The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger

  TESSA: Great stories, Beck. Thanks.

  BECK: Just don’t tell your mom.

  TESSA: That’s the third thing.

  BECK: ’Night, Tessa.

  SEVENTEEN

  ROSE

  On Tuesdays she would swing by BloomAgain on her way home from the lab to pick up Azra. Sometimes they sat in front of Azra’s house for an hour, parked at the curb, processing their lives. This time together was safe, close, precious.

  Today Azra was venting about the twins: Charlie struggling in school and soccer, Aidan thriving in both, the brothers diverging in ways she could never have foreseen. They’re different kids, Azra wanted Beck to see, with different needs, different talents and strengths.

  “That’s something I need to remember about the Emmas,” Rose offered. “They’ve been together since daycare. I’m just worried what things will be like, say if Z gets in and Q doesn’t.”

  “Or the reverse.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Hey, stranger things have happened,” Azra said. “And with Kev’s connections?”

  Rose frowned. “That’s not how this school works, or at least I hope not. Mainly I just don’t want our daughters to drift apart. They’re like two peas in a pod.”

  Azra got a look.

  “What? Too cliché?”

  Azra shook her head. Something in her eyes, or the late-afternoon light playing tricks on her face.

  “What?” Rose asked.

  Azra dug in her purse for her keys. “I should go. Glen will be by soon.”

  “Well, thanks for letting me vomit. You’re so lucky you don’t have to worry about all this.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Azra made no move to get out. A hardness gripped her features, and the temperature in the car seemed to drop ten degrees.

  Rose said cautiously, “You know, with the school.”

  “Go on.”

  “I just mean—the boys have their soccer, they’re such amazing athletes—”

  “Have their soccer?” she snapped. “Rose, are you listening to yourself?”

  “I thought they didn’t test. They weren’t there on Saturday.”

  “Beck took them skiing. I told you guys that. So they’re taking the CogPro tomorrow night, in the makeup session.”

  “Oh.”

  Azra’s lips formed a tight line. “So predictable.”

  “What?”

  “You blab all day about Q and Z, the intricate dynamics between you and Samantha and your girls, how brilliant Xander is, a budding scientist like you. But my boys are nowhere on your radar.”

  “I’m sorry, Azra, I just didn’t think—”

  “It didn’t occur to you, is what you mean. That they would test.”

  Azra was right. It hadn’t.

  “The academy hasn’t seemed like a priority to you,” Rose pleaded. “I think of you guys as contemptuous of it, that’s all.” She was stumbling, feeling horrible, wondering at this sudden anger.

  “You and Samantha sometimes, it’s just—” Biting off the words. “Swear to God, if there’s one thing that makes me absolutely insane, it’s the smug parents of well-behaved girls.”

  This time Rose kept her mouth shut.

  “It’s been this way since they were tiny,” Azra went on. “The boys run around like hooligans, getting into everything, kicking soccer balls through the windows, total fuckstorm. Meanwhile the Emmas are sitting at the table having tea and reading Jane Austen. Do they even burp?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Not fair? Did you say not fair? I’ll tell you what’s not fair. Potty training, that’s what.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “My guys didn’t train until they were four and a half, Rose. Four and a half and I’m still changing their shitty diapers, one after the other. That’s my main memory from those months while me and Beck were first having trouble, the hell of that. And meanwhile your daughter—who trained right after her second birthday, mind you, just like her BFF Emma Z—heads off to the toilet, comes back smelling like a lilac bush, and you’re all ‘Good job, Emma Q!’ in your perky girl-mom voice, right in front of me.”

  “God, Azra.”

  “And it’s no better now. ‘Hey, Rose, what are you up to today?’ ‘Oh, I’m going with Samantha to Clarita Ranch. We’re taking our daughters to ride these cute ponies!’ ‘Oh, hi, Azra, I’d love to meet for a drink. But you know what? The Emmas have ballet.’ Our daughters our daughters the Emmas the Emmas.”

  She bared her teeth and pushed back against the headrest. “It’s just hard, when your two best friends have this part of their lives you’re shut off from completely. Sweet, studious little girls beloved by their teachers. I don’t have that and never will.”

  Your two best friends. Until that moment Rose had never seen herself this way, on a par in Azra’s eyes with Samantha—though not with Lauren, and it was surely no accident that hers was the next name out of Azra’s mouth.

  “It’s one of the things I really appreciate about Lauren. I’m not saying Xander’s out there rooting in the mud with my little pigs, but I mean, for all her quirks she’s not into the showy girl shit with Tessa.”

  Rose closed her eyes, wanting to speak up in her own defense. For one thing Tessa had been, until recently, a total train wreck; there was nothing to be showy about. But she reached over to press a hand on Azra’s fists, clenched together in her lap. “I don’t know what to say except I’m so sorry we make you feel this way. I really am.”

  “It’s just different, having boys.”

  “Azra, I hear what you’re saying and I’ll think about this, I promise.”

  “God you’ve had a lot of therapy, Rose.”

  Rose gasped. Azra raised a hand to her mouth. She burst out laughing and Rose did too, and for a minute they lost it completely. When they recovered their composure, Azra smiled sadly out the windshield. She wiped her right eye with a knuckle.

  “I feel better,” she said.

  “Well I don’t,” said Rose.

  “Good.” Azra’s face brightened. “You know what Beck used to do?”

  “What?”

  “He only ever confessed it to me, because it’s so unlike him. Bet Sonja doesn’t even know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “So when the boys were little,” she said, rage dissolved, “when Beck was out with one of them at PlaySpace, or one of the climbing structures on the Emerald Mall—”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s say he was sitting and some rando parent sat down next to him and started asking questions. You know, How old is your son? How long has he been walking? Where they want to talk about their kids so they start by asking about yours kind of thing.”

  “They want to compare.”

  “Right. So you know what Beck would do, if it was some mom or dad he didn’t know? He’d subtract a few months from the boys’ ages. Tell other parents they were only nine months when they were a year. Eighteen months when they’d just turned two.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “It made the boys look like they were more developed. That they had more language, more motor skills. Like they were walking way younger than when they actually did.”

  “But why?”

  Azra’s eyes gleamed. “He wanted to see that flicker of worry in the parents’ eyes. It would thrill him, to make a self-satisfied mom just a teensy bit jealous that some nasty boy was hitting the milestones earlier than her princess.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “When he confessed it in counseling, I weirdly loved him for it. I have a little bit of it too, that protective ferocity about my boys.”

  “We all have that, I think. With our kids.”

  “But it’s different for me, and for Beck too. The fact that you guys don�
�t see the twins the way you see the Emmas, or Xander, see them as smart and respectful and academic and capable of anything—”

  Rose started to object.

  “Don’t,” Azra warned, a finger raised.

  “Okay,” she responded meekly.

  Azra’s face held an expression that Rose couldn’t read. A certain firmness there; resolve. “You know what, Rose? About this test, this school?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I hope Emma Q gets in. Emma Z too. You know I love those girls, and I know the whole thing is important to you and Samantha, to your families. But I don’t want to hear about Crystal Academy from you anymore, not for a while. I’m sorry but I don’t. It’s just not a good subject for us, okay?”

  Rose gave her friend a tight smile, the newness of it not choking her up until Azra was out of the car, up the stairs, unlocking her front door. Because with Azra, with the way they talked, there had never been rules, never been limits. Never a taboo, until now.

  * * *

  —

  Late that night, with Gareth and Q asleep, Rose sat out on the living room couch, still shredded from the encounter but distracting herself by prepping an upcoming lecture and slides for grand rounds at the Medical Center.

  Seizures, slurred words, loss of motor control, eventual paralysis, and inevitable death: whenever she described her work on neurodegenerative disorders in preadolescent brains, Rose felt as if she were narrating the prologue to a horror novel. The question was how to pitch the subject for first- and second-years, how to spur their interest in this obscure corner of pediatric neurology. The family of diseases she studied in her lab was rare enough that Rose had met only twelve patients with infantile diagnosis since she had started working on the terminal disorder seven years ago. These years of research had convinced her that her team had revealed a new pathway to treatment, that the particular enzymatic mechanism she had isolated held the key to a much wider range of neurodegenerative disorders. Finding that key would require money and time, too much of both, and the field of neurology was fiercely competitive. But give her five years and five million dollars and she would tame this monster tearing through the brains of the young.

  Two MRI images glowed from her screen. Close-up cross sections of an atrophic parietal lobe, the decay highlighted in the red PowerPoint circles and arrows she had just added to the slide. Below the image, her cold description of its pathology.

  She looked away and into the darkened kitchen. The brains of the young. As the stove clock ticked to 2:12 a.m., her thoughts churned over the fraught exchange with Azra, Beck’s gaslighting of other parents, Azra’s frustrations with her sweet boys and her annoying friends. Rose’s work had taught her never to take Emma Q’s health for granted, though maybe it was too easy for all of them to lapse into a glib complacency, with these constant parental worries about achievements and test scores, the invidious but inescapable comparisons.

  She took one final glance at her screen before shutting her laptop and stealing into Emma Q’s room for the day’s last look at her little girl, a soft kiss on that forehead. Survivor’s guilt, now incarnate in her daughter. Every night Rose came home from her mouse brains and her next-gen sequencer to whisper an agnostic’s fierce blessing down through the skull and into the thriving brain of her only child.

  EIGHTEEN

  XANDER

  The problem,” said Mr. Aker, scraping his fingers across a dandruffy scalp, “is that what you’re doing here isn’t really science.”

  “It’s probability, Mr. Aker. Mathematics.”

  “Yes but only you can see the payoff. Do you understand?”

  “Not precisely.”

  Until recently Xander had been working on the biomolecular composition of the secretions and excretions of Dysdera crocata, the woodlouse spider, figuring out the cellular information, breaking down the genetics, doing some dissection. Mr. Aker had even made contacts at the university to see if Xander could do some venom testing with mice.

  Then, two weeks ago, Xander had grown bored of the biomolecular composition of the secretions and excretions of Dysdera crocata. So he’d switched topics. Since then he had been much happier with his project. Now it was all about probability and chess, the equations that explained why certain things happened in the game in particular ways, about how to calculate multiple combinations of pieces and moves.

  Xander looked at the formulas and figures on his printout. It was pretty easy to research all this stuff, a lot harder to confirm its validity to his satisfaction. But he had done it, and now these proofs and calculations were even more skull-blowing to Xander than before.

  Like Hardy’s estimate for the number of possible chess games: ten to the tenth to the fiftieth. Or Shannon’s equation for the number of possible positions:

  P (40)≈ 64! ≈1010

  (32!) (8!)2 (2!)6

  Of course, that was only if you factored in every possible game with every possible permutation of openings and defenses and moves and outcomes. But even after just four moves the number of possible positions—according to Flye St. Marie back in 1903—was 71,852. Xander couldn’t quite believe that number when he’d first read it, but he’d done the proof himself, and it was true.

  “Okay, so let me put it this way.” Mr. Aker folded his arms. “I’m a pretty good chess player, right? I can hold my own against you better than anyone else at Odyssey. Agreed?”

  “Affirmative. You actually beat me one time.”

  Mr. Aker flashed a quick smile. “But the folks who will be judging the science fair won’t be even as good as I am. So all these tables and charts, the Shirking Hand or whatever—”

  “The Shrikhande graph,” said Xander.

  “It’s above the head of basically anyone who would ever judge the competition. You see?”

  Xander said nothing.

  “Whereas the stuff you were working on a few weeks ago—the genetics, the collagen—that was interesting. It’s the kind of project that could easily win districts, go on to states, maybe even nationals. So could we go back to Dysdera crocata, see if you can get some more questions generated?”

  “Why do you like the spider project so much?”

  “Because it’s simple, Xander. You can understand its significance right away. The project is beautiful, complex, smart as heck—but mostly because it’s simple.”

  “I understand.”

  “Great.” Mr. Aker got up and went to talk to one of Xander’s classmates, a girl working on water pollution in the Crystal streams. How exciting. Xander stared at the back of Mr. Aker’s head, not angry, just bummed out. Mr. Aker was nice, and getting all mad about things, like Tessa did, was an idiotic waste of time.

  He looked back at his charts and graphs, four pages of calculations. In one motion he gathered them together and crumpled them up into a ball and tossed it toward the wastebasket in front of Mr. Aker’s desk.

  Swish. Eat that, LeBron.

  No big deal. He’d memorized it all anyway. But still.

  He spent the rest of science class staring out the window, his chin resting on the back of a hand, trying not to care. Because if there was one thing Xander hated, it was simplicity.

  NINETEEN

  CH’AYÑA

  Ch’ayña waited until she heard Tiago leave before she came out of the bedroom and down the hall to where her daughter sat on the small sofa. She settled next to her and took Silea’s good hand in her lap. The other was buried in a white plaster cast up to her shoulder, swirled with Atik’s designs in magic marker and pen.

  “Where is Atik?” Ch’ayña asked.

  “He’s out running with Kyler.”

  The gringo kid three rows down, the only one in the park. Nice boy, though not the brightest bulb; not like Atik.

  “I’ll call him in,” Ch’ayña said.

  “Give him a few more minutes. He’s been workin
g hard.”

  “He has,” Ch’ayña agreed.

  They needed him to. Silea had broken her elbow eleven days ago after slipping on an icy walk in front of the Rite Aid. A serious break, and now Silea had her arm locked out in front of her in a cast-and-brace contraption that made her look like a robot. She couldn’t mop, vacuum, shake out a rug, load and unload the truck, or drive.

  Since his mother’s fall Atik had filled in some at the houses, offering again, as he had last time, without being asked. So far he’d missed three days of school. Soon there would be questions from the teachers.

  Ch’ayña said, “For supper I’ll do potatoes and those peppers with the beef.”

  Silea nodded toward the counter. “Tiago brought dinner already.”

  Ch’ayña looked over. A chicken sat in steaming plastic, roasted at the store. There was also a loaf of bread and a pale sphere of lettuce by the cutting board. “Fine,” she said with a huff.

  Silea patted her mother’s wrist. “Be kind to him. He likes to help.”

  Those first weeks Tiago had come around, every time he showed up, Ch’ayña would pour him a glass of water from the sink. Back in Huánuco, to offer a guest a glass of cold water was an insult: For you, I can’t even be bothered to boil water for tea. But Tiago took the glasses of cold water as signs of approval, even fondness. He’d started smiling at Ch’ayña, trying to talk Spanish with her, maybe thinking of her already as his new suyra. She stopped with the water after that.

  Footsteps on gravel, familiar stomps, door swinging open. Atik came in, breathless, looked at them on the couch, and glanced at the stove clock. “I have to be there at seven,” he huffed. “Can we go now?”

  “Go where?” Ch’ayña asked.

  “To school.”

  “To school at night? That’s what the wawa wants?”

  “He has a test,” said Silea.

  “He has chores,” Ch’ayña countered. “There are dishes, there’s trash.”