Ungifted

  I couldn’t suppress a smile. “It said ‘fireproof’ on the box.”

  “Maybe that meant the box was fireproof,” Nussbaum conceded.

  We all laughed. At the time, it hadn’t been funny, but it was pretty funny now.

  “I’ll show you the robot.”

  Homeroom 107 wasn’t far from the gym—just two turns down dim hallways past the custodial offices and a couple of science labs. The door was closed but unlocked. I opened it, and turned on the lights to reveal the organized chaos that was the robotics program.

  “Whoa!” breathed Sanderson. “Paging Dr. Frankenstein!”

  Funny, I was used to the place. But to the Daniels, it might as well have had bubbling test tubes and jagged forks of electricity dancing up Jacob’s ladders. Equipment was piled on every surface, components and spare parts lay strewn like candy wrappers, and odd instruments and tools hung from the walls. There were even “cobwebs” of multicolored wires suspended from the ceiling and stretched all over.

  “So where’s the robot?” asked Nussbaum.

  I pointed to Tin Man at the center of it all. “Star of our show.”

  “What? That?” Sanderson exclaimed in disbelief. “That’s just a metal box with a picture of some old guy eating a banana!”

  “That’s Einstein, Einstein!” Nussbaum exploded.

  “He’s old, isn’t he?”

  “No, he’s dead! Sheesh! How stupid can you get?”

  Sanderson gestured at the jungle of wires and technology that surrounded us. “Donovan, you understand all this … stuff?”

  “I don’t understand any of it,” I replied honestly. “Even Mr. Osborne doesn’t get much more than half. That’s why it takes a team. We’ve got mechanical people, electronics people, computer people, hydraulics people, and pneumatics people.”

  “Which are you?” Nussbaum prodded.

  “I downloaded the pictures,” I admitted ruefully. “And I’m good with the controller—years of practice with video games.”

  They seemed dissatisfied with this explanation, like I was holding something back. “Guys, you of all people know why I’m at this school. Do you think I got into the Academy for my brain, and then busted up the gym on purpose so I’d have a cover story as an excuse to come here every day? I’m hiding! I know it’s not going to last forever, but I have to keep it going at least until the heat dies down. My family doesn’t have the kind of money it would take to fix that gym. Or to pay for lawyers if we get sued! So please don’t make it any harder than it already is.”

  They took pity on me. It must have been the lab that did the trick. Maybe it finally sunk in how unfun it was to be the only mental turkey in a school of soaring eagles.

  By the time we got back to the gym, the dance was completely off the chain. The floor almost moved with the force of hundreds of pounding feet. Bodies were packed in like sardines, the heat and humidity pushing past the tolerance level. The chaperones were trying in vain to thin out the crowd, which had to be far past what the fire marshal would have found acceptable. Whatever food and drink was left had been mashed into a paste and spread as a thin film across the hardwood. The music was so loud that the beat rattled your brain inside the casing of your skull.

  Did I mention the smell? Pizza, sweat, and AXE body spray.

  Sanderson grabbed Nussbaum. “Let’s find Heather and Deirdre!”

  “I’ll catch up with you guys later,” I promised. It was a lie. The only person I intended to catch up with was Mr. Osborne. Once my extra credit was in the bag, I was out of here.

  You couldn’t push through this crowd any more. You had to be swallowed, the way an amoeba ingests its food. Movement was worth your life. At least twice, the ebb and flow took me out onto the dance floor. At one point, I passed very close to Chloe, who glared at me, still miffed. When I finally spotted Oz, he looked like he now regretted making attendance mandatory for his students. It served him right.

  I waved my arm in an attempt to catch his attention, and that was when I recognized the other adult standing beside him, the man who had to be even hotter than the rest of us in his three-piece suit.

  Dr. Schultz.

  I ducked out of the superintendent’s line of sight. He’d never spot me at the crowd’s butt level. Being trampled was a small price to pay to remain hidden. Extra credit meant nothing now. All that mattered was escape.

  I got down on all fours and crawled, not the most dignified way to leave a party, and definitely not the cleanest. Let me tell you, whether it’s the coolest Hardcastle jock, or the dweebiest squint in the Academy, it hurts the same when they’re stomping on your fingers. But it was the most efficient way to travel. Pretty soon, I was at the door, home free.

  Before I made my break, I gave the madness one last scan. What I saw nearly stopped my heart.

  At the very center of the dance floor, the nucleus of the amoeba, a huge tight circle had formed around a small group of dancers. Three of them, to be exact. Daniel Sanderson, Daniel Nussbaum, and Tin Man Metallica Squarepants.

  Rage almost blinded me. My “friends” had doubled back to the lab and wheeled the robot right into the riotous pounding heart of the Valentine Dance.

  The dilemma was excruciating, and instantly clear. If I went back in there to rescue Tin Man, and Schultz spotted me, my whole world would come crashing down around my ears. What did I care if Tin Man got trashed? It wasn’t my robot. It wasn’t even my school. The sum total of my contribution to the project was a name and Einstein eating a banana!

  No. Not true. I’d made another contribution—the Daniels. If it wasn’t for me, those two bottom feeders would never have known that Tin Man even existed. Anything that happened to that poor robot tonight was my fault.

  That’s when it hit me. I did care. Not so much about the robotics team—and definitely not about some bucket of bolts on Mecanum wheels. How many chances did I get to limit the damage of my impulses? Once Atlas’s globe is rolling, there’s nothing anyone can do to save the gym at the bottom of the hill.

  But this was different. Tin Man wasn’t wrecked yet. There was still time to make things right.

  I pushed back into the gym, jamming my way through dancing torsos. I could see that my trajectory was taking me on a collision course with Oz and—yikes!—Dr. Schultz. The adults had spotted Tin Man and were rushing to the robot. I grabbed a baseball cap off the nearest head, and jammed it low over my face. Why make it easy for the guy to bust me?

  Some of my classmates had noticed too. Kevin, Jacey, and Latrell were stuck at various places in the crowd, struggling to reach Tin Man. Abigail was red-faced and screaming, although her cries were inaudible in the general din. Chloe got behind me, riding my wake toward the scene of the crime. We were making progress, but would we get there in time?

  At the center of it all, Sanderson was draped over Tin Man’s back, rolling the robot to and fro as if slow-dancing with it. Nussbaum had hold of the two forklift arms, and was jitterbugging to his own rhythms. I tackled him to the gym floor, and when he went down, he took one of the arms with him. Triumphantly, he held it over his head, and an enormous cheer rose in the gym.

  To my classmates, it meant only one thing: Tin Man was being dismantled.

  Kevin and Latrell faced down Sanderson.

  “Get away from Tin Man!” Kevin bawled.

  Problem was, those guys had never been in a fight in their lives, so their body language was completely unfightlike. Latrell couldn’t even make a fist properly—he had his thumb pressed inside his fingers.

  Sanderson took one look at that and laughed in their faces. He stopped laughing, though, when Abigail booted him in the shins.

  “Get out of my school, you”—she struggled for just the right put-down—“you average person!”

  That’s when it got ugly. A shoving match broke out. After a few seconds, it was no longer just the Daniels vs. the robotics team. The conflict had widened. It was now Hardcastle vs. the Academy.

  All the rese
ntment, the jealousy, and the bullying attitude toward the gifted program boiled over at that very spot, turning the dance into a free-for-all, with Tin Man caught in the crossfire.

  The bloodcurdling shriek was barely human. We all looked up to see Noah Youkilis, poised atop the deejay’s giant speaker tower, muscles flexed—at least, they would have been if he’d had any. The bizarre pose left no room for interpretation. It was a ridiculous time to notice it, but I finally understood what his outfit was supposed to be. He was a WWE wrestler, just like the ones he’d seen on YouTube, only fifty times skinnier.

  And before everybody’s horrified eyes, he did exactly what they do on SmackDown. He launched himself off the tower in a spectacular dive into the fray. I figured he was dead meat. But his fall was broken by the people he landed on. The crowd swayed, absorbing his impact. Many figures went down. Tin Man was one of them.

  Oz looked like he wanted to tear himself in half. I’m pretty sure he couldn’t decide whether he should rush to the aid of his fallen student or his fallen robot.

  And then, for the first time all night, something intelligent happened. The fire alarm went off. At first I was kind of surprised it wasn’t me who did it. It was very much my style. But when I looked over at the wall, the culprit was standing there, still holding on to the lever.

  Dr. Schultz. I guess when you’re the superintendent, you don’t have to worry about getting in trouble.

  In the blink of an eye, several hundred kids swarmed the gym door. Hey, I knew an exit strategy when I saw one. I was gone before Schultz could even glance in my direction.

  UNSORRY

  NOAH YOUKILIS

  IQ: 206

  For all the eight hundred million videos on YouTube, you had to figure there were at least another eight hundred million that never got filmed.

  YouTube had its conundrums too:

  A) The best stuff comes when somebody does something awesome.

  B) Awesomeness is unpredictable, so it isn’t practical to have a camera in hand at all times to capture it.

  Me being the hero of the Valentine Dance, for instance.

  One day it might be possible to hardwire a person’s optic nerve to a tiny memory chip implanted in the base of the skull. You’d just need a simple internet connection to upload the images to YouTube.

  With our best minds focused on curing diseases and stuff like that, I wasn’t holding my breath.

  Speaking of the dance, Friday night had not been kind to Tin Man. Oh, the scratches could be buffed out, the dents repaired, and the broken forklift arm reattached again. But the motor that ran the lift mechanism had suffered permanent damage, and Oz said our budget for new materials was exhausted.

  Abigail was distraught. “But if we don’t have a lift mechanism, we’ll have to withdraw from the competition!”

  This prospect had Jacey so stressed out that she started talking about South American butterfly migrations. If anyone knew more random facts than me, it was Jacey.

  But today it was getting on my nerves. “My blunt-trauma anterior epistaxis is better, thank you very much!”

  “Who cares about your dumb bloody nose?” Abigail snapped.

  “I care!” I shot back. “It really hurt! I didn’t see any of you guys single-handedly rescuing Tin Man in the riot.” For some reason, I was getting no credit at all for sacrificing my body. If it isn’t on YouTube, it might as well have never happened.

  “More like you caused the riot,” put in Latrell sourly. “When you jumped on everybody from the top of the deejay booth.”

  “It wasn’t a jump,” I explained through clenched teeth. “It was a takedown. It was a textbook wrestling move.”

  Chloe turned to Donovan. “Your two friends named Daniel—why did they do that? Why would they want to mess with our robot?”

  Donovan shrugged. “A lot of kids have an attitude about the gifted program. And those guys definitely have an attitude now that I’m in it. Look at this place—Hardcastle’s an ancient ruin compared to here. They’ve got about a sixteenth of the stuff we do. They may call us nerds, but it’s pretty cool having your own robot.”

  I didn’t agree. A robot wasn’t cool; it was just complicated. Like the LEGO Star Wars Imperial Snow Walker. (Consumer Reports said that not even a genius could put one together. They were wrong. I’d already assembled six.)

  In my opinion, having a robot was a lot less interesting than having a riot. Riots were unforeseeable and chaotic—very YouTube-like.

  Oz tried everything to get money for a new motor. He requested funds from the athletic budget, but he couldn’t convince them that Tin Man was more important than badminton. He even took apart his own lawnmower in the hope that the engine would be the right size. It wasn’t—and now the lawnmower won’t go back together again. Latrell has to go to his house to fix it.

  “Couldn’t we raise the money?” Chloe pleaded. “Sell candy bars or something? We can’t drop out!”

  Oz shrugged unhappily. “There’s simply not enough time to set up something like that. The robotics meet is in three weeks.”

  Donovan was even quieter than usual during the entire class. Tin Man’s outer shell was completely covered with graphics by now, so there was nothing for him to do but drive. And with the lift system inoperable, there was no sense driving the robot anywhere.

  Finally, when the period was over, he gathered us in the hall. “I think I’ve found us a spare motor.”

  Abigail began jumping up and down. “What? What? Where?”

  “In the custodial office,” he explained. “It runs one of the floor polishers. You’d know better than me, but I’m pretty sure it’ll fit Tin Man.”

  “How did you reach that conclusion?” I inquired. “Did you measure the unit itself, or are you thinking of the size and location of the key components and connections?”

  “I guessed,” he admitted a little sheepishly.

  We stared at him in amazement. After all, we were the ones who had created Tin Man, not Donovan. It had taken design, programming, electronics, hydraulics, pneumatics, and mechanical engineering. No guessing.

  Donovan explained. “There are two ways it can go. It can either fit or not fit.”

  “A probability analysis?” I mused.

  He shrugged. “I can’t say for sure it’ll work. But I guarantee that if we don’t at least try, that bucket of bolts will have no lift motor. What have we got to lose?”

  Chloe had a practical question. “And the custodians are letting us have it? They’re always so crabby.”

  Donovan grinned. “They’re really great guys.”

  He insisted that we had to pick the engine up immediately, even before going to the cafeteria to eat. We’d all learned to trust Donovan for one reason or another, so we went along with it. But when we arrived at the custodial office, it was deserted.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  “At lunch,” Donovan replied.

  “But where’s the motor?” Abigail persisted.

  “It’s in the floor polisher,” Donovan explained, producing a screwdriver. “Where else?”

  It was all beginning to make sense. The custodians weren’t giving us anything. We were taking.

  Abigail was furious. “We can’t steal their motor!”

  “It’s not their motor,” Donovan lectured. “It’s the school’s motor. It’s also the school’s robot.”

  I’d seen things like this on YouTube, but never could I have imagined being a part of it in real life. It took Latrell several tense minutes to dismantle the polisher and remove the engine.

  “Put the cover back on,” Donovan instructed. “We don’t want them to see it’s missing.”

  Abigail was practically hysterical. “Don’t you think they’re going to notice when they try to polish the floor?”

  I was the lookout. It was my job to give the code word if I saw one of the custodians coming.

  “Pythagoras!” I hissed.

  Donovan yanked the screwdriver out
of Latrell’s hand and tossed it out of view while kicking the floor polisher under a workbench. In the same motion, he herded everybody into the supply closet, jammed in after them, and slammed the door. I’d never seen anybody move so fast.

  “It’s okay,” I called. “I was just testing.”

  Donovan came out of the closet and fixed me with twin lasers. “Do that again and they’ll be watching your funeral on YouTube.”

  I admired Donovan, but he scared me sometimes.

  Sneaking back to the robotics lab with our prize was the most exciting experience I could remember, even better than my big takedown at the dance. I knew a lot about the effects of adrenaline on the human body, but that was different than actually feeling my heart pounding against my rib cage. Fear mixed with exhilaration, plus the notion that, at any second, we could get caught. It was almost as if I hadn’t really been alive until Donovan showed up at the Academy.

  Oz was ecstatic. “Where did you guys get this?”

  It didn’t bother him at all that nobody answered.

  The polisher’s motor was a little bit bigger than the broken one. “We’ll have to reconfigure it to run on battery power,” Oz advised. “And the extra weight might slow us down a little.”

  “But we’ll have a lot more juice,” Donovan put in.

  “We don’t need more juice,” Abigail pointed out. “The task is to pick up inflatable rings that weigh practically nothing.”

  Oz had a different opinion. “We had a real problem, and we found a way to solve it. That’s what the robotics program is all about.”

  The next day the floor looked a little dull and neglected. But Tin Man was back online.

  The rumor started with Kevin Amari, who dropped the bomb in the cafeteria.

  “I overheard Oz telling Mr. Del Rio that they’re going to retest Donovan for the Academy.”

  Chloe choked on a celery stalk. “What? Why?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Abigail said flatly. “It’s obvious to everybody he isn’t gifted. They gave him a few weeks to prove himself, and he didn’t.”

  “He’s proved himself a million different ways,” Chloe argued.