The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger

  THIRTY-FOUR

  BECK

  In the kitchen he found a semi-clean pan and fried up two hot dogs while the twins went at it in the den, throwing f-bombs that matched the content on the screen. He almost couldn’t look at the TV these days. When they first got an Xbox for Christmas a few years ago, Beck bought them sanitized versions of a couple of games, PG-rated at worst. Car chases, minimal gore. But somehow the guys had acquired (hacked?) the R-rated versions, complete with stacked women and avatars with the weaponry of a psychopath shooting up a shopping mall. Way too old for his eleven-year-olds, but what’s a laid-back dad supposed to do?

  He turned up the heat until the hot dogs sizzled. He’d love to have made them a better dinner, but it wasn’t his fault. This standoff with Sonja was really wearing thin. With Azra he could get in a big shouting fight and they’d both end up knowing where they stood. Sonja was different. Things were always set on this low Austrian simmer that made him feel like an unwitting crustacean in a stewpot, being slowly boiled alive by her resentment.

  A little while ago they’d had one of their typical low-key tiffs before she left the house with Roy.

  Have we thought about dinner at all, babe? Beck began.

  We?

  Just, yeah. I have this meeting I have to go to, about the school, so.

  So?

  So what are we supposed to eat?

  Well, I know what I am eating.

  What do you mean?

  I am taking Roy over to Cynthia’s for dinner with my mothers’ group. It has been on the calendar for two weeks.

  The calendar.

  On your phone. On my phone. The family calendar.

  Well, could you take the boys along?

  No, I could not take the boys along. They are not invited. Take them to your meeting.

  I can’t do that.

  Then they will be fine here on their own. They are eleven.

  With that she was gone, Beck abandoned on the savannah to spear something for supper. It had been happening more and more lately. Their dynamic reminded him of that year before the divorce, when Azra started taking the twins out of the house, over to Samantha’s or Rose’s or Lauren’s. That year when she’d started deserting him in his own goddamn house (technically her own goddamn house, which had made things somehow worse). Leaving him alone with the au pair . . .

  “Two minutes, guys,” he called into the den. Leaning back from the stove, he saw, on the split screen in front of them, a fat black guy in a balaclava step out from behind a Jersey barrier on a bombed-out boulevard and heave a grenade toward the viewer. Aidan flinched, thumbed his remote, and the grenade exploded in the air, showering his avatar with shrapnel. “Shit,” he said.

  “Mouth,” Beck said loudly, getting a snicker from Charlie, whose avatar was leaping over some kind of hot-pink futuristic Humvee full of Wonder Woman–looking white chicks wielding machetes. Charlie blew them all away with one sweep of his machine gun.

  “Ready, boys,” Beck said cheerily.

  They paused their game and trooped into the dining room, where Beck was busy clearing small appliances and stacks of Tupperware off one end of the table to give them room to eat. He’d started the project a few weeks ago to get a handle on the food storage and processing situation, which had long been dire. There was a juicer Sonja had used maybe once, a fondue set untouched for a decade, a George Foreman Grill Beck had drunk-ordered off the screen during a martial arts bout a while back, plus dozens of mismatched containers and lids.

  “I’m starving,” said Charlie sullenly.

  “Whadda we got, pops?” said Aidan.

  Beck proudly set down their plates, but his bubble popped when he saw their reactions to his offering. Black-striped overcooked franks wrapped in freezer-burned hot dog buns, unwrapped granola bars, and two wimpy carrot sticks each, which he’d managed to sculpt out of the skinned core of the one somewhat firm vegetable he’d found in the fridge.

  “Is there ketchup at least?” Charlie asked.

  “Nope, you’ll have to make do, and don’t make me start in about starving kids in Bangladesh. Now I have to run.” He patted his pants for his keys.

  “Dad,” Aidan said.

  “What?”

  “We can’t eat this.”

  “It’s disgusting,” Charlie chimed in.

  “It’s fine,” said Beck.

  “It’s not fine,” said Aidan. “It’s like Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans from Harry Potter, but every bean is—”

  “Snot flavor,” Charlie finished for him.

  “Or shoe flavor.”

  “Or poop flavor.”

  “Okay okay, I get the idea.” Beck sighed heavily and looked at the clock. “I gotta motor though. Can you guys just order pizza?”

  “Again?” they said at the same time.

  “Or whatever. Walk down to Chipotle, maybe.”

  “Yes!” Aidan exclaimed.

  “Do we have to use our allowance?” Charlie whined.

  “What allowance?” Aidan glared at his dad, as if Beck needed a reminder. He’d had to cut the twins off the dole a few months back. Every penny . . .

  “They’ll take this.” Beck pulled a credit card from his wallet without looking at it and slapped it on the counter. On the way out the door he called: “Homework after dinner, guys, okay? No more gaming tonight.”

  “Gotcha, Dad,” said Charlie.

  * * *

  —

  By the time he hustled into the crowded auditorium at East Crystal High, it was already 7:16. Beck took a seat near the back. Some kind of dispute was unfolding onstage, a lot of muttering from parents and uncomfortable looks traded among the administrators up there, including Joe Jelinek, superintendent of the Crystal city schools. There was also a slick-looking bunch of overdressed consultants on one side of the stage who seemed to be garnering a fair degree of parental contempt.

  Beck sat back to enjoy the spectacle. A mom standing near the front was almost shouting up at Jelinek: “Look, we are under assault out there just for having our kids get through the first cut. Did you read the Camera?”

  “I did,” Jelinek replied, spreading his hands to placate her. “And nobody’s under assault here, ma’am. It’s not as if our admissions meetings are being picketed.”

  “Not yet!” someone called out.

  “That’s right!” someone else shouted.

  “Look,” Jelinek said. “Come September, when the Academy is up and running, this controversy will be yesterday’s news. The important thing for right now is that we give you the tools you need to feel good about entrusting your children to us starting next fall. So we really need to move on now, okay?” More grumbles but everyone soon calmed down.

  Jelinek continued: “Now tonight we’re going to fill you in thoroughly on the next stage of the admissions process.”

  Beck, already bored, slipped his phone from his pocket and scrolled through his Twitter feed. There was this one journalist he followed who really knew how to put the pieces together. She shaded a bit centrist, and occasionally Beck had to give her some pointers about finding less corporatist sources. But she was always entertaining, certainly preferable to the admins onstage.

  The next time he looked up Jelinek was introducing Bitsy Leighton, the new principal. Beck hunched forward in his seat as Leighton rose and moved to the center of the stage. She began by giving them a bit of her background, then explained why she’d made the move to the Front Range.

  “Now, as you can imagine, I’ve had a lot of questions since arriving in the Denver-Crystal corridor. What would motivate an educator to leave Los Angeles, one of the most demographically diverse cities in North America, to come to a town like Crystal? Because I look around Crystal and I look around this meeting and I see exactly what you’ll see if you turn your heads. Go ahead, let’s get it out t
here. Do it. Look around at yourselves.”

  Beck turned to his left, to his right. He stretched his neck and saw Azra down near the front, one of the few Asian American parents in the crowd. There was a Turkish couple Beck knew two rows in front of him, plus a scattering of maybe-Latino folks sitting over to the left. But mostly just white people.

  “Okay,” said Leighton, drawing their attention back to the stage. “Now what did you see?”

  A long, awkward silence. “Segregation,” Beck called out, looking around for reactions. He heard some clucks, though there were also a fair number of nods in the crowd, reluctant sighs. Someone near the front raised a hand.

  “Yes?” Leighton said.

  The hand raiser didn’t stand. “I’m sorry, but the lack of racial diversity in Crystal is a function of economics, not bias. This is one of the most progressive cities in America by any measure. It’s about class, not race.”

  “Oh, please,” Beck huffed.

  “Class, not race.” Leighton smiled. “Well, let me give you a hypothetical, so I can illustrate this point another way. Are you ready?”

  Eager liberal nods.

  “Let’s say Crystal Academy, for some reason, doesn’t open in the fall. Lack of funding, politics, whatever. What would your community say instead to a new magnet school for foreign-language acquisition? You like that idea?”

  More heads bobbing.

  “Now imagine if I could promise you that by the time your child enters high school she will be fluent in a second language. How would you react to that?”

  Several hands flew up.

  “Yes, you.” Leighton pointed to someone in the second row. Samantha Zellar. She stood and Beck listened carefully, sensing a trap and willing Samantha to walk right into it.

  “Speaking personally, I can tell you a school like that would be fantastic.” Sam swayed attractively, gesturing with both hands in her speaking-for-all-of-us-oh-and-guess-what-bitches-my-husband-is-on-City-Council way. “We have International Baccalaureate programs in some of the schools, and that’s great. But IB only goes so far. Without truly rigorous training in a second language, I don’t see how we’ll get these kids ready for the most competitive colleges.”

  “Excellent, thank you,” Leighton said. Samantha looked around, smiling broadly as she sat. “Other reactions?” She called on a man in the front right. “Yes, sir?”

  A man in a tweed sport coat stood and shot his cuffs. “I do have thoughts on the issue, which is quite close to my heart,” said the guy, obviously some douchebag academic from Darlton. “We have a bilingual household. We speak English and Mandarin in the home.” Beck could hear the quiet groans as the guy gave a capsule version of his earlier career. Two years of fieldwork in China, a Fulbright there after leaving New Haven with his equally white wife, their devotion in the years since to instilling in their two children the ethical imperative of multilingualism.

  Leighton called on a few other parents, all of them making predictable points about the importance of foreign languages in an interconnected world. She looked around for more hands. Beck saw one go up, on the right side of the auditorium, in a middle row. Leighton lifted her chin. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “My son,” the woman called out. She was sitting between a boy and an old woman. “He speaks Spanish and he speaks English too, and—”

  “Both of them fluently?”

  “Sí.”

  “What grade is he in?”

  “Sixth grade.”

  “And where is it you live, ma’am?”

  “We live in Dry River,” she said. A migrant community in Beulah County, one of the poorest towns in Colorado. Beck had detoured through it once on the way to a soccer tournament in Nebraska.

  Leighton said something in Spanish, then the woman’s son stood, edged out of his aisle, and bounded up to the stage. He was a short kid, pole skinny with round wire glasses and a narrow face. Leighton held the microphone down by her waist and spoke to him softly, then turned to the audience.

  “Everyone, this is Atik Yupanqui. He’ll be translating for the Spanish-speaking folks. I hope that’s okay?” She turned and looked at the senior admins lined up along the middle of the stage.

  “Of course.” Jelinek nodded vigorously. Should have thought of getting a translator ourselves, his embarrassed look implied. Beck started to see where Leighton was going.

  “Well, how about that?” she said. “A bilingual kid way out in Dry River.”

  Parents moved in their seats; the few claps quickly died down.

  “So let’s think about what this means.” Leighton paced the stage. “You want a magnet school for languages so the kids in beautiful Crystal, Colorado, can learn some Chinese or Arabic. Who would argue with that?” She paused so Atik could translate. He had a high-pitched voice, but Leighton’s idiom and vocabulary gave him no trouble. “Now I’m not here to burst your bubble. But we need to think about the wider context of language acquisition, the broader contours of the problem. Because you know where most of the bilingual kids on this part of the Front Range live? You just heard it from this bilingual mom right here. They live out in Beulah County, where their parents farm the crops and slaughter the animals that provide the farm-to-table cuisine served at the restaurants down on the Emerald Mall.”

  Nods, murmurs, hums. They were lapping it up.

  “In fact we’ve got a small but vibrant Peruvian community out in Beulah that— Say, Atik, who is that, sitting next to your mother there?”

  The kid said some word Beck didn’t catch.

  “Your grandmother?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Does she speak English?”

  “A little.”

  “Does she speak Spanish?”

  He held up a thumb and finger spaced an inch apart. “Some. Better than her English.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “Why don’t you tell her what I’ve been talking about here. Just the high points.”

  Atik started speaking loudly across a dozen aisles to his grandmother. Not Spanish, not English. A Native tongue, Beck guessed, glottal but quick. When the kid finished he looked up at Leighton.

  “Wow. What language was that, Atik?”

  “That was Quechua, ma’am.”

  She looked out at the audience. “Quechua. Spanish. English.”

  More shifting, some muted notes of appreciation. Wow. Incredible. Holy shit. Plus a few gentle laughs as people started to catch on.

  Leighton rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Atik here is one of seven or eight kids in the Beulah County public schools who speak English, Spanish, and Quechua. Those kids are not monolingual, not bilingual, but trilingual. They practice an indigenous trilingualism, with equal facility in a Germanic language, a Romance language, and a Native language of South America. Their brains know how to process multiple languages, how to code-switch, how to move from one tongue to another. Their lives have been multilingual. So you start those kids in fifth grade in Arabic? Persian? Mandarin? Pashto? No telling how far they’ll go.”

  She leaned down and stage-whispered to Atik, “You can go back to your seat now, son.”

  The kid smiled, waved at the audience, and this time received sustained applause from the grown-ups. Beck clapped too but couldn’t help feeling a flash of indignant annoyance that the school system would put a student of color on display like that just to make a point to a bunch of white liberals—though the sudden surge of righteousness did little to quell his envy of the Peruvian kid’s multicultural fluency. At least Aidan had his biracialism going for him, though the twins didn’t speak a word of Urdu or Punjabi, as Azra’s folks had; and as his ex would be the first to point out, being Pakistani or any kind of South Asian was hardly an edge, given today’s pretzel-twisted notions of affirmative action. If anything, his guys would be disadvantaged by their race, the same way �
��demographically overrepresented” Asian kids got royally screwed by the Ivies, at least according to an article this one guy had posted on a subreddit Beck frequented. The whole thing was complicated, that was for sure.

  “Now just to wrap up,” Leighton said when the claps died down. “Will these Beulah kids score a one-thirty on the CogPro? Maybe not. But you get them in a Farsi classroom and I promise you they will run rings around the monolingual kids you have in this city. What I’m talking about, let’s call it radical inclusion. How do we bring these children into the conversation around gifted education? How do we include them in our selection process for this school, and how do we ensure that they have every bit as strong a chance of admission as a monolingual and monocultural child from Maple Hill whose family can afford intensive test prep and one-on-one tutoring?”

  “Oh snap.” Beck said it quietly, though the dad in front of him heard. He swiveled his head around and shot Beck a frown; and there was a lot in that frown, Beck thought as the guy turned away. Anxiety, insecurity, fragility, liberal guilt. Maybe a touch of fear.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  BECK

  Out in the courtyard Beck saw Azra’s quad of friends huddled up by a dry fountain. His ex-wife was wearing a clingy black dress, scant for the evening chill in the foothills. The high cut showed off the smooth arcs of her calves, like maybe she’d come here tonight from an early dinner date. The four women stood with their backs to the crowd as Samantha Zellar snitted about something, probably her nontrilingual daughter’s admissions chances.

  Gareth paced on the far side of the fountain, looking down at his phone, waiting for his wife. Beck sidled around to him. “Hey, man.”

  Gareth slapped him on the arm. “It’s been a while.”

  “I was just thinking that.”

  “We should—”

  “I know. No time like the present?” Sonja should be home, and the boys would have already grabbed dinner, thanks to Mastercard.

  Gareth agreed. “Let me just check with Rose,” he said, then approached his wife from the rear as the quad broke up. He took a slow stutter step, like a left back afraid to miss a penalty kick. Rose whirled on him with a What? and Beck watched as Gareth made his request. Rose gave Beck a cute frown but fluttered her fingers in a reluctant half wave.