The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger

  “Well happy Thanksgiving,” someone deadpanned into the silence. One of Kev’s brothers, Rose thought. Blakey made a low cruel laugh, and immediately Rose could see how this exchange would be parsed up in Steamboat, the big family cackling over that unfiltered friend of Samantha’s who’d been such a bitch to her daughter.

  Rose got a patch of heat in her throat, feeling for Tessa—but oddly for Lauren too, the way she had tainted the meal. Only a few at that table knew what their family had endured over the years, the source of these occasional darts.

  “Hey, guys, let’s get these cranberries moving around.” Samantha lifted a cut-glass bowl and the feast resumed. A rough patch Zellar-smoothed.

  A Touch of Tessa:

  One Girl's Survival Guide to Junior Year

  A Video Blog

  Episode #34: HAPPY FUCKING THANKSGIVING

  . . . 7 views . . .

  [Tessa, in moonlight from window, huddled in bed and sniffling.]

  TESSA: Hello, no one. Well, I hope you guys had a better Thanksgiving with your fams than I did. So today I marched the trail of tears over to the Zellars’ house. My first time in “Twenty Birch” since—wait, I mean, who the hell even names their house? But anyways it was my first time in their big fancy Maple Hill crib since the fateful night of Tessa’s great fuck-up, when I left their daughter alone. I said a million times I didn’t want to go, because I knew I’d get all these condescending questions about my hair, my “unique fashion sense,” my “five-year plan.” Where would you like to go to college, Tessa? Theo’s at Princeton, you know. Tessa, where do you see yourself in ten years? Plus, my mom always ends up feeling like shit when she’s around their big happy family, and I told her we should stay home this year and make our own dinner, you know? Or just do Thanksgiving with Beck and Sonja and the twins, which would have been so nice, because Xander loves those guys and Beck is such a goofball. But Lauren made us go to the Zellars’, and it was so—just—

  [Cries; stops recording.]

  TESSA [wiping nose]: Okay, I’m back. Anyways I used to love that house, especially after my dad died, when I was over there all the time. They always had the best snacks, bowls of fruit on the counter, fresh bread and muffins. You could just take like an organic grass-fed Fudgsicle out of the freezer whenever you wanted. But going over there today was like—I mean, Samantha? She used to buy me dresses, take me out to lunch. She even took me for my first pedicure. She liked to brush my hair when she was brushing Z’s. Ten strokes for Emma, ten strokes for Tessa. Ten strokes for Emma, ten strokes for Tessa. And I remember how she smiled at me in the mirror. Samantha was so beautiful, not a little unibrow troll like my mom, which is probably how I’ll turn out. I wanted to look just like her. So I mean the Zellars basically adopted me, like Azra did, and even uptight Rose, but now . . .

  [Sniffs; long silence.]

  The dad’s still really nice, I guess. Kev. He has a sister who OD’d and almost died when she was like twenty, even though the Zellars never talk about that and I only know because Azra told me one time when I was hanging out at the store. Yeah, they like to sweep all their shit under the rug over at Twenty Birch so their Latinx housekeeper can vacuum it up three days a week. Now the same sister’s some corporate lawyer in New York. She was there today. High-key bitch, totally clueless about other people the same way my mom is. Oh, and my mom? Holy shit. In rare form today, even for her, and I’m like—god it’s like she hates me because my dad died. How fucked is that? [Long sigh.] Sorry, I know I’ve told you guys all this stuff like a million times. But the whole thing made me think about how different everything used to be. How nice it all was. And that maybe I could find some way to . . . I don’t know. Just sort of start over. [Long silence, blinking into phone.] Any ideas?

  TEN

  CH’AYÑA

  It’s time,” Ch’ayña said, rising from her chair.

  Atik wristed sleep from his eyes and finished his juice and put his glass in the sink. “Mamay,” he called down the hall.

  “Coming, coming,” Silea answered.

  Ch’ayña’s daughter appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on her dress, and the two women rushed to throw their lunch into plastic bags. Ch’ayña noticed Atik’s blue fleece draped across the back of the sofa and tossed it to him.

  “What’s the hurry?” Atik asked. “Aren’t they all gone to the mountains, like you said?”

  Ch’ayña and her daughter exchanged looks.

  “If they left it like last year, it’s a big job,” Silea said briskly. “Like cleaning a mountain, and then we have the smaller house to do after that.” Her busy hands paused as she looked at him. “It’s nice, though, Atikcha, that you’re coming.”

  “Your first time,” Ch’ayña said proudly, and Atik gave them a sleepy smile. He was a good boy, polite but full of tricks. He’d offered to come along last night, to shorten their day. Silea had refused the gesture at first, because she didn’t want him thinking this was the kind of job for him. But there’s no shame in cleaning houses, Ch’ayña had pushed back; no shame in hard work. Besides, Atik had insisted. What am I supposed to do on a no-school day, he’d asked, alone out here, where there’s nothing to do but TV and origami?

  Ch’ayña rubbed a hand across her grandson’s hair, tangled and thick and in need of a comb, still smelling of his bed. On the top step she turned to lock the trailer door.

  Just after seven, sunrise on the Beulah flats, a single swath of brown. The air smelled of cow shit in the late November cold, and in the distance a tractor roared to life. A bluish haze of exhaust rose from the startled engine.

  Ch’ayña opened the cap of the pickup, and Atik slid the half-dried mops into the bed between the bins of cleaners and rags. He hopped in the cab first, taking the middle of the bench between Ch’ayña and Silea. By the time the truck bumped out of the gravel lot between the neighbors’ trailers Silea was already nodding off against the passenger door.

  “We’re going first to the Zellars’, then to Ms. Holland’s,” Ch’ayña said, in Quechua.

  “Okay,” Atik said.

  “Okay,” Ch’ayña echoed, gently mocking. She turned left. Always west, toward Crystal and the distant mountains. A few miles on, after they had left the little town of Dry River behind, she said, “Some things to remember.” Silence. “You awake?”

  He wasn’t. She reached over to poke him in the side and he startled.

  “Listen,” said Ch’ayña.

  “I am listening,” he said, in his Quechua this time.

  “Hollands want the dishwasher emptied but the Zellars don’t care.”

  “Okay.”

  “When you’re doing the showers, pour the 409 all-purpose into the empty green clean bottle under the sink. It does better on the mildew, and Ms. Holland never knows the difference. But Zellar, she’ll notice. She’s got a better nose, so be careful.”

  “I will.”

  “Also Zellar likes the wineglasses polished.”

  “With a cloth?”

  “Paper towels. Hollands drink wine from jars. We don’t polish those.”

  “Why jars?”

  “Who knows.”

  Silea turned over in her sleep, her head flopping down onto Atik’s shoulder.

  “Ms. Holland will try to speak Spanish if she sees you,” Ch’ayña said. “Her Spanish is even worse than mine. But be nice when she does it and speak slowly so she can understand. Also the Zellar father is a pig. But the girl’s very clean, keeps her room tidy and makes her own bed and does her own laundry.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “I’ve only seen pictures. Pretty. But something in her face looks a little—nasty.”

  The last word was in English. Atik made a sleepy laugh.

  The truck stop came up on the right, before the interstate. Ch’ayña pulled past the pumps and handed Atik a
dollar bill and three quarters. “Get a coffee,” she told him.

  He shook his head. “I’ll be fine, Awicha.”

  “You need a coffee. So does your mamay.”

  Silea made a sleepy moan. Atik shrugged and closed his eyes, seeming content to remain in the truck. She’d get it herself, then.

  The door groaned open and Ch’ayña dismounted to the asphalt, a long drop. She got some looks. She always did here, not from the clerks anymore but often from the distance boys ambling in from their rigs.

  The store was quiet for a Friday, only a few customers milling slowly beneath the fluorescent pallor. Ch’ayña poured a large coffee into a Styrofoam cup. There was no milk or cream; the three decanters were missing. At the counter a clerk she didn’t recognize—a big, white, maggoty thing—rang up her purchase. Ch’ayña owled the girl, because the new clerks shorted you on change sometimes.

  “Lichi?” Ch’ayña said, on purpose. The new girl wrinkled her nose. “Milk?” Ch’ayña said.

  The girl rolled her eyes. “It’s Thanksgiving, lady. We’re short-staffed.” She pointed back to the coffee counter and made a pulling gesture with her hand. Ch’ayña walked over to the coffee again, opened the cupboard beneath the line of decanters, and found some creamers.

  Over in the corner of the parking lot the usual gang lingered by the dumpsters, hoping for a work pickup. Good luck on a holiday Friday, Ch’ayña thought. Guatemalans mostly, guys she recognized from Mountain View, their sprawling neighborhood. One of them was perched on top of a dumpster, binoculars to his eyes, looking out for an ICE van rolling down off the interstate ramp.

  She saw Tiago, Silea’s man who came around. He waved at her and Ch’ayña raised the foam cup a sullen inch before looking away.

  She didn’t like the fellow. He tried too hard, in all kinds of ways, always bringing wildflowers or candies or packs of beer, staying around to watch American shows with Silea into the night with his feet up, acting like their home was his.

  These days his attentions were turning more and more to Atik. Earlier in the fall Tiago had arrived with a baseball, glove, and bat for the boy, then, a few weeks later, a soccer ball. He’d even tried to give Atik an old computer that a cousin of his was selling. He needs to be connected, Tiago had claimed. Linked to a bigger world.

  But Ch’ayña wouldn’t have it. You’re not his tayta, she’d snapped at him—in Quechua but he got the idea. So he had taken the computer back to his cousin, and that was the end of that.

  When Ch’ayña climbed back into the truck, Silea was awake with the window down, making eyes at the man from across the lot.

  “Here.” Ch’ayña shoved the coffee over at her daughter, because Atik’s hands were busy. “Share this with him.”

  Silea took the coffee and reluctantly raised the window. In the distance Tiago turned away.

  * * *

  —

  As they drove out past the pumps, Ch’ayña saw that her grandson had already folded two of his flowers and fruits using the papers in the glove compartment. A yellow rose, its petals lined with machine print. A delicate white pear with a stem fashioned from a stir stick.

  Years ago Atik had started with a lily: the one paper trick Ch’ayña had ever taught him, the only one she knew. Now he could fold cars, trucks, flowers, fruits, animals of every kind, and he’d learned them all on his own. Give him a packet of colored paper and he’d make a garden, an orchard, a zoo, a train. A few months ago he’d even folded his jatunmama. Ch’ayña had recognized the paper figure instantly as herself, with a striped dress crafted of ten color strips each no wider than a nail clipping. She pinched his ear for that but still had the figure by her bed, watching her while she slept. The trailer was full of Atik’s creations, whole forests of his clever origamis, creeping along the tops of the stove and the refrigerator, lining every shelf, arranged carefully by Silea on half the eating table.

  Atik nudged the pear and the rose against the windshield, next to a pair of green tomatoes he’d created last week from Wrigley wrappers.

  Ten minutes later the truck hitched over the train tracks and they were in Crystal. Here, the pavement smoothed out. Bigger, lusher trees gathered over the avenue. An electric bus painted deep purple angled quietly away from a charging station, the end of the city line.

  “The bus drivers here aren’t like Huánuco drivers,” Ch’ayña observed. “Never wait for the regulars, they just go.”

  “We’ll be there soon,” Silea said, alert now from the coffee.

  “Remember, Atik,” Ch’ayña continued. “Pledge spray will stain and ruin the suedes and leathers, so when you’re doing the floor by the couches, keep the can pointed down.”

  “I’ll remember,” he said.

  “Also another thing. Zellars want the piano keys whitened today. They’ve had a lot of guests and a lot of sticky fingers in the house. So here’s what you do: you rub the ivory with Colgate, then you buff using a cloth dampened with whole-fat milk. The Colgate will smear on the black keys, and she’ll notice if it does.”

  “So always polish the black keys last,” Silea said. “Both sides and the top.”

  “Also the parts in front,” Ch’ayña added. “They’re easy to miss when you’re cleaning, because they’re so small, like your little toes.”

  “Stop,” Atik said. He hated baby talk, more and more since his twelfth birthday.

  Ch’ayña patted his knee. “Just be a good worker, Atik Yupanqui. If we go at it hard, we can finish early and maybe your mamay won’t make us eat her chicken tonight.”

  “We’ll see,” Silea muttered. She drained the last of the coffee and bent her smooth neck back in a yawn.

  On Birch Street they pulled to the curb and hauled the mops and bins up the front walk. Halfway to the house Atik stumbled on a paving stone.

  “Careful,” Ch’ayña warned him. He grunted something, and as he hefted a mop Ch’ayña looked back at the truck and saw the flashes of color through the windshield. Her grandson’s rose and his pear and his two green tomatoes stood guard on the dashboard, tiny miracles against the glass.

  PART II

  THE FIRST CUT

  All this can lead to an apparently paradoxical situation when parents who are proud of their gifted child and who even admire him are forced by their own repression to reject, suppress, or even destroy what is best, because truest, in that child.

  —ALICE MILLER,

  The Drama of the Gifted Child

  City of Crystal

  SCHOOL DISTRICT

  achievement, excellence, equality

  TO: City of Crystal School District Families

  FROM: Dr. Joe Jelinek, Superintendent

  SUBJECT: Cognitive Proficiency (CogPro) testing

  March 15, 2018

  Dear Crystal Families,

  As most of you are aware, we will soon be administering the Cognitive Proficiency (CogPro) test to all children grades five through eleven who wish to be assessed for admission to Crystal Academy for the 2018–19 academic year. The test will be administered simultaneously to students in the school districts of the Four Counties.

  The CogPro is a nationally certified standardized test aimed at assessing multiple measures of student aptitude, including verbal, nonverbal, spatial, and quantitative reasoning. The test is multiple choice and will be given to students at two designated times at their current school locations: the first on Saturday, March 24, between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m.; the second, for those who cannot attend the Saturday testing session, on Wednesday, March 28, between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. Students who currently attend private or parochial schools and wish to be considered for Crystal Academy’s first intake are asked to sign up for the Saturday session.

  Along with my counterparts in the Four Counties, and in response to many questions and concerns from parents in our districts, I want to emphasize two aspects of this process. Fi
rst, the CogPro testing is purely voluntary. Your child is not required to take the test or apply for admission to Crystal Academy. Second, a child’s score on the CogPro test is but one factor among many that will be used to determine the eligibility of applicants for the first intake. Further details on the next steps in the admissions review will be provided once the CogPro testing has been completed. We ask for your patience as we work through this challenging and exciting process.

  Thank you for your understanding, and best wishes for a wonderful spring on our beautiful Front Range.

  Joe Jelinek, DEd

  ELEVEN

  ROSE

  The four of them were, Azra had once joked, like mail carriers. Rain, sleet, or snow, the friends met early on Friday mornings for a four-miler, and had for ten years. A ritual carved into the flinty stone of their lives, something dependable, shared since they’d first started trimming up again after the births of their children. Occasionally one of them might be out with an injury or away on a work trip, so they would run in threes or in pairs. But whatever the combination, Friday run was sacred, an unspoken pact.

  That day it was just the two of them, Rose and Lauren. A dry March cold had lowered on the foothills, sharpening the air with resin of pine. Lauren always brought a quiet seriousness to these early mornings in the Colorado chill, when mountain birds could seem to be cheeping just for them and deer would linger on the path ahead before bounding off into the scrub. Desert lizards skittered across the trail, avoiding shoes.