Ungifted Page 14

  The shorter Daniel took something out of his pocket and began unfolding it meticulously. It was a T.G.I. Friday’s napkin, crushed for who knows how long in a linty pocket. He handed it to me, and I blew my nose gratefully. Neither of them spoke. It was the first time I’d ever seen those guys at a loss for a snide remark.

  Finally, the taller Daniel spoke up. “When did you say that robotics meet was?”

  CHEATING INVESTIGATION

  INTERVIEW WITH NOAH YOUKILIS

  MS. BEVELAQUA: No, you may not film this interview. I’ve already made enough appearances on your YouTube channel. But we’ll have that conversation on another day.

  NOAH: We should reach ten thousand hits sometime next week. You know, based on the rate of increase of daily views. It’s simple calculus—

  MS. BEVELAQUA: I know that. I’m a math teacher. Please pay attention, Noah. Would it be possible for someone to take control of a computer that’s transmitting over a secure internet connection?

  NOAH: Oh, sure. You just have to create an application to decrypt the data. It’s boring stuff.

  MS. BEVELAQUA: And did you do it to make sure Donovan passed his retest?

  NOAH: I thought of it, because we really need him around here. But it wouldn’t have done any good, because he got kicked out anyway. You know that statue thing? That was Donovan. What a YouTube video that would have made …

  MS. BEVELAQUA: Back up. You thought of it?

  NOAH: Sure. I was going to do it. But I forgot.

  MS. BEVELAQUA: And I’m supposed to believe that?

  NOAH: I got busy shooting a video and, by the time I remembered, the test was over. Donovan was back in class, and he didn’t seem upset, so I assumed he aced it. It is pretty easy, you know.

  MS. BEVELAQUA: I can’t believe you’re being so casual about something this important. Cheating is a very grave offense, whether you do it for yourself or somebody else. You could get expelled from the Academy for that.

  NOAH: Really?

  UNSCHOOLED

  DONOVAN CURTIS

  IQ: 112

  According to ancestry.com, James Donovan went to Washington to testify as a witness at the Senate hearings into the sinking of the Titanic. That was what I had to do, only it was more like I was saying that I deliberately picked up the iceberg and sliced open the boat with it. According to Schultz, the insurance guys needed to hear the real story straight from the mouth of the person who did it. The executives looked like they were all going to go home and yell at their kids, just to keep them from turning out like me.

  The worst part wasn’t the testimony, but the one-on-one time with Schultz in his car. The guy hated me basically because he had made a mistake. Plus, he was such a slow driver that the trip took twice as long as it should have. And trust me, the conversation wasn’t flowing. The only upside was, when he dropped me at home, Beatrice climbed into the car and peed on the floor mat. Believe it or not, I was starting to appreciate that dumb dog.

  These days, the chow chow was kind of my soul mate around home. She moped; I moped. She hid in the basement and refused to talk to anybody; me too. We lay side by side on the furnace room floor, gazing up at the spots where the ductwork disappeared into the ceiling. Her belly was even more swollen than Katie’s now. Sometimes you could actually see the skin rippling as the unborn puppies wriggled inside.

  My mom tried to pretend she wasn’t devastated by my new ungifted status. But I could read between the lines no matter what she said.

  “I’m every bit as proud of you as I was the day before we got that letter.” See the problem? Think about it. It’ll come to you.

  Katie was already nostalgic. “Strange but true, I miss those geniuses. They’re getting restless in Afghanistan. My stomach hasn’t been on YouTube for a whole week.”

  My dad reported that the turpentine had worked, and he no longer was the proud parent of an honor student.

  School was the worst. I couldn’t hack it in the gifted program, but the work at Hardcastle was just too easy. Crazy as it seemed, all my fruitless studying at the Academy had stuck with me. Now I was getting straight A’s—and instead of being happy about it, my good grades served as yet another reminder of the place I’d been kicked out of. It was like I had a foot in two different worlds, and they were moving apart. I was going to crack up the middle like a wishbone, and I didn’t much care.

  The Daniels kept trying to cheer me up. But their plans always involved doing something that would get me into trouble for their entertainment. One day they brought a stink bomb for me to set off in the cafeteria, and they were genuinely amazed when I said no. Believe me, it had nothing to do with following the rules. I just wasn’t that guy anymore. I felt the presence of that bent-over Atlas, and I couldn’t work up a stink-bombing mood.

  It was the same with the vampire teeth for the skeleton in the science lab on Tuesday and the latex vomit for the teachers’ dining room on Wednesday.

  So when I got to school on Thursday, and saw the Daniels coming at me in the hall, I was wary. “What is it this time? Itching powder for the soap dispensers? Nerve gas for the ceiling fans? Cyanide for the salsa?”

  “Better than that,” Nussbaum promised. “You need a mental health day off from school.”

  “Be serious, you guys,” I complained.

  “Trust us,” said Sanderson.

  They wouldn’t take no for an answer. I swear, I thought they were kidding, because they were always kidding. And besides, where could they possibly want to take me in the middle of a weekday, when it would be obvious to everyone that we were ditching?

  They shoved me out the double doors at the side entrance. I was just about to fight my way back in when I recognized the car parked at the curb, waiting for us. The front seat was pushed all the way back to make room for the burgeoning stomach of the driver.

  Katie.

  “What’s going on?” I demanded.

  Nussbaum grinned. “Shut up and get in the car.”

  “Hey, Donnie.” Katie greeted me as I got into the passenger seat and the Daniels crawled into the back. “Up for a road trip?”

  I was mystified. “Where are we going?”

  “Dude, it’s a very special day,” Sanderson reminded me, sitting forward until he was breathing down my neck.

  “What day?”

  “Well, let’s work it out,” Nussbaum pondered. “It’s not my birthday, and it’s not Cinco de Mayo. Christmas? No, that’s already past. It’s not the Fast of Gedalia, or Bastille Day—”

  “Cut it out!” I snapped.

  Katie was laughing. “Put him out of his misery. Tell him, already!”

  “I can’t believe you forgot,” Sanderson scolded. “Your girlfriend is going to be really mad.”

  “What girlfriend?”

  “You know—plaid Chloe with the big brain.”

  I bristled. “She’s not my—” But the thought of Chloe made me remember. Today was the state robotics meet at the Dutchess Auditorium in St. Leo!

  They were taking me to watch Tin Man.

  My first thought was I don’t want to go. Yet before the words made it out of my mouth, I realized that I did want to go. Possibly more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life. It would hurt to be sitting in the audience instead of in the pit with the joystick in my hand. But it was better than not being there at all. Tin Man was going into competition against Cold Spring Harbor and the top robots in the whole state. I should be there to cheer him on.

  “I love a good robotics meet,” Nussbaum enthused. “It’s just like the Super Bowl, only nobody cares, and it’s way more boring.”

  I shook my head. “How did you guys even know about this?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Katie put in. “I’m just the driver. Your buddies put together the whole thing.”

  “Your girlfriend told us,” Sanderson supplied. “She showed up looking for you, and she was all moaning and groaning, and a total downer pain in the butt. In other words, exactly like you’ve b
een lately. So we figured the only way to shut the two of you up was to get you together at a good old-fashioned robotics meet.”

  “Thanks—I think.” But I didn’t just think; I knew. Who would have dreamed that there were real hearts hidden under all that baloney? Not even the gifted program could have predicted it.

  St. Leo was forty-five miles from Hardcastle, but Katie needed two bathroom stops on the way, so it took more than an hour to get there. I was amazed at the size of the Dutchess Auditorium, which was a huge rambling building on the edge of town. The team had always said that the robotics meet was a big deal, but I guess I’d never really believed them.

  “Maybe it is the Super Bowl,” Nussbaum mused.

  Inside, grandstands ringed the vast floor. On one side, a checkerboard of pits was laid out in an orderly fashion, providing home bases for the teams. I counted thirty-six of them. On the other side was the course, looking remarkably similar to what we’d laid out in the gym for Tin Man. Even though I wasn’t a part of it anymore, I felt a jolt of excitement. My teammates had told me about this, had described it in such detail that I felt like I’d already seen it.

  Katie, who had trouble standing for long periods of time, settled her awkward bulk into a seat, and reserved three more for the rest of us.

  Sanderson leaned back in his chair and tipped the peak of his baseball cap over his face. “If anything happens in the next four hours,” he murmured, “wake me up.”

  “Are you kidding?” Nussbaum crowed. “It’s like a nerd city down there! One good wedgie could start an epidemic!”

  “Can it,” I ordered. I had just spotted the Academy pit. I saw Latrell first, lying on his back, working on Tin Man’s undercarriage. Tin Man! There were a lot of robots, but I only had eyes for ours. I hadn’t built him, and I wouldn’t be driving him, but the pride of ownership was electric.

  “Hey”—Nussbaum nudged his fellow Daniel—“isn’t that the little shrimp who kicked you in the face?”

  Sanderson sat up and followed his pointing finger. “He’s not so small. We’re just high up, that’s all.”

  I had to laugh. “Save my seat. I’m just going to run down for a minute and say hi to the team.”

  I worked my way through the crowd, which was made up mostly of parents and siblings of the contestants, mixed in with an assortment of teachers from the various participating schools. I stepped around a large cardboard sign that said GREAT NECK SOUTH ROBOTICS and jumped down to the floor. As I snaked through the grid of pits, I checked out a few robots. They were nothing special but, of course, I hadn’t seen them in action yet.

  I didn’t know any of the contestants from other towns, but in a way they were familiar to me. They looked like the Academy kids. The brilliant dweebs, like Noah. The psycho overachievers, like Abigail. The hands-on engineers, like Latrell. The all-purpose brainiacs, like Chloe. There was even the occasional kid who reminded me of me—some average ungifted slob who happened to get taken along for the ride. Some of the teams were tinkering and fine-tuning; some were greeting old friends and competitors; a few pits had music playing—one group was dancing, doing “the robot.”

  Right. We get it.

  The school banner read COLD SPRING HARBOR, but I would have known this team anywhere. Their pit was better equipped and better organized than anybody else’s, from the easy-access tool rack to the stacked hammocks for relaxing between rounds. Their robot looked like it had just rolled off an assembly line in a high-tech factory. It had none of the homemade, cobbled-together appearance of Tin Man and most of the others. The shape reminded me of my grandma’s giant stew pot if you added wheels and mechanical arms. But it was huge—Pot-zilla, Lord of the Robots.

  Cold Spring Harbor were the defending champions, and the kids wore their arrogance like a uniform. Come to think of it, they had a real uniform—custom T-shirts that blazoned their achievements not just at this meet but at others around the country. To look at them was to want to ram their robot down their throats. But that might have been my team spirit. If my time in Oz’s room had hammered one thing into my head, it was that Cold Spring Harbor was the enemy.

  I passed Pot-zilla and headed down the narrow aisle for the Academy’s pit, the smile already transforming my face. It had only been a week, but I could hardly believe how glad I felt at the prospect of seeing my former teammates again.

  The smile didn’t last. I was close—so close that I was about to call out to Oz—when a tall figure in a three-piece suit crossed my line of vision.

  Schultz.

  I did the fastest about-face in the history of direction changes. I couldn’t let him see me! I was supposed to be in school right now! He’d had to let me off the hook for Atlas because it made him look bad too. But if he caught me here, cutting class to attend an event of the gifted program he’d just yanked me out of, I’d get no mercy.

  I returned to the seats, heart pounding in my ears.

  “Is it over yet?” Sanderson mumbled, half asleep.

  “How are the dorks?” Katie asked fondly. “Do they look nervous?”

  “They’re fine,” I assured her.

  I wish I could have said the same thing about myself.

  UNSEEN

  MR. OSBORNE

  IQ: 132

  The state robotics meet.

  It was my favorite day of the year. There was nothing quite like it for our kids at the Academy. Schools have so many outlets for athletes to shine. But for the gifted program, robotics was ideal. It combined creativity, design, engineering, mechanics, electronics, pneumatics, and computer science, all in an atmosphere of healthy competition. It was sent from heaven.

  This year? Not so much.

  The team I brought to St. Leo was distracted and dispirited. And I hated to admit it, but I was too.

  He should have been here. Donovan. And not just because he drove Tin Man better than anybody else. My group was unmatched in ability level, but it took Donovan to make them a team. On the surface, he contributed very little. But without him, nothing worked.

  I should have been furious with that kid. He had committed an atrocious act of property damage. He had got into the gifted program under false pretenses, and had used it as an opportunity to hide from the consequences of his actions. He had cheated on the retest. Or, at minimum, he had let somebody cheat for him, which was even worse. He was barely from the same planet as my students.

  If I had been a better teacher, I would have shouted down the class’s complaints about Donovan’s sudden departure from the Academy. When the bellyaching continued, I would have set a strict rule for our class: the name of Donovan Curtis was no longer to be mentioned within those walls. And if that hadn’t worked, I would have told them a few home truths about misplaced loyalty, and people who lie and cheat to get their way. I had considered doing all those things. But I didn’t. Because, deep down, I missed Donovan just as much as they did.

  Maybe even more. I kept seeing him around the auditorium, as if wishful thinking might produce him in front of me. One time the illusion was so real that I actually began to wave before I looked again, and he wasn’t there. That’s the kind of impression the kid made.

  Dr. Schultz shook my hand and nodded affably to the students. “Good luck, everybody. Make me proud.”

  If looks could have killed, he’d have been pinned to the wall by a volley of arrows. The last time they’d heard from their superintendent, he’d been pulling Donovan out of the gym, and out of their lives.

  The first phase of the competition was the autodirected portion, where the robots navigate by electric eye, following a course of varicolored lines painted on the floor. By the time Tin Man’s heat came up, Cold Spring Harbor was already in first place with a comfortable lead over Orchard Park in second. I watched, the team crouched around me, following the stopwatch in my hand, as Tin Man ran that course to perfection. My number was unofficial, of course, but I was certain our time was right up there with Cold Spring Harbor’s mechanical monster. And when
the final scores went up, Tin Man Metallica Squarepants was ahead of the pack with a two-second lead over last year’s champions. The performance held up, and we headed into phase two with a ten-point advantage.

  We had a long break before our next event, and experience had taught me that that wasn’t always a good thing, especially for front-runners. I tried to keep the kids busy, checking things that didn’t need checking. But soon Noah came back from the bathroom with huge black thumbprints on the lenses of his glasses.

  “What happened to you?” I asked anxiously. “Is that paint?”

  “It was a stamp pad,” he replied, annoyed and embarrassed. “Those Cold Spring Harbor guys did it to me. They were waiting in the bathroom.”

  I frowned. This was something you could expect from Cold Spring Harbor that you didn’t get from any other team. They traveled with a large group, and two or three of them were big sullen boys who didn’t seem to have much to do with their robot. I think they were there as intimidators. They had certainly done a pretty good job of intimidating Noah.

  Abigail was angry. “We have to complain to the judges! They shouldn’t get away with this!”

  “Take it easy,” I soothed, handing her a cup of YoukilAde. “They’re just trying to get into our heads. And see? It’s already worked. Forget about Cold Spring Harbor. We’ll let Tin Man do our talking.”

  But as the competition progressed, the human element became a bigger factor. Abigail was at the controller, and she was darn good. But it was impossible to avoid comparisons with the way Donovan had handled the joystick. He couldn’t make Tin Man go any faster, of course. But there was a nimbleness to his driving, an economy to the robot’s maneuvers. Every cut and turn seemed to be an inch or two wider than it needed to be without Donovan at the helm. And all that extra motion added up to lost time. Before you knew it, Cold Spring Harbor had retaken the lead. Soon after that, we dropped to third position, and then fourth. That was a cause for worry, because if Tin Man fell one more place, we’d fail to qualify for the final round.