The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger

  * * *

  —

  So good to see any kind of beauty budding in this girl again. For years Tessa had been a favorite sitter for the younger kids, an older version of the Emmas. Sweet and open, wicked smart, a bit of a babbler but a joy to have around, the source of her mother’s often insufferable pride, for good reason. Lauren had compensated for Julian’s death by throwing herself into her daughter’s development and education. Advanced math, Chinese, martial arts, flute lessons with the principal player in the Colorado Symphony: by eighth grade Tessa had become a living, breathing benchmark, a proof of concept for the overinvested parenting they all practiced with varying degrees of obliviousness and guilt.

  Then, the summer before high school, something snapped.

  Rose had never quite extracted the full story from Lauren. A creative sequence of lies. A tenth-grade boy with a bad reputation. A progression of risk that culminated one night when Emma Z, only eight at the time, was left alone for hours. Kev and Samantha had arrived home after midnight to find their daughter weeping under the covers, afraid to leave her bed for fear of the monsters that a wildly drunk Tessa had warned her would slice up her feet if they touched the floor.

  Tessa herself didn’t make it home until the next morning, smudged half circles beneath her eyes and a CVS bag dangling from her fingertips. Lauren confronted her at the door, but Tessa just snarled at her and disappeared into the bathroom. When she emerged an hour later, her flowing charcoal hair was gone, in its place a chopped salad dyed a cheap inky blue.

  As Tessa progressed through her early teens there had been more episodes: drinking, pills, cutting, a shoplifting bust at the mall. Lauren’s attempted interventions only made things worse, until finally she was forced to give her daughter a choice: a restrictive boarding school in Missouri for troubled girls or an intensive ninety-day inpatient rehab program in Denver. Tessa chose rehab, and in the six months since returning she’d really started to pull herself together. Shed the nose rings, looked grown-ups in the eye now.

  Then, a few weeks ago, Lauren had finally talked Rose into trying her daughter out as a sitter again. Tessa needed a job, she’d pleaded, and the Zellars wouldn’t budge, not until the teen had proved herself with the others.

  Everyone was rooting for her, or so Azra claimed. Rose wasn’t so sure. Samantha in particular seemed to take a guilty pleasure in watching for latent signs of Tessa’s next catastrophe.

  Rose saw her as a girl teetering on a knife’s edge, grasping for a hand.

  * * *

  —

  The doorbell chimed again. Gareth checked his phone and said, “That’ll be Kev.” He wiped his hands on a towel, looking displeased. Rose got up to answer.

  At the front door Kevin Zellar greeted her with a hearty “Hey, Doc!” and that amiable grin he switched on for business types and donors. His windbreaker rustled when he embraced her, and his breath smelled of mint, a taint of bourbon beneath the wintergreen. Kev wore his hair in a sandy sweep, combed but not fastidiously so. Rose followed his athletic stride down the hall into the kitchen.

  “Looking great, you two,” Kev said, taking in the trifold. He bent to give Emma Z a kiss and reached over to mess Q’s hair. “When’s it due?”

  “Monday,” said Z. “We have to finish this weekend.”

  “Looks ready to go.”

  “Glass of wine?” Rose asked him, mostly to annoy Gareth. “It’s a nice Shiraz.”

  “Why the hell not,” Kev said expansively, shrugging off his windbreaker.

  Behind him Gareth folded his arms. Her husband wanted to leave, get date night revved up, but after a curt nod from Rose he poured some Shiraz into a jelly jar and handed it over. Kev took a drawn-out sip.

  “Long day?” Rose asked him, enjoying the moment.

  “Oh, you know, Doc, the usual. Disgruntled millionaires, twentysomething tech barons. Plus the mayor’s got a stick up his ass this week.” Kev fake-grimaced and looked sheepishly at the Emmas. “Sorry, girls.”

  “Oh, believe me, Q hears worse than that in this house,” Rose said, for Gareth again.

  Tessa looked up from her sketchbook and laughed. Kev raised his jar and laughed with her, a low broker’s chuckle that played well in the political and financial circles in which the Zellars traveled. Kev served on the Crystal City Council while managing a high-dollar equity fund and sitting on a dozen nonprofit boards. A bit of a flirt but rarely boorish or crude, though his attentiveness toward Rose could make Gareth squirm at times. The two men had so little in common, in bearing, looks, ambition.

  Rose hated herself for thinking in this cold way about her dutiful husband. But she also loathed dishonesty, as she’d said to their therapist many times—all the false assurances that spouses whisper to themselves to keep the marital boat placid in the water.

  “You all set, sweet pea?” Kev asked his daughter.

  “Can I stay a little longer, Daddy?” Z wheedled. “Just so we can finish the captions? Please?”

  Kev looked at Rose. She shrugged. Kev tilted his jar at Gareth for another pour.

  “Fine with us, we’re getting sushi,” Gareth said, ignoring him. “Tessa, you mind?”

  “Nope.” Tessa pushed herself off the stool. Her blouse tightened against her chest.

  Rose narrowed her eyes. “Tessa,” she said pleasantly, “would you make sure Q’s lights are out by nine? You’ll probably have to take her Kindle away.”

  “No problem,” said Tessa. “I’ll just be in here, you guys.” She sauntered into the living room with her sketchbook.

  Gareth went back to the bedroom for a clean shirt and a fleece. When they left the house, Tessa was sitting by the gas fire and Kev at the kitchen table, helping himself to another pour of wine, watching the Emmas at their work.

  THREE

  EMMA Z

  By fifth grade, the child’s brain has created a unique ‘self’ due to its one-of-a-kind neural pathways. The upgraded analytical ability also enables fifth graders’ noggins to become keenly—”

  “What’s a noggin?” asked Emma Z, lying on her side on Q’s bed.

  “Oh, sorry.” Emma Q slapped her hair with the open magazine. “It’s this. Your head.”

  “Then why don’t they just say that?”

  “I don’t know. Sorry,” Q said again.

  Z rolled onto her other side and looked out the bedroom window. The Holland-Quinns’ house wasn’t very nice, like Z’s, and it wasn’t very big. All you could see from this window was the side of a much bigger house going up next door, replacing the tiny one that got knocked down last summer.

  All little houses in Crystal are destined for a scrape-off, Emma Z’s father always joked.

  “Do you want me to keep going?” Q asked.

  “Fine,” Z sighed.

  Q took a loud breath and read on. “The upgraded analytic ability also enables fifth graders’ noggins to become keenly, painfully aware of how they fit, or don’t fit, into certain social groups. Partnered with dramatic imagination, your child may feel lonely and unaccepted, a social failure with fragile self-esteem.” She paused. “Oh. My god.”

  “What?”

  “That’s a dangling modifier.”

  Z said nothing.

  Q explained: “Because ‘partnered’ doesn’t go with ‘your child,’ it goes with ‘analytic ability.’ So it shouldn’t be—never mind. Sorry.”

  Emma Q was always sorry. Sorry for sounding too smart, sounding too stupid, eating too fast, reading too much, even though Z never cared how Q ate or read or what she sounded like when she talked.

  “Is there a more interesting part?”

  “I’m getting to it.” Q flipped a page. “Ooh, this is good. My mom underlined it. Your fifth grader is probably sliding into adolescence now, especially if she’s a girl. Don’t delay! Inform her or him about all the physical changes o
f puberty: breast development, pimples, bras, pubic and underarm hair, menstruation, larger testicles—”

  “That’s disgusting!” Z screeched and turned around, clutching a pillow. She threw it at Emma Q’s face, and the magazine fell from Q’s hands and fluttered to the floor.

  They rolled around for a while, clutching their stomachs and giggling, because breast development! and pubic hair! and menstruation! and especially testicles! which was probably the most revolting word Z had ever heard.

  When they calmed down, Z said, “Why does Rose even give you stuff like that?”

  Q shrugged. “She leaves magazines on the back of the toilet. She says she wants me to know what’s going on in my brain and my body. She says most parents think their kids are stupider than they really are, and so they try to hide things from them.”

  “Well, I’m reading Island of the Blue Dolphins right now.”

  “I read that in second grade.”

  “Me too.” Technically Z hadn’t started it yet, but it was sitting by her bed, along with ten other books her mom wanted her to read. Z hated reading but pretended to love it, because it was just easier that way.

  “Do you think it’s true, though?” Emma Q asked.

  “What?”

  “That stuff about kids who don’t belong. Who start to feel bad in fifth grade because they don’t—fit?”

  “Of course it’s true,” said Emma Z, sitting up on the bed, because this was something that was actually interesting. “There are lots of kids in our class who don’t fit with the rest of us. I mean, just think about Katie Johnston.”

  “She’s so, so fat,” said Emma Q in a whisper, even though they were alone.

  Emma Z smiled, looking at Q’s chubby arms. “And what about Caleb Bingham?”

  “He’s just—you know.”

  Z thought of Caleb Bingham’s leg braces, the way he walked. “It’s really sad,” she said.

  “I know.”

  In the sympathetic silence that followed Z picked up her phone and texted her dad.

  Can we go now?

  * * *

  —

  Down in the kitchen Emma Z’s father sat at the counter with Tessa, explaining something about money. Z fished a third cookie from a box in the cupboard and ignored Q’s frown. Q’s mom didn’t let her have second desserts.

  “Is that a good idea, though, do you think?” Tessa asked him, pushing some black hair behind her ear. Z looked at herself in the window above the sink and tried pushing her hair away like that. Tessa was prettier than she used to be, but the gesture looked better with long yellow hair, like Z’s.

  “Well, let me ask you,” said Kev. “What are these cheapskates paying you to sit Emma Q? Ten, twelve an hour?”

  “Fifteen,” said Tessa.

  His eyebrows went up. “Impressive. So let’s say you’re on for two hours. You combine that thirty with your next six or seven sitting gigs and buy yourself a two-hundred-dollar CD at two-point-seven percent with a sixty-month term. You with me?”

  “Uh-huh,” Tessa said. She flashed a cautious glance at the Emmas and tightened her lips.

  Emma Z smiled. Uh-oh. There was an old joke in the families about her father’s money talk, which Tessa’s mom had once called Kevsplanation. Lauren did an amazing imitation of him that was always in Z’s head whenever Daddy started blabbing about investments and interest-bearing checking accounts.

  “End of those five years you’ll end up with an extra, what, thirty bucks,” he went on. “Doesn’t sound like much. But you multiply that by ten, twenty, and so on, and soon you’re talking an investment of a couple thou, with a return in the low hundreds. Again, not big numbers, but you’ve got to think long term, Tessa. And that’s just a rinky-dink CD. Better idea? Open a brokerage account, maybe a custodial Roth IRA, because then you’d capitalize on—”

  A loud giggle burst from Z’s throat. Tessa turned away with her hand on her mouth.

  Kev leaned back with his arms folded. “Oh, I see. So my life’s work is just a big joke to you girls, is that it?” He reached over and pulled Z to his lap. Z giggled wildly until her father spun her around and set her on the floor feetfirst.

  “Sorry, Kev,” said Tessa.

  “Offense taken.” Kev smiled. “Point I’m making is, the earlier you start the better. Doesn’t matter how.”

  “I understand.”

  “And hey.” His face got serious. “It’s good to see you, Tessa. Out and about.”

  “Thanks, Kev.” Tessa tossed her hair again, but she sounded serious too.

  “Good enough.” He knocked on the counter three times as he stood and looked down at Z. “You ready, sweet pea?”

  * * *

  —

  From the yard, as they walked to the car, Emma Z looked back through the front window of the little house and saw Tessa sit down with Emma Q on the sofa. Tessa began typing on her phone and Q was reading on her Kindle. They weren’t even talking. Honestly, they both looked kind of lonely.

  It must be so sad for Q, Emma Z thought, not to have a father like hers.

  Even sadder for Tessa, not to have a father at all.

  FOUR

  ROSE

  At Shobu they left their shoes in the vestibule and took a corner table low to the ground. Cushions rather than chairs, a space designed for intimacy. Ugh. When they were settled, Gareth split apart his chopsticks and toyed with the broken ends, waiting for Rose to crack their ever-present ice.

  “The girls’ project looks good,” she said, treading the familiar. “Thank you for working with them on it.”

  “Well, I’ve learned as much as they have,” he said. “Did you know there were more than two million mustangs in the Western states at one point?”

  “Mm.”

  “And that it was Christopher Columbus who introduced horses to the New World?”

  “Really.”

  “Though apparently there’s a big debate over whether the Spanish mustang should be called an indigenous or invasive species, a native breed or a genetic interloper. Something about whether the same strain evolved in the New World, then crossed the Bering Sea before going extinct over here.”

  This made her ears perk up. “So there’s a scientific angle.”

  “I—guess so,” he said.

  “I didn’t see that on the trifold, though.”

  “Emma Z thought there was already too much going on.”

  “Could they maybe incorporate that into one of the panels?” she suggested. “Biohistory is big these days.”

  “It’s already over the top, don’t you think?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, all the bells and whistles. Whatever happened to good old book reports?”

  One of Gareth’s most annoying tics, these habitual bursts of Luddite nostalgia that made him sound like Rose’s father. Whatever happened to good old rotary phones? Good old typewriters? Good old manual transmissions?

  She placed her stoneware cup of miso soup against her lips. “History Day is competitive,” she said between sips, “just like everything else. But Flora Wilson-Bianchi went all the way to nationals last year with a project on the Anasazi, and I don’t see why the Emmas can’t at least get to states with this horse thing.”

  Gareth cocked an eyebrow.

  “What?” she said.

  “States? They’re eleven, Rose.”

  “Mm.” She took a longer swallow, enjoying the heat.

  Gareth could be so pious about these things, regarding his status as a full-time dad as a license to dismiss Rose’s concerns about Q’s development and education, to question her parenting suggestions while making her feel guilty for raising them at all. Their differences in approach—the philosopher versus the helicopter, as Gareth had once infuriatingly termed it—were what had final
ly driven them into therapy over the summer.

  Because Rose could handle Gareth’s passive attitude toward their marriage, toward Rose’s need for intimacy and passion; she had her friends and her work for those. But when it came to their daughter, she worried that his sense of failure and, well, stuckness would rub off on Q, that his laissez-faire parenting style was already having an effect on their daughter’s body and mind, whether in Q’s overconsumption of the muffins and cookies he baked as after-school snacks or in his unthinking indulgence of her whims—as when he passively allowed her to slog through the Harry Potters for the third time rather than train her voracious reading habits on something new and challenging. Living in a pressure cooker like Crystal could be hard on kids, no doubt; but as Rose’s own education and career had taught her, it was possible to control most outcomes if you just worked steadily and planned ahead. She was still holding out hope that therapy might get Gareth to see the benefits of a more directed approach.

  “How were things at the hospital today?” he asked.

  A return to neutral ground, following the script. Very nice.

  Rose said, “Some tough cases.”

  “Back to the lab next week?”

  “This weekend, if that’s okay,” she said. “The pre-application paperwork is due to the administration in a few weeks.”

  “The NIH neuro scheme?”

  She nodded and smiled, glad he’d remembered. For the past few weeks, and with the support of her chair and the dean of the medical school, Rose had been preparing her lab for a major grant application to the National Institutes of Health: five million dollars to fund a new center for the study of neurodegenerative disease. If she won it, the grant would fund the next decade of her career, take her through two promotions, support grad students and postdocs, procure new machines and laboratory equipment—in short, make Rose the belle of the neurology ball. Putting together the grant would require countless late nights and serial weekends in the months ahead, all worth it in the end, she had to hope.