The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger

  “Really?” As far as Rose knew Gareth hadn’t submitted a piece of fiction in over a year. “What’s it about?”

  He shook his head. “Once I hear back from the journal.”

  “Fair enough.”

  They huddled over the menu, close together with their elbows touching.

  * * *

  —

  Emma Q’s test score didn’t come up until entrees, when Gareth wanted to know what happened next in the application process. She read him the results letter from her phone, and they bonded over their possibly exceptionally gifted daughter and her chances of admission. For once Rose felt that she had a full partner at an important moment in their parenting.

  “What about Aidan?” he asked at one point.

  Rose checked her texts. Nothing from Azra, not that Rose would have expected her to write after that tense exchange in her car.

  “Xander?” he asked.

  “I haven’t heard from Lauren, but I mean, come on.”

  “Right.” He gnawed on a chili-spiced short rib. “And Z?”

  “Oh, she made the cut.”

  “Good for her,” he said curtly, then signaled for another round.

  Rose smiled down at her snapper, liking the salty edge in his voice. No doubt it would have been a small source of evil satisfaction for Gareth if Emma Z had failed to nail the CogPro, given his long history of distaste for Kev. Rose would have enjoyed that little shiver too, if she were being honest with herself. But the fact that the Emmas both did well was as it should be. There were hundreds of spots in the sixth grade, plenty of room for the two of them.

  * * *

  —

  On the mall she wheeled her bike toward the car, too buzzed to ride. The night air tingled with such sweet possibility that Rose wasn’t even a little bit grossed out when Gareth stopped in front of Crystal Books and pulled her in. As her bike crashed to the bricks she lifted up a leg, just for fun, and her husband dipped her in a Doisneau and pressed her lips.

  “I’ve missed that.” He stood her up.

  “Me too,” she said.

  “What’s with you tonight?” he asked, obviously loving it.

  “Who knows.” Rose smiled and swayed and let her husband lift her bike, an act he performed with a chivalrous ostentation that, if she’d been sober, would have annoyed her and certainly turned her off, but in the moment she found charming. They walked another block, and his hand went out with his keys to bleep the car doors unlocked. When he opened the hatch, they worked together to wedge her bike inside. Their fingers touched, their bodies bumped, and before she knew it Rose was wanting her husband’s touch in a way she hadn’t for months, maybe years.

  Thankfully Emma Q was asleep when they got home. Gareth paid Tessa and Rose walked her out to her car and watched her drive off. She was about to head inside to have nondutiful sex with her husband when she was arrested by a voice in the night.

  “Rose.”

  She peered through the low-hanging branches of a crabapple tree and saw Lauren at the fence with her old dog Aquinas, both of them cast in shadow by the streetlamp.

  “Lauren, what are you doing here? Tessa just took off.”

  “I know. I was waiting until she left.”

  “Oh.” Well, that’s weird, Rose thought.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Of course, sweetie.”

  Rose opened the gate for her. They went inside to the living room, and Rose sat her friend in the middle of the sofa while Aquinas slumped at her feet. Lauren’s cheeks were bright pink, eye sockets crimson and chafed.

  “Do you want some ginger tea?” Rose asked. Gareth appeared in the kitchen, but she waved him away.

  “I’m fine,” Lauren said. “And I’m sorry to bother you.”

  “Oh, stop. Tell me what’s going on.” Rose sat down next to her so their knees touched.

  “It’s about Xander.” She looked at Rose sidelong. “God, this is embarrassing. I can’t believe I’m here.” She gazed longingly at the front door.

  “Lauren, just tell me.”

  She huffed out a sharp sigh. “He didn’t get in.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The CogPro.” She blinked. “Xander didn’t make the first cut.”

  “No.” Rose kept her eyes poised in sympathy as her fear unwound. Given Lauren’s demeanor, she had been expecting disaster, awful news about one of their friends, maybe a cancer relapse. Her mind quickly adjusted against catastrophe—though for Lauren that’s just what this was.

  “It’s ridiculous.” Lauren inched her chin up. “It seems impossible.”

  “I know, insane.” Rose shook her head, worked her sternest frown. “I mean, if anyone was going to ace the CogPro, it was Xander, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He bombed the verbal. No surprise, but I assumed the other components would bring his cumulative up enough to pass the bar.”

  “That just really sucks.”

  “I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Embarrassed? Lauren, why would you be embarrassed about your son’s test score?”

  “Because everybody thinks of Xander as a genius. He’s a very visible kid. The independent studies, the chess, all of it. Everybody’s watching him all the time to see how he does on things, especially on something as public as this. Then look what happens. Now I have to face people at work, my friends . . .”

  Rose nodded some more, trying to think of a useful nugget to share with her blindered, suffering friend.

  “Well, I don’t know if this is helpful or not,” she said patiently. “But when Gareth used to get blue about his writing—you know, being late with his next novel, thinking his agent must be sitting around laughing at him—he’d keep this one quote taped to his monitor. Something like, ‘You’ll be a lot less obsessed with what people think of you when you understand how infrequently they do.’ Some writer he likes said that. Just the idea that most people are usually thinking about themselves, not about others. The point is, no one will care what Xander’s score was.”

  “But I care,” Lauren said, offended. “Xander cares.”

  “Of course you care, Lauren. That wasn’t my point. What I’m trying to say—”

  “I just don’t know what to do.”

  Rose steadied her breath. With Lauren always be practical, she reminded herself, not emotional. “Can you appeal? I thought I’d heard something about a process for that.”

  “Already on it.”

  “Good.”

  “What about Q?”

  Rose hesitated.

  Lauren said, flatly, “She made the cut, didn’t she.”

  Rose nodded.

  Lauren looked away. Her blinking sped up. “That’s great. I’m happy for you.” She spoke like a movie robot. “So that means Z definitely made it?”

  Rose wanted to scream. Lauren simply had this way sometimes. You tried to be supportive, accommodating of her unfiltered flow, and she found a way to spatter it back in your face, like a wet cough.

  “Y—es,” Rose said. “Apparently Emma Z hit the mark too.”

  “Good for her,” she said—exactly the way Gareth had said those same three words not one hour ago.

  Lauren sprang to her feet. “Anyway. Thanks for listening.”

  “Hey, anytime.” Rose put on a smile and stood with her. “Do you want me to say anything to the others?”

  Lauren’s face softened for a moment. “Would you? That would really help. I just can’t face more conversations like this.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you, Rose.” Without so much as a smile or a hug Lauren beelined out of the house, tugging Aquinas along behind her.

  When the door shut, Gareth appeared in the kitchen. It was clear he’d been eavesdropping
.

  They locked eyes. “Christ,” he said.

  “I know,” Rose said, and maybe it was being wound so tightly all day and now loosened by the alcohol and the rush of adrenaline from the awful yet somehow delicious news about Xander that caused a rare course of energy to thrill through her nerves.

  Their therapist had long asked them to be more in the moment, to jump each other’s bones when the feeling moved them, a phrase Rose despised, unable to recover the early lust this impromptu bone-jumping would require. Sex had become something that happened because therapeutically prescribed. Perhaps once a month, if that.

  Things felt different tonight. Wanton.

  When Gareth saw the look on her face, he hesitated at the counter. “Do you still—”

  “Is Q asleep?”

  He nodded. “But I mean is that something—”

  “Yes but no talking.”

  In their room she pushed the bedspread aside and wrestled off the warm socks she’d put on when they got home. He came over to help, and pulled her shirt up over her breasts and from her arms but left it twisted around her wrists and held it above her head as she fell back on the mattress. He started to touch her, but she shook her head and pushed up against him and they moved together like that, his slightly uncomfortable weight on top but her hands pinned up there above the pillows in the way she used to like, the rest of her writhing in unfamiliar pleasure beneath him. His breath moved across her ear and along her neck; he’d brushed his teeth, maybe even flossed. He never altered their positions but thrust against her pelvic bone again and again and brought her almost there before moaning and collapsing on her.

  He withdrew and rolled off, leaving Rose frustrated, wanting to yank him back on with her newly freed hands—but now another surprise as he lowered himself down over the lower reach of her belly. Gentle pressure, just right; and her breath went short. She bit her lip, she felt herself flush, bit harder, she clawed her fingers into his scalp, and at the end she squeezed her husband’s head between her thighs and covered her mouth with a hand to keep from waking Emma Q.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward, unable to sleep while Gareth’s gullet sawed away, she thought about their lovemaking.

  No, not lovemaking. What they had just shared, sparked by an email and seared hot by Lauren’s misery, didn’t deserve such an ennobling name. It had been, Rose thought with a reluctant but oddly delicious shiver, a carnal expression of parental pride.

  But even that was too generous.

  It was a schadenfreude fuck.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  CH’AYÑA

  She rose at dawn to put the coffee on, then took a blanket outside to wait. After five minutes of huddling on the top step she heard a rustle. The foxes appeared, a pair of them that denned in the little woods south of there, between the sprawl of the trailer park and the fancy riding stables on the other side. They always came to see about garbage and discarded food. Once they got a cat, which was nice for everyone; it had been a loud cat.

  They nosed in a neglected mulch pile beneath the next trailer where the neighbor’s dog liked to go when she was staked out. The dog barked from inside the house, and the foxes straightened their skinny necks, looking startled but unafraid.

  Back inside Ch’ayña poured two cups of coffee and took one to her daughter, who was just sitting up. After three sips Silea set the mug on the bedside table and reached for her phone with her good hand.

  “You don’t need that,” Ch’ayña chided her. “Too early for that thing.”

  “Atikcha will ask,” said Silea. “He’ll want to know how he did.”

  Ch’ayña shook her head and rose. Back in the kitchen she made an effort to clatter things.

  “Mamay,” Silea called down the short hall. “He’s sleeping. And come here, let me read something to you.”

  Ch’ayña stood at the bedroom door and listened as Silea read out a letter from the school. Harder and harder for her, as she translated stumblingly for Ch’ayña. Silea was losing her mother’s tongue.

  Atik was different. He got better at Quechua by the day, Ch’ayña made sure of it, and not just the speaking. She’d found him a Quechua translation of some old Spanish book about a knight and windmills. It took him a while to work out the letters, but now he was reading everything he could, his school librarian ordering the few titles she could find, Atik wondering why there weren’t more. I’ll teach you to read Quechua next, Awicha, he’d promised her once or twice.

  When the letter was done, Ch’ayña felt something go soft in her chest, a kind of reluctant loosening. So you cared after all, she scolded herself, but the relieved pride was too much not to share.

  “I knew the wawa got an A,” she whispered. “I knew already.”

  “The email just came,” said Silea.

  “But I could tell that very night when I picked him up, from the way he hopped in the truck.” Ch’ayña sat on the edge of the bed. “The whole sixth grade came crowding out of the school. Our Atikcha was last. He saw the truck and gave me a wave and just plowed on through everybody and got in, like it was nothing. ‘How’d the test go?’ I said, and he took off his glasses and cleaned them that way he does with his breath and shirt, like he’s forty years old behind a desk. Door’s still open and he’s wiping the glasses and he turns his head to me and says, ‘That was easy, Awicha.’ Quite a bragger, your wawa.”

  Silea was smiling over the phone.

  “That’s when I knew. That’s when I knew already, that we’d get the news. And look there, we did.”

  “We did,” said Silea.

  “Read it to me again. Spanish is fine.”

  Silea read the email from her phone a second time. Ch’ayña shook her head. “‘That was easy, Awicha,’ he says. Little mouse. Little devil.”

  Atik’s door opened. He peered out, looking scared at first. “Did you hear?” he asked.

  Silea gestured for him to come, and Ch’ayña pulled him into the room. Atik sat on the bed next to her.

  “Some news for you, Atikcha.” Silea set down her coffee and handed him her phone. Atik held it in front of his face. His lips formed a half smile as he read the letter, almost a smirk.

  “So you’re in?” Ch’ayña asked him.

  “Not yet,” Atik replied. “But I will be.”

  He handed the phone back to his mamay, and the glow it made on his face showed his pride.

  But it made Ch’ayña shiver a little, to see her grandson swell like this, and all through the day as she cleaned she wondered what it would mean, to send Atik to this new school, to surrender him to a place like Crystal with its flashy glass palaces and its spoon-fed whelps and its sidewalks clean as polished teeth. What it would do to their Atikcha to release him into a world like that, where he’d learn to strut like them, think like them, speak like them, live like them—then be forced to come back to Dry River, a new cock in the yard, bursting to escape.

  A Touch of Tessa:

  One Girl's Survival Guide to Junior Year

  A Video Blog

  Episode #159: A Big Surprise!!!!

  . . . 19 views . . .

  TESSA: Yo, guys, check it out!

  [Close-up of laptop opened to email: “Dear Ms. Frye: We are writing to share the results of our initial round of admissions screening for Crystal Academy. We have been working with an excellent team of consultants to ensure that our review process is carried out with the utmost integrity and transparency.” Zoom in, scroll down.]

  TESSA: I mean, I didn’t even vlog it before because I didn’t think I had a chance, but Azra said I should just go for it and I did. Here’s the important part.

  [Wobble, then focus on underlined text: “Your child has scored sufficiently high on the CogPro to be advanced to the next round in the admissions process. Details of the subsequent steps will be p
rovided . . .” Reverse to Tessa, rolling eyes and beaming.]

  TESSA: This is so hype and my mom will flip. But here’s the thing, because this isn’t even the crazy part. The abso bizarre thing about all this is that Xander didn’t pass. Seriously, you guys, my genius little brother didn’t make the cut. And I don’t want to throw shade or whatever but—what is that about, you know? Anyway. [Shrugs.] Low-key now, I am seriously proud of myself. I did this on my own, without her help, without anybody’s help. This is my thing, not theirs, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Xander. So I’m gonna keep going. Whatever it takes I’m doing it. You heard it here first, bitches. I’m getting into that fucking school.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  XANDER

  His mother was acting strangely tonight. Earlier she’d been stomping around the house cleaning things. Pots and pans slamming into the sink. The vacuum running over the same rugs three times. Finally she put Aquinas on his leash and took him for a walk, without a word.

  Xander knocked on Tessa’s door.

  “What?”

  “Fraternal unit.”

  “Begone.”

  He opened the door and walked in. Tessa looked up from her phone and gave him a funny smile. “Hey, little brother.”

  Xander said, “Mom’s mad.”

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  “What’s up her ass?” He used the word just to get his sister’s attention.

  She kept smiling.

  Xander sat on the edge of her bed. She stared at his neck, then his forehead. Her eyes went to the left, to the right. She couldn’t hold them steady. Her eyes couldn’t look at his eyes.

  Xander said, “You’re nervous. Palpably nervous.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “There’s something you’re scared shitlessly to say.”

  “Stop trying to read my mind.” She kicked at his leg. “It’s creepy. Anyway I have long shifts at BloomAgain this weekend and have to do homework.”