Ungifted (17 page)

“I didn't think so,” I said crisply. “He's bailed you out on Human Growth and Development and he's the Mario Andretti of the robot-driving circuit. But his academics are no better than they ever were.”

“Well then, how did he pass the test?” Oz demanded with growing defiance.

“Maybe he didn't,” I mused, voicing for the first time a thought that had been nagging at me over the past few days.

“Are you saying he cheated?” he sputtered. “Impossible! He took that test over a secure internet connection directly from the state department of education. He was alone in the library with a staff member's eye on him every second.”

“It's impossible for Donovan,” I agreed. “But what about the others?”

His incredulous expression slowly settled into one of alarm. Of course the others were capable of hacking into a secure connection, some of them without breaking a sweat.

“Why would they do it?” he managed at last. “Why help him pass?”

“Open your eyes, Oz. They
love
him. And it isn't just because of his sister and the way he drives the robot. He's normal, he's casual, he's capable of having a good time. He's everything they can't seem to master, despite all their brains.”

He looked melancholy. “I like him, Maria. Maybe he doesn't belong, but he's good for these kids. He completes them.”

“He turned one of them into a cheater,” I reminded him.

“Hey, we have no evidence of that.”

And that was the whole problem. If one of Oz's superachievers had found an undetectable way to take control of a secure computer and do the test for Donovan, who would ever be smart enough to prove it?

 

 

MS. BEVELAQUA
: Your score on the retest was remarkable, Donovan.

DONOVAN
: Thanks.

MS. BEVELAQUA
: It far outstrips any work that you've done in class. How do you explain that?

DONOVAN
: I studied really hard.

MS. BEVELAQUA
: Come, now. You know this isn't the kind of test you can study for.

DONOVAN
: Maybe I got lucky. Some people are just good test takers.

MS. BEVELAQUA
: Or maybe someone helped you.

DONOVAN
: I was all alone. Ask the librarian.

MS. BEVELAQUA
: It's possible to take control of a computer remotely. In that case, someone would be able to do the test for you.

DONOVAN
: I wouldn't have a clue how to do that.

MS. BEVELAQUA
: I believe you. In fact, you've just proved my point. You could never accomplish such a thing. But the person who achieved that score could.

DONOVAN
: I don't know what you're talking about.

MS. BEVELAQUA
: Yes, you do. I want the name, and I want it now.

DONOVAN
: I'm late for robotics.

MS. BEVELAQUA
: You realize that we're talking about cheating here.

DONOVAN
: You know the kind of kids in my class. Who'd risk that kind of trouble to help someone like me?

MS. BEVELAQUA
: Perhaps nobody. But to help the brother of a living, breathing Human Growth and Development credit …

W
ell, it was official, confirmed by the vet. Beatrice wasn't dying. She wasn't even some evil demon dog dumped into the world for the purpose of ruining my life. She had a reason for her nasty behavior. The chow chow was as pregnant as I was. I never thought I'd say this, but she had my sympathy.

And that was pretty pregnant. Dr. Orsini said Beatrice might even whelp before I did. That came out wrong. Beatrice was the one who would be whelping.
I
would be giving birth. And while I knew exactly who the father was, the jury was still out on Beatrice. Odds were, we were about to welcome a litter of serious mongrels. And if you've ever seen a chow chow, you'll know they don't mix well with any other breed. So the Westminster Kennel Club was out.

I still hadn't worked up the nerve to tell Brad—even though the whole fiasco was his mother's fault, not mine. To be honest, I didn't like to distract him with the kind of problems that would seem silly to someone fighting a war. Plus, he'd been emailing me about how relaxed and happy I seemed lately, and I didn't want to spoil it by dumping this big matzoh ball in his lap.

From: First Lieutenant H. Bradley Patterson, United States Marine Corps

Honey, you're the best! I know this has been a stressful time with me away and the baby coming. What's your secret? …

My secret?

Reality check—I felt like I'd swallowed an anvil and it was lodged behind my belly button. I'd gained thirty-two pounds. A stiff wind was enough to knock me off balance. I had to sit so far back from the dinner table, I needed a telescope to see my food. My legs were covered with varicose veins. My back ached. My skin had broken out, thanks to my raging hormones. I couldn't allow myself to be more than sixty feet from a bathroom. Yeah, I felt wonderful.

Was it the news that the dog wasn't dying? Ha! Just because Beatrice was okay didn't mean she wasn't driving me nuts. For the past month she'd had no appetite at all; now she was eating us out of house and home. She had no bladder control, so the carpet was a minefield. She was antisocial to everyone except Donovan. And her new hobby was disappearing. The last time she vanished it took an hour to find her curled up inside a bale of pink insulation in the furnace room, and longer than that to pick the fiberglass fragments out of her coat.

I'd moved back in with my parents and kid brother, a world away from my husband, who was fighting in a war zone. My life stunk, no doubt about it.

But Brad was right. He had read between the lines of my emails. I
was
relaxed, even happy. Positively serene.

Why?

It had to be Human Growth and Development. For some reason it was like therapy. Only instead of telling my innermost secrets to some high-priced shrink, I was spilling my guts to Donnie's geek patrol. For free!

Trust me, I could have killed my brother when he blackmailed me into serving as their class pet like a lizard in a glass terrarium. It would have been uncomfortable enough in front of normal kids. But to be stared at by these geniuses with their Coke-bottle glasses and analytical frowns—it was like being dissected and having your vital organs spread out on slides. At first, I had to pretend I was floating above my body, and that was somebody else down there being studied.

But then there was this one morning when I got out of bed and stepped right into one of Beatrice's puddles. By the time I got that sopped up, my spine felt like the disc spaces were filled with lava, but my mother only wanted to talk about the wonky pilot light in the furnace. So I wrote an email to Brad that was so full of whining and complaining, you could have set it to music. I deleted it without sending. Reality check—the poor man was risking his life every day. He didn't need to hear my problems.

That was when I glanced at my watch and realized that I was counting the minutes until I could go to the Academy and lay out my complaints to the only people who seemed to be interested. Chloe, Abigail, Latrell, Jacey, Kevin, even Noah—they'd understand because they understood
everything
. They knew more about me than my husband; they knew more about my pregnancy than my doctor—and they were a lot easier to reach than either of them.

When friends took me out to dinner, and I was unsure whether or not it was safe to eat oysters, I texted Chloe. I had the answer I needed—cooked, okay; raw, never—within thirty seconds. When I noticed an odd chemical on the ingredient list of my shampoo, I emailed Abigail, who was able to tell me it was just a harmless preservative. When I became alarmed by a strange rash on my belly, I had the perfect resource to turn to. I watched Noah's YouTube video “Stomach of Champions,” which proved that the skin had been like that for weeks.

How had I survived without those guys?

Until Human Growth and Development I hadn't realized how
alone
I was, even among my own family. Going to those medical appointments was like walking the Tour de France route, up steep hills and over broken roads, all by myself. But when I saw the minibus parked outside the clinic, my spirits soared because I knew I had a team with me—even if it was a robotics team. One day, the bus broke down on the way to the office. Dr. Manolo wouldn't start the appointment until the kids had arrived. He forwarded Oz Listserv emails from the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. This class wasn't just going to pass Human Growth and Development. They were going to be qualified to teach it. All except Donnie. If there was one of them who didn't have a clue, it was my lunkhead brother.

What was he doing with these brilliant, motivated students? That was the biggest reality check of them all. Was it that, as his sister, I couldn't see how gifted he really was? Or did he just not care about this course because he already had the credit?

We were replaying the results of my fetal echocardiogram, watching the image of my baby's tiny heart beating on the Smart Board. It was entrancing. Chloe was almost in tears at the beauty of it. Abigail scribbled pages of notes, all without looking away from the screen. Noah had the flip cam trained on the monitor, so I knew this would be on YouTube in Kandahar before I got home that day to warn Brad that it was coming. The whole class, including the teacher, was fascinated.

All but Donnie. He was bored out of his mind, struggling to keep his butt in his chair. And he lost the struggle, jumping up and mumbling, “Going to the bathroom.” He practically galloped out of the room.

A few minutes later, a couple of visitors walked into the lab, and Oz paused the video. I knew one was the principal, Mr. Del Rio. The other looked like a congressman, or some other kind of big shot, an older guy in a very snazzy suit.

He walked right up to me, smiled warmly, and held out his hand. “I'm Dr. Schultz, superintendent of the Hardcastle schools. I came specifically to meet you, Mrs. Patterson, and thank you for what you're doing for this class.”

That's
why he looked familiar. He used to be the principal at North High when I was a cheerleader at Hardcastle. He's the jerk who lodged a complaint that our uniforms were too “minimalist.” He'd been a stuffed shirt back then, and it didn't seem as if that had changed now that he had the top job.

But all that was in the past, especially my cheerleading career. I was a mature adult, almost a mother. I shook his hand. “I'm happy to do it. They're great kids.”

Dr. Schultz went on for a while—how selfless I was, people should follow my example, my brother was so grateful, blah, blah, blah. He seemed to think that a) Donnie needed the credit I was providing, and b) Donnie was actually
here
, and not in the bathroom. Neither Oz nor Mr. Del Rio corrected him, though. I guess you don't interrupt a superintendent, even when he hasn't got his facts straight.

Then Donnie made his return—at least he started to. His head poked in through the doorway. His eyes widened in horror at the sight of Dr. Schultz—like I was standing with Count Dracula, not the superintendent of schools. Donnie backed up and was gone in a heartbeat. No one else noticed him. For sure Schultz didn't.

I don't claim to be an expert, but I knew my brother. He was scared to death of the guy. Something was up.

The class went on to show Dr. Schultz some of the work we'd been doing. He seemed impressed by the echocardiogram and the sonogram footage, but he didn't have much patience for Noah's new breathing technique. The superintendent had begun glancing impatiently at his watch.

Noah wasn't offended. “That's okay. You can watch it on my personal YouTube channel, Youkilicious.”

“Let us introduce you to Tin Man at least,” Oz offered. He looked around for his designated driver. “Where's Donovan? Not on another one of his extended bathroom breaks?”

“Some other time,” Dr. Schultz said briskly. He turned to me. “Thank you once again, Mrs. Patterson. You're a credit to the Hardcastle community.” And he and the principal slipped out of the lab.