Ungifted (10 page)

T
hese were my math test results for the semester so far: 0 out of 20, 1 out of 15, 4 out of 35, and incomplete.

This was my math grade on my progress report: A-plus.

I explained to Ms. Bevelaqua that my score was actually 4.52 percent, a solid F-minus on any reasonable scale. She just laughed, and changed the A-plus to A-plus-plus. Then she wrote in the “comments” section: “Computes averages without aid of calculator.”

How unfair was that?

I found a clip on YouTube called “Failing Math.” But when I watched it, it was completely unhelpful. They didn't teach you how to fail math; they taught you how to pass! I expected more from YouTube, which usually had great stuff, like wrestling videos, oranges that talk, and people putting out oil-well fires.

There was another video called “Failing Schools,” but it turned out just to be this news story about how our education system isn't any good. I could have told them that. And not for the reasons
they
gave. The problem with our education system is if you score one little 206 on one little IQ test, everybody goes nuts about it. You have to go to a special school, only they call it an “Academy,” which really just means the same thing. And then the pressure starts: Do better, reach for the stars, live up to your potential, go all out, strive, achieve.

Why?

“You've been blessed with an incredible gift, and you're wasting it!” Oz was constantly telling me. “You should be getting a hundred percent on everything!”

He wanted me to admit that I got 4 out of 35 on purpose; that I could have gotten 35 out of 35 without breaking a sweat. That was missing the point entirely. To me this stuff was all so easy that 4 out of 35 and 35 out of 35 were really the same thing. It was like kicking puffballs of dandelion seeds as you walk across an open field. You
could
get them all. But why would you? It just didn't
matter
.

Abigail thought I was crazy. I disagreed. And if I was as smart as the IQ test said I was, which one of us was right?

I never asked to be right about everything. It just happened that way. When you have the answers before anybody asks the questions, nothing is very surprising, whether you're in the gifted program or not. You might as well go to the regular school around the corner from your house.

I wanted that
so much
. The students who went to that school laughed a lot. And even when they weren't in the act of laughing, they seemed
unpressured
. I could hear it in snippets of conversation as I waited for my bus to the Academy: “I don't care … who cares … I couldn't care less … ask me if I care … like I care …”

Everybody said they were less intelligent than us, but I thought those kids were really on to something. At the Academy, people cared
too much
, which was why we laughed so
little
. And
unpressured
was the last word you'd use to describe us.

So why couldn't I convince my parents to let me transfer? Was that argument beyond even my intellect? Did it require an IQ of 207 or better? I was failing at failing. The teachers were on to me. They'd never let it happen.

There was a conundrum here:

A) Only sheer genius could get me out of the Academy
.

B) Anyone showing sheer genius is sent to the Academy
.

I used to spend many hours pondering this, back in the days when I had many hours to spend pondering. That all changed when Donovan Curtis told me about YouTube. This was an important revelation for me, because almost everything on YouTube is surprising. I'll never forget when Donovan showed me how to use it. He clicked on a video and, for eleven magical seconds, we watched a cocker spaniel drinking out of a toilet. In those eleven seconds, my world was transformed. What I had just seen could not have been predicted by anyone, regardless of IQ. It was astonishingly simple and utterly random—the brain hiccup of a collective mind seven billion people strong.

I'd been looking for something like this my whole life. And I was infinitely grateful to Donovan for opening that door for me. I almost forgave him for bringing in his sister and spoiling the only chance I might ever have to flunk.

The word had just come in from the state department of education that studying Katie Patterson's pregnancy officially counted as real-life experience in Human Growth and Development. You should have seen the celebration when Oz made the announcement in the robotics lab. Everyone mobbed Donovan, slapping him on the back and cheering. All except Abigail. She actually wept at the news that she wouldn't have to go to summer school. It was a little confusing. She took classes all summer anyway, so wasn't that summer school too? What was the difference between the summer school she went to on purpose and the summer school she'd do anything to avoid?

Speaking of confusing, there was Donovan himself. He clearly didn't belong at the Academy. I knew that after his first twenty minutes in the lab. What was he doing here? I had no idea—and that alone was considerably awesome. There were very few things that I had no idea about. The fact that one of them had landed a few seats away from me in homeroom was wonderful in itself.

Donovan was like a human YouTube video—unpredictable. We could have worked on Tin Man for years, incorporating every refinement allowed by technology. But none of us could have envisioned that the greatest improvement of all would be simply in the way you drove it. Yet when Donovan took over the joystick, the answer was right there for all of us to see.

It also made excellent YouTube footage. Google
Tin Man Metallica Squarepants Exposes Teacher's Underwear
and the clip should come up. It already had more than a thousand page views, making it my greatest hit so far. Picture this: Ms. Bevelaqua was covering for Oz in the lab, and one fork of the robot's lift mechanism got under her skirt. By the time she noticed it, her hem was up around her ears, and everybody was staring at her underpants, which were bright yellow with a pattern of Cartesian geometry.

Ms. Bevelaqua didn't accept Donovan's apology. You'd think a math teacher who wore Cartesian geometry underwear would have a better sense of humor. But she was really mad. Her face looked like she was being tasered—or at least how those people look in YouTube videos.

We were just getting calmed down after that brouhaha when Chloe pounded into the lab, gasping from an all-out sprint. “You won't believe it!” she panted. “They still haven't fixed the Hardcastle gym, so they're moving the Valentine Dance
here
!”

Donovan looked uncomfortable. “What do we care about another school's party?”

“Don't you get it?” Chloe crowed. “It's on our turf, so we're all invited! I've been in the gifted program since I was eight, and you know how many dances we've had? Try zero!”

“Except for ‘The Dance of the Electrons,'” I reminded her. “My sixth-grade science project.”

Abigail did not share Chloe's enthusiasm. “I can't think of a single thing that interests me less than a school dance.”

Chloe stared at her. “But you're
going
, right?”

“Not even at gunpoint.”

Chloe was devastated. “But you have to! We may never get the chance to go to another one!”

Abigail was adamant. “That suits me just fine.”

“You're a scientist,” Ms. Bevelaqua challenged her. “How can you arrive at a conclusion without any data to back it up?”

Chloe jumped on the bandwagon. “Look at this as an experiment. A
social
experiment. Right, Donovan?”

Donovan shrugged. “Don't ask me. I never go to dances.”

“Well, you're going to this one,” announced Oz, striding into the room. “I'm making it a class assignment.”

Abigail was horrified. “Oz—you can't make us go to an after-school event!”

“No,” the teacher agreed, “but I can assign everybody to write an essay about it. And if you haven't been there, you'll have to take a zero.”

“
I'll
take a zero,” I volunteered readily.

“You couldn't get a zero if you handed in a blank page,” Abigail said in a resentful tone.

She was tight-lipped, but I had a feeling she'd be there. I'd kill for a bad grade; she'd kill to avoid one.

Oz panned the room, making eye contact with each student. “This is a good idea, people. We're all so focused on our specialties that we tend to miss out on ordinary experiences. Having fun is part of an education too, you know.”

“I don't have time to go to a dance,” I complained. “In the three hours it would take me to get there, be there, and get home, I could watch between seventy and one hundred YouTube videos—depending on the duration of each, of course.”

“There's more to life than YouTube, Noah,” chided Chloe.

“That's where you're wrong,” I retorted. “YouTube
is
life, only better. The entirety of human experience is on that little screen. Last night, I watched a modern-day clash of gladiators in bathing suits battling in and out of a roped square, jumping off tables and hitting each other with chairs!”

“It's called professional wrestling, Noah,” Donovan announced. “And it's all fake.”

“I saw blood!” I respected Donovan, but he didn't know everything. “If my mother hadn't pulled the plug on my computer, I could have watched a steel-cage match!”

Oz put an end to the discussion. “It's settled. We'll all be there. And there's extra credit in it for anybody who can relax enough to have a good time.”

“Will you be going?” I asked Donovan as we headed back to our seats.

“I never went to Hardcastle dances when I was a Hardcastle student,” he told me. “Why should I start now?”

Oz overheard us. “Extra credit, Donovan,” he said enticingly, dangling the prospect like a fisherman dangles bait.

“So you'll be there?” I persisted.

“What do you care?” Donovan snapped, suddenly angry. “
You
shouldn't even be going. You don't need extra credit. You've got more points than you know what to do with.”

“I wish I could give you some of mine,” I told him honestly. “But I don't think it works that way.”

He stared at me for a moment, and then sighed. “See you at the dance.”

“D
onnie!”

I was getting ready for school when the bloodcurdling scream brought me running out of the bathroom.

“
Donnie, get in here this minute!
”

I leaped over Beatrice, who was sprawled across my doorway, and ran into Katie's room, preparing to dial 911. But she was alive and well, sitting at her laptop computer, reading her overnight emails from Afghanistan.

From: First Lieutenant H. Bradley Patterson, United States Marine Corps

Katie—Captain Hunsinger says he saw your stomach on YouTube.

What gives?

Brad

I reddened. “It was probably Noah. YouTube is his whole life.”

“I'm entitled to a life too, you know!” she stormed at me. “That didn't change because you blackmailed me into signing on with your freaky brain trust! I found that video! It's basically a two-minute close-up of my fat belly while ‘We Are the Champions' plays in the background!”

“It's a compliment. He's got nothing better to do with his two hundred IQ.”

“Cut it out, Donnie. You're not talking to your misfits here—”

“They're not misfits,” I insisted. “They're just—different. Supersmart. But dumb in a way, too. Like babies.”

It was the wrong word. It reminded her. “My husband is eleven thousand miles away in a dangerous war zone. He shouldn't be hearing about his wife's pregnancy from YouTube. And his captain shouldn't be hearing about it at all.”

“I'll get Noah to take the video down,” I promised. “He didn't mean anything. You don't understand about him.”

She looked curious. “What happened to you, Donnie? You're giving your best friends the cold shoulder, but defending these crazies?”