The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger

  Willis steepled her fingers on the table. “So, let me tell you why I’ve asked you in. It seems that four of the girls in Ms. Avery’s class have formed a club of sorts.”

  “What kind of club?” Rose asked.

  “Well, those four girls are the only members so far. They’re considering allowing a few boys in, but they’re still working out the application protocols.”

  Gareth snorted. Rose turned and glared at him.

  “Who are the other three girls?” Rose said.

  “That I can’t tell you. Student confidentiality.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your daughter is the secretary.”

  “The secretary?” Gareth, still acting amused. “Well, that’s kind of insulting.”

  “Gareth,” Rose said under her breath.

  “Sorry.”

  “And what kind of club is this?” Rose asked.

  “That’s the kicker. Because this isn’t about Donnelly Elementary. This is about the new school, Crystal Academy.”

  “Oh no,” said Gareth, his tone changing.

  “Oh yes.”

  Willis, Rose saw, was holding back real anger.

  “Four girls and one boy in Ms. Avery’s class tested into the next round of admissions. By a strange coincidence these same four girls have taken it upon themselves to form this new club.”

  The first-cut kids. Samantha’s phrase, that blithely superior tone. Smug, exclusive, clubby.

  “And what are they calling it?” Gareth said.

  But Rose already knew.

  “They’re calling it the Gifted Club,” Willis said with unmasked contempt, her air quotes performed with outstretched arms.

  “That’s horrible,” said Gareth.

  “Yes, and a direct violation of our no-bullying policy.” Willis pointed a thumb at a poster framed over her right shoulder. Six guidelines screamed in all caps.

  WE ARE RESPECTFUL TO ONE ANOTHER

  WE ARE KIND TO ONE ANOTHER

  WE ARE RESPONSIBLE TO ONE ANOTHER

  WE SUPPORT ONE ANOTHER

  WE DO NOT EXCLUDE ONE ANOTHER

  WE DO NOT ACCEPT CRUELTY TOWARD ONE ANOTHER

  “Quite a few of the students are very upset,” Willis said. “As you know, we have an existing program that identifies exceptional learners for targeted instruction. But that’s an officially sanctioned program, with wide participation. The Gifted Club? That’s something else entirely. This club is exclusionary. It’s elitist.”

  “That seems a little harsh,” said Rose, feeling defensive for Emma Q.

  Willis tilted her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Gareth asked, “Have you seen outright cruelty from any of these girls?”

  “Yes. And according to Ms. Avery, it’s more than borderline at this point.” Willis clasped her hands on top of a folder. “Now this is going to be hard to hear.”

  Rose folded her legs.

  “Three things,” Willis said. “First, the spreadsheet. Ms. Avery found it in Emma Q’s cubby this morning.”

  She took out a piece of printer paper and rotated it so they could see. A spreadsheet divided into four columns, each filled with students’ names and headed with a word or phrase naming their designated category.

  The Ivies | Out-of-State | In-State | Community College

  “This is a lovely bit of fortune-telling,” Willis said. “The girls have taken it upon themselves to divide the class according to each student’s college prospects. What kinds of schools the kids are ‘in the ballpark’ for, as one of them put it. Over here we have the Ivy League–bound.”

  Emma Zellar, Emma Holland-Quinn, and two other girls’ names Rose recognized, plus a boy named Caleb Sykes.

  “Let me guess,” Gareth said. “The members of the Gifted Club?”

  “No comment.” She moved a finger to the top of the next column. “And here we have the one child bound for an ‘out-of-state.’ A sporty type. The girls feel he’s more suited to athletics, kind of a ‘dumb jock,’ as they’ve been heard to pronounce.”

  “Jesus,” Gareth muttered.

  “As you can see, the chart goes all the way down from the Ivies to that last column: ‘Community College.’ Only a hair more fortunate than the kids who will be, as Ms. Avery heard one of the girls say, ‘stuck in a crappy Colorado state school.’ I’ve had calls from two outraged parents already whose children have been labeled ‘in-staters’ by the Gifted Club over this last week. That’s why Ms. Avery went looking for the spreadsheet.”

  “Did she confront the girls?” Rose asked.

  “She did, and that’s the second thing. When she pulled Emma Q aside to ask about the chart, your daughter said to her, ‘You’re just a teacher. You don’t even have a PhD, so how would you know?’”

  “She didn’t,” Rose whispered through her fingers.

  “She did. And let me tell you. Tasha Avery? She’s a first-generation college graduate and the only black woman on my entire teaching staff. Now she’s seriously considering whether to quit and just substitute in Denver for the balance of the school year. Because this town—” She shook her head and didn’t finish the thought; didn’t need to.

  Gareth looked across the table at Rose, one eyebrow raised, a snitty sneer on his lips. Don’t say a word, she wanted to scream at him.

  “Q isn’t like this,” said Rose, eyes seeping. “She’s just not.”

  “I know that. And her teachers know that, Ms. Avery said it herself when she reported all this today. Q’s a good kid.” Her voice softened. “And that’s precisely why this has us so alarmed.”

  The wall clock ticked toward the hour.

  “What’s the third thing?” Gareth said.

  Willis took a deep breath. “What your daughter said to me when I called her in. I asked her where she was getting all this, who was putting these awful things into her head. She wouldn’t tell me, but what she did say was that she doesn’t think quotas are a good idea.”

  “What?” Gareth sputtered, sitting up.

  “As Q put it, ‘But they have to let Beulah County kids in because otherwise the school would be too white.’”

  * * *

  —

  You need to address this with Kev and Samantha right away,” said Gareth once they were outside.

  Rose, incredulous, fixed him with a stare. You?

  “That crap about in-staters, about the Beulah kids?” he went on. “You can just hear Samantha spouting that shit, poisoning our daughter.”

  I have heard her spouting it, Rose thought bitterly, a dozen times. She looked at her husband: shaken, seething, a rage in his voice that almost frightened her.

  “Let me talk to Sam.” Rose decided to ignore his implication that this was somehow her sole responsibility. “She and I will address it with the Emmas together.”

  “I just don’t want her bulldozing us. Or blaming the ‘club secretary’ for all of it.”

  “I won’t let her do that,” Rose said, though she knew Samantha’s tactics. Once, when the Emmas were three, Z had found some paints Gareth was trying out in the bathroom. She brought the ugly brick red and the hideous burnt umber back to Q’s room and smeared the walls, the carpet, the bed. When Rose walked in to check on the girls, Emma Q’s room looked like a slaughterhouse. Q herself was perched up on her new big-girl bed just watching, fascinated, clean as a whistle. But when Samantha saw what was going on, she barged into the room, swept her paint-spattered daughter up off the floor, and marched her to the shower, saying, “Did Q want to paint with you, sweetie? Did Q show you some paints?” Couldn’t have been Z’s idea, of course.

  “Another thing to keep in mind.” Gareth ran his hands through his hair.

  “What’s that?”

  “This could get a lot worse,” he said ominously. “The CogPro was only the first
cut. What happens next time, when these kids get the final word on admissions? How will the Emmas handle that?”

  And how will I, Rose wondered—and how will Samantha, and Lauren, and Azra?

  She crossed her arms. “How have we raised these little brats with our friends?”

  “They’re not my friends.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Just—” Then he said it: “I told you this school was a fucking nightmare, Rose. And now look what’s happened. I’ve known all along this was a bad idea.”

  She examined him closely, with a quiet fury. He was pouting now, despite his anger, like a petulant boy.

  “This is not about you, Gareth,” she said, with a calm precision. “It’s about our daughter.”

  FORTY-TWO

  ROSE

  The mistress of Twenty Birch spooned honey out of a pot and smeared it on a wedge of pear and added a small slice of Gorgonzola. She handed Rose the concoction. Sweet and savory dancing on her tongue, a burst of juice. Rose had always loved the kitchen over here, the calming way the light played on the copper countertops, cluttered with bowls of fruit and strainers of freshly washed vegetables, a warming round of cheese on a clay plate, a crusty bread sliced on a rustic cutting board.

  She’d been hesitant about coming over after the meeting at Donnelly, wary of Samantha’s reaction, but Gareth was right. This couldn’t go on, and so she’d texted Sam to ask if she could stop by with Q.

  Samantha was still in her gym clothes. She offered a glass of Prosecco but Rose declined, thinking of the missed hours at the lab she would have to make up late into the night. Again.

  Samantha took a cherry in her mouth. She pushed out the pit, set it on her napkin, and looked at Rose with a sigh. “So, the Gifted Club.”

  “Yeah,” Rose said.

  “Was Sue Willis schoolmarmy with you guys?”

  “She was pretty upset.”

  “Same when we went in.”

  “And that’s not the only thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Rose told her, finally, about the drive out to the stables, the girls’ atrocious exchange regarding their classmates. She watched Sam’s lips for that defensive twinge they would often make when her perfect parenting was challenged. Instead she nodded along, mouth soft and pooched, and when Rose was finished, she didn’t immediately jump in to correct her account.

  “It scared me,” said Rose. “Made me feel like I don’t know my own daughter. Have you had that sense, with all of this?”

  Samantha considered the question. “I mean, Z’s a Zellar. She felt entitled to her test score. Of course she’s going to top a one-forty, you know? She can be so disdainful sometimes when she doesn’t see other kids acting up to snuff. I want to protect her from that side of herself because it’s not attractive, but Kev is—well—”

  “A Zellar.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Hey. Q isn’t an innocent here either,” Rose said quickly. “That stuff about Xander not really being all that smart, a kid they’ve known for ten years? And the way Q talked to her teacher? It feels vicious to me.”

  Samantha smirked. “The vicious part was saying something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, Rose. You know it’s true. Just be honest: the Emmas are two of the smartest kids in their grade, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “And what they say about Beulah kids is actually true.”

  “Sam!”

  “Don’t be so PC and benevolent. I mean, think how Azra feels. Do you realize that an Asian American kid has to score a hundred points higher on the SAT than a white kid to get into the same elite colleges? It’s how they were discriminating against Jews fifty years ago. What, you think a bunch of deserving Crystal and Kendall County students won’t lose out to kids from Beulah just so the districts can meet an arbitrary numerical target? Please, girlfriend. The problem isn’t that they think it. The problem is that they shared it with their classmates.”

  Rose started to protest, to summon all the arguments Lauren and Azra would make against this regressive view of the school system’s diversity strategy. But with Samantha such objections would fall on deaf ears—and besides, there was something darkly alluring about Sam’s view of her own privilege, and thus Rose’s. If the Emmas weren’t admitted to Crystal Academy, this outcome would say nothing about their intelligence or talent or ability; rather it would be an accident of metrics and political compromise, a necessary concession to the demographic realities of the Front Range.

  Rose got a weird taste in her mouth: bad cherry, she thought, and ate a fresh one.

  Samantha toyed with the paper tab of her tea bag. “Obviously this is all Z’s fault.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “You know Emma Z, always the ringleader. Gifted Club president is a natural fit. I’m sure there wasn’t a vote.”

  Rose bristled but calmed herself quickly. Samantha’s braggy observation rang true, and this wasn’t about Rose’s feelings.

  “So, shall we call them to the mat?” Samantha asked.

  “You mean, right now?”

  “Why not?”

  “I think I should talk to Gareth before—”

  “Men are useless with this kind of thing. Let’s just nip it in the bud.”

  “Should we make some hot chocolate for them, to soften the blow?”

  “Oh, for god’s sake, Rose. You’d be a horrible general. We need to get these little bitches in line.” She pushed herself off the stool and walked to the basement door, then leaned over the head of the stairs and shouted down.

  “EMMA Z! EMMA Q! COME UP HERE, PLEASE!”

  * * *

  —

  That felt good,” Rose said once the girls were gone. Confessions and tears had been extracted, and Samantha had made the Emmas write letters of apology to the teacher, the principal, and the children they’d most upset.

  “Want some of this now?” Samantha held up the Prosecco bottle, dewed, the label sloughing off.

  Rose couldn’t imagine doing any good work tonight, in the lab or at home. Better to start fresh tomorrow. “Just a sip.”

  Samantha retrieved two flutes from a cabinet and poured. As she set the bottle down her phone rang. “I should take this,” she said. She walked into the next room, far enough from the kitchen that Rose heard only murmurs, then a raised voice followed by a few spits of angry air. Then silence.

  When Samantha came back, her face had changed. Rose waited for her to say something, but the silence lengthened.

  “Who was that?” she finally asked.

  “Just Kev,” Sam said tightly. “Some crap at work.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Sam grasped the stem of her flute. “It’s fine.” Her eyes glazed over and her knuckles went white on the flute; then, with a crack that Rose would remember for the rest of her life, the crystal stem snapped in her grip. The narrow, beautiful bowl tipped and fell to the countertop, where it shattered, flinging a wash of Prosecco across the copper.

  “Sam!” Rose reached for her friend’s hand, but Samantha pulled away. “Are you okay?”

  “Ha! Look at that!” A gash of blood rose on her left palm. She shoved it under the sink and turned the faucet on. “And that was Baccarat from Kev’s grandma. Dammit.”

  As Samantha tended to her hand Rose unspooled a length of paper towel and sopped up the mess, gathered the crystal shards. By the time Rose had cleaned up Sam had covered her small wound with antibiotic cream beneath a Band-Aid, the only trace of her injury sterilized and concealed.

  FORTY-THREE

  EMMA Z

  My fingers hurt.” Emma Q shook out her right hand. They’d just finished writing their apology letters to teachers, classmates, and the principal, and now they were back in the den
figuring out what to Netflix while their mothers talked some more in the kitchen.

  “Better than getting grounded,” said Emma Z. She really wanted Q and her mom to leave now. It had been a long afternoon already.

  “Why did your mom make us do all that? It’ll be so embarrassing when people get the notes.”

  Z kept flipping through show choices. Emma Q hated to be punished. This one time when they were both little and everyone was over at Azra’s house, she’d loudly repeated something that Emma Z had whispered (duh!) about Xander and his big head. Azra had made Q apologize and sit in a chair for fifteen minutes until she promised to be nice. She cried and cried for over an hour and finally had to go home. Q wasn’t used to getting consequences, for anything.

  The main reason was that Rose was so wimpy. She was all squishy about things like discipline. Sometimes Rose told Q she wasn’t allowed to do something, and then an hour later if Q whined a little she’d say fine, okay. And Q, surprise surprise, was exactly the same way. She couldn’t even pick her own lunch at Noodles.

  Which was why Emma Q would never be a strong leader like Emma Z. She didn’t have the qualities a decisive manager or department head needed to succeed in today’s dog-eat-dog corporate environment.

  Emma Z’s mom, on the other hand, did have those qualities. That’s why her mom’s friends always did what she said. They always saw the movie she wanted to see, ate at the restaurant she wanted to eat at, had the kind of party she wanted to have.

  Some people would have said this was because Z’s mother was bossy. She’d heard people say that before, people like Beck and Charlie and even Rose. But being bossy was really just about having sound leadership skills.

  Which reminded her. Emma Z set down the remote on her beanbag chair and went to the table against the wall of the den where the materials were spread out for her portfolio. A stack of glossy papers, a trifold, pamphlets, a copy of a magazine, and the banner, printed in big blocky letters that would make the whole thing look very official once it was all put together.