Ungifted Read online

  I was intrigued. “You know him?”

  “We went to the same elementary. He’s the kid who jumped off the roof with one of those Gymboree parachutes.”

  I sized him up. He was kind of cute in a careless, windblown way. Great eyes—black fringed, pale blue. “Well, he must be smart if he passed all the tests to get in here.”

  Abigail was unconvinced. “Maybe. But he would have had to change a lot since I knew him.”

  I bit my tongue. Okay, so Abigail thought he was dumb, but next to her, everybody was dumb. I was probably pretty dense compared with her. If Donovan Curtis didn’t measure up to Lee standards, that hardly made him stupid. There were no dim bulbs at our school. But that’s not to say that we didn’t range from somewhat bright to superbright—and in a few cases, like Abigail and Noah, supernova.

  She was telling me about Donovan getting his tongue frozen to a chain-link fence one winter, but by that time I’d stopped listening. I’d never met this new kid, but I already had him perfectly sized up in my mind.

  Donovan Curtis was normal.

  Normal! We had a lot of talents in our homeroom. Normalcy wasn’t one of them. Noah’s IQ was off the charts, but he’d yet to hold a conversation with a real human being this year. Most of the time, he didn’t even make eye contact. He always seemed to be speaking to the empty space over your left shoulder. Or Jacey Halloran, who had already discovered an uncharted galaxy, but still couldn’t figure out how to open a combination lock. Or Latrell Michaelson, our mechanical marvel, who took cars apart and put them together again blindfolded—for fun. He couldn’t manage to wrap his mind around the fact that he had to wait in the food line to buy his lunch. Every single day was World War Three in the cafeteria.

  We had kids who had set academic records, and published books, and won every conceivable prize and honor. We had kids who could quote you the exact line of dialogue that’s spoken 94 minutes and 30 seconds into The Matrix or Return of the Jedi.

  What was missing was somebody—anybody—normal.

  “I am the great and powerful Oz,” Mr. Osborne told the newcomer in a mystical tone—he said that to everybody the first time he met them. “Technically, this is homeroom 107, but you’ve probably noticed that it looks like a cross between a mad scientist’s lair and a garbage dump. We do robotics here. Even if you’re not taking robotics this semester, I hope you’ll help out with the team. It’s a pretty big deal here at the Academy.” He turned to the rest of us. “Guys, meet Donovan. Donovan—the guys.”

  There was a very lukewarm chorus of greeting. Another thing about the Academy—being gifted rarely extended to social skills. My enthusiastic “Hi!” stood out embarrassingly over the murmurs.

  Donovan ignored us. Instead, he faced our latest robot, a work in progress for this year’s competition. “What’s his name?”

  We were all stunned.

  Noah spoke up. “It’s not a he; it’s an it. It’s a mechanical device, and, as such, has no name.”

  Donovan blinked. “Robots have names. Haven’t you ever seen Star Wars?”

  Was he kidding? Half of us could recite Star Wars.

  “We’ve been doing this for a long time,” Abigail informed him in a superior tone. “We’ve made the finals three years in a row, and we did it with science, not by calling our entry Harry or Fred.”

  A few others spoke up in agreement. To be honest, I was on their side. The robot wasn’t a toy or pet; it was a machine. I kept my mouth shut, though. Poor Donovan had only been in our class about thirty seconds, and we were already jumping all over him.

  It didn’t seem to bother the newcomer. “Okay, no name.” He turned back to the robot. “Sorry, Tin Man.” Oz on the brain, I guess.

  He grabbed hold of one of the forks of the lifting assembly and gave it a hearty handshake. With a snap, it came off in his hand.

  There was nothing lukewarm about the class reaction to that. A babble of outraged accusations filled the lab. Abigail, our team captain, was on her feet barking, “You broke it!”

  Donovan tried to press the broken fork back onto the chain drive. It clattered to the floor.

  “All right! Quiet, everybody!” Oz held his arms up for order. “Donovan didn’t break anything. The component hadn’t been attached properly.” He turned to his newest student. “But it’s not a bad lesson for your first day in the lab.”

  “I won’t mess with any more of your—stuff,” Donovan promised, chastened.

  The robotics teacher shook his head. “I want you to mess with stuff. This is a place of tinkering, fiddling, experimentation. But,” he added pointedly, “before you touch, ask somebody.”

  “Especially before you touch Tin Man,” Latrell added feelingly.

  “He’s a delicate piece of equipment,” Abigail pointed out. “And he’s not Tin Man.”

  I was fascinated. Now everybody was referring to this array of nuts and bolts and circuits as he. Was it possible that in not naming our robot, Donovan had just named our robot?

  <>

  Kevin Amari raised his hand. “Even though he’s not Tin Man, is it okay if we call him Tin Man for short? ‘The robot’ is so impersonal.”

  “Maybe because he’s not a person!” By this time, Abigail was gritting through clenched teeth.

  “He’s not actually made of tin,” Noah mused thoughtfully. “But I guess Aluminum Man isn’t appropriate either, since he’s also made of titanium, steel, plastic, various polymers, and silicon computer chips.”

  “How about Metallica?” suggested Latrell.

  “That’s good too,” Donovan approved. “Anything but ‘the robot.’ Poor guy.”

  “Squarepants,” Kevin offered. “You know, because he’s so boxy.”

  “Oh, perfect,” Abigail snarled. “Now all our hard work is named after a cartoon!”

  “Let’s live with it for a while,” Oz put in hurriedly. “We don’t have to decide right away.”

  Amazing—in a few minutes we had gone from no name to three. And all because Donovan Curtis had walked into our school.

  I kept an eye on him through homeroom. Except for the mishap with Tin Man—or whatever the name was going to be—I saw no sign of the buffoon Abigail had described. If anything, Donovan was trying to be friendly—not that he was getting very far with our crew. Engaging Noah in conversation isn’t the easiest thing to do under the best of circumstances. But Donovan was asking him for advice on what to expect in some of his classes.

  “Well,” Noah replied thoughtfully, “math is easy, and the only thing easier than chemistry is biology or maybe physics. Social studies—easy. And English—well, you get the picture.”

  Poor Donovan just stared at him. He’d probably spent his entire life hearing stories about the Academy’s killer courses and crushing workload. And here Noah had dismissed them all in the space of about eight seconds.

  <>

  If Donovan had inquired about unraveling the genetic code, Noah would have said that was easy too.

  “Thanks, I guess,” Donovan told him. “Is anything in this place—well—hard?”

  “You know what’s hard?” Suddenly, Noah’s face flushed with emotion. “Trying to control your own destiny. It’s not just hard; it’s impossible.”

  So Donovan shifted gears and talked to Latrell about the robot, which also backfired. Latrell got weirdly defensive, as if Donovan might be trying to steal his job as the team’s top mechanic. And Jacey became so genuinely flustered by the newcomer’s presence that she asked him which of the earth’s continental plates was his favorite.

  Abigail went over to Donovan and put her two cents in. “You know a Gymboree parachute isn’t the same as a real parachute, don’t you?”

  Well, how could I not say something? He was going to think we were all nuts.

  I caught up with him in the hall on the way to fi
rst period. “Hi, I’m Chloe Garfinkle from homeroom.”

  I held out my hand, and he shook it lightly. Maybe he expected it to break off like that piece of robot.

  “Hey, don’t worry about the lift mechanism,” I soothed. “The weakness probably came from a bad weld that got jarred loose by the chain drive, or maybe too much compression from the Bimba cylinder.”

  He looked blank. “What’s it for?”

  “Oh, the Bimba cylinder provides the pneumatic pressure—”

  “I mean Tin Man,” he corrected. “What does he do?”

  “The robot has multiple capabilities,” I enthused. “The electric eye can navigate color-coded tracks on the floor. The forks pick up inflatable rings that the lift mechanism places on various pegs at different heights. And it—uh—he can deploy a mini-bot that will climb a pole and strike a bell at the top.”

  He seemed confused. “Is that how geniuses spend their time? Picking up toys and ringing bells?”

  I bristled. “You’re here, aren’t you? If being smart’s such a crime, you’re just as guilty as the rest of us!” He had no answer for that, so I went on in a calmer tone, “Noah’s the only one who’s really a genius. Except that the work is a little more challenging, how’s the Academy any different from Hardcastle?”

  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.

  <>

  UNKNOWING

  DONOVAN CURTIS

  IQ: 112

  When 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 cTx …

  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.

&nb
sp; 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.