The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger

  a. speedy

  b. tastily

  c. swiftly

  d. fast

  e. efficient

  They tried to trick you with answers that seemed correct, or could seem correct if you weren’t paying attention, like cone which could be part of a pine tree like needle, or tastily which was an adverb like swiftly.

  The math questions were even dumber. Sure, they’d put two equations in the same problem. But who wouldn’t know that

  x − 7 = 4y / y = 63 ÷ 9

  solved for 35? Or that

  432 ÷ y = 27 / √y + x = 91

  solved for 16 and 87? Xander could take one glance at a quantitative test page and know the answer to every question at the same time. It was hardly worth deigning to fill in the dicky little circles with your asshole No. 2 pencil.

  He pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth and looked up from the testing booklet.

  Tick tick tick.

  With his lips parted he clicked his tongue. Really soft (ooh, sorry: softly), so only the nearby kids could hear, and also so it was hard to tell who was doing it. A few turned their heads to look around, trying to figure out where the annoying noise was coming from.

  Tick tick tick.

  Emma Holland-Quinn’s head went up two rows in front of him and one table to the right. She looked to one side, to the other. Xander smiled.

  Tick tick tick.

  Out of the top edges of his eyes he could see her turn around again. Staring at him. He looked right at her. She stuck out her tongue.

  “Eyes on tests,” the teacher called out.

  Q turned away.

  Once, in second grade, before his mother switched him to Odyssey and before the twins went to St. Bridget’s, Xander got in huge trouble for taking a pair of scissors from the teacher’s desk and lopping off a thick wodge of Emma Q’s hair while the class was watching a movie. It was a dare, from Aidan. Q’s mom took her to a fancy hairdresser to fix it, but she had really short hair for a long time after that.

  He stared at the back of Q’s head and remembered what those scissors felt like, slicing through that thick hair. Like cutting up a stack of paper, or making snowflakes at Christmas.

  Not as easy as it looked. Not as easy as the next five questions on this asinine test.

  He filled in another bubble and sighed.

  FOURTEEN

  ROSE

  Chill out. It’s just the first round.”

  Samantha, a silky whisper to her left.

  “Hi, you,” Rose said. She relaxed her folded arms, and her skin prickled when she dropped them to her sides.

  “Lunch after?” Samantha asked.

  “Sure. Finnegan’s?”

  “Emma Z has the dentist at two, but we should be done by then.”

  “On a Saturday?”

  “If they want my business.”

  “Poor thing. Q hates the drill.”

  Samantha waved a hand, dismissive. “It’s just a six-month cleaning. And Z couldn’t get a cavity if she ate ten cupcakes a day. Those Zellar teeth.”

  Rose sighed against the glass, remembering Emma Q’s last appointment. Two fillings, swollen gums, puffy jowls.

  Not Emma Z. Rose located Samantha’s daughter in the cafeteria, three tables down from Q. All the other children were slouched over their booklets and bubble sheets, frowning, scribbling away. Not Z. She sat perfectly straight in her chair, face serene, almost bored: ostentatiously so, as if she knew the parents were out there and wanted them to see how well she was performing.

  That was Z, always. Early to the finish line, error- and cavity-free.

  * * *

  —

  The stop time crept near. More parents arrived, dozens herding tensely into the north vestibule, all put-on levity and forced humor. Rose looked at her watch, and when she looked up again, Samantha’s daughter was gone. She frowned. A moment later Emma Z’s head popped up above the table, a dropped pencil in her hand.

  A bell rang, followed by the muffled voice of the proctor.

  Xander was first out, weaving around the other kids and throwing himself like a kindergartner at Lauren, just walking in for pickup. Samantha, texting nonstop, had whipped up a group lunch. Azra would meet them all at Finnegan’s with the twins, she said. As the kids pushed their way out of the cafeteria, Rose searched her daughter’s eyes for some sign of how the test had gone, but Q was already chatting with her best friend.

  The post-testing crowd flowed from the dim vestibule out into the Colorado sun. The stone faces of the Redirons sparkled gold, radiant with the leavings of an early spring snow. On the way to their car Emma Q took her mother’s hand, a childlike gesture that surprised Rose. Skin cold to the touch, hand gloved with sweat.

  * * *

  —

  At Finnegan’s Wake they shoved tables together at the edge of a cavernous room lined with bookshelves. Students, academics, and earbudded professionals tapped away, buzzed on lattes, happily cloistered in the Saturday crowd. Xander walked over to the chess table and the Emmas settled on a nearby sofa. Azra hadn’t yet appeared and wasn’t returning texts.

  “So,” said Lauren when they were seated. “Do you think the Emmas tested well?”

  “I guess we’ll know next week,” Sam answered curtly.

  “What do you think the cutoff will be?” Lauren asked with her usual bluntness. Everyone knew Xander’s score would be astronomical.

  “Maybe one-twenty-five.” Samantha scanned her menu.

  “Really?” Rose blurted out. “I thought they’d said anything one-fifteen and above would make the first cut.” One-twenty was Q’s highest score on the CogPro. Hard to imagine she would top that under pressure, despite all the practice tests Rose had found for her.

  “That’s for the outer counties,” Samantha said. “They don’t test as well in the boondocks.”

  “They’re weighting it by district?”

  “Apparently so.” Samantha lowered her voice. “Each school district in the magnet area will have its own cutoff for the first phase. For the City of Crystal and Kendall County it should be five or ten points higher than for Western and Madison counties. And for Beulah County—I mean, who knows how those kids will score.”

  Beulah, the poorer county stretching east over the Colorado plains, five hundred square miles of sprawling trailer parks, small town pawn-and-gun shops, and an agricultural base that furnished carloads of workers, local organic produce, grass-fed beef, and other necessities to service Crystal’s moneyed population.

  “Is there a specific percentage of Beulah kids they’re committed to taking?” Rose wondered how the schools would navigate this delicate ecology of privilege.

  “Hasn’t been decided yet,” Samantha responded. “Everything’s up for grabs. Kev thinks they’ll intentionally keep it a mystery.”

  “There’s a good reason for that, though,” Lauren said, her tone sharp.

  Here it comes, Rose thought: subjects like this were kindling between those two. The wealthy matron versus the social worker, both fighting blind.

  “You have in-built testing biases, racial and economic disparities in educational attainment,” Lauren continued. “We see it all the time at Youth and Family Services, plus social and psychological issues like nutrition and health care. Even nonverbal IQ scores are affected by environmental circumstances.”

  “And brain chemistry,” Rose added, mostly to keep the conversation going. Better than quailing over Q’s potential CogPro score.

  Samantha’s brows, freshly waxed, rose a half inch. “I guess I trust the teachers to know what they’re doing.”

  “And I trust the research to account for difference and diversity,” Lauren countered. “Sounds like the school boards want to avoid advantage hoarding and address the excellence gap, and I’m all for it.”


  “Advantage hoarding? Are you serious?” Sam’s kombucha bottle thudded down on the table. “So how are they supposed to do that, Lauren? I mean, in a way that’s objective and doesn’t disadvantage kids who happen”—here she lowered her voice again—“to be wealthy and white.”

  “I’m not the expert,” said Lauren. “But there are ways of taking account of each student as a unique individual.”

  Samantha sniffed. “Easy for you to say.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, come on. Your unique individual’s in no matter what.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Sure we do.”

  As if summoned by Samantha’s jaundiced reply, Xander came over from the chess table and stood next to his mother. His thick lenses cast a shadow on his face and transmitted that familiar diagnostic vibe. Azra and Samantha had mentioned it too, more and more in recent months: as if the kid had memorized a psych manual and already had you pegged with a disorder you’d never heard of but fit you like a second skin.

  “Are you guys talking about Crystal Academy?”

  “Not right now, sweetie.” A rare panic on Lauren’s face.

  His distorted eyes shifted back and forth, landing on Rose. “You don’t think Emma Q will get in, do you?”

  He asked the question loudly, prompting an awkward silence from their corner of the coffee shop. Rose glanced at Q on the big sofa, mouth hanging open, nose buried in a borrowed book, sweetly oblivious.

  “Xander, you’re such a butt,” Emma Z called out. Rose looked fondly at Z’s face, the screwed-up frown on that familiar mouth. She could kiss her right now.

  Xander turned and flipped her off, double-handed. Lauren gently pulled her son to her side and nuzzled his neck, no hint of a correction. Mama Bear, protecting her cub.

  * * *

  —

  They had just asked for the bill when Azra strode in, harried. “Sorry, you guys. I can’t reach Beck, and it’s making me crazy.”

  Lauren craned her neck. “Where are the twins?”

  “His weekend.” Azra flopped down in a chair. “They should have been waiting outside at Donnelly, but I went to pick them up and they weren’t there. They missed the CogPro.”

  Rose blinked. You put Beck in charge of their testing?

  “Wait, the twins are taking the CogPro?” Samantha asked.

  Azra frowned. “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t know,” Samantha said quickly, trying to cover.

  “We just assumed,” said Lauren.

  We? Rose shook her head, wanting no part of this, but Azra was already rising from her seat.

  Lauren blanched. “Hey, I just meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” Azra said. A tightening around her eyes. “I have to pee.”

  As Azra strode off toward the bathrooms Rose marveled at her composure. It was a boon to their group, a gift Samantha and Lauren had never valued as Rose had, though even she sometimes wondered where Azra got her serenity, and the kindness in her that allowed her to forgive: Beck for his manifold failures as father and spouse, Samantha for her smug, judgmental side, Lauren for the superiority complex that elevated Xander in her eyes miles and mountains over Azra’s sporty boys.

  And Rose—for what?

  There must be something. There had to be, over all these years.

  * * *

  —

  It began, as they began, in the water.

  The swim class had beckoned for weeks from posters at the gym: a multicultural assemblage of grinning moms and a few dads and a swarm of floating babies shot from above and frozen in aquamarine, a small masterpiece of graphic design. H2OhBABY! the posters called it.

  A poor pun, hokey; but to Rose the class had a certain appeal, promising company in misery, a venture out of the house, a first taste of postnatal fitness. You should go, Gareth urged her. He had stopped working out regularly, neglecting his fitness along with his writing; but he was always trying to get her to take advantage of their joint membership.

  H2OhBABY! did have a few rules. Your child had to weigh at least twelve pounds, with decent head control, and had to wear a swim diaper; parents were required to provide their own flotation devices. At three months Emma weighed in just shy of fourteen pounds. Prior to the first session Rose picked up a packet of lime green swim diapers and tested one out in the bathtub.

  What she overlooked was the flotation device. Her eyes must have skipped that part of the fine print; or perhaps she imagined herself as a flotation device, the notion of letting go of Emma’s tiny body in a pool even for a moment unthinkable.

  She was already running late when she arrived at the Rec Center. A minor crisis at the med school, a grad student turned down for summer funding. Rose made some calls, fixed things, though the effort slowed her down, and she found herself suited up and out at the edge of the pool six minutes after the hour, with Emma clutched to her chest, sting of chlorine in the air.

  The instructor, leading the class in opening stretches, greeted her with a disapproving frown. Rose gazed out over the water at the pitying looks from the other moms and au pairs, because despite the gender-neutral ads they were all moms and au pairs, and despite the posters they were all white, like Rose, except maybe one, and they all stood in the pool with their babies tucked into a rainbow of floats and inner tubes, scooping water over the gently bobbing heads.

  It’s just a swim class, Rose told herself as a burning gathered in her chest. A harried morning at home, then the crisis with the student that made her miss her lab and wonder why she had arranged for so much time off. She started asking herself why they moved to Crystal in the first place when she could have taken a position at Northwestern, in a real city where she could have had real friends. Then, as she began to turn away to slink back to the locker room, a soft alto rang up from the water.

  “Hey, I’ve got an extra,” said the voice: low, rich, almost husky. Rose looked down and through the blur of her rising tears saw a sweep of straw-blond hair pulled back from a face that was open, friendly, heart-shaped—the face, it seemed in that instant, of an angel.

  “Are you sure?” Rose said.

  “Absolutely.” The woman pushed herself out of the pool and plucked her baby from an inner tube. In twenty seconds she was back from the locker room with one hand pinning her dripping child to her hip, the other clutching a matching inner tube already half inflated, the nozzle fixed between her teeth and lips.

  “Oh, let me do that,” said Rose, adjusting Emma on her side.

  “Goth ith,” the other woman lisped around the nozzle. A few last breaths and the plastic tightened up. “Here.” She handed Rose the tube before deftly twisting herself and her baby back into the pool. “You don’t mind the duck head?”

  “Not at all.” Emma was already entranced by it, eyes fixed on the orange bill, the flapping rubber wings. Rose went over the side and situated herself with her daughter, who started kicking gleefully once in the pool. Soon Rose too was hop-jogging in place and feeling part of the class, the water a balm to her spirits and skin.

  “Someone always forgets,” the woman said.

  “You’ve taken this class before?” Rose asked.

  “Only taught it five times.”

  “You work here?” Which would explain the muscled legs and sculpted arms. The women tilted left, right, left.

  “Not since my seventh month. I do personal training, some nutritionist stuff. I’ll probably come back at some point.” In midtilt she turned and examined Rose’s face. Water had beaded finely on her flawless, almost shimmering skin. “I’m Samantha Zellar,” she said. “Sam.”

  “Rose.”

  “And who’s this?”

  “Her name is Emma.”

  Samantha crinkled her eyes in a way Rose liked. “That’s funny.”

  “What?”
<
br />   “She’s Emma too,” Samantha Zellar said, and chucked her daughter’s chin.

  * * *

  —

  The next week Rose arrived poolside on time, her own flotation device in hand. She looked for Samantha and Emma in the front row but didn’t see them. The same lonely sadness welled up just below her neck.

  “Rose! Back here!”

  At the far corner of the pool Samantha stood, gesturing for her. Rose scurried around the lifeguard, then lowered herself into the water between Samantha and a woman trying to manage wriggling twins who didn’t seem particularly happy to be there. Neither did their mother, the only woman in the pool who wasn’t white. A pink swimming cap tightened the roots of her hair against the light brown skin of her forehead as she struggled with her twins, now screaming. The mother barked “God, I can’t with these guys” across the pool, drawing scowls, a prim frown from the instructor. Samantha sidestepped until she had her Emma positioned next to the closer twin. He stopped his screaming long enough to stare at the wide-eyed girl floating in on a pink doughnut. The mom glanced at Samantha, grateful, but by this time the other twin had become distracted by the thrashing of a bigger baby next to him, a white boy with a sizeable head that he enjoyed slamming back and forth against the sides of his inner tube. A giggling fit quickly spread from one twin to the other, and the four mothers laughed in relief.

  “Ladies, please,” the instructor snapped through her throat mic. “Your classmates are trying to hear the instructions. Can we calm it down back th—”

  Screeeeee!

  Feedback whined from the sound system, a shattering volume that caromed around the high-ceilinged pool deck. The women clapped hands to their heads, and the babies in Rose’s corner froze, their eyes large with shock, then every child in the pool started screaming at the assault on their delicate ears. Twenty-odd howling infants, panicked and angry mothers and au pairs, but the four women in the far corner shared their first laugh, giddy, like middle schoolers escaping punishment.