Ungifted (19 page)

Probably why I never ran into any robots on ancestry.com.

“We get the point,” Oz put in, grinning. “Let's keep it to ourselves. It's a little premature for a victory celebration.”

“There's no way Cold Spring Harbor can match the kind of times we're putting up,” Kevin enthused. “Not unless they're running their robot on rocket fuel.”

I'd never been much of a joiner, so this was my first taste of how it felt to be part of a team that was a real contender. And not just a part. With the robot completed, I was more important than any of them. All those geniuses, and the one person who could make Tin Man perform at championship level was the dummy who got stranded in the gifted program by mistake. I didn't have a clue how to design, build, or program a robot. But it was up to me to bring home the gold.

For the first time since I'd landed at the Academy, I truly
belonged
.

The heavy metal gym door was thrown open with such violence that it pounded against the cinder block wall. There, framed in the light from outside, was nothing less than an avenging angel.

Dr. Schultz.

I swear he crossed the gym in three gigantic strides, shooting sparks from his eyes. I considered running, but what for? Even if I could manage to escape, where did I think I could go? I was completely and totally busted.

“Dr. Schultz—what a surprise,” said Oz. “You're just in time to see us put Tin Man through his paces.”

“That will have to happen some other time.” The superintendent's voice was colder than his expression, if possible. The eyes fell on me. “Donovan Curtis—your parents are on their way.”

Chloe was the first to clue in to the gravity of what was going on. “Donovan might not be gifted in the same way as the rest of us, but he's the heart and soul of our team! He's the heart and soul of our
class
!”

Dr. Schultz regarded her sternly. “Donovan's problems go far beyond trying to be what he's not.”

I followed him out of the gym, while the squawking and protesting of my teammates rang off the rafters.

“He drives the robot!”

“We're dead without him!”

“He is
so
gifted!”

“He brought us Katie!”

“He showed me YouTube!”

“He's one of us!”

Their support would have made me feel good if I hadn't been on my way to the end of the world.

I scrubbed hard with the polishing cloth, and Madagascar got a little shinier. Maybe. It was so dark in the subbasement of the administration building that it was hard to tell Africa from South America.

I was in the dungeon—or at least the closest thing they had to a dungeon in the Hardcastle school district. My sentence was to polish up the bronze world I had knocked off Atlas's shoulders all those weeks ago. The worst part wasn't the polishing; it was chipping off years of bird droppings that had ossified by a chemical process I'll bet even Noah Youkilis couldn't explain.

It was all useless, of course. There was no way Schultz was going to put this thing up again. Not after what had happened. But he wanted it perfect and gleaming in its hiding place. Actually, what he really wanted was for me to suffer. Believe it or not, cleaning the celestial sphere—as part of twenty hours of community service—was my only punishment for everything that had happened. My family was not going to have to pay for repairs to the Hardcastle gym. I was off the hook—a survivor, just like my ancestor, James Donovan, when he climbed out of the icy North Atlantic and into the lifeboat. Whacking the statue with a branch had been a dumb thing to do, but, in the end, it fell within the range of normal wear and tear. The rusted bolt was at fault, not me. Now the only question was, would the insurance company pay for a design flaw from a foundry that no longer existed?

“You got off easy, Donovan Curtis,” the superintendent had told me sternly at the meeting with my parents. “I hope you realize that this could have gone a lot harder on you.”

He called me by my full name, almost as if he was afraid he might forget it again. I couldn't blame him. These past weeks must have been like chasing a ghost. That's probably why he was so animated when he added, “I suppose I don't have to tell you that you're no longer a student at the Academy for Scholastic Distinction.”

Seated between Mom and Dad, I'd recoiled as if he'd slapped me. I didn't much care about the Academy—I'd never belonged there in the first place. But it hurt to be off the robotics team.

My mother cried, but that wasn't exactly breaking news. She cried whenever anyone got voted off the island on reality TV. I understood her disappointment. As of today, I wasn't gifted anymore. Not only that, but I was responsible for the biggest town disaster since the famous gas-line explosion of 1986, which ruptured a drainage pipe and filled the Hardcastle Public Library with raw sewage up to the second floor.

Worse still was how Dad took it in stride. Some of that might have been his good mood at finding out he wasn't going to have to foot the bill for a new gym. Mostly, though, it said he had never truly believed I was gifted in the first place.

His only comment was, “Do you think turpentine will take that bumper sticker off the car?”

I never gave much thought to the fact that me being at the Academy had been such a big deal to him. But for some reason, it bugged me that he wasn't more upset to learn that the whole thing was a sham.

“You always suspected, huh, Dad?”

He was quiet for a moment, then, “You know that website you like—the one about the ancestors and great-granduncles and old-time relatives? Well, I did my share of that kind of poking around when I was your age.”

That didn't make sense. “They had ancestry.com when you were a kid?”

“Well, back then they called it the library. But if you go through enough microfiches, you can learn the same things. The names you dig up, I've heard most of them before—Irish forebears who moved to America, Canada, England, Australia—places like that.”

Amazing! I still couldn't explain why I did the things I did. But at least now I understood why I turned to ancestry.com to look for answers.

“All those people went on to different jobs,” he continued. “Teacher, construction worker, lawyer, grave digger—even a mayor and a couple of city councilmen. As far as I can tell, they all lived satisfying, happy, productive lives, but you know what? Not one of them was especially gifted. Think about that, and maybe you'll see why I'm not so crushed about this. What matters—the only part I really care about—is that you're happy.”

It was an impressive speech for a normally quiet guy like my dad. There was only one problem: I
wasn't
happy. In fact, I was pretty far from it.

It was completely outside my control, but I felt like I was letting the robotics team down. For sure Tin Man wasn't going to win anything with Abigail at the joystick. Worse, Katie was quitting Human Growth and Development.

“If they boot my brother, they boot me too,” she said stoutly. “Who says you're not gifted?”

“
You
do,” I replied honestly. “And it's the truth. Come on, Katie, it wasn't the kids who kicked me out. They're still fourteen hours short for their credit. They'll have to go to summer school!”

“That's tough!” she snapped. “Summer school will be good for them. Let them see how the other half lives!”

What could I say? She was supporting me. Strange she should choose to start now. I felt bad, but I had to let it go. Dr. Schultz had spelled it out. That place wasn't my life anymore. In the real world, it never had been.

My locker was gone. I mean, it was still there. But while I was at the Academy, the administration had hacksawed my lock off, and all my stuff had vanished. At the office, they told me to make a list of the missing items. I tried, but the only thing worth more than three cents was one combination lock. So I gave up.

I kept seeing my locker at the Academy—spacious, freshly painted, its built-in power strip waiting to help me by keeping my devices charged—not that I had any devices. By comparison, my Hardcastle locker was about the size of a tiny apartment mailbox. It smelled like feet.

The whole building was an extension of my locker—shabby, crumbling, depressing. The Academy was a palace by comparison. I don't know if I appreciated it when I was there, but I definitely appreciated it now, surrounded by broken drinking fountains and crumbling plaster. Week-old lunches overflowed out of every garbage can. The halls rang with the voice of an assistant principal, chewing out some poor kid over a random offense. Nobody took you for a cooling-off walk and a philosophical discussion at Hardcastle. Here, a paper airplane was not an experiment in aerodynamics. It was an act of war.

I tried to work up more gratitude for being off the hook for the Atlas incident. This place just crushed it out of me. I doubt James Donovan ever stood on the deck of the
Carpathia
and yearned to return to the icy water, but I couldn't stop itching for a rewind button to whoosh me back to the Academy. It was stupid, I know. I never said I was gifted. I just wish I'd been better at faking it.

The Daniels arranged a homecoming for me that I'm not soon going to forget. In front of the entire lunch crowd in the cafeteria, they presented me with the 2012 Moron of the Year Award, which looked suspiciously like the missing toilet from the upstairs boys' room. On the bowl, in dribbling red paint, was written:
WELCOME HOME, STUPID
. It weighed a ton and a half.

“Here he is, back from a very limited engagement at the Academy for Scholastic Dork-stinction, the man who turned out to be just as lamebrained as the rest of us—give it up for
Donovan ‘The Dummy' Curtis
!”

I didn't die of humiliation. I only wanted to. There were a few lukewarm cheers, but most of the kids didn't know quite what to make of it. I'd only been gone a few weeks. Half of them might have figured I took a long trip, or had mono, or got suspended or something. Probably a lot of them thought: Who's Donovan Curtis?

“Come on, you guys!” Sanderson goaded the crowd. “If it isn't loud, he won't understand it!”

I hefted my “award”—which must have tipped the scale at thirty-five pounds—and swung it at the Daniels. The seat came off, whacking Nussbaum in the back of the head before cracking on the floor. That got a bigger response than the announcement of my award. My one consolation was that Chloe wasn't here to witness this. I didn't know for sure, but she struck me as a pacifist. At any rate, toilet fighting was probably a no-no. This might have cured her of her longing to be “normal.” If it didn't, she was nuts.

“Come on, man,” Nussbaum offered. “We'll buy you lunch.”

“I brought my lunch,” I said stubbornly.

“Then grab a table,” Sanderson instructed, rubbing the back of his head. “And don't forget your award—what's left of it.”

I was wary. “I'm not going to get blamed for stealing this, am I? I'm running low on schools I haven't been kicked out of yet.”

“See, that's what's been missing around here,” Nussbaum noted. “That Donovan sense of humor. Welcome home, bro. The place wasn't the same without you.”

We had lunch with Heather and Deirdre. Apparently, those four had been eating together for weeks. That made me the party crasher. I'd thought the one good thing about coming back to Hardcastle was at least I'd fit in. Guess again.

As it turned out, I had to throw my sandwich away. It had spent the morning in my locker, and now the mayonnaise tasted like feet. I took handouts from my four companions.

Girls put avocado in everything.

I was back with friends, or what passed for that. Funny—I'd been convinced I was friendless at the Academy. But I'd felt more a part of things in Oz's robotics lab than anywhere here at Hardcastle. How could I compare the Daniels and their jokey, in-your-face version of friendship to the guardian angel/hacker who had risked everything to pass that test for me? Now, with the Academy permanently in my rearview mirror, I still had no idea who it was. I would have liked to say thank you. In a weird way, though, that person was even more ungifted than me. It made no sense to believe that a test score could make me into something I wasn't.

Classes at my new old school weren't better, exactly, but at least I understood what was going on. I'd been faking it for so long at the Academy that it was startling to suddenly know actual answers. I even raised my hand a few times in math, until Sanderson bounced a spitball off my skull and hissed, “Dude—this isn't the Academy!”

And I couldn't help thinking, No, it sure isn't. You can see it in the paint job, and taste it in the bad cafeteria food. You can hear it in the dead air that hangs in the classroom when the teacher asks a question. You can smell it in the sweaty gym socks—so different from the synthetic-oil aroma of a set of Mecanum wheels.

While I was in the bathroom, someone stole my toilet—the award one, not the one I was using.

I made a mental note to buy Febreze for my locker.