Ungifted (20 page)

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.

 

 

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?

<<
Hypothesis: Truth is stranger than fiction
.>>

M
ake 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.

<<
Hypothesis: I don't care
.>>

“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.”

<<
Hypothesis: Desperate times call for desperate measures
.>>

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.”

<<
Hypothesis: Donovan made a bigger impression in just a few weeks at the Academy than in nearly three years here
.>>

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.

<<
Hypothesis: Non-Academy kids are very loose in the shoulders
.>>

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 disconnected 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?

<<
Hypothesis: We don't deserve Donovan at the Academy
.>>

“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.

The shorter Daniel took something out of his pocket and began unfolding it meticulously. It was a T.G.I. Friday's napkin, crushed for who knows how long in a linty pocket. He handed it to me, and I blew my nose gratefully. Neither of them spoke. It was the first time I'd ever seen those guys at a loss for a snide remark.

Finally, the taller Daniel spoke up. “When did you say that robotics meet was?”

 

 

MS. BEVELAQUA
: No, you may not film this interview. I've already made enough appearances on your YouTube channel. But we'll have that conversation on another day.

NOAH
: We should reach ten thousand hits sometime next week. You know, based on the rate of increase of daily views. It's simple calculus—