Supergifted Read online

  I pulled Hashtag aside while Noah soaked up the glory. “Are you crazy? Why would you treat him like a hero in front of everybody?”

  He actually seemed surprised by the question. “Because he is a hero. You know that better than anybody. You’re the one he saved.”

  “Might have saved,” I amended.

  “Don’t you think it’s kind of cool? It’s like going to school with Batman or something.”

  I glowered at him. “You’re messing with me, right? Please tell me you’ve got the brains to tell the difference between that guy and Batman.”

  He shrugged. “Well, obviously Noah hasn’t got real superpowers or anything like that. But how many of us ever get to meet a hero?”

  I made a face. “So what? Hero or not, he’s still a weirdo.”

  “I don’t think that anymore,” he informed me. “Shrimpy little kid like Noah—I should have been able to wrap him around my little finger. You know why I couldn’t? Because he’s the superkid. He hadn’t saved anyone yet, but that was always inside him.”

  Look who’d turned into the big philosopher—Hashtag, who half the time communicated via a series of grunts and scratched himself in his parents’ picture window.

  It was the perfect end to a perfect day.

  At least we had something to cheer about. The Hornets destroyed Rutherford 9–1, even though Hashtag couldn’t play. The team dedicated their first win to Noah, because he was their inspiration today. Hashtag himself handed Noah a game ball, signed by all the players.

  Zane told him, “Every time I started to get tired, I thought: ‘Where would we be if the superkid gave up? Where would Megan be?’”

  Noah himself supplied the answer. “Burned up in the fire!”

  “I might have escaped!” I yelled once again.

  “No way,” said Hashtag. “You would have been a goner.”

  Noah added, “He means considering the combustion temperature of propane and the wood framing underneath the brick of your home.”

  I wanted to hug him again—this time until he stopped breathing.

  Rah, rah.

  12

  SUPERSPOTTY

  CHLOE GARFINKLE

  << Hypothesis: The greatest heroism can come from the last place you’d ever think to look for it. >>

  Or maybe it wasn’t a real hypothesis, since it had already been proven right here in Hardcastle.

  Noah Youkilis had thrown himself into a runaway truck and steered it away from a fiery collision with the house in its path. No one could talk of anything else. It was the kind of amazing story that happened in some other town, but not yours.

  Even more amazing, the superkid who performed this miracle was one of us! Sure, the gifted students won spelling bees and science fairs and summer internships—that happened all the time. But here was proof that we could be more than good grades and high test scores. We weren’t just the kids you’d go to when you needed homework help or someone to get that nasty virus off your laptop. We could make a difference. We could be heroes.

  The best part was that it was Noah. The superkid turned out to be the supergifted kid. And exactly the strengths that made him gifted—a nimble mind, an understanding of science, an ability to analyze a variety of factors and instantly decide on a course of action—had saved the day. Those strengths were our strengths. He might have been the hero, but his triumph counted for all of us. You bet we were proud of him!

  Of course, Noah didn’t attend the Academy anymore, even though he was smarter than all of us put together. But he’d been on the gifted track with us most of the way. And he still came three afternoons a week for robotics—him and Donovan. No question he was ours. So when we heard the news, it was a big deal. We celebrated like it was someone from our own class.

  We planned a little reception for him in the robotics lab on his first visit after the announcement. We hung streamers from the multicolored wires suspended like cobwebs from the ceiling, and we programmed our robot, Heavy Metal, to cross the room, stop in front of Noah, and raise a sign that read: CONGRATULATIONS, SUPERKID.

  Everyone started peppering Noah with questions about his heroic moment. Noah responded in a very Noah-esque way—a lot about the properties of propane, the effects of gravity versus inertia on a vehicle stopped on a slope, and Archimedes’s principles of buoyancy as applied to a tanker truck in a swimming pool. You know, easy stuff we’d all understood since elementary school.

  “Okay, people, I’ve got a surprise for you,” Oz announced. “Noah did an interview with The Russ Trussman Hour yesterday, and it’s broadcasting in about two minutes. Take a seat, everybody. Let’s watch our star in action.”

  We scrambled to our desks and the teacher turned on the flat screen at the front of the lab. Russ Trussman ran an interview show that had been on the air since our parents were our age. It was proof that Noah’s story was spreading beyond just Hardcastle. The Russ Trussman Hour was out of the network affiliate a few towns over, and around here it was huge. Everybody watched Russ Trussman—all the adults, anyway.

  We applauded the sight of Noah sitting on the couch that had hosted so many movie stars, sports heroes, and presidential candidates. And there in the host’s chair was Trussman himself, the perfect teeth and the perfect tan, the store-bought nose, the perfect hair (also probably store-bought.).

  << Hypothesis: The more famous you are, the fewer original body parts you have. >>

  “I can’t believe Noah is on Russ Trussman!” exclaimed Jacey, who was normally the quietest kid in the Academy. No one was immune to Superkid-Mania.

  The host asked Noah pretty much the same questions we had, and got pretty much the same answers. Noah seemed a little stiffer than usual but on the whole was fairly poised. After all, it had to be nerve-racking to have TV cameras pointed at you. The studio audience cheered every single statement he made, even when he answered “How old are you?” with “Thirteen years, two months, eleven days, six hours, and two-point-seven minutes—subject to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, of course.” Or maybe they thought he was kidding.

  The screen showed video of an enormous crane winching the propane truck out of the Mercurys’ pool while Noah recited the formula for determining how much lifting power was required. Surprisingly, the pool was undamaged, and was ready for use as soon as the fence around it could be repaired.

  “How do you think that folding chair got into the water with the truck?” Trussman asked him.

  Noah looked startled. “Folding chair?”

  Trussman frowned. “Didn’t you see it? It was the only other thing in the pool besides the tanker.”

  “I—I—maybe it’s the Mercurys’.”

  “No, I asked them,” Trussman replied. “They have absolutely no idea where it came from.”

  “Well, neither do I,” Noah told him.

  The host looked into the camera. “It seems we have a mystery on our hands. If any of our viewers can cast some light on where the mysterious chair came from, please call us at the studio. In a moment, we’ll ask our superkid about his sky-high IQ and whether his superior intelligence helped him make the split-second decision that saved a home and probably the four lives inside it . . .”

  As we watched the rest of the interview, I was distracted by the peculiar look on Noah’s face when Trussman asked about the chair. It set off bells inside my head. Not the chair itself—I had no explanation for that. But the whole story sounded . . . It was hard to say, but . . .

  What it didn’t sound like was Noah.

  How could that be, though?

  << Hypothesis: Sometimes a gut feeling carries more weight than the so-called facts. >>

  Not that Noah wasn’t a good person. Of course he’d want to help a family in danger. He might even try. But by the time he’d be done analyzing the situation, the fire from the explosion would have burned the house to the ground.

  I tried to shake the thought out of my head. Why was I obsessing over this? Finally, the hero was one of
us!

  I needed him to be real.

  But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the Noah I knew could never have done what he was now so famous for doing.

  When the interview ended we all applauded, even me. But my mind was whirling. The whole thing didn’t make sense. And as a scientist, I wasn’t a fan of things that didn’t make sense.

  Oz turned off the TV. “Congratulations, Noah. You were terrific. Now let’s get some work done. Heavy Metal’s pretty smart, but he’s not going to program his own software.”

  As the rest of the team gathered around the robot, Donovan and I brought up the rear. I watched as Noah tripped over a cable, and only Oz’s steady hand kept him from face-planting on the floor.

  I grabbed Donovan’s wrist. “It wasn’t him,” I whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “The superkid. It couldn’t have been Noah.”

  “But”—it genuinely seemed to throw him—“but everybody says it was him. The mayor. The police chief. Even Russ Trussman!”

  “I get that,” I told him, “but it’s just not possible. Listen, I love Noah—I’d never put him down.”

  “It’s not that—” Looking miserable, Donovan glanced away from me to the opposite corner of the room, and murmured, “You have to promise not to tell anyone.”

  That brought me up short. “What? What are you talking about?”

  He leaned in and whispered, “It was me.”

  “What was you?”

  What he told me shocked me down to my toes—that he, not Noah, was the superkid. That he’d only been in the neighborhood to keep Noah from tangling with a bully named Hashtag (what kind of name was Hashtag?). And by some colossal illogic, I couldn’t tell anyone about this because it would result in Beatrice being impounded by Animal Control and declared vicious. The more details he filled in, the nuttier it became.

  I glared at him. “Where do you get off making up a story like that?”

  “But it’s true!” he pleaded.

  “I sort of accept it from Noah, because he’s—well, Noah. But you? I thought we were friends!”

  “Look,” he reasoned. “You figured out it couldn’t be Noah. But it had to be somebody, right?”

  “Not necessarily,” I pointed out. “Maybe the truck changed direction when it thumped over the curb, so it missed the house and went into the pool. The simplest explanation for something is usually the correct one.”

  “The driver saw my legs sticking out the window!” he hissed in protest.

  “Eyewitnesses can be undependable,” I retorted. “When the tanker swerved, the driver assumed someone must have done it, and his mind filled in the rest. You two ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Did you and Noah cook this up to help him make a splash at Hardcastle?”

  “Of course not,” he countered. “If Noah wanted to be special, all he’d have to do is take an IQ test. The last thing he’s looking to do is stand out.”

  At that moment, Noah announced, “Our lacrosse team is on a winning streak because of me. I hope I can have the same effect on robotics.”

  I shot Donovan a grimace and joined the others around Heavy Metal. Hey, I admired Donovan a lot. I’d been the first in the gifted program to appreciate what he had to offer. But what had made him so unique at the Academy was that he brought in an outside point of view that none of the rest of us had. He wasn’t gifted—he was just normal.

  Noah, on the other hand, was the opposite of normal. I’d worried what would happen to him in regular school, and now my worst fears were coming true. Once outside the academic atmosphere of the gifted program, he’d started craving the thrill of popularity, and Donovan had cooked up this cockamamie scheme to give it to him.

  Well, maybe Donovan thought he was doing Noah a favor, but this could only end one way—with the superkid exposed as a fraud.

  Why was I so surprised? Donovan’s time in the Academy had been spent this way—always scrambling, a half step ahead of disaster.

  << Hypothesis: A leopard never changes its spots. >>

  But this time he was taking poor Noah along for the ride.

  13

  SUPERBLACKMAIL

  DANIEL SANDERSON & DANIEL NUSSBAUM

  One thing about being friends with Donovan: It was never boring.

  For us, boring was the enemy, and it had the edge over us. Boring was school’s trademark. And school owned us a hundred and eighty days a year.

  Donovan was our secret weapon against boredom. Like the time he opened the top of his uncle’s convertible halfway through the carwash, or the zoo trip when he tried to see if a human could beat a chimpanzee at a poop-throwing contest. (The human lost.)

  Sometimes we were there for the event itself. Others we just saw the aftermath, or rode with Donovan to the emergency room. We missed it when he tried to adopt the raccoon that had moved into the school’s dumpster, but we got to go to the doctor’s appointments for the rabies shots. Judging by the hollering, it was pretty painful. We could hear it from the waiting room. Sanderson recorded it on his phone, and we play it every now and then, when things get dull.

  But of all the crazy stuff Donovan had done to keep boring away, this superkid business might have been his crowning achievement, because it tossed Noah into the mix. You didn’t meet a lot of people who were a genius and an idiot at the same time. Noah was so smart that he moved the needle all the way around the dial back to stupid. Either that or his mind was far too brilliant to deal with ordinary dumb stuff like life.

  Donovan couldn’t admit he was the superkid. He needed a stand-in to cover for him. Noah.

  It was the kind of mess that only happened to Donovan. And it really made it worth our while to go to school every day.

  It was hard to get Noah alone lately. He was always surrounded by admirers. After all, Superman had Clark Kent; Batman had Bruce Wayne; Spider-Man had Peter Parker. But Noah had no secret identity to hide behind. Everybody knew who the superkid was. At least they thought they did.

  About that: What a bunch of dopes. You didn’t need Noah’s brains to see that the kid himself had zero action-hero potential. He couldn’t walk across a football field without tripping over one of the chalk lines on the turf. It proved that people would believe anything. And not just kids—the principal, the superintendent, the chief of police, the mayor.

  But don’t knock it. If everybody wasn’t gullible, we never would have had this golden opportunity.

  We waited for the last superkid fangirl to type her contact info into Noah’s phone and press it lovingly into his hand. Then we cornered him in the boys’ room.

  “Oh, hi, Daniel. Hi, Daniel.”

  Sanderson started the conversation going. “We’re going to do you a big favor, Noah.”

  “It’s okay,” he told us. “You don’t have to. Everybody wants to do me favors now. Sophie Lewin bought me mini Oreos at lunch today, and I didn’t even ask for them. I only eat regular-size Oreos.”

  Nussbaum took over. “You’re going to want this favor. It’s a good one. We’re going to do you the favor of not telling anybody who the real superkid is.”

  His usual innocent, clueless expression disappeared in a hurry. He turned pale, but since he was pretty pale anyway, the color was closer to concrete gray.

  “What do you mean?” He was as good at lying as he was at cheerleading.

  “Noah,” Sanderson clucked. “You know we know. We know Donovan is the superkid, and you were only in the neighborhood to pick a fight with Hashtag.”

  “Nice outfit, by the way,” Nussbaum put in. “Especially the painted-on boots.”

  “Just imagine how upset everybody would be if they found out,” Sanderson went on. “Think about the kids. Think about Sophie Lewin. She might want her Oreos back.”

  “She can have them!” Noah panicked. “They’re in my locker! I didn’t eat them—they were the wrong size!”

  “Don’t worry,” Nussbaum soothed. “Your secret is safe with us. But Daniel here
”—indicating Sanderson—“you know he loves to talk. Don’t freak out. He won’t. But keeping something that huge inside is going to be hard. So you’ll have to do something for us in return.”

  “Anything!” he promised. “Just name it.”

  “Our homework,” Sanderson replied readily. “We’ll email it every day after school. You can send it back when it’s ready.”

  “Donovan says the classes here aren’t challenging enough for you,” Nussbaum added. “Maybe this’ll help. Extra—challenge.”

  Noah looked relieved. “Thank you. I won’t let you down.”

  We both frowned. Maybe we should have asked him for more.

  Having a certified genius doing our homework didn’t turn out to be as good as we thought it was going to be. Don’t get us wrong, it definitely had its advantages—like the fact that we didn’t have to do it ourselves. But it wasn’t perfect.

  It was no big deal for Noah. He was so smart he could do it blindfolded. Within half an hour of the end of cheerleading practice, there it was on our iPads. He didn’t even email it. It just magically appeared as if we’d done it ourselves.

  “It’s relatively simple,” he explained. “I hack into the school’s server, and from there, gain access to your individual devices.” He added disapprovingly to Sanderson, “I don’t think one-two-three-four is a very secure passcode.”

  But there were problems. The written work didn’t sound like us. It sounded more like someone who knew what he was talking about. Worse, it sounded like Noah, which meant it didn’t sound like anybody on earth. Eventually we realized we were spending more time dumbing it down than it would have taken us to do it the normal way.

  The math and science went better, except that our teachers were finding it hard to believe that we always had the right answers without showing any work. Noah never showed work because he didn’t do any—all the calculating happened at light speed inside that goofy head of his. But the teachers thought we were copying from somebody else. We denied it, which was technically the truth. We weren’t copying; we weren’t doing anything at all. But we knew from Donovan’s experiences at the Academy that suspicious teachers were bad news.