Ungifted (5 page)

He gave me a half smile. “Seriously?”

“If there's one thing we're good at here,” I assured him, “it's being serious.”

“Have you ever been to Hardcastle Middle School?” he asked.

“I know we probably take some things for granted—”

“But they're probably not the things you think. If you want to plug in a computer, can you find an outlet with three prongs? Can you find one that even works? Will part of the suspended ceiling come down on your head in the middle of class? Will the cafeteria refrigerators break, so you can't buy lunch for a day, or a week, or a month?”

“Hey, things like that happen at the Academy too,” I insisted, almost triumphantly. “Last year the freezers failed so there was no ice for”—the wind went out of my sails as I realized how lame this was going to sound—“the sushi bar.”

He nodded sympathetically. “You guys should get T-shirts made. You know: I Survived the Sushi Crisis.”

“Hey!”

“All I'm saying is that you brainiacs have a nice racket going here.”

I skewered him on that point. “Don't you mean
we
brainiacs? You're one of us now.”

“Right,” he agreed, flustered. “But—well, I just got here, so you've been riding the gravy train longer.”

“Regular school has its advantages, right?” I didn't want to seem dorky, but I was genuinely interested. “Dances, parties …”

A shrug.

“Pep rallies, sports—the basketball team is all-city. Wasn't there some kind of huge accident at their last game?”

His eyes narrowed. “What do you know about that?”

“Everybody's talking about it. A piece broke off this statue....” My voice trailed off. Why did he seem so suspicious? I was only trying to be friendly, and he was acting like this was a CIA interrogation under hot lights.

“I don't go to that school anymore,” he said very sharply, almost like he was mad at me. “I'm too—smart.” And he stormed away, leaving me standing in the hall with my mouth hanging open.

It wasn't his rudeness that struck me. It was this: Ever since I'd started at the Academy, the one thing I'd been yearning for was somebody normal. Now, finally, he was here.

<<
Hypothesis: What if the normal people are even weirder than we are?
>>

W
hen the paper airplane bounced off the back of the driver's head, the man pulled the bus over onto the shoulder. He got out of his seat, picked up the offending aircraft, and waved it at us.

Honest—it wasn't me. The last thing I wanted to do at the Academy was draw attention to myself. But I was so used to getting blamed for stuff that I braced myself for the onslaught.

“Interesting experiment,” the driver said in an approving tone. “The air moves with the bus, so the plane flies normally. An open window would interfere with that. The more open windows, the greater the interference. And if the bus had no roof, the plane would be half a mile behind us.”

Whoa, even the Academy bus drivers were gifted! If you chuck a paper airplane at someone, they assume you did it for science. On my old bus, the driver would have held us all hostage until we gave up the person who did it—probably me. And you can bet that “interesting experiment” wouldn't have been what he called it.
Mutiny
, maybe. Or
armed insurrection
.

There was a smattering of applause as a seventh grader, flushed with triumph, reclaimed his plane, and we were under way again.

Soon we arrived at the Academy for Scholastic Distinction, which looked absolutely nothing like a school if you ask me. It was, by far, the most modern building in town. Every inch of the place was covered with solar panels. On sunny days, it was like pulling up to a jewel-encrusted palace. Supposedly, the students had worked with the architects who designed it. The Academy was 100 percent eco-friendly, right down to the bathrooms, where the toilets had different “flush settings,” depending on the kind of waste you were getting rid of. There was no button for “cherry bomb,” which is what the teachers invested a lot of energy preparing for at my old school.

Mr. Del Rio, the principal, stood outside the automatic sliding doors greeting his students with handshakes. At Hardcastle Middle, you never saw the principal unless you did something wrong—which, in my case, was fairly often. Mom always used to say, “Donnie gets a lot of personal attention at the very highest level at that school.” She was so proud that I was at the Academy now. I felt a pang of guilt for the bogus reason behind it.

Determination surged through me. Maybe I could hack it here. After all, half of being gifted was just the fact that everybody
expected
you to be smart. Like that seventh grader on the bus. No way was that any experiment. The guy made a paper airplane, and he couldn't resist flying it. Well, Couldn't Resist was practically my middle name. I wasn't that different from the Academy kids. Obviously, I was never going to star at this place. But with hard work, a little bit of luck, and a lot of good acting, I might just be able to fake it.

If
x
represents the vector of variables
, b
and
c
are vectors of known coefficients, and
A
is a matrix of coefficients, determine the maximum value of the objective function
c
^T
x
…

I stared at the problem until my liquefied eyeballs were about to drip out of their sockets and roll down my cheeks.

All around the math room, my classmates were working away, calculating and figuring. It went without saying that I couldn't
do
it. Man, I couldn't even
read
it.

In the next row, Noah Youkilis was scribbling away like it was the easiest thing in the world. The kid really
was
gifted—although anybody who looked like Noah and
wasn't
gifted would have a genuine complaint. Picture a four-foot-eleven praying mantis suffering from extreme malnutrition, with a long nose and glasses that were last in style when President Truman wore them.

As he plowed methodically through the page, I couldn't help noticing what a dark pencil he was using. The numbers really stood out against the bright white of the worksheet. Another thing about me—I've been blessed with excellent peripheral vision. Well, what was I supposed to do—sit there while the period ticked away? According to ancestry.com, my great-great-great uncle was a “spotter” during World War One—he floated over the battlefield in a hot-air balloon and peered down into the German trenches. It didn't explain much about me, since he never tried to bungee-jump out of the basket. But it was probably why it was so easy for me to copy the answers off Noah's paper.

I tried to get a few wrong, which was actually pretty tricky. I understood so little that it was impossible to know what a reasonable mistake might be. Even cheating was harder in this place.

Noah scrambled up on scrawny legs and handed his paper to Ms. Bevelaqua. “I'm done.”

She glanced at it and then handed it back without so much as notation. “All right, Noah. Do it properly this time.”

The praying mantis hunched a little farther forward. “I'm working to the best of my ability! It's not my fault this math is too hard! I'll never get it right!” His lower lip quivered.

The teacher nodded understandingly. “Poor you. It isn't easy to master calculus in middle school.”

“This isn't calculus; it's linear programming!” Noah blurted. “Everybody knows that!”

“Right,” she said triumphantly. “Including you.” She motioned him back toward his seat.

He looked bummed at getting caught, but he couldn't have been half as bummed as I was. In a class of geniuses, I had copied from the guy who got it wrong on purpose.

Luckily, there were plenty of fish in the sea. I leaned a little closer to Abigail Lee, who was motoring through the assignment at almost-Noah speed. I remembered her from elementary school, where she'd been all-universe at anything that took brains. Her writing wasn't quite as clear, but beggars can't be choosers. At least I had the reasonable belief she wasn't trying to fail. What was up with this Noah kid, I couldn't imagine.

“Hey!” Abigail hunched over, blocking my view of her paper. “What do you think you're doing?”

I played dumb. “What?” I covered my worksheet, like I was preventing
her
from copying from
me
.

“Ms. Bevelaqua!”
she bawled.
“Donovan's cheating!”

“Chill out,” I tried to hiss.

“I'm not going to chill out! If we have the same answers we'll both get zero! I've never had a zero in my life! I can't get zero! I work too hard to get zero! What am I going to tell my tutors if I get zero?” She was red in the face, heading for purple.

Noah seemed genuinely bewildered. “Well, if you're looking for the
right
answers,” he asked me, “why don't you just
calculate
them?”

“Big talk from the freak who goes out of his way to put down the wrong ones!” I retorted.

That got Chloe's back up. “Watch who you're calling a freak, you—
troglodyte
!”

“Yeah?” I spat back. “Well, I don't know what that is, so trog-whatever to you too!”

Then this girl Jacey, who said random things at moments of stress, announced, “In Brazil more cars run on ethanol than regular gas.”

It had the effect of a referee's whistle, separating the combatants from their clinch.

I learned a few things in that class. First, the regular student code about not ratting people out—that didn't apply at the Academy. Second, nobody knew how to deal with cheating, because it never happened. No one needed to do it. Third,
zero
is a four-letter word.

Amazingly, I didn't really get in trouble, although it was pretty obvious who was copying from whom. I wasn't sent to the office; there was no detention; nobody even yelled at me, which was a first in my educational experience. Instead, my homeroom teacher, Mr. Osborne, came and suggested we take a walk. At Hardcastle Middle, if you're caught off campus during school hours, they've practically got guard towers to gun you down. I was beginning to see that they had two sets of rules in our district—one for the brainiacs, and one for everybody else. Of course, I was living the good life now. But I still took it personally since I knew it was all a mistake.

“Look, Donovan,” Mr. Osborne said pleasantly, “at the Academy, we've got kids who are talented at a lot of different subjects. But very few of us are good at
everything
. If you're not up to this math, it's no disgrace to admit it. In fact, it happens all the time. We have regular classes too.”

I nodded dumbly.

“This is a period of discovery,” he went on. “We're getting to know you, and you're getting to know us. And during that process, we'll explore where your true gifts lie. Are there any fields of study that really turn you on?”

I hesitated. Sooner or later, somebody was going to realize that my presence here was completely bogus. But—also sooner or later—my namesake, James Donovan, would have joined his fellow
Titanic
passengers on the bottom of the ocean. He'd survived by staying afloat until the rescuers could get to him—
by making it later rather than sooner!

I had to keep swimming.

“I think,” I said aloud, “that we should stick with the exploring part a little while longer.”

He nodded approvingly. “Very wise. Let's not rush into anything. But promise me you'll join the robotics team and help out with Tin Man. I mean—our entry.”

“Last time I touched Tin Man, his hand fell off,” I reminded him gently.

He shrugged it off. “You'll watch and learn. That's what the Academy is all about.”

“Thanks, Mr. Osborne,” I mumbled.

“Call me Oz.”

I hate it when adults do that.

The Hardcastle Mall used to be one of my favorite hangouts. Tonight, though, it looked a little drab and in need of a face-lift. It wasn't the mall that had changed. It was just that school was newer, nicer, and cleaner. The Academy, not Hardcastle Middle, obviously. Our cafeteria had better options than the food court, and the prices were lower.