The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger

  At the top of the valley they took a few minutes to stretch and look out over the northern reaches of Crystal, where Route 62 snaked along the Front Range down from Lynn. Pinprick headlights punctured the rising dawn. Lauren bent over to tighten a shoelace, then straightened, hands on her hips.

  “Where is Emma Q testing?” she asked, breathing heavily.

  “The CogPro?”

  “Right.”

  “Public school kids test at their regular elementaries,” Rose said. “So she’ll take it at Donnelly.”

  “Same with Xander. The Odyssey kids test at the nearest public.”

  They stood there for a moment in their chilling sweat, panting, facing off. A twitch in Lauren’s features, more she wanted to say, but before Rose could ask, her friend turned and started heading down the slope. Rose followed. Her thighs quivered on the descent.

  The final quarter mile downhill brought them to Fourth Street. Usually they headed south from here, but today Lauren angled across the intersection, making for Maple Hill. Rose thought nothing of it until they had progressed two blocks east.

  They slowed and stopped in front of the old Maple Hill Elementary building. The three-story Georgian façade rose above a row of overgrown chokecherry trees. A temporary wire fence ran along the foot of the school’s main staircase, and two dumpsters at curbside brimmed with ravaged chunks of drywall and broken lumber. A sign at the foot of the steps heralded the building’s new purpose:

  FUTURE HOME OF CRYSTAL ACADEMY

  THE LOWER SCHOOL

  A MAGNET SCHOOL FOR EXCEPTIONAL LEARNERS, JOINTLY OPERATED BY THE SCHOOL DISTRICTS OF WESLEY, KENDALL, MADISON, AND BEULAH COUNTIES AND THE CITY OF CRYSTAL.

  FOUNDING HEAD OF SCHOOL:

  DR. ELIZABETH “BITSY” LEIGHTON

  OPENING AUGUST 2018

  FOR ADMISSIONS INFORMATION AND ALL OTHER INQUIRIES PLEASE CONTACT THE CITY OF CRYSTAL SCHOOL DISTRICT

  Another mounted display showed glossy mock-ups of the classrooms and labs. Modular tables, shiny computers and whiteboards, well-lit rooms teeming with plants and books.

  The gifted school had arrived.

  * * *

  —

  A shining promise on a hill, not yet open for business but all the more alluring for that. The subject of admissions came up every time Rose was with her friends now, fleetingly and always with a little edge, accompanied by uninterested shrugs, easy smirks. Hey, it’s one in a hundred, someone would say. Might as well be one in a million. What chance does my kid have?

  She heard the topic being batted around by colleagues at the med school and the hospital, neurosurgeons and anesthesiologists and pediatric oncologists, everyone with a brainy kid of eligible age treading this edge of want—because in Crystal, whose kid wasn’t gifted?

  The school was like a rare wine, or a piece of some exotic fish. Give us one taste and the world will change. My child deserves nothing less than this.

  So far it had been all speculation, idle conjecture, abstract and hypothetical. But now, with the approach of the first round of testing, admissions loomed large, assuming sudden weight and substance. The Emmas would take the CogPro on Saturday.

  The first cut.

  * * *

  —

  So here we are,” Rose said, sounding stupid to herself as she gazed at the sign and, behind it, the façade of the lower school midrenovation. When Lauren didn’t respond, Rose smoothed a hand over her friend’s back.

  “Lauren, what is it?”

  A side of Lauren’s mouth lifted. “Just Xander.”

  “Oh, come on. You know he’ll get in. Of all our kids he’s the one.”

  “That’s the thing. He doesn’t even want to test.”

  “But why? This place would be perfect for him.” And for Emma Q, Rose didn’t say.

  “That’s what I thought. But Xander says he doesn’t want to go to school with a bunch of freaky nerds.”

  Rose stifled a laugh. Pot, meet kettle. “Where’d he get that?”

  “Where do you think?”

  Rose considered it. “The twins?”

  “Charlie,” Lauren said shortly. “Xander stayed over at Azra’s last weekend while I was in Minneapolis. Apparently he was gabbing about the academy at dinner and how great it sounded when Charlie jumped in and started ripping the place. You know, why would you want to surround yourself with a bunch of dorkheads? Like you, was the implication. So Xander comes home dead set against it.”

  “I’m sure he’ll come around.”

  Lauren’s head jerked left. “You know how he looks up to those boys, though. The jock hero worship, they’re so cool. He said if I make him go he’ll deliberately flunk out, or do something to get suspended. It’s infuriating.”

  “Maybe he’s just pulling your leg?” Rose suggested. “He has a weird sense of humor sometimes.”

  She remembered (because how could she not?) what everyone now called the Smoothie Incident. It had started when Lauren came home one summer afternoon with a high-end blender that could supposedly liquefy tree roots. Xander was taken with the machine, using it constantly to make soups, desserts, homemade ice cream for anyone who dropped by. At a Fourth of July gathering he made a pitcher of green smoothies and handed out Dixie cups of the concoction to those gathered in their backyard. Fruity and sweet but with a bitter tang, maybe kale or Swiss chard. After everyone had a taste, Xander stood on the stairs to the deck and called out, “Friends, Romans, Crystalmen, lend me your ears!”

  Heads turning, mild curiosity. The Emmas had been standing on the far side of a citronella candle that lit their young faces. Rose saw Z purse her lips, whisper something in Q’s ear. Poor Xander, Rose thought. So smart, so painfully weird.

  “What’s the verdict, people?” he shouted.

  “It’s delicious, sweetie,” Azra called over to him, matching his enthusiasm in her affable way. “What’s your secret ingredient?”

  They waited for it. He told them in three word bursts.

  “It’s a PLAINS! . . . LEOPARD! . . . FROG!”

  Moans, groans, lots of spitting and gagging. But then Xander did a Spiderman leap to the lawn and started a run through the crowd, his arms airplaned as he shouted Justkiddingjustkiddingjustkidding in one long stream.

  The whole thing had been very strange; very Xander.

  “So maybe he’s joking,” Rose repeated now.

  “That’s what I’d like to think,” Lauren replied. “As long as I can get his little butt in a chair on Saturday it should be okay.”

  “What about Tessa? When do rising seniors test?”

  Lauren scoffed. “Are you serious?”

  “You don’t think she’d have a shot?”

  “Rose, please. Tessa got a 1310 on the PSAT.”

  As if this were the equivalent of driving drunk, or a bust for shoplifting.

  “That’s a good score, Lauren.” Rose was gentle, trying not to chide, the memory of that awful moment at Thanksgiving still fresh months later. “Most parents would be thrilled with a 1310.”

  “Well, even so, that doesn’t translate into the kind of CogPro score she’d need to get into Crystal Academy. They’re saying senior year will be the most competitive of all. They’re only holding sixty spots for the first graduating class.”

  Ah, Rose thought, so you’ve already checked it out.

  “And she’s being so difficult lately. I mean, I’m glad she’s working, I’m really grateful to you and Azra for giving her a chance, but she has this new hostility that scares me sometimes.”

  “Remember,” Rose said, “it’s a truth universally acknowledged that teenage girls despise their mothers.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s a phase I’m not looking forward to with Emma, believe me. But Lauren, you’ve guided her through the hardest
period in her life. Look at her now.”

  “Really.”

  “She was always so talented,” Rose said. “I’m sure all of that is still there.”

  Lauren went into a knee bend. “Well, the only special talent I’ve seen from Tessa lately is being pretty. It’s the one thing she inherited from her dad.”

  While Lauren squatted the observation sat there, like an unpleasant smell.

  “You ready?” Lauren asked, rising to her five-foot height. Rose followed in her draft, those ugly words ringing in her ears.

  * * *

  —

  When they arrived at Lauren’s town house, Tessa was just coming out of the downstairs shower wrapped in a skimpy towel. She saw Lauren first and shot her mother a scowl before noticing Rose.

  “Oh, hey, Rose,” she said, the nasty look arcing up into a beautiful smile. She gave her a little wave before dodging into her room and closing the door.

  Lauren turned to Rose. “That’s my good morning,” she said flatly.

  In the dining room the rough farm table was a cluttered mess. A vase of dried flowers and an embroidered runner had been pushed to one end. Two cardboard trifolds were laid out flat and open, the surfaces mostly empty but with shapes drawn for insets of various sizes. An assortment of charts, graphs, and photographs were splayed across an open folder.

  Rose stopped. “What’s all this?”

  “Xander’s science fair project,” Lauren said. “A molecular study of spider poison, or something. He can’t decide between that and chess.”

  “You’re helping him with it?”

  “You’re kidding, right? He won’t let me within twenty feet of him when he has a project like this.”

  Rose felt it happen, instantly. The part of her that wanted to reassure Lauren about the well-being of her children receded and cooled. She saw the tip of one graph, a rainbow code strand Xander had modeled after the kind found in a lab report. The quantity of diagrams and illustrations in the folder threw her into a mild despair.

  Gareth was useless when it came to this sort of thing, but he was the only parent Emma Q would ever allow to help with science and math, despite what Rose did for a living. You keep taking over, Mom, she’d moan, and it was true, she did, but there was so much Rose could have been teaching Emma if she’d only let her. We could design a controlled experiment on memory and cognition across three generations, sweetie! How about a cellular atlas of your own brain? Instead Q had concocted some sad horticultural scheme involving avocado pits, currently festering in a corner of her room.

  Because Q’s greatest gifts were, like her father’s, verbal. “You read too much, young lady,” the one teacher Q had ever disliked told her, which had made her want to read even more. Over the last six years she had consumed whole libraries, going hours into the night with a Kindle propped between her knobby knees, fingertipping her way through a dozen books a week that would show up on Amazon receipts in whirlwind lists of unfamiliar titles that left Rose too overwhelmed to monitor with any regularity. She did worry that the books Q chose were childish, unambitious, repetitive; how much intellectual growth could there be in obsessively rereading the Narnia chronicles ten times each?

  Gareth, as always, saw things differently. Let her lose herself in another world, he chided Rose, rather than getting tangled up in yours.

  Maybe he was right. Azra would frequently lament that the twins never picked up a book. In the age of the iPhone, who cared what your child was reading, as long as she was reading? As for those Amazon bills: Worth every penny, her husband insisted, quietly proud of their word-loving child.

  * * *

  —

  Rose stopped off for gas and tapped her foot, glancing at her watch while the tank filled. Silea came on alternate Fridays, and Rose liked everyone to be out of the way by nine so the cleaner could work through an empty house. Good for the spirit, to have a mildew-free shower at the end of a long day in the lab; Gareth’s haphazard straightenings were a poor substitute for Silea’s thorough cleanings.

  On the way home she tried to untangle her thoughts. Lauren’s distress, Tessa’s scowl, Xander’s science project. Always comforting to know that other families struggled with their darker moments, and Lauren’s crew had endured more than their fair share—genius could be a curse as much as a blessing. Crystal Academy or not, Rose wouldn’t trade Emma Q’s verbal flair for Xander’s unsettling brilliance to save her soul.

  Because unlike the others, Rose had never believed that Xander was joking about that pitcher of green smoothies. Her scientist’s ear had discerned the biological specificity in his gleeful, creepy announcement. The secret ingredient was a frog, Xander had crowed, and not just any frog but a Plains leopard frog. A world of thought and research packed into that detail. The taxonomic precision of it had stayed with her for years.

  Every so often Rose still woke from a bad dream with the bitter taste of Plains leopard frog coating her tongue.

  TWELVE

  EMMA Z

  On Friday she came home from school and ate two of her mother’s zucchini muffins and did a math worksheet and practiced violin. Then she went upstairs and noticed three things that were different from usual.

  The first thing was in her bathroom. She peed and then stood at the sink. Reaching for the faucet, she saw a small amount of water on the white surface, pooled around the cold handle. She looked down by the drain and saw a dribble of her own toothpasty spit from that morning, and when she looked in the mirror, she could tell that it hadn’t been wiped down. Weird.

  The second thing she noticed was her favorite yellow sweater, the soft cashmere one her father had bought her in Zurich last time he was there. Emma Z remembered folding it up that morning and setting it on her pillow. But somehow it had ended up under her bed. She squatted down and stared at it for a few seconds, then pulled it out, refolded it, and put it on her sweater shelf. Also weird.

  Then she noticed the third thing, the biggest thing of all. Emma rarely picked out a book to read, even though her parents bought her books all the time from Crystal Books and Barnes & Noble, as birthday presents or Christmas presents or just random things they thought she would like. They always left them on her bed, and when she came into her room, she would put them on the shelf with the rest of her books. She didn’t particularly care where they went or in what order.

  But today the books were actually organized on the bookcase. The top shelf and half of the second shelf had all her books that belonged in series. All her Percy Jacksons, her Harry Potters, her Boxcar Childrens, her Amelia Bedelias, her Chronicles of Narnias. She looked more closely and saw that all of these series had been sorted, alphabetized by the last name of the author: Coleman, Lewis, Parish, Riordan, Rowling, Warner, Wilder, and so on. The books that didn’t belong to series were organized in the same way, from A all the way to Z.

  Really weird.

  * * *

  —

  In the kitchen she helped herself to another zucchini muffin and watched while her mom ordered an olive leather jacket off her iPad. After watching her click on the Complete Purchase button, Z asked, “Do we have a new maid, Mommy?”

  “What’s that?” her mom said, browsing through some blouses now. Z liked the frilly ones but her mom never wore that kind.

  “Nothing,” said Z, looking around the kitchen and living room. Everything else looked like it normally did on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and besides, the stuff in her room wasn’t that important, so she decided not to say anything. Silea was really poor and lived in a trailer way out by Wild Horse Stables. Which reminded her.

  “Who’s driving us to the barn tomorrow?” she asked.

  Her mother clicked something and bought the blouse. “Lessons are canceled, actually. Tomorrow you have a test.”

  “A test?”

  “Yes, silly. It’s the CogPro, like the ones you’ve been do
ing with Cynthia.”

  “Oh,” said Z. Cynthia was her test tutor. She’d been to their house probably twenty million times since Christmas. “The one with the shapes and stuff?”

  “That’s right,” said her mother. “So I’ll make your favorite salmon tonight, and we’ll have that kimchi broccoli you like. Sound good?”

  “Uh-huh.” Emma Z finished her muffin. “I like tests.”

  Her mother reached over to boop her chin.

  * * *

  —

  That night in her room Emma Z found a fourth thing, standing by her lamp. A paper giraffe the size of a clothespin. She picked it up and examined it closely, trying to figure out how it was made. There must have been a hundred separate folds in the yellow paper. Daddy had once showed her how to make a paper balloon that you could actually blow up, but even he could never make something like this.

  She put her thumbs in the giraffe’s gapped neck and pulled the pieces apart, spreading them out. She split the animal’s back, unfurled its legs, and once it was all unfolded, she tried to fold it back together again but couldn’t, not even close. By the time she was done trying, all that was left of the paper animal was a square of torn and wrinkled paper. Emma Z flattened it with her palm and left it there, curling beneath the light.

  THIRTEEN

  XANDER

  Xander sat in the cafeteria three tables from the front and two off center, filling in bubbles. The CogPro questions were stupid. Like, third-grade stupid.

  They never gave tests like this at Odyssey, which was one of the reasons his mother had moved him there in fourth grade.

  Leaf-> Maple : Needle-> __________

  a. ant

  b. cat

  c. cone

  d. forest

  e. spruce

  The boy ran ________ down the sidewalk.