Quicker (an Ell Donsaii story) (2 page)

Then he saw his Grandfather step into the room with one of the kitchen knives. To Jamal’s great admiration, the frail old man advanced with sudden vitality toward the struggling couple on the floor and quickly dropped, plunging the knife into the soldier’s back.

But it didn’t plunge! It stopped, point barely penetrating the soldier’s armored backplate. Propelled by all the force he could muster, the old man’s hands slid off the handle and down over the blade lacerating his fingers. With a shout that must have been a curse the soldier rolled off Jamal’s mother and away from his grandfather. A pistol appeared in the soldier’s hand and barked twice at Grandfather, then swung to Jamal’s mother where it barked once. 

The soldier stuffed his obscenely swollen organ back in his pants and was struggling to his feet when another beetle helmeted soldier burst in through the doorway. “What happened?”

“Tryin’ to question these frags when they attacked me! Sunsabitches!”

The second soldier looked for a moment at Mother’s bare legs. Briefly Jamal thought he would question the story he’d been told. But then the soldier simply shrugged, looked back over his shoulder and said, “Let’s get outta here.”

The two soldiers hustled out of the door, leaving Jamal desolate and alone. No family. No friends. No life. Just an upwelling bleak hatred.

***

Jamal stood staring at distant heat mirages through the chain link fence around the refugee compound.  A small voice came from behind him. “Jamal, there’s a man wants to talk to you.”

He turned and saw Aki’s sister. For a moment he saw his friend’s smiling likeness in her face, but her face sagged with no hint of Aki’s sparkle. He thought back, trying to remember if she had always been this way? Or just since Aki and her father’s death? She started to turn away and Jamal realized he should respond. “What does he want?”

“He’s talking to boys who don’t have families.”

Jamal wandered to the little table where the man sat near the entrance to the compound. The man, obscenely fat, sweated profusely and wiped his head with a cloth that had probably once been white. Jamal instinctively disliked him. “What do you want?”

“You have lost all your family?”

“Yes.”

“And you hate the Americans for their part in your tragedy?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want revenge?”

Jamal stared.
Revenge? Of course, but how?
Nonetheless, “Yes.”

The man stared into Jamal’s eyes. “You might be killed… or called upon to die.”

“I do not care.” Jamal spit into the dust.
What was there to live for?

The fat man stared into Jamal’s eyes a few moments longer, then shook his head as if frightened by what he saw. He wiped his head again and stood. “Come.”

“I, will, not, study, that, accursed, language!” Jamal’s eyes were slits and he could barely control his trembling fury. “All these things you want to teach me are worthless. They will not help me kill Americans! Just give me a gun and send me into the city! Or give me a bomb and I...”

The blow cut him off in mid sentence. Jamal flew from the stool upon which he had been sitting to crash against the dusty mud-brick wall. Head ringing Jamal looked up into a face somehow all the more fearsome for not appearing angry. “Little one,” the man who had struck Jamal shook his head. “Our plan is not to waste you in killing one, or two, or even fifty Americans. Oh no, you will be much more deadly than that. A great warrior does not kill a
few
through brute strength but
thousands
through cunning. At the moment you have no cunning. However, we will teach you cunning, and deceit, and strategy. We will fashion you into a weapon much more dangerous than the Americans’ vaunted ‘smart weapons.’ For now though, you are a ‘dumb weapon’ who does not even know how little it knows.” The man squatted down, bringing his face within a few inches of Jamal’s. His garlicky breath and coarsely pitted skin made Jamal shrink away. “You will learn what we
tell
you to learn
when
we tell you to learn it and you will
not
complain again!”

Thus Jamal set about learning English and eventually many other things he thought unimportant. But he never again complained. Not even when he found, years later and to his great amazement, that he was being sent to the accursed America to study at a university there.

Chapter One

Ell’s AI chimed in her ear, “You have a call from Mr. Mandal.”

Mandal was her school counselor. Ell said, “Yes?”

Mandal’s voice came on, “Ell, your SAT scores have come in, I assume you’ve seen them?”

“Yeah, my writing score sucked.”

Mandal chuckled, “Ell, you maxed out the math section! I wasn’t even aware that they gave 100th percentile scores until
you
got one! I checked with the testing people and it means you got the highest score in the country, so that it was better than 100 percent, or
all
, of the other test takers. I’m
certain
that this is the first time anyone in our school district got the high score in the country. And as a sophomore you can take the SAT again next year and focus on getting a better score on the writing section.”

“But I want to go for early admission.”

There was a pause. “Can you come in and talk about it? I’ll look into what your options might be.”

“Come in?” Ell couldn’t imagine what they couldn’t handle over the net?

“Yeah, we should talk, ‘off the record.’”

The next morning Ell was in Mandal’s office and they both unjacked their AIs. “Ell, why are you in such a rush to get off to college?”

She shrugged, “Just want to get out of here I guess.”

Mandal scratched his chin. He knew that Ell’s mother had remarried a couple of years ago. “Trouble at home?”

Ell shrugged again. “Naw.”

“Your step dad, what’s his name again?”

She grimaced, “Jake Radford.”

“Mr. Radford causing you any trouble?”

“He’s a jerk. But it isn’t anything I can’t handle.”

Mandal looked hard at her. “Is he doing anything to you?”

“No! I don’t like the way he looks at me. But he’s harmless. I just can’t believe my mother married him is all.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes! Talk to me about colleges.”

Mandal looked at her pensively for a few more moments. The girl was very, very attractive. She had brilliant green eyes, short, silky, strawberry blond hair and a smooth unblemished complexion with a light sprinkling of freckles on an evenly proportioned, “pixie like” face. Slender and an athletic phenom, she could easily get a softball or volleyball scholarship, but she’d already told him that she wanted to focus on academics in college. “Do you have money for private or out of state schools?” Mandal knew her mom was a schoolteacher and doubted that they had a lot of savings, but maybe there was insurance money from her father’s death or possibly the step dad had money?

“No! In state will be hard enough. Couldn’t I could get a scholarship?

“Athletic?”

“No!”

“Well your scores would get you
some
kind of scholarship. To be honest you probably could get a great scholarship if you’d get involved in some leadership activities and pull up that writing score on the SAT.”

“No! I want out of here by the end of next year and I
don’t
want to ‘run for office.’ It’s hard enough being two years younger than my classmates without making a target out of myself by running against Mindy Martin for class president!”

Mandal sat back, bemused. Ell’s apparent shyness and feelings of social inadequacy always surprised him. She never seemed to believe that people liked her. His personal take of the school’s social dynamics placed her as one of the most popular kids in the school. She might be chronologically younger than her classmates but she acted more maturely than most of them. She didn’t seem to belong to any cliques, but he thought she was liked by almost everyone. Her stunning looks, he was sure, contributed to her popularity—except with the country club clique of fashionable girls who might be jealous. Mandal didn’t think she acted “better than thou” like a lot of the other pretty girls did anyway. He wasn’t even sure
she
understood
that she was beautiful. In any case, her humility regarding her sports accomplishments and her willingness to help
anyone
with
any
problem had to be a huge part of it too. Besides, just her athleticism guaranteed that she would be admired, especially because she wasn’t a “glory hound.” He wondered if she thought she wasn’t “popular” because she didn’t belong to any of the cliques?  “I’m pretty sure you’d have a good chance at being elected to office,” he started.

“Hah!” She interrupted, “Not a chance. You really have no idea what it’s like.”

Well
, he admitted to himself,
that’s true; I really didn’t know what goes on within the kids’ social dynamics.
Kids loved by teachers were sometimes despised by their peers without the teachers realizing it.

“OK then. Carolina? I’m almost certain you could get in. I doubt you’d get a full ride scholarship like the Morehead without doing some of the things I’ve mentioned though.”

“No, State. I want to study engineering. Well, maybe physics.”

“It’s a good school. You could apply for the Park scholarship, but I really don’t think you’d get it based on your grades and a record setting math score alone.”

“I can
apply
to both schools
and
for both scholarships though right?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t any private or out of state schools have full ride scholarships?”

“I’ll look into it for you. Would you consider a military academy?”

A wrinkle formed between Ell’s eyebrows. “Military?”

“West Point, Navy, Air Force Academy. They provide full rides to
all
their students but you owe them some time on active duty afterward. Great educations though, and they’re all big in engineering.”

“Huh, I’ll look at their stuff on the net.”

Kristen heard Ell come in the front door. “Ell? Did you get your SAT results today?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Well?” Kristen said with the patiently exasperated tone of a parent having to drag conversation out of a teenager.

“I got 94th percentile on reading but only 78th on writing.”

“Ell, those aren’t bad! Especially for a sophomore… Wait, how’d you do on math?”

“Oh… I got 100th percentile on math.”

“Hundredth?! What does that mean? I don’t know the scoring system, but how can anyone get the hundredth percentile?”

“Um, it’s the max score. It means that it was the highest score of all test takers this year.”

“Really?! The max score for all sophomores?”

“No, for all takers Mom.”

“My God, Ell! That’s wonderful! I knew you were good at math but holy crap!” She paused and frowned, “How are you that good at math when the Carteret county schools don’t even have any AP classes for you to take?”

“You can take AP classes online. They’re expensive if you take them for credit but you can ‘audit’ almost all of them for free.” She shrugged, “I
really
like math. After I got interested in it I audited the online AP courses and then some free online college courses. The courses had a lot of recommended reading and most of that was pretty cool too.”

“How did you have time to do that between your sports and school and stuff?”

“Just here and there, it doesn’t take all that long to get through a course.”
Especially when you really like the subject,
Ell thought to herself.

Kristen stood stunned for a moment, wondering how her daughter could just breeze through advanced math courses without any help and tell her that, “
they don’t take long.
” Then Kristen threw her arms around her daughter, “Oh, Ell! You make me so proud! We’ve got to go out and celebrate!” Mother and daughter bounced up and down together in excitement.  “Just wait ‘til Jake gets home.”

Ell’s frame of mind slumped. She’d been excited to go out and celebrate with her mom. But, not with Jake. She had a feeling he’d ruin her good mood somehow. Ell heard the back door creak open. “I’m home.” Jake called out. He stepped into the room and frowned, “What are you guys all wound up about?”

Kristen beamed, “Ell got a ‘hundredth percentile’ on the math section of the SAT?”

Jake’s brow drew down further, “That isn’t possible.”

Ell wondered whether he meant that there was no such score or that it couldn’t be possible that his stepdaughter got a good score. Kristen grinned though and said, “I’d never heard of a ‘hundredth percentile’ score either, but Ell says it’s the highest score of all takers this year, meaning that she did better than 100% of the other people who took the SAT!”

Jake shook his head and said, “That can’t be right. Forward your result to my AI.” His tone was suspicious, preemptory and demanding

Ell stared at him for a moment as ice ran down her spine and she felt her right eyelid twitch involuntarily several times. Then she said, “No.” Her resentment at a hundred little ‘put downs’ from Jake over the past few years had just boiled over.

“What?!”

“I said no. You can trust me or not, but they’re
my
results and I’m
not
forwarding them to
you
.” Ell heart throbbed and she worried that she might get so wound up that bad things could happen. She still had nightmares about blinding the man who’d attacked her mother three years ago. She looked down at the floor and took a couple of deep, calming breaths.

Kristen looked at her in shock. “Ell!” She’d often been uneasy about the rude way that Jake talked to her daughter but Ell had always let it roll off in the past. Kristen had wondered if her uneasiness about his condescension was just an overreaction. After all, mothers are often overprotective of their children.

Ell felt calmer. She looked her mother in the eye. “Sorry Mom. You love him, but I don’t and I’m just
so
sick of his attitude toward me.”