“Because he stole a motor?” she retorted.
“Maybe,” I said defiantly. “If you give the robotics team a motor, we can do anything with it. But if you ask us to get a motor, we’d all be dead in the water.”
“And what about Human Growth and Development?” Chloe demanded.
“It doesn’t matter,” Abigail insisted. “They can’t just keep on letting him flunk.”
“They do it with me,” I muttered. “I’d love to be retested. I’d show them the true meaning of flunk.”
Abigail stared me down. “Come on. You can’t seriously be saying that you don’t see any difference between Donovan’s situation and your personal weirdness. Your IQ is higher than his by at least a whole person.”
“We need him,” I insisted. “He’s more important than any of us.”
“Please! One of us couldn’t learn how to work a controller? Or download stupid pictures to put on him?”
“We could do it,” I gritted. “But we’d do it wrong!” It was impossible to explain what I meant. Donovan was a human version of YouTube. Click on him, and you might get Einstein eating a banana, or a heisted motor, or a robot driver, or a Human Growth and Development credit. It was like rolling a die with an infinite number of sides.
Chloe looked thoughtful. “Maybe he’ll pass the retest.”
There was an awkward silence as that idea went down like a lead balloon.
“He’s working really hard,” she argued. “You know—for him.”
“Exactly.” Abigail was triumphant. “His grades are awful. He might be trying, but what does that mean? That this is the best he can do?”
“You don’t have to look so happy about it,” I told her.
“What about his science project?” Latrell suggested. “He’s burning the midnight oil on that.”
“Right,” Abigail agreed sarcastically. “Googling dog facts and taking pictures of the family pet.”
Kevin had a suggestion. “We could ask Oz to delay the test. At least until after Human Growth and Development. And by then the robotics meet will be done too.”
Chloe was annoyed. “A little selfish, don’t you think?”
“Besides,” Latrell told him, “big-time colleges bench superstars who are household names because their grade point averages drop below 2.0. He’s toast.”
“We’re toast,” groaned Kevin. “If we go to the meet without Donovan, Cold Spring Harbor is going to run all over us again.”
“Not necessarily,” Abigail said defiantly. Even she didn’t sound convinced.
Jacey seemed to be bursting with something to say, but when we turned to her, she just mumbled, “Nothing. I was thinking about those subatomic particles that travel faster than light. I guess it doesn’t help Donovan to know Einstein was probably wrong.”
“He could study,” Chloe suggested. And when snorts of laughter greeted this, she added, “We could help him study.”
“Or,” I put in thoughtfully, “one of us could take the test for him, and make sure he passes.”
“Oh, right,” scoffed Kevin. “Like no one’s going to notice it’s the wrong person.”
“The test is on a computer, remember? All we’d have to do is gain remote control of his mouse and change just enough of his answers to put him over the top.”
Abigail was horrified. “That’s cheating! Do you know how much trouble you could get in for that?”
I was intrigued. “How much?” In my case, they’d probably just take the opportunity to give me extra credit. The whole system was against me.
“If you get caught doing something like that,” Abigail warned, voice rising, “it would go on your permanent record! You’d never get into Stanford or MIT with a black mark like that!”
“Really?” I asked.
Abigail rolled her eyes. “For you, they’d just add twenty grand to your scholarship.”
Chloe shook her head sadly. “I feel bad for Donovan. He’s a really good person. I got mad at him at the dance, but now I know he was only trying to protect me. I wish we could help him. You know, legally.”
I realized something about Donovan then. We were two sides of the same coin. He was struggling to stay in the gifted program, and I was struggling to get out.
UNTESTED
DONOVAN CURTIS
IQ: 112
Noah Youkilis gave Daniel Sanderson a black eye at the dance on Friday night. It happened when Noah did that Wrestlemania dive from the deejay’s speaker tower. Somehow, he must have kicked Sanderson in the face with his mother’s red leather boots. I’m sure it was an accident. Noah wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Technically, it was all my fault. I’m the one who turned Noah on to YouTube, and that’s where he discovered professional wrestling. I didn’t feel bad, though, because Sanderson totally had it coming. My only regret was that Noah couldn’t have gotten Nussbaum with the other foot.
Trust me, I didn’t hear any of this from the Daniels themselves. I told my parents and Katie that, if those guys called or came by, I was officially not at home.
“But why, Donnie? They’re your best friends.”
“I thought they were my friends when I showed them the robot,” I replied. “But then they went behind my back and wheeled it into the gym, so a thousand idiots could use it as a punching clown!”
“What do you care about their robot?” Katie challenged.
“I’m the driver,” I argued. “We’re like the Lone Ranger and his horse.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Any idiot can work a joystick. What else did you do on the project? Did you help build it?”
“Part of it.”
She was unconvinced. “What part?”
“The exterior,” I said stubbornly.
“You can’t even make Kraft dinner,” Katie accused. “Where would you learn how to build a sophisticated piece of technology?”
“It’s not about the robot; it’s about the Daniels,” I insisted. “Those guys think they can treat the gifted kids like they don’t measure up as humans. You can’t push people around in front of a dozen chaperones, so they took it out on Tin Man. I’m not talking to them.”
Mom respected my wishes but, on Wednesday, Nussbaum took a picture of Sanderson’s face on his cell phone, and texted it to Katie. She’d always had a soft spot for the Daniels, if you can imagine Katie having a soft spot for anybody. Anyway, when she showed me the picture, I did a double take. Sanderson looked like he’d been hit by a train, not a half-pint YouTube-obsessed genius. What a shiner! His eye wasn’t just black. It was purple and yellow and green, and a few shades I didn’t know the names of.
“Noah did that?” my sister exclaimed in amazement.
“He comes across like a dork, but he’s got killer moves.” And his mom had killer footwear.
In the end, my conscience won out, and I headed over to Sanderson’s. If the Daniels were texting my sister, they were really angling for a visit. Which meant they probably wanted to apologize. I guess I had to go over there and let them.
Sanderson might have been suffering, but it hadn’t stopped him from milking this injury for all it was worth. He had Deirdre and Heather over there, holding his hand and refreezing ice packs for his poor eye.
Nussbaum was on the scene too, limping a little just in case there was any sympathy spillover from the girls. If I thought I was going to get an apology, I was mistaken. Instead, everyone started talking about the night of the dance, and “that bully.” I swear, I had absolutely no idea who they were talking about. The only bullies in that gym had been the Daniels themselves.
“What bully?” I asked finally.
“You know,” said Sanderson. “The one who hit me. That bodybuilder in the wrestling outfit.”
I was blown away. “With the red boots?”
Sanderson gave me a beseeching look. He was determined to prove in front of the girls that he’d been brutalized by a huge monster, and he expected me to back him up.
He picked the wrong person on the w
rong day. “Noah Youkilis could lose a fight to a spiderweb. He’s six inches shorter than you, and he weighs about as much as your cat.”
“He’s a black belt in tae kwon do!”
Deirdre spoke up. “You guys in the Academy may think you’re special just because you’re smart. But you can’t go around punching people. This Noah delinquent could be kicked out of school for what he did!”
I laughed. “Noah? He couldn’t get kicked out of school for murder!”
The Daniels stuck to their guns though. Every time they mentioned Noah, he got bigger and meaner, and trained by a more secret paramilitary organization. As soon as the girls were gone, though, they offered a little remorse for kidnapping the robot—in a Daniels sort of way.
“Yeah, I guess it was kind of uncool,” Nussbaum murmured. “But you should have seen the look on your face!”
“Totally worth it,” agreed Sanderson. “At least till that little ninja cold-cocked me. And by the way, thanks for nothing for having my back with Heather and Deirdre a minute ago.”
I laughed mirthlessly. “You’d better pray they never get a look at Noah close up.”
“He’d better pray he never gets a look at me!” Sanderson promised darkly.
“That’s quite a crowd you hang with over at the genius school,” Nussbaum observed. “You never told us plaid shirt was the normal one.”
For some reason, that really got to me. “You know, a few of those kids are so smart that we’re not even smart enough to understand how smart they are. So leave them alone. And definitely leave their robot alone.”
“We were just fooling around,” Nussbaum mumbled. “We used to know a kid who did stuff like that all the time—a kid named Donovan Curtis.”
I almost forgave them, because they definitely had a point. What were a few bumps and scrapes on Tin Man compared to the wreckage I’d visited on the Hardcastle gym? They were the same old Daniels. I was the one who was different.
Besides, with my big retest coming up, you had to figure I’d be back at Hardcastle Middle School before too long. I was going to need some friends there.
I approached the upcoming testing the way a death row inmate approaches the date of his execution. Reluctantly, and with feet dragging.
It was kind of touching how many of my robotics classmates offered to help me study, coach me. With the exception of Abigail, who was planning to relish my failure, everyone seemed to be pulling for me. A lot of it might have been because of Katie, or because I was the best person to drive Tin Man at the robotics meet. But I like to think some of it was because they’d accepted me as one of them—even though I was so far below them intellectually that I needed a telescope to see the soles of their shoes.
Chloe offered to work with me at least twenty times. She was kind of offended that I kept blowing her off. I couldn’t make her understand that it was nothing personal. I probably should have just come out and told her, point-blank, that I had even less chance of comprehending what she knew than I had of passing the test. When I finally caved, and let her help me with the math portion, she talked so far over my head that all I could hear was airy whispers. And every time she tried to dumb it down, it became a little bit harder to understand.
When we were done, she looked at me in genuine alarm. “Oh, wow, Donovan. What are you going to do?”
Translation: Stick a fork in me. I’m done.
I shrugged. “I’ll put in some time tonight. Maybe it’ll all click.”
She wasn’t buying it. “You need more than a click. You need a miracle. Maybe we should get Noah to tutor you. He’d do it. Any one of us would!”
I laughed bravely. “If I can’t understand you, a study session with Noah would make my head explode.”
Funny—even though Chloe was back to her plaid shirts and baggy jeans, I kept seeing her as she’d looked all dressed up at the party. The idea of her finding out exactly how smart I wasn’t had become kind of sad to me. I even had a plan for cleaning out my locker after school hours so there would be less chance of her witnessing my disgrace. One day I’d be there, the next I’d be gone. After a few weeks, maybe somebody would say, “Remember that guy who used to go here for a while? What was his name again?” No one would have the answer except Noah, and he would pretend he didn’t. Eventually, all that would remain of my time at the Academy would be the faded pictures peeling off of Tin Man. And by then, no one would be able to recall who had put them there.
On the big day, things were quieter than usual in the robotics lab. Nobody would meet my eyes, not even Oz. As my homeroom teacher and faculty advisor, it had to have been him who recommended me for retesting. He probably felt like an axe murderer this morning. Even Tin Man seemed a little slumped over and depressed, although that might have been the extra weight of the floor-polisher motor.
I had one last card to play. I marched up to Oz and placed a thick folder on the teacher’s desk. He regarded me questioningly, and I pointed to the title: “Chow Chows: A Special Breed.” Below it was a large photograph of Beatrice, flaked out on her side, looking about 90 percent comatose. To my long list of regrets, I should add the fact that I had waited to take the picture until she was too far gone to be alert and alive.
“My science project,” I announced.
“Shouldn’t this go to Mr. Holman?” he asked.
“I thought maybe you could hand it in for me,” I explained lamely, “since I might miss science today while I’m taking the test.”
My pathetically desperate Technicolor hope was that he’d see this fabulous project, realize that I was working my butt off, and cancel the retest. But he didn’t even open it. “Sure,” he said very absently, and glanced at his watch.
Noah drifted by the desk. “Good picture,” he commented. “Interesting idea to use a pregnant dog.”
The earth lurched. “Pregnant?” I rasped. “Beatrice?”
“Of course.” The young genius pointed out the features that had gotten by me and my entire family. “Note the distended belly, the prominent nipples, and the languid posture. Weren’t you paying attention in Human Growth and Development when we compared human pregnancies to those of other mammals?”
I couldn’t even respond, so rocked was I by this news. Wait till Katie got a load of this one. Her tank commander husband was expecting not one blessed event, but two! Brad’s sainted mother must have let Beatrice run wild—and look what had happened! Later, when the dog started acting funny, Fanny had dumped her on us so she wouldn’t have to take the blame.
My project—the one that was going to prove I belonged at the Academy—didn’t mention a single word about pregnancy. So it was all stupid.
I snatched up my folder. “I just need to make a few last-minute adjustments—”
At that moment, the PA system crackled to life. “Mr. Osborne, would you bring Donovan Curtis to the library....”
“Ten minutes!” I pleaded.
I don’t know if the voice heard me, but the announcement continued, “Immediately, please.”
That’s where it was going to happen—the library. They would sit me down in front of a computer, and feed me questions I didn’t have the answers to. In the end, it wouldn’t matter that my chow chow project was a disaster. I wouldn’t be in the gifted program much longer.
I squared my shoulders to my classmates. “Later, guys.” But what I meant was, Good-bye.
They looked devastated. Even Abigail seemed a lot less happy than I’d expected her to be. Either that, or she was holding off on the celebration until I was officially out.
The walk to the far side of the building had never seemed shorter.
“The test will be coming over the internet from the state department of education,” Oz explained as I took my seat. “Don’t be nervous. It’s not meant to trick you; it’s meant to let you show what you know.”
That was not at all comforting.
The state department of education made me cool my heels. I sat in stiff-necked misery, sweating. The
bell rang. Homeroom was over. I heard the sounds of moving feet in the hall. Life was going on for everyone but me.
Oz gripped my shoulder. “We’re all rooting for you, Donovan.”
“Thanks,” I said in somebody else’s voice as he abandoned me to my fate.
The first question appeared on the screen. I read it over—once, twice, three times. No idea. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Of course, I had known this was coming. But somehow you always hold out hope. Nobody was perfect. Maybe they’d give me the wrong test—like for second grade remedial. It was possible.
But, no. This was the real thing. And as I looked into those words and numbers and symbols that meant absolutely nothing to me, I could almost see Dr. Schultz waiting at the front door of Hardcastle Middle School. It wouldn’t take long for him to find me there.
I felt the icy water that had surrounded James Donovan in 1912, and the suction of the sinking Titanic pulling him under. James had resisted, but I didn’t have the strength. I was going down.
There was one final chance. The test was multiple choice. I had a one-in-five shot at being right. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something.
I took hold of the mouse to make my first fatal selection. And then something strange happened. As I moved the pointer toward box B, the small arrow changed direction and traveled on its own to check box C.
I stared, thunderstruck. Was there a problem with the computer? Just my luck! On top of all the things that were stacked up against me, I was taking the test at a broken workstation. Although, come to think of it, I was just as capable of getting the wrong answers on my own, without any help from a malfunction. I considered changing C to B. But C was just as likely to be correct. So I left it, and clicked Next.
Question 2 seemed to have something to do with chemistry. But again, way out of my league. This time I settled on A, because—well, did there have to be a reason? I clicked it, and then it happened again. I lost control of the pointer. It deselected my choice, and immediately checked box E.
Then, without any action from me, it hit Next, and question 3 appeared.
Maybe I wasn’t gifted, but I had the brains to know that this was no electronic glitch. There could be only one possible explanation for it. My computer had been hacked! Somebody was taking the test for me!