of us.”

“Please! One of us couldn't learn how to work a controller? Or download stupid pictures to put on him?”

“We could do it,” I gritted. “But we'd do it
wrong
!” It was impossible to explain what I meant. Donovan was a human version of YouTube. Click on him, and you might get Einstein eating a banana, or a heisted motor, or a robot driver, or a Human Growth and Development credit. It was like rolling a die with an infinite number of sides.

Chloe looked thoughtful. “Maybe he'll pass the retest.”

There was an awkward silence as that idea went down like a lead balloon.

“He's working really hard,” she argued. “You know—for him.”

“Exactly.” Abigail was triumphant. “His grades are
awful
. He might be trying, but what does that mean? That this is the best he can do?”

“You don't have to look so happy about it,” I told her.