The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger

  Rose felt her body go heavy in the seat.

  It got worse. Soon the Emmas began rating the admissions chances of their classmates and friends. Z called one boy a “drooler,” and then Q opined, world-weary, that someone named Connor would get in because of his father’s big prize in astrophysics. Rose heard a vicious analysis of Caitlin Comstock, a hilarious girl who’d come to their birthday parties for years, always bearing a thoughtful gift.

  “Caitlyn can’t even finish a book,” Q observed, her pitch too high.

  “I know!” Z’s laugh, belly-deep. “She’s had Order of the Phoenix in her backpack for, like, six months!”

  “That’s just sad.” Q pretended to be pained.

  “I know, right? She pulls it out and just, like, thunks it on her desk and opens it so everyone will think she’s reading a big thick book.”

  “What about Stephie Turner?” Q asked.

  “She can’t even talk like she’s smart.”

  Q laughed. “You’re right. But Xander’s good at that.”

  “Good at what?” Z snapped.

  Rose looked in the rearview. Emma Z’s pretty face had contorted at the mention of Xander’s name.

  “Sorry, I just mean, he . . . he’s good at talking like he’s smart,” Q stumbled. “Xander can read anything, right? But it seems like he doesn’t understand a lot of what he reads. Because of how he is. He just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get—context.”

  Q had lingered a beat over the last word, like a taste of milky chocolate on her tongue. Context: a recent acquisition, and she was clearly thrilled to be deploying it to such good effect.

  Then Z’s wicked laugh again, approbation for her friend. “Yaaaaasssss!” she said, tickled by Q’s insight. “Yes, that’s totally it. It’s like—it’s like he’s actually not as smart as everybody thinks. Because what he doesn’t get means that the stuff he does actually know, like all that chess stuff, is just . . .” She paused before her punchline. “It’s just wasted.”

  And these girls were only eleven.

  * * *

  —

  For Rose the last five minutes of the drive passed in a trancelike state of despair, her ears gathering more of their hateful chatter as they went along. They had moved on from the subject of the academy and were now cycling through the other girls in their riding class, sorting the decent riders from the poor, the skillful from the “pathetic”—another lovely new word.

  There had been some small behavioral issues with Emma Q over the last year, all of them at school. A call from the principal about passing notes. A half-dozen girls rebelling against the gym teacher for making them run laps in the drizzle. Minor stuff.

  This was different. The Emmas had suddenly metamorphosed into mean girls. Little bullies, preadolescent vipers ruthlessly judging those deemed inferior. More than that: Emma Q sounded like a different person when she was talking to Z. Withering, ungenerous, casually cruel. Like someone else’s child.

  By the time they arrived at the barn, Rose’s skin was sheathed in a cold, almost feverish sweat. She wasn’t paying attention to her speed in the unfamiliar SUV, and as she drove through the gate into the parking lot, she almost hit a signpost. The Buick skidded before coming to a stop, the wheels kicking up a haze of dust that lingered when the doors slid open and the girls tumbled out, Z on the passenger side, Q on hers.

  Rose climbed down from the high driver’s seat. Q was already slipping on her riding boots. Rose stood over her.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” she told her daughter.

  For a moment Emma looked scared, or ashamed. But then she shrugged, buckled her riding helmet, and ran off to join her friend. The Emmas skipped together to the barn.

  * * *

  —

  Rose unloaded her bike and within two minutes was helmeted, sunscreened, and clipped in, pushing up County Road 346, bearing due north. She could get a good thirty miles in before the lesson ended at noon. The strain of her pumping thighs and tightened abs soon worked like a Xanax, calming her thoughts.

  Perspective. It wasn’t as if the Emmas had been outright bullying other girls at school, or their parents would have heard about it. Nothing they’d said in the car indicated they had acted on their appalling dissection of their classmates.

  But kids could be so cruel. This Rose knew from her own childhood as the geeky poor girl who’d always raised her hand first. Oversize glasses, hand-me-down clothes, the wrong brand of shoes, slant-toothed and too broke for braces, and despite all that Rose would never have stood out if she hadn’t participated so avidly in class, strived so hard for the approval and attention of her teachers.

  Smarts, she had seen early on, might be the only way out, success in school the one thing that might lift her away from an environment that had depressed her even then, though she understood the real weight of it only once she got to college. A full ride to Lehigh on a merit scholarship; after that, Michigan for her PhD, then the postdoc at Stanford, and finally a multimillion-dollar neurology lab here at Darlton. Pole vaults, all the way up.

  Character-building, though growing up like that had also taught Rose how much she didn’t want to raise her own child the same way. No, they didn’t buy Q the latest fashions in jeans and shoes. No, they wouldn’t be springing for a new SUV any time soon. But they’d been comfortable enough on her salary to give Emma Q what she needed, and much of what she wanted. Problem was, what she wanted was starting to match everything her wealthy best friend got: riding lessons, maybe someday her own horse, boutique summer camps. But Gareth’s adjunct pay was low and unreliable, and faculty salaries didn’t keep up with inflation even in the medical school.

  Besides, they had always agreed that they wanted Q to grow up without a sense of entitlement, that unearned air of privilege you saw in all too many kids in a town like Crystal. To succeed on her merits, not her social status. Rely on hard work, not “good genes,” like the Zellars’, or a trust fund, like Beck’s. Because success in life didn’t just happen. Things didn’t always work out, no matter where or how you were raised. The thought of Emma Q sliding back into that world filled Rose with a shivering fear. Slow death by lower-middle-class angst.

  So it was no mystery why she wanted Emma Q to have a shot at Crystal Academy. A public magnet school that measured student worth not in money or social status but in pure ability and smarts? If Rose had had something like that growing up, it would have saved her years of misery. She would never have taken its existence for granted, let alone its admissions requirements.

  She ascended a low hill, then let herself coast down the other side to the western bank of the Silver Lake Reservoir, two hundred acres zithered by breeze and flashes of sun. She circled the oval, pushing herself—up to twenty miles an hour, twenty-five—pumping and pumping until the endorphins jump-started the better half of her thoughts.

  * * *

  —

  With her bike stowed Rose strolled over to the main paddock to watch the last part of the session. Five riders, all girls, had their horses in single file moving in a serpentine line around the arena, playing a game of red light, green light. Janelle Lyman, their beloved instructor, got them all lined up in a single rank at one end and did another version of the stop-and-go game, calling out when she saw a resistant side step, a rein too quickly pulled. After five minutes of this the riders broke up to work on their maneuvers. Emma Z was closest to Rose’s end. Samantha’s daughter attempted a figure eight around one of the gates, but her horse was resisting.

  Just then Emma Q glided by, ignoring her mother’s presence. She reached the far corner and executed a smooth turn along the rail.

  A voice said, “Yours?”

  Down the fence stood a man wearing mirrored aviator glasses on a sharp and narrow nose, his muscled arms straining at the sleeves of a navy polo shirt. Rose had seen him out here once or twice but hadn’t met h
im yet. Some girl’s dad.

  “Yes. Emma,” she said, nodding toward her daughter. “And which one is yours?”

  “Caitlyn, in the purple jacket.” Rose saw his daughter struggling around one of the far gates. “So how long has Emma been riding?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I think this is maybe her tenth or eleventh lesson?”

  His head cocked back. “You’re kidding.”

  “Maybe the twelfth?”

  He lowered his aviators. “I assumed she’d been riding for a few years, and I should know because our older daughter rides collegiate at Cornell. Your girl is very good.”

  “Really?”

  “A natural. You can’t tell?”

  They looked at Q together, guiding her horse through another figure eight. She did look more comfortable in the saddle than the other girls out there, more at one with the huge animal beneath her.

  “I’ve never ridden,” Rose confessed. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Well,” he said, conspiratorial now, edging closer to her along the fence. “Look at her lower back. You see how straight that is down there, how you could take a yardstick and put it up against her spine? She’s doing it naturally, by instinct. It takes months to get them to do that, because they naturally want to huddle over. Feels more protective. And the way she sits the trot, I mean, look at my poor little Caitlyn.”

  He pointed out some of the other differences between the girls’ competencies, explained certain terms and phrases, and soon Rose started to see it too. There was Emma Z, her face set in frustration, eyes tearing as she tried and failed to put her horse through the basic maneuvers. There was Caitlyn, sweet and open, laughing at her mistakes and trying again. And then there was Q, straight and confident in the saddle, the animal responding to her slight tugs on the reins and the imperceptible movements of her knees and thighs.

  Rose rode bikes, not horses; wouldn’t have known a canter from a trot. But the man’s observations sparked a parental glee that all but erased Q’s atrocious behavior in the car. Because Q might be a voracious reader, but Emma Z was always the best: at school, at ballet, at violin.

  But not, it seemed, at this.

  TWENTY-TWO

  EMMA Z

  There was something extremely irritating about Rose. She thought she was the chill kind of mom but really she was tense all the time and watched everything Q did.

  For example: the way she got about food when they went to restaurants. Z always decided right away what she was going to order. Today, for instance, Z was really in the mood for Japanese pan noodles, and when Rose had told them on the way out to the barn where they’d be going for lunch she’d known exactly what she was going to have. Now, on the way home, she could already taste the crunchy sprouts and the carrot slices and the shiitake mushrooms, the thick soy-saucy strands of the noodles and the gooey way they would feel when she sucked them through her lips.

  “What are you going to order, Z?” Emma Q asked her. For probably the third time.

  “Japanese pan noodles,” said Emma Z.

  “Oh.” Q looked worried.

  Z cocked her head. “What about you? What are you going to order?”

  Q’s eyes widened. “I don’t know yet. Do you think I’d like that, the Japanese thing?”

  “You never know until you try it,” Z said brightly. Something her dad always said.

  “Maybe I should just get the buttered noodles.”

  Z sighed. “You could, I guess. But isn’t that what you always get?”

  Rose frowned in the mirror, then shifted her eyes to Q. “How about the penne rosa, Q? Remember how much you liked that last time? The spaghetti and meatballs are good, but we had your dad’s brisket last night, so that might be a lot of beef.”

  “Yeah,” Q said doubtfully.

  “And if you want more variety, you could get the kids’ mac and cheese,” said Rose. The car turned into the parking lot and steered toward the wavy awnings. “Remember, it comes with two sides, so you could order applesauce and a crispy. Or broccoli and pineapple.”

  “I guess so,” Q said doubtfully.

  Z smiled.

  * * *

  —

  In line Emma Z stood in front and listened while Rose kept talking through the options.

  “Well, I know you like salad, sweetie. They have the chicken Veracruz, and I personally always like the Med, or there’s a Caesar you can get with or without chicken. You like Caesar because of the romaine, that really crunchy kind of lettuce? So how about a salad, Q?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or there’s chicken noodle soup. You like their chicken noodle, don’t you?”

  “It’s too salty,” said Q.

  * * *

  —

  At the table Emma Z, chewing on a noodle, observed, “They’re not really Japanese, though. I just like them.”

  “Why aren’t they Japanese?” Rose asked.

  “Um,” said Z, and took a sip of lemonade. “I guess they’re sort of Japanese? When we were in Yokohama over New Year’s my dad took us to the best restaurant, which wasn’t even fancy and it didn’t even have tables. It was in the train station, and there were mostly just businessmen in there. It was really smoky, and you had to stand at the counter and eat noodles and broth from these bowls. They’re called soba noodles, and they’re made out of buckwheat. They put them in this spicy soup and crack an egg on top and you eat it almost raw. The cook really liked me, because my dad taught me how to order in Japanese. He gave me an extra egg. And it was only three-fifty yen.” She looked up from her bowl at Rose. “That’s about three dollars.”

  “Wow,” said Rose, blinking fast.

  “I don’t like this, Mommy,” said Q, pushing aside her bowl after probably two bites. Thai green curry with shrimp. Rose had ordered it for her after Q couldn’t make up her mind. Definitely the wrong dish for Q, who was an incredibly picky eater even though her parents liked to pretend she wasn’t.

  “My mom makes really good curry,” said Z. She picked out a cluster of sprouts and cilantro from her bowl and swallowed it after three chews. “We went to this spice market in Bangkok, I think? Or Chiang Mai? Anyway, she got these special spices there and uses them to make curry and pad Thai. But they’re almost gone now.”

  “Well I guess you’ll just have to go back to Thailand and get some more, won’t you?” said Rose, with one of her creepy smiles.

  Z shook her head. “This summer we have to go to Machu Picchu.”

  “Oh! Your mom didn’t tell me that. Did you tell Silea?”

  “Who?”

  “Silea. She’s from Peru.”

  Emma Z said nothing.

  “The woman who cleans your house three times a week,” said Rose.

  “Oh, you mean SilEEa,” said Z, getting bored. “I’ve only seen her one time, I think.” She thought of the paper animals that kept appearing in her room after Silea’s cleanings. There had been another one yesterday, a pink elephant on her dresser. Z had unfolded it like the others but still couldn’t figure out how it went back together.

  “She cleans our house too,” said Q.

  “Only once every two weeks, though,” said Rose hastily.

  Z looked up at Emma Q’s mom as she finished her lemonade. Rose was staring at her in a way that wasn’t nice at all, a way that actually looked kind of mean.

  Z just raised her eyebrows and concentrated on her last delicious noodle. Yes indeedy centipedee. Q’s mom was really irritating sometimes.

  Scary, even.

  TWENTY-THREE

  ROSE

  Notification day: mere hours and they would know.

  As the light rose in the bedroom she stared at their water-stained ceiling and heard again the Emmas’ voices in the car. A small part of her now wanted Q to be rejected, needed this whole thing to be done w
ith, so her daughter could go back to being her sweet self and they could concentrate on raising an ethical child rather than an entitled little brat.

  But only a small part. Most of her craved good news from the committee, the kind of news that would allow her to continue parsing the ins and outs of admissions criteria over the coming weeks with Lauren and Samantha, and perhaps Azra too; the kind of news that would give her and everyone else a sense that her daughter, even if ultimately not admitted to Crystal Academy, had passed through an objective assessment of her abilities and intelligence with flying colors.

  In the kitchen that morning everyone was brittle and tense. Emma Q whined about the lunch her father was packing (“No egg salad, Daddy, you KNOW I hate egg salad!”), Rose snapped at Gareth when he dropped a table knife on the floor with a teeth-rattling clatter, and Gareth slapped his hand on a cupboard when Rose reminded him to schedule appointments with the dentist and orthodontist for Q. By the time she left for work she and Gareth were speaking to each other through clenched teeth and tightened lips and poor Q was nearly in tears over a piece of homework she’d forgotten at Twenty Birch.

  Throughout the day at the lab Rose squirmed and shifted in her chair. As the hours at her desk unspooled—instrumentation costing, hiring proposals, a hastily eaten lunch over spreadsheets—she found herself constantly refreshing her email, just as agitated at work as she’d been at home and no kinder to those around her. She spoke sharply to two of her postdocs and grew impatient with a doctoral student for misunderstanding an equipment protocol. She felt like an ogre, hideous and impossible to be around.

  Anything yet? Gareth texted just after three, trying to reach out, share her nervous anticipation of the results.