Supergifted

  “Come on, Megan,” I argued. “Give the guy a little credit. He used to be a disaster. Now he isn’t anymore. You’ve got to appreciate that. It’s easy to be good at something when you’ve got natural ability. But when you really, really stink, and you have to work hard, and never give up, and finally get to be just so-so—that takes commitment. That’s what it takes to become a hero.”

  She glared at me. “Oh, please. He’s only so-so because I changed our routines to keep him at a safe distance,” she snarled. “And gave him things to do that even he couldn’t screw up.”

  “Have a heart, Megan. He’s a great guy. And not just because he saved your life—”

  “Might have saved my life,” she corrected through clenched teeth.

  “Look,” I said. “I made fun of him too. I hid his pants in gym class—the whole nine yards. And I was wrong. Just because he’s weird and skinny and kind of funny-looking and talks like an encyclopedia doesn’t mean he isn’t as good as anybody. And you know what else? I like him.”

  She rolled her eyes. “News flash: You’re the president of his fan club. If you had a magic wand, you’d turn yourself into him.”

  “Not true!”

  “Look at yourself. You’re even standing like him—hunched over, your head hanging, your knees bent—”

  “I am not!”

  “Look!”

  She whipped out her makeup compact and held up the mirror. Oh, man, she was right! I threw my shoulders back, stuck out my chest, and straightened my legs. “Well, so what? When you make friends with somebody, you pick up some of each other’s habits.”

  Come to think of it, I’d been noticing a lot of kids, boys and girls, looking like that—round-shouldered, kind of stooped. It had to be Youk—not only did we see him around school, but his picture was displayed in store windows, and he was constantly in newspapers and on TV, especially The Russ Trussman Hour. He was like a fashion statement—you know, when some celebrity does something and everybody starts to copy it. I called it “The Youki-look.”

  The funny part was that Noah didn’t have the Youki-look so much anymore. As he got better at cheerleading, he also started standing up straighter.

  “It’s from Marine training,” he explained when I asked about it.

  You had to love the guy. It was like everything else he said. He might have been joking, but who could tell? Maybe he was talking about some military stuff he found on YouTube. If there was one thing the Youkinator liked more than cheerleading, it was YouTube.

  I used to think that I was popular because I was an athlete, and I hung out with all the right girls, and the cool people. But Youk was the opposite of that—an oddball loner who nobody really knew, and didn’t have any friends, except maybe that loser Donovan Curtis. And, true, people only noticed him because he got famous. But that was a while ago. At first, people liked Youk because he was the superkid. Now we liked him because he was Youk.

  Soon the governor would be coming to town to honor him. Governor Holland had never visited Hardcastle before, not even when he was running for office. But in a few short days he’d be in our cafeteria, giving our Youkinator a medal.

  That was going to be epic.

  22

  SUPERREVEALING

  MEGAN MERCURY

  Ms. Torres always taught us that there was a cheer to cover every situation. Your team was down by fifty points? E for effort! That’s how we do! We are proud of you! Pouring rain for the entire game? Weatherman, weatherman—you’re no good! The bleachers were on fire? EMT for you and me! Let’s all hear it for the VFD!

  She was wrong. There could be no cheer, no chant, no routine for a situation where the entire world was upside down.

  On Saturday, Governor Holland was coming to Hardcastle to hang a medal on Noah. It started out as a celebration for just our school. But once people like Mayor DaSilva and Superintendent Schultz got wind of it, the whole town was involved. Decorating the cafeteria had become an obsession. No classwork had been done for days. All anybody had to say was, Can we make more streamers or posters or paper chains for Saturday? And the teachers would be off to the art room for supplies. Seriously, Earth could have had an extra rainforest if it wasn’t for the construction paper we used.

  As I walked through the halls, Noah’s face beamed at me from every wall. My school, where I’d been head cheerleader since sixth grade, host of the best pool party every spring. I used to be somebody in this school. Now I was just the almost-victim the superkid had saved, and the most important thing about me was that my house had been there to allow him to become super.

  Could you do a cheer for insanity? Give me an I! Give me an N! . . .

  No. Nothing to cheer about here.

  On Friday, the Hornets won their eleventh straight lacrosse game, breaking a school record and taking first place in the county conference. And did anyone congratulate the players, or the coach, or the goalie, who had a shutout, or Zane, who scored four goals?

  Of course not. Instead, the Hornets stormed the sidelines and hoisted the superkid up onto their shoulders for a victory lap. And while that was going on, the rest of my squad cheered louder than they had during the actual game.

  That was the last straw. “Oh, please!” I exclaimed in disgust. “You act like he’s personally responsible for an eleven-game winning streak! He’s never touched a lacrosse stick in his life, and if he did, he wouldn’t know which end to hold! He’s a cheerleader like the rest of us, except that we’re good and he’s hopeless!”

  They didn’t like that. Vanessa stood right up to me. “You’re the one who always told us that school spirit is just as important as physical ability. Well, Noah has more spirit than anybody!”

  “And he definitely gets the crowd excited,” Kelsey added, “which is every cheerleader’s main job.”

  “Noah’s a great cheerleader!” Vanessa insisted. “Maybe he didn’t start out with mad skills, but he’s worked really hard, and you give him no credit at all.”

  “Fine,” I conceded. “He isn’t as clumsy as he used to be. That’s not saying much. No one is as clumsy as he used to be. So, sure, he improved—only because it’s impossible to be less than zero.”

  “You’re wrong,” Vanessa said seriously. “He could be as good as any of us. You’ve written him out of all our big routines. Most of the time, he’s just cheering by himself thirty feet away.”

  “Where he can’t do any harm.” I pointed to her nose. “You know that better than anybody.”

  She shook her head. “Where he’ll never be able to show that he’s on our level, because you won’t give him the chance.”

  “The last time I gave him a chance, he nearly took your head off.”

  She looked me straight in the eye. “You always told us that cheerleading was as legit as any sport—that it took just as much ability and drive and commitment. Well, Noah’s more driven and committed than any of us. He’s ready to show that he’s got the ability. Only you won’t let him. I’ll bet you’re not even that grateful to him for saving your life!”

  “Hey—no one can be sure that I would have—” I protested.

  But Vanessa had already turned her back on me and joined the other cheerleaders, who swarmed around the players toting Noah. It was the biggest celebration of the season so far, and I wasn’t part of it.

  Her words haunted me. Was it true? Was I really so blind where Noah was concerned? Okay, he’d gotten better. I never said he hadn’t. For sure he wasn’t falling all over the place anymore. His posture was straighter; his balance was decent; there was a level of confidence in his movements . . .

  Was he as good as Vanessa and the others believed—and I was too biased against him to see it?

  It was impossible to tell. I didn’t watch him on the sidelines, mostly because I wanted to pretend he wasn’t there.

  So you couldn’t go by me. But you couldn’t go by the others either—they were such superkid fans that they thought everything he did was perfection.


  I needed an impartial judge. But who?

  My eyes found Noah in the swirling festivity. He was reaching down from his perch on everybody’s shoulders to high-five Katie Patterson in the first row of bleachers. On closer examination, I saw that it wasn’t Katie’s palm he was slapping; it was the tiny hand of a very young baby in Katie’s arms.

  It hit me: Katie was Noah’s private cheer coach. However much he’d improved, it had to be thanks to her. She had a better sense of Noah’s true ability level than anybody.

  Could I trust her opinion? As his teacher, maybe she wouldn’t be impartial.

  One thing settled it for me: Katie was a fellow cheerleader; a fellow head cheerleader. Sure, she was an adult now—but once you’d carried those pom-poms, it was like a sisterhood.

  I didn’t know where she lived, but Donovan was in the school directory. He’d tell me where to find her.

  It was Saturday morning. At one o’clock the entire town of Hardcastle would be squeezed into our cafeteria to watch Governor Holland hanging a medal around Noah’s pencil neck. At ten-thirty, though, the day looked totally normal. Nice, even—sunny, not too hot. Cheerleaders lived for weather like this, where you could run up and down the sidelines without a) freezing in your miniskirt, or b) sweating into your makeup. Three cheers for Mother Nature!

  But there was no game today. My mission began at the Curtis house, so Donovan could point me in the direction of his sister Katie, the Klutz Whisperer. She was the magician who had supposedly made a cheerleader out of the clumsiest dolt ever to hop, skip, and face-plant across a sports field.

  I rang the bell at Donovan’s address. From inside, I heard a couple of dogs barking. Finally, the door opened and I was startled when Katie herself appeared. She looked kind of frazzled, holding a pacifier into her baby’s mouth. Yesterday, I hadn’t realized how young the kid was—a newborn, practically.

  “You live here?” I blurted.

  She nodded. “Temporarily. Until my husband gets a long-term assignment. Megan, right?”

  “Right,” I said, thrilled to be recognized by my one-time hero.

  She sized me up. “Are you looking for Donnie? He had to go to the Academy.”

  “For Scholastic Distinction?” I finished in amazement. That didn’t fit the picture of Donovan I had—you know, the kind of idiot who’d dive-bomb a pool party from a tree.

  She grinned. “Yeah, it doesn’t sound much like my brother. But he’s on their robotics team. The eggheads are doing a demonstration for the governor today, and they’re working the last-minute bugs out.”

  “You’re the one I actually need to talk to,” I told her.

  She invited me in and we sat down on the couch. The house wasn’t a mess exactly, but there was a bassinet in the middle of the living room, an infant swing on the floor, and dog toys scattered everywhere. On the wall was a portrait of Katie in a beautiful white wedding dress and a tall, very good-looking guy in a military uniform, and a smaller picture of a much-younger Donovan as a Little Leaguer. The look on his face seemed to say: I can think of a lot of good uses for this bat, and hitting a baseball isn’t any of them. I’d seen that expression on his face more than once.

  “You’ve been coaching Noah, right?” I began.

  “Donnie told me he was a hopeless cheerleader,” Katie explained. “So I thought maybe I could help him. But it was a lost cause.”

  “No—he’s gotten better.” It hurt to say, but I was never going to get to the bottom of this if I couldn’t be honest with myself. “Some of the girls think he’s as good as anybody on the squad.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Katie admitted. “I couldn’t do anything with Noah. That’s when my husband took over.”

  “Your husband is a cheerleader?”

  She shook her head. “He’s a tank commander in the Marines. They don’t do cheerleading. They march. For miles. With heavy packs. That’s what he and Noah have been doing. It’s been like boot camp around this place—push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, tire flips—you name it.”

  I was blown away. “And it works?”

  “It must,” she replied, “because he was a total loss when I tried to work with him—Kandy, stop chewing on the playpen!”

  She was scolding the weirdest puppy I’d ever seen—light brown, with a bushy tail and giant feet that looked like they belonged on a grizzly bear.

  “Boot camp,” I repeated. “How would that do anything?”

  Katie shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Ask Brad. He believes Marine training is the answer to all the world’s problems. Kandy—stop! Kandahar!”

  My head snapped up. “Kandahar? The dog’s name is Kandahar?”

  Katie nodded. “That’s where Brad was stationed in Afghanistan.”

  My mind traveled back to when the pool guy had pulled that dog toy out of the filter—purple plastic, dumbbell shaped. And the name written across it . . .

  That wasn’t like Fido or Poochie. How many Kandahars could there be in a town the size of Hardcastle?

  How had this puppy’s toy ended up in my pool?

  “Kandy chews on everything these days,” Katie was explaining. “Shoes, carpets, furniture—he’s not fussy. He used to have a bowwow bone he loved, but we managed to lose it somewhere.”

  It was like being struck by lightning. In that electrified instant, I knew exactly who had lost the bowwow bone—and exactly where and how. Donovan had lost it in my pool while climbing out of the propane truck that he—and not Noah—had steered away from my house.

  Noah wasn’t the superkid. It had been Donovan all along!

  How could I have missed it? Noah was the last person in the galaxy who would ever jump into a moving truck. Not only was he physically incapable of it; it would never even have crossed his mind to try.

  My eyes returned to the photograph of Donovan the Little Leaguer, brandishing the bat with unholy glee. That was the face of someone who’d be crazy enough to throw himself at tons of runaway propane without even thinking about the worst-case scenario. I pictured him dropping from the sky into the middle of my pool party. He was exactly the right kind of reckless idiot! And I remembered what had happened a few seconds after that—that same Donovan tackling Peter out of the way of the falling tree branch.

  He wasn’t the hero type, not even close. But deep down, hidden beneath his many faults, he’d always had that heroic streak. It had been staring me in the face all this time.

  Donovan had saved my family. It was a hard thing to wrap my mind around—mostly because I had to unwrap my mind around the idea that Noah did it.

  I had to come to terms with it—I owed my home and family to Donovan the Doofus. Not even a doofus. He was just sort of—nobody. Not an athlete, not a genius, not a ladies’ man, not a student council type. It was like being indebted to a filing cabinet, or the flagpole in front of the school.

  Only what filing cabinet ever risked its life to protect a house full of sleeping people?

  I was suddenly overcome with a wave of gratitude toward Donovan. For the first time, I felt like there really was a superkid in Hardcastle.

  “Are you okay?” Katie asked in concern. “You’ve gone all pale.”

  “I’m—fine.” I got up and headed for the door, nearly tripping over Kandahar. “I just realized I have to be—uh—somewhere.”

  “Will I see you at the governor’s ceremony later?” she called after me. “I think the whole town’s going to be there to cheer for Noah.”

  “For sure,” I managed. “I can’t wait to see Noah get what’s coming to him.”

  23

  SUPERFRIEND

  NOAH YOUKILIS

  In his theory of general relativity, Einstein predicted that the fabric of space was actually curved. That was pretty smart for some guy back in 1915, but he missed the most important part. Not only was space curved, but so were cause and effect.

  When I was at the Academy, my 206 IQ made me special. I left there to go to Hardcastle Middle School to follow my dream to become a
verage. And it worked for a while. Before long, though, I was the superkid, which meant I was special again. I had followed the curve of cause and effect from unique to ordinary and back to unique.

  Which was fine. I hated the way I was tops at the Academy, but being the superkid was fantastic, especially the part where I got to be famous and everybody wanted to be my friend.

  And today had to be the very best of a long line of really great days. Today, Governor Holland was coming to town to present me with the state’s highest award for youth achievement. Donovan thought this was a terrible idea, because he was the one who’d saved the Mercury house, not me. But as I saw it, human history was filled with examples of people getting rewarded for doing absolutely nothing. Look at all those kings and emperors and sultans and grand dukes who never did anything except get born into the right families. Besides, it wasn’t as if the governor asked me if I wanted a medal. He just decided I was getting one. What was I supposed to do? He was the governor.

  I wasn’t even sure if Donovan was my friend anymore. It made me sad, but there was no more logic in crying over friendship decay than there was over radioactive decay. It was just how the universe worked. These days, Donovan complained about everything I did. Not like Hashtag, who said it was the governor who should feel lucky for the chance to present a medal to me.

  “Hold still, Noah.” Dad finished tying my tie and folded my starched collar back into place. He clapped the shoulders of my blazer. “Mom and I are so proud. But I hope you realize that we’d be proud of you, superkid or not.”

  “That’s good to know,” I said, honestly. It was supposedly both a blessing and a curse to raise an exceptional child like me.

  My phone rang. It was Chloe, calling from the robotics lab. The rest of the team had been there all morning. Heavy Metal was still acting up, and time was running out to fix the problem before the demonstration for the governor.

  “We’ve been through every micron of Heavy Metal, and we can’t find anything wrong.” She sounded exhausted and a little bit scared. “It has to be a software issue.”