Ungifted

  Amazing! I still couldn’t explain why I did the things I did. But at least now I understood why I turned to ancestry.com to look for answers.

  “All those people went on to different jobs,” he continued. “Teacher, construction worker, lawyer, grave digger—even a mayor and a couple of city councilmen. As far as I can tell, they all lived satisfying, happy, productive lives, but you know what? Not one of them was especially gifted. Think about that, and maybe you’ll see why I’m not so crushed about this. What matters—the only part I really care about—is that you’re happy.”

  It was an impressive speech for a normally quiet guy like my dad. There was only one problem: I wasn’t happy. In fact, I was pretty far from it.

  It was completely outside my control, but I felt like I was letting the robotics team down. For sure Tin Man wasn’t going to win anything with Abigail at the joystick. Worse, Katie was quitting Human Growth and Development.

  “If they boot my brother, they boot me too,” she said stoutly. “Who says you’re not gifted?”

  “You do,” I replied honestly. “And it’s the truth. Come on, Katie, it wasn’t the kids who kicked me out. They’re still fourteen hours short for their credit. They’ll have to go to summer school!”

  “That’s tough!” she snapped. “Summer school will be good for them. Let them see how the other half lives!”

  What could I say? She was supporting me. Strange she should choose to start now. I felt bad, but I had to let it go. Dr. Schultz had spelled it out. That place wasn’t my life anymore. In the real world, it never had been.

  My locker was gone. I mean, it was still there. But while I was at the Academy, the administration had hacksawed my lock off, and all my stuff had vanished. At the office, they told me to make a list of the missing items. I tried, but the only thing worth more than three cents was one combination lock. So I gave up.

  I kept seeing my locker at the Academy—spacious, freshly painted, its built-in power strip waiting to help me by keeping my devices charged—not that I had any devices. By comparison, my Hardcastle locker was about the size of a tiny apartment mailbox. It smelled like feet.

  The whole building was an extension of my locker—shabby, crumbling, depressing. The Academy was a palace by comparison. I don’t know if I appreciated it when I was there, but I definitely appreciated it now, surrounded by broken drinking fountains and crumbling plaster. Week-old lunches overflowed out of every garbage can. The halls rang with the voice of an assistant principal, chewing out some poor kid over a random offense. Nobody took you for a cooling-off walk and a philosophical discussion at Hardcastle. Here, a paper airplane was not an experiment in aerodynamics. It was an act of war.

  I tried to work up more gratitude for being off the hook for the Atlas incident. This place just crushed it out of me. I doubt James Donovan ever stood on the deck of the Carpathia and yearned to return to the icy water, but I couldn’t stop itching for a rewind button to whoosh me back to the Academy. It was stupid, I know. I never said I was gifted. I just wish I’d been better at faking it.

  The Daniels arranged a homecoming for me that I’m not soon going to forget. In front of the entire lunch crowd in the cafeteria, they presented me with the 2012 Moron of the Year Award, which looked suspiciously like the missing toilet from the upstairs boys’ room. On the bowl, in dribbling red paint, was written: WELCOME HOME, STUPID. It weighed a ton and a half.

  “Here he is, back from a very limited engagement at the Academy for Scholastic Dork-stinction, the man who turned out to be just as lamebrained as the rest of us—give it up for Donovan ‘The Dummy’ Curtis!”

  I didn’t die of humiliation. I only wanted to. There were a few lukewarm cheers, but most of the kids didn’t know quite what to make of it. I’d only been gone a few weeks. Half of them might have figured I took a long trip, or had mono, or got suspended or something. Probably a lot of them thought: Who’s Donovan Curtis?

  “Come on, you guys!” Sanderson goaded the crowd. “If it isn’t loud, he won’t understand it!”

  I hefted my “award”—which must have tipped the scale at thirty-five pounds—and swung it at the Daniels. The seat came off, whacking Nussbaum in the back of the head before cracking on the floor. That got a bigger response than the announcement of my award. My one consolation was that Chloe wasn’t here to witness this. I didn’t know for sure, but she struck me as a pacifist. At any rate, toilet fighting was probably a no-no. This might have cured her of her longing to be “normal.” If it didn’t, she was nuts.

  “Come on, man,” Nussbaum offered. “We’ll buy you lunch.”

  “I brought my lunch,” I said stubbornly.

  “Then grab a table,” Sanderson instructed, rubbing the back of his head. “And don’t forget your award—what’s left of it.”

  I was wary. “I’m not going to get blamed for stealing this, am I? I’m running low on schools I haven’t been kicked out of yet.”

  “See, that’s what’s been missing around here,” Nussbaum noted. “That Donovan sense of humor. Welcome home, bro. The place wasn’t the same without you.”

  We had lunch with Heather and Deirdre. Apparently, those four had been eating together for weeks. That made me the party crasher. I’d thought the one good thing about coming back to Hardcastle was at least I’d fit in. Guess again.

  As it turned out, I had to throw my sandwich away. It had spent the morning in my locker, and now the mayonnaise tasted like feet. I took handouts from my four companions.

  Girls put avocado in everything.

  I was back with friends, or what passed for that. Funny—I’d been convinced I was friendless at the Academy. But I’d felt more a part of things in Oz’s robotics lab than anywhere here at Hardcastle. How could I compare the Daniels and their jokey, in-your-face version of friendship to the guardian angel/hacker who had risked everything to pass that test for me? Now, with the Academy permanently in my rearview mirror, I still had no idea who it was. I would have liked to say thank you. In a weird way, though, that person was even more ungifted than me. It made no sense to believe that a test score could make me into something I wasn’t.

  Classes at my new old school weren’t better, exactly, but at least I understood what was going on. I’d been faking it for so long at the Academy that it was startling to suddenly know actual answers. I even raised my hand a few times in math, until Sanderson bounced a spitball off my skull and hissed, “Dude—this isn’t the Academy!”

  And I couldn’t help thinking, No, it sure isn’t. You can see it in the paint job, and taste it in the bad cafeteria food. You can hear it in the dead air that hangs in the classroom when the teacher asks a question. You can smell it in the sweaty gym socks—so different from the synthetic-oil aroma of a set of Mecanum wheels.

  While I was in the bathroom, someone stole my toilet—the award one, not the one I was using.

  I made a mental note to buy Febreze for my locker.

  On the way home, the Daniels and I passed by the statue of Atlas. I hadn’t been there for a while, not wanting to revisit the scene of the crime. The titan was still oddly bent, with no celestial sphere to weigh him down. And, at the bottom of the hill, the entrance to the high school gym remained boarded shut. I’d been so wrapped up in my own weird predicament that I hadn’t given much thought to the mess I’d made over here. The wave of remorse was stronger than I’d anticipated. Suddenly, twenty hours of scraping pigeon poop off a bronze sphere seemed like no more than I deserved.

  “You’ve done a lot of crazy stuff,” Nussbaum sighed, “but this was your finest hour.”

  “It wasn’t so fine for the gym,” I said bitterly. “Or for me.”

  Sanderson nodded thoughtfully. “You’re right. It would have been better if the globe had gone crashing into the parking lot. It could have smashed, like, ten, fifteen cars.”

  I glared at them. “You guys deserve the toilet award more than me.”

  Nussbaum grinned appreciatively. “Good to have
you back where you belong.”

  Where I belong. I looked at the gray, dreary hulk of Hardcastle Middle School, and felt deeply bummed that he was probably right.

  CHEATING INVESTIGATION

  INTERVIEW WITH ABIGAIL LEE

  MS. BEVELAQUA: You’re aware, of course, that Donovan Curtis has left the school for good.

  ABIGAIL: He never should have been here. I knew that from the first day.

  MS. BEVELAQUA: As did I. Which brings up the question of how he managed to pass the retest. We believe that someone took control of his computer, and helped him cheat. Was it you?

  ABIGAIL: You must be joking! I’m the last person who would help that guy! His presence lowered Academy standards for every one of us. Why would I want to help him stay?

  MS. BEVELAQUA: Well, for one thing, his sister was providing you with a Human Growth and Development credit. Then there’s the robotics team, in which he had taken a key role.

  ABIGAIL: Oh, please. He worked a joystick like any other half-witted gamer.

  MS. BEVELAQUA: Except that a better driver could have meant the difference between winning and losing. It’s been my observation that you’re not too keen on losing.

  ABIGAIL: Nobody likes to lose.

  MS. BEVELAQUA: I know how you think, Abigail. For you, education is more than learning. It’s a high-stakes chess match. The state robotics meet is a resumé builder. A better resumé means a better college. A better college means a better future. Just how far would you be willing to go to assure all that?

  ABIGAIL: Part of strategy is risk vs. return. Why would I risk getting busted for cheating over a jerk I can’t even stand?

  UNBELIEVABLE

  CHLOE GARFINKLE

  IQ: 159

  >

  Make that way stranger.

  At the Academy, we’re taught to think outside the box. But to guess this, you’d have to be so far outside the box that you couldn’t find your way back with a GPS.

  The disaster at the Hardcastle gym—that was Donovan. And by some misunderstanding growing out of it, he’d been sent to the Academy and parachuted into our lives.

  Abigail had been right, as usual. He didn’t belong. She’d said it first, but since then, every one of us had at least thought it. He’d never belonged. There was not a single imaginable reason why Donovan Curtis should ever again set foot inside the Academy.

  >

  “I miss him too, Chloe,” Oz admitted when I finally cracked in front of him. “I think we all do. But there’s no way he can ever come back.”

  “Why not?” I demanded.

  “For starters, because it comes from Dr. Schultz himself, and his word is law in this district. And second, because there are dozens of requirements for admission into the Academy, and Donovan meets none of them. Besides, what would he do here?”

  “What did he do when he was here?” I countered. “He brought us to life! He turned Tin Man from a nameless machine into a part of the family! We got a spirit from him that we don’t have anymore! And next week we’re going to sleepwalk into that robotics meet and finish dead last when we could have won it all! I don’t know if I even want to go to this school anymore!”

  He was horrified. “Chloe! You need the level of academic challenge—”

  “That academic challenge landed me in summer school!” I snapped. “And in case you forgot, Donovan had a solution for that too. And we threw him out.”

  “Katie had a choice,” Oz argued. “She could have stayed with us and finished the course.”

  “Why would she, after the way we treated her brother? I don’t blame her a bit. I blame us.”

  >

  I was so upset that I did something I’d never done before. I cut school that afternoon. Not just a class or two; all of it. I hopped on a crosstown bus, and rode east toward the one person who could help, if anybody could. I was going to Hardcastle Middle School to find Donovan.

  The ride was endless, slow, stopping at every tiny un-street along the way. I kept checking the time on my phone, but it didn’t move the bus any faster. I wasn’t sure what the schedule was at Hardcastle, but dismissal had to be coming up pretty soon. To commit my first act of truancy in a spotless school career only to miss Donovan would be too much to bear.

  I got off at the high school and started running up the hill. There he was, Atlas, sans globe, overlooking the boarded-up gym. I took heart—this was definitely the right place. But my first sight of the middle school almost took my breath away. They were already coming out, swarming all over the campus, crowding onto buses.

  I ran into the midst of the crowd, frantically scanning faces on the off chance I’d find the one I was searching for out of more than nine hundred. They all seemed familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I’d probably seen many of them at the dance. But that didn’t matter. Nobody was familiar enough.

  I was beginning to get some strange looks. “Is Donovan Curtis around?” I asked one boy.

  His response was a blank stare.

  His companion shoved him. “The dude who dissed the basketball team.”

  “You know him?” I prompted.

  “Not really.”

  >

  I caught a glimmer of how someone could disappear among a student body of more than three hundred at each grade level. It could never happen at my school. You were famous for what you knew, or what you could do, or what you might become. Or, in Donovan’s case, even for what you didn’t know.

  I tried another kid, a girl this time. “Do you know Donovan Curtis?”

  She shrugged. “I heard he transferred to the Academy.”

  “I think he’s back,” piped up the boy behind her. “Isn’t he the guy who won the toilet award?”

  Probably. It sounded like him. “Have you seen him anywhere?”

  Another shrug.

  >

  I’d always envied them their relaxed casual attitude—something that never came naturally to us in the gifted program. But right now, I felt like I was drowning, and nobody cared enough to throw me a life preserver.

  By this time, some of the school buses had taken off, and the crowd was thinning out. An ugly truth began weighing me down like a heavy meal. I wasn’t going to find him. I’d come all this way for nothing. Worse, I was going to have to get back on that crosstown bus and jounce my way home. I wasn’t even really sure what I’d been planning to say to the guy. I just knew for certain that the mere sight of him would have settled me down.

  Suddenly, a too-loud voice behind me announced, “Hey, isn’t that the plaid chick?”

  I wheeled. There they stood, staring at me, Donovan’s two friends named Daniel. I ran over to them. “I’m so glad to see you guys—”

  “Whoa—” One of them held out a hand. “Not too close! Your brain waves might fry my cell phone!”

  “Guys, is Donovan still here?”

  The taller Daniel sneered down at me. “Look who needs Donovan all of a sudden! You should have thought of that before you threw him out of your smarty-pants school!”

  “Woulda, shoulda, coulda,” put in the other one.

  I ignored their baiting, and plowed forward. “I totally agree with you. If it was up to me, Donovan would still be at the Academy. That’s what I came here to talk to him about. Has he left yet?”

  “He wasn’t in school today,” the taller Daniel said finally. “Schultz took him to meet with the school district’s insurance company. You know he’s the guy who busted the gym, right?”

  “We were eyewitnesses,” added the other one. And he went into this ridiculous story about how Donovan had, for no reason at all, whacked the statue on the rump with a tree branch, and all the damage had happened because the globe had disc
onnected and rolled down the hill.

  I was just about to say, “How stupid do you think I am?” when it dawned on me—that story was totally Donovan! It was exactly why he was so needed at the Academy. None of us ever did anything without thinking it out in detail, making an elaborate plan. Donovan acted—whether it was hitting a statue, or naming a robot, or stealing a motor, or finding someone to teach Human Growth and Development because she was Human Growth and Development. For Donovan, it was all as natural as breathing.

  “Well,” I stammered, “can you give me his phone number? I really need to talk to him.”

  Taller Daniel was indignant. “And give you brainiacs another chance to make him feel stupid? No way! He’s miserable enough!”

  And then, as if I hadn’t sufficiently humiliated myself, I began to sob like a heartbroken child. Part of it was pure frustration with this wild-goose chase—the fact that these two jerks could easily have put me in touch with Donovan, but they wouldn’t. And part of it was this: I’d been so wrapped up in what we’d lost, how we’d suffered, the fact that we’d have to go to summer school; I’d never even wasted a thought on how Donovan must have felt about all this. How selfish was I?

  >

  “Hey, wait a minute!” the other Daniel exclaimed. “What are you doing?”

  “Go ahead!” I sniffled. “Let me have it! Make fun of the Academy nerd crybaby! All I wanted to do was let him know how much we miss him, and how we’ve all been like zombies since he left! Next week is the robotics meet we’ve been preparing for all year, and now nobody even wants to go! I didn’t come here to make him feel bad! I came to tell him how sorry we are!”

  I fell silent, catching my breath, and waiting for them to laugh in my face. This was one more thing to regret for poor Donovan: He had such lousy friends.