The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger

  He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose, fingers pressed into his eyelids. To get control again. What would that even look like? What would that feel like?

  He thought of Sonja, the calm beauty, the competence, the control. He could almost taste her right now, her lips and her thighs and the line of sweat she sometimes got along the vale of her lower back, and a feverish, sad longing swelled inside him as he stood twisted against the school wall. He couldn’t lose her, not like he’d lost Azra. This couldn’t be happening. Not again.

  When he opened his eyes, Tessa was there, not five feet away.

  SIXTY-SIX

  BECK

  Tessa! Hey Tessa!” He waved through the crowd and bumped right into her as she emerged from a classroom.

  “Hey,” he said breathlessly.

  “Oh god.” She shielded her face with a hand and tried to push past.

  He matched her steps as she strode up the hall. “Why haven’t you answered any of my texts?”

  “My mom took my phone last night,” she muttered. “I stole it back this morning, okay?”

  “Well, listen—”

  “Just a sec.” She dodged into the next classroom. Her pirouettes took her around tables and desks and parents and kids and a school staff member or two, looking at all the student projects displayed on the tables and walls. When she came back out to the hallway, she looked tense.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “I need to find Xander.” She jerked her hair back over an ear. “He’s putting on a little show today. I think you might really enjoy it.”

  “A show? What—look, Tessa, I don’t have time for that. We have to talk.”

  “Not right now, Beck. This is important.”

  “Well, so is this, goddamnit.”

  She stopped and took in his out-of-control beard, wrinkled her nose at his BO, which Beck kept forgetting about because he couldn’t even smell himself.

  “Fine,” she said, then dodged into the small tiled vestibule of a custodial closet. She leaned against the door frame tapping her foot, impatient with him in that way only teenagers can be impatient, as if nothing in your lame fortysomething, kid-having life could possibly be as important as the most minor detail of their own.

  “So, what?” she asked.

  “You know exactly what, Tessa. That fucking video.”

  “What about it? I took it down, just like all the others. My mom made me, and I’m in deep shit. And I’m sorry I ever put it up, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, somewhat mollified. Beck had downloaded the video to his phone and watched it probably fifty times since yesterday. Huge relief to know it no longer lived online—though this took care of only half of his current worry. “But listen. Have you said anything to the twins, or your mom or Azra or whatever, about—about us?”

  “Us? What does that even mean?”

  “Like, that we—I don’t know. That I tried to make a move on you, up in Breck?”

  Her eyes widened. “No. God. Yuck. That is so cringey, I can’t even. Who would say that?”

  Beck could have done without the yuck and the cringey, but he also got a relieving crackle in his chest. “You have to tell Azra that nothing’s going on,” he demanded softly, glancing at the crowds shuffling past. The skin beneath his beard started to prickle. “Seriously, you have to tell her that I never even hinted at making a move like that, okay? Because you know I didn’t, you know I’d never do that. And you have to tell Sonja if she says anything. I can’t have my wives thinking—”

  “Your wives?” she snorted.

  “Whatever,” he said. “The point is, my life’s fucked up enough already as it is. I can’t have Azra and Sonja believing that I’m—that we’re—”

  Her face changed, going all lit and righteous. “Your life, Beck? You think this is about you and your lame problems? You’re seriously clueless enough to believe that?”

  Beck gaped at her.

  “The twins are messed up, Beck,” she spat at him. “You have no idea. Especially Aidan. He just broke my brother’s glasses on purpose. Like, stomped on them in the bouncy house.”

  “Aidan wouldn’t do anything like that,” he protested. “It must have been Charlie.”

  “Wrong. And besides, that vlog you saw? Okay, it’s gross, but it’s also basically proof that nothing happened. So chill out, okay? And seriously, bro, take a shower. I’m going.” She whirled off and left him there in a fug of mute, gelatinous helplessness, a stinking waste of skin huddled against the door of a custodial closet.

  Just then Lauren passed by, saw him, and stopped, her face lit with fury. “Why were you texting my daughter last night?”

  “Oh shit, Lauren, just don’t—” He glanced over her shoulder, half expecting the cops to be right behind her. “Look, you gotta ask her, because we just talked and it’s all straightened out.”

  She shook her head and hedgehogged off to wherever.

  Control.

  Beck had lost all semblance of it—but then so had his sons’ lives. Routine, predictability, stability. Maybe Tessa was right. Maybe this wasn’t about Beck at all.

  Because when your parents split up and then your dad marries your au pair and then your au pair has a baby who’s your new brother but not the same kind of brother as your twin because he has a different mom and then you see your totally baked dad get out of a Jacuzzi and finger Nutella out of a jar while a half-naked teenager who’s your current babysitter gets out of the same Jacuzzi a few minutes later, all of this while your dad’s freaking out about money and you don’t even know where you’re going to school next year and your brother’s kicking your ass in soccer when you’ve been the star for years and now he’s also getting higher test scores, not to mention your mom getting closer with this Glen motherfucker who apparently has a whole family of his own—

  —well, then, yeah, you might start thinking and saying some weird-ass shit too, no matter how outrageous it might sound. Because what you’re asking for is some sense of order in your life. Some sense of predictability. Security. Balance.

  But then what about Aidan and what Tessa had just told him about Xander’s glasses? Why would Aidan pick on a sweet kid like Xander?

  Well, Christ. Maybe they both needed help; but so did he, Beck admitted to himself for really the first time. Bigly.

  He fumbled his phone out of his pocket and looked down at the screen and called up “Breck with Beck.” He hit Play, and as he watched once more he understood that Tessa was right, that this was evidence of a sort in his favor, showing him not as some skeezy middle-aged perv but as a bumbling idiot, as harmless as he was clueless; yet somehow these same moving images of himself, this vision of his big hairy ass and his shaking gut and the pathetic false bravado on his thickly bro-bearded face as he posed in a towel and tried to suck in his stomach and straighten his shoulders—because he still thought of himself as a man with shoulders that could straighten, a man with an abdomen that could flatten—somehow this, more than anything he had experienced in his adult life, throbbed through him like the low, intense pulse of an electric bass with Beck as its single string, a long, thrumming nerve stretched and tensed to a breaking point he could feel coming but had no power to hold off.

  But shit, man. Maybe he did.

  He lifted his eyes from the phone screen and looked down the hall, where his ex-wife stood staring at him from an open doorway. He saw her in that photo from Burning Man, on that perfect day in the desert, Beck poised at the top of the wheel beneath an impossible flood of sunlight with his whole life—

  He blinked. Azra was gesturing toward the classroom. They’re in here, she mouthed, and when Beck staggered into the room, he saw the twins at the front of a crowd watching a video on a wide-screen monitor affixed to the wall.

  Beck’s video, sleekly produced over hours in his basement and
showing off Aidan’s mad soccer skills to their best advantage. His son’s deft dribbling through the legs of his opponents. His son’s virtuosic juggling with the ball bouncing on his ankles and shoulders and head, the traps and feints and turns, tricky assists, goals rocketed into the net or slammed in with a buck of the head. Every move introduced with a flashy text graphic naming the opponent and listing Aidan’s stats for the match in question, then a starburst identifying him on the field in freeze-frame, so viewers wouldn’t confuse him with his teammates when play resumed.

  His teammates. And there they were, in the background of each play, working just as hard as Aidan—though Beck’s camera followed only his son. Only one of his sons, actually, despite the fact that Charlie appeared in every third or fourth clip playing with his brother, doing his best, but treated by his father as so much background noise.

  Beck looked down from the monitor and watched his incredible boys watching themselves, being watched by the parents and other kids crowded into the room to see Aidan Unsworth-Chaudhury burn it up on the soccer pitch. Aidan’s face glowed with unabashed pride but also, and he noticed it for the first time in that moment, something cold and arrogant that chilled Beck while he stood there inside the doorway.

  Charlie’s gaze was more opaque, brooding and confused as he experienced his brother’s talent through the rapt and admiring looks of so many others. Including, it occurred to Beck, a father who seemed to have eyes only for his twin.

  Azra turned to Beck and flashed him a proud-mama smile that faded when she saw the look on his face, the tears he could feel streaming from his eyes.

  “Impressive,” said some dad in the crowd. “So is this film of both of you playing?”

  “Nope,” Charlie said, voice tight and edgy. “Just him.”

  “My brother’s playing left bench this season,” said Aidan, prompting a few mean chuckles from some other kids. The dad raised his eyebrows and whispered something to his wife. Something about Aidan.

  For a moment Beck saw flashes of crimson, just as he had on the sideline in Grand Junction last weekend. For a second there he wanted to deck the guy for the smug, superior look.

  But then the red mist of his anger cleared, and what he saw instead was Charlie’s humiliated little face, he saw the hidden gritting of his son’s teeth, he saw how hard the kid was working to hold all that fury in. But Beck could see the anger and shame just under the surface. He recognized it; knew it.

  He looked at Azra, who was staring now at Aidan, visibly stricken by their son’s cruelty. In one long movement Beck pushed through to the monitor, switched it off, and squatted down in front of his boys.

  “You know what, guys?” he said quietly. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “But the best part’s coming up,” Aidan protested.

  “We need to go. Right now.” He held out both his hands, and maybe it was some new calm in his voice that made his sons step forward and grasp them without a fuss.

  Control.

  They trooped out of the room together and into the milling crowd. When they reached the top of the stairs, Beck turned back to Azra.

  “Please let me take them,” he said, keeping his voice steady and cool. “I’ll bring them to my place, get them cleaned up and fed, sort through how we’re going to deal with St. Bridget’s. Then we’ll talk about all this. That okay with you?”

  He liked the surprised look on Azra’s face. “Yes, okay,” she said nodding. “That sounds good.”

  He let go of his sons’ hands and stepped closer to her. “And that Tessa thing is total bullshit,” he said with a deeper kind of calm, looking into those kind eyes he’d always loved. “You know that, right?”

  His ex-wife nodded, then reached out and touched his hand. Just for a moment, but it was enough. With his sons at his side Beck walked down a flight of stairs, out the front entrance, and down to the sidewalk, heading for home.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  CH’AYÑA

  The new school was on the hill, tucked up against the mountains. From the truck Ch’ayña saw for the first time the height and size of the place. Without knowing it she had driven past the school thirty times on the way to the Zellar house but had never once looked at it. Today all the people swarmed like flies, up and down the stairs and on the play equipment in the yard.

  Maple Hill Lane was full of cars, so they had to park around the corner on a side street. The three of them climbed out of the truck. Atik, sweating through his buttoned shirt. Silea, the skin of her healed forearm grayish and loose. Ch’ayña, heart thumping madly against her ribs. She dreaded the event, had always been bad with crowds, though today there was something else eating her from the inside out.

  In the packed yard the first thing they did was join a line.

  “For ice cream,” Silea explained, up on her toes, looking about.

  Ch’ayña stood behind her daughter, peering through the thick crowd of Crystals. The women in their short dresses and the men standing on their bare, hairy legs, all their spoiled children demanding more of everything, in English but Ch’ayña could still understand them.

  More ice cream. Another burger. A blue cloud of spun sugar.

  Atik didn’t belong here among these spoon-fed whelps glued to their phones. Ch’ayña felt the conviction start to harden, a contempt for the place, a clawing certainty that it could never be right for her wawa.

  On the far side of a sliding board a familiar face appeared. Tiago, sauntering toward the cooking meats, looking for Silea. Ch’ayña watched as their eyes kissed across the schoolyard.

  He hurried up and spoke to Ch’ayña first. “Alli-lla’n’chu, doña?” he said, mangling the hello. She stared at him, took in the way Silea stapled herself to his arm.

  Ch’ayña waited in the playground until the others finished their ice cream, then they made their way up the stairs and into the building. The air was soured with the hot bodies mingling, and there was a nervous current in the crowd. Along the hall and in every classroom the talents of the children were displayed. On tables, on walls, on television screens. The gifts shone out from every corner of the school, a spot for every child who had given them something. Atik was skipping ahead of them now, looking for his pictures, the proof of his gifts.

  They climbed up to the second floor. As they went down the hallway Ch’ayña saw Ms. Holland—their employer saw her too. Ms. Holland’s eyes went wide with surprise, and with something else. She sidestepped to the middle of the hall and put up her hands, stopping them, her face a ruddy blushing mess as she spoke with Silea.

  Ch’ayña listened as Ms. Holland huddled with her daughter. Silea stared at the woman, giving her nothing. She caught some of Ms. Holland’s feeble excuses. . . . my fault, Silea, my fault entirely . . . a meeting with my boss . . . feel just TERRIBLE . . . some trouble at work . . . just forgot . . . next week, first thing Monday I’ll bring it in and explain everything, I promise . . .

  I promise, I promise. But it wasn’t enough, of course; could never be enough.

  Ch’ayña clung for a few moments more to her denial, but she understood what she had done, how it was all her fault.

  Because Silea had wanted to drop by the school first, turn in the portfolio themselves, on their way up Opal Canyon. It was Ch’ayña who’d suggested asking Ms. Holland, Ch’ayña who’d rushed out to the truck and grabbed the portfolio from beneath the seat, placed it in Ms. Holland’s irresponsible hands. Ch’ayña didn’t even know the lady, didn’t know a thing about her soul, and yet she’d trusted her with all of Atik’s hopes that day, just to save them fifteen minutes.

  Atik’s binder in her mind became a stiff bird with blue vinyl wings, smashing out the windows of Ms. Holland’s house and flying through town and into the schoolyard and up the outer stairs with its panels flapping wildly to disgorge the glossy pictures, to show these people Atik’s gifts, to show them what the boy could do
with his hands and his intricate mind.

  She felt her knees wanting to give out. Moisture beaded up in the pits of her knees and arms and the blood rushed to her face and her limbs went cold.

  Sweet Atikcha had heard none of this, she saw, hadn’t even noticed Ms. Holland stopping them in the crowded hallway. There he was, walking ahead, chatting with Tiago, happy as you like.

  Atik peered through the doorway at the end of the corridor, then looked back at Ch’ayña with a smile and a little nod and a come-on gesture with his right hand. Ch’ayña had to look away. Ms. Holland was finishing up her wet-cheeked apology and Silea was being nice to her, of course, fawning and flattering, because what choice did she have, the lady was one of her bosses. Ch’ayña glared at the woman until she turned and walked away. Silea glanced again at her mother, but Ch’ayña couldn’t meet her gaze. Together they walked unspeaking down the hall after Atik, who had just disappeared into the classroom.

  They went in together, Ch’ayña first and Silea right behind her. Once in the classroom she didn’t see it at first. Then Silea made a happy little moan, and then—

  Ch’ayña stared past Atik and Tiago at the far wall, transfixed.

  “Chekaqchu!” she blurted, clapping a hand to her lips.

  Because there, on the wall, were Ch’ayña’s photographs, arranged around a window in a display of Atik’s skills—and something more.

  Beneath the window on a table sat Atik’s paper model of Mountain View Mobile Park alongside a small gathering of his animals and flowers and trees. An elephant, a cat, a moose, a gorilla, a giraffe. A daisy, a sunflower; roses in pink, purple, orange. An oak and a pine tree and an aspen shedding golden leaves.

  Her grandson’s origami foldings: perfect in this rich light, like cut gems. But how had they gotten here? Who had brought them?

  Atik walked over to the display, and the boss of the school started talking to him. Ch’ayña couldn’t speak, she could only shake her head and look on mutely as Atik moved his magical hands and explained the work of his fingers.