The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger

  Tiago was talking to Silea. Ch’ayña couldn’t hear what they said, but once they were finished, Silea came over and took her mother’s hand.

  “It’s my fault,” said Ch’ayña, her eyes flooding.

  “It’s not your fault, Mamay.” Silea patted her hand. “You’ve had so much on your shoulders these last months with all the houses, the driving. Taking care of us.”

  Ch’ayña shook her head. “But how—”

  “Tiago made another folder for him and drove it here, that same day,” Silea said, gesturing for the man to join them, “along with the model and some of his other designs. He got everything in on time.”

  “I thought they should see the origami itself, not just the pictures,” Tiago explained. “I made a second binder and brought it in with the mobile park and those animals. I told Atik, but I should have said something to you.”

  Tiago raised his eyebrows and gave her a meek look, a shrug of his bulky shoulders.

  Ch’ayña made a decision right then, as she stood with her arms folded stoutly and watched her grandson boast to the school boss. No more cold water for Tiago. From now on she would offer the man a cup of tea when he came over. Coca, mint, lemongrass, any kind he asked for. A whole damn pot if he wanted it.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  EMMA Z

  The Emmas strolled along the third-floor hallway sharing a raspberry-lemon scone from the pastry cart. You weren’t supposed to bring food inside the school, but Z didn’t care. She ate first, breaking off a little piece from the first flaky corner before handing it over to Q. She watched as Q snapped off the next corner.

  Emma Q always had to be a copycat, even with a scone. Z sighed loudly.

  “What?” Q looked alarmed.

  “Oh, nothing,” said Z in a singsongy way. “Just—nothing.”

  “But tell me.”

  “It’s not important.” Z led them through a door into a classroom full of light and color.

  It was an art studio. There were easels, there were shelves full of clay bricks wrapped in plastic, there were famous paintings on the wall (“Look, Mommy, that one’s Klimt!” an annoying girl said in a very shrill voice). A big wall of windows faced outside. The classroom was high up, on the top floor of the school. You could see the Redirons way off, shoving their pointy blades at the sky.

  A big television monitor at the front of the room showed a girl who looked the same age as the Emmas sitting at a potter’s wheel making a bowl out of clay. The girl shown in the video was standing there with both her parents watching, like she hadn’t seen her own video a million times already. The real bowl, mustard yellow and spiraled from top to bottom with an aqua stripe, sat on the shelf just below the monitor.

  Z took another pinch of scone. “This is boring.” She chewed loudly, dropping crumbs.

  “So boring,” Q agreed, taking the scone.

  The girl’s father turned and glared at them.

  Z said, “Let’s try a different room.”

  * * *

  —

  She made them skip the next two doors, because those classrooms didn’t look that interesting and there were no kids in them, and so far she hadn’t seen Born to Lead displayed anywhere. And maybe it wouldn’t be displayed anywhere, because if her CogPro score wasn’t high enough and what that man said to her father was true . . .

  In the third classroom there was a family who looked maybe Hispanic, staring at some photographs on the wall. A boy, a mother, a father, and an old lady who was probably the boy’s grandmother. The mother looked familiar. Emma Z stared at her, trying to figure out where she’d seen the woman before.

  The boy was talking to Dr. Leighton, the lady who had been speaking into the microphone outside. He had brown skin like Azra’s but a little darker. He wore round glasses with silver rims. The lenses weren’t thick like Xander’s, but the shape of the glasses made him look like an owl.

  “This is really ingenious, Atik,” Dr. Leighton was saying to the boy.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” The boy’s chin went up a little, which was annoying.

  “Where did you learn to do this kind of work?” Her head moved in a slow, exaggerated circle, as if she were taking in some museum exhibit and wanted everyone to see her seeing.

  “From myself, ma’am.”

  “Your parents must be so proud.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, then spoke to the old woman in Italian or Spanish or something. The grandmother beamed at the teacher and the boy. They talked a little more to Dr. Leighton before heading toward the door.

  When they were gone, Emma Z went up to look at the pictures. There were seven of them, the first two showing views of a mobile suspended from a ceiling in someone’s house. From the mobile dangled about twenty paper birds of every shape and color. Flamingoes, pelicans, hummingbirds and cardinals and bluejays. The next picture showed a bunch of house trailers in rows, and seeing the model gave Emma Z a strange rush of familiarity, because it looked just like the trailer park they would pass every Saturday before turning into Wild Horse Stables way out in Beulah County. Other photos showed paper cars, paper trucks, paper people. On a narrow table just below all the pictures stood ten actual paper animals. Including a giraffe exactly like the one that somebody left in her room all those weeks ago.

  Emma Z’s eyes fixed on one of the four thumbtacks attaching the lowest picture to the wall. She wanted to pull the tack out and keep it. She was just reaching for it when she realized the boy had come back into the classroom without the others and was standing nearby, watching her look at the pictures.

  “You’re Emma,” he said.

  She put her hands on her hips like her mother did and frowned at him. “How do you know my name?”

  He mumbled something.

  “What did you say?”

  “From pictures,” he said.

  “What pictures?”

  “In your house.”

  “What were you doing in my house?”

  He smiled. “Cleaning,” he said, and Emma Z thought of her yellow sweater pushed under her bed; of all her books, neatened and organized on the bookcase. Of the paper animals left on her shelf.

  “Is your mother Silea?” she asked him. Now she knew who the familiar woman was. She remembered her own mother saying something about Silea’s other family members, how they had to do the cleaning while Silea’s arm was healing.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Oh.” She blinked, not knowing what to say.

  The boy stepped closer to her and nodded at the pictures and the folded animals.

  “Those are from my portfolio. It’s called origami. Do you like it?”

  Emma Z turned toward the animals on the small table. All the shapes, the folds, the impossible intricacies of the boy’s creations.

  For some reason she thought of the CogPro. She thought of Question 15.

  A square, a circle, a parallelogram, a cone, a rhombus.

  Blue, red, green, yellow, purple.

  The boy was staring at her, but in a way she sort of didn’t mind.

  She shrugged. “Paper isn’t really my thing. My project is on leadership.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Emma Z rolled her eyes at the boy like she rolled her eyes at all boys. “It means I’m a leader. It means leadership is my spike. I’m a junior auditor at Darlton University.”

  “What’s a junior auditor?”

  “Someone who takes classes there, same as the college students.”

  “Wow. That’s amazing.”

  “I guess.”

  He stood there until finally she raised her eyebrows and gave her head a little shake, like she saw Tessa do sometimes when she was impatient.

  “Well . . . good luck,” he said, and his face looked kind of disappointed.

  Emma Z decided to smile at hi
m. “You too,” she said.

  Without saying goodbye he turned away and said something to his grandma, who’d just come back in the room to find him. She frowned at Emma Z and patted the boy on the head, then pushed him toward the door. As they left the classroom she kept her head turned back, her old eyes fixed on Emma Z’s.

  * * *

  —

  Once they were gone, Z’s gaze swept across the small crowd. There were ten or twelve people in the room, but no one was paying attention to her. With a fingernail she plucked one of the thumbtacks out of the poster, slipped it into her pocket, and pressed the pad of her thumb against the point. It didn’t hurt that badly. She removed her hand from her pocket and sucked a bead of blood off her thumb.

  When she turned from the photograph display, she noticed that Emma Q wasn’t moving. Her friend looked frozen in place, and her eyes were wide, and she was standing in front of a trifold.

  There must be something verrrrry interesting on that trifold, Z thought, because Q was staring as if the flaps might close on their own and bite off one of her chubby cheeks.

  “What is it, Q?” Emma Z called across the room.

  Q broke her stare. “Huh?” she said dumbly. She looked scared.

  “What’s on that poster?” Z started toward her.

  “Nothing.” Emma Q moved away from the trifold and stood there, blocking Z’s way.

  “Move,” Z said.

  “Let’s go down the hall,” Q replied. “This stuff is all stupid.”

  “No, it’s not. That origami’s not stupid. Could you make paper animals like that?”

  “No, sorry, I mean some of it is, like, all that stuff over there.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Let’s just go.” Q grabbed Z’s arm and tried to face her toward the door. Z pushed her hand off.

  “What is your problem?” Emma Z kept her voice down so the parents wandering the room wouldn’t hear.

  But it was too late. Dr. Leighton frowned at them. “Is there an issue, girls?”

  “No, ma’am,” Z said sweetly.

  Q got an I-give-up look on her face, then Z spun away and walked to the table where the trifold was displayed. When she saw the front of it, she laughed. “Q, you’re so weird. This is just our History Day thing.”

  But then she saw the new header unfurled across the top.

  THE HORSE IN THE AMERICAN WEST

  BY EMMA HOLLAND-QUINN

  Z stared at their project. “That’s funny. How did—”

  Then she understood.

  “Ohhhh,” she said, turning to look at her friend. Q had her mouth open and her head was shaking and she was about to start crying, and obviously Q knew this was going to make Z very angry, and Q also knew how much Z would enjoy telling her mom that her very best friend’s daughter basically stole Z’s work for her portfolio. And right now Dr. Leighton was walking over to them.

  So this was big.

  It was weird, though, but the new caption didn’t really make Emma Z all that mad. In fact she felt almost proud of Emma Q for stealing so openly from her and thinking she could get away with it. The theft showed a side of Q she’d never seen before. It was sneaky, it was dishonest, and it was almost, like, kind of brave.

  But Z was going to have to punish her for it anyway. Maybe a week without talking at all, or even two weeks or a month. Or maybe having a big party at her house or at JumpGym to which Q wouldn’t be invited.

  Oh yes, this was definitely big.

  SIXTY-NINE

  ROSE

  She leaned against the tiled wall, humiliation burning her cheeks, as Silea and her mother continued down the hallway. Would she ever forget the disappointment in Silea’s eyes just now, or that look of pure hatred from her mother, that gut-punching contempt? All her privilege, all her benevolence, all her smug self-satisfaction that she had a house cleaner come just once every two weeks when the Zellars had theirs come three times a week—and now an abject failure to fulfill this simple yet infinitely meaningful request: a ten-minute detour to do an easy favor for a woman who’d scrubbed her toilets for the last five years.

  And now Rose had to find Emma Q, her portfolio, and Samantha—hopefully all three of them, and in the right order—before yet another catastrophe struck.

  The crowd moved slowly and with deliberation, pooling and congealing at doorways and in the narrow spaces between tables, but despite the throngs Rose made quick work of the east side of the third floor. She crossed into the first classroom on the west side, then the second, and had made it all the way down to the last room when she saw her daughter across the hall.

  Two tables in, the Emmas stood together in front of a trifold with Bitsy Leighton squatting between them, her head wedged between their pretty faces, their attention clearly riveted by the enormity of what Rose had done. For the second time in five minutes she found herself rooted to the floor, unable to move.

  She looked past them, the misery gathering in her head like a sneeze—and saw a table full of Atik’s origami animals standing beneath a window. Above them a dozen photographs from his portfolio, arranged attractively to show off his talents. She stared at the array, baffled.

  “Why, this is lovely, Emma,” Bitsy Leighton said to her right. Rose looked away from Atik’s creations. Bitsy’s arm had settled on the shoulders of Emma Q.

  The classroom was pitched at a low murmur that Emma Z’s voice snicked through like a blade when she said, “It was a lot of work.”

  Bitsy turned her head. “What’s that?”

  Rose held her breath. Emma Q’s eyes went wide as pancakes. Emma Z grinned up at Bitsy, then turned to look at Rose. Samantha’s daughter gave her a bitchy little smile.

  “I’m going to go look for my mom and dad now. I can’t find my trifold anywhere,” Z said, then skipped from the room.

  Rose let out air. Q’s milky face was flushed a fierce and blotchy red. She dashed out of the classroom with her fists pumping, darting for the stairs. Rose wanted to go after her but couldn’t leave the project here like this, bared and exposed, almost pornographic in its raw disclosure of her dishonesty; and Samantha could be anywhere. Bitsy Leighton frowned as Rose meekly approached the table, folded up the trifold, and tucked it under her arm.

  Before leaving the room, she took one look back at the woman’s face. Rose saw confusion there, then a glimmer of understanding. Worst of all: a hint of pity in the woman’s eyes.

  SEVENTY

  XANDER

  After taping his glasses back together in the main office, Xander went upstairs to a chemistry and biology lab, stocked with two empty terrariums, microscopes, beakers, and test tubes for show; posters of the periodic table and instructions on laboratory safety. Dozens of science fair trifolds stood like skyscrapers on the high lab tables.

  Water pollution, jet propulsion, rocketry, lake biology, ocean biology, creek biology, aerodynamics, asteroids: exactly forty-four science fair projects were displayed in the lab.

  But not Xander’s. There must be another lab, on a different floor.

  When he left the classroom, he saw Emma Q coming down the hall, tears and snot smearing her face. Xander crossed the hall and followed her into another classroom. This room was different from all the others, quieter somehow. There was music on, a cello, and a girl was performing gymnastics on a television screen. There was no pattern, though. It looked as if the teachers had stacked the room with a bunch of projects they hadn’t known where else to put. Everything was very—miscellaneous.

  A few adults stepped away, and Xander saw Mr. Quinn staring down at a trifold, his face unmoving and his right arm crossed over his chest. It looked like he was holding his heart. His left arm dangled at his side.

  One of Xander’s favorite things to watch was this old clip of Mikhail Botvinnik winning the Soviet championship against Salo Flohr (Leningrad, 1933)
. You couldn’t find a video of the whole match, but the part Xander liked best came near the beginning, when you saw Botvinnik staring down at the table with his lips pooched and a dark pit in his sucked-in cheek and his spectacles tight against his eye sockets, so they looked more like goggles than glasses. The champ’s face was one big, brainy ball of unmoving focus. You got the feeling that his whole life had come down to this one moment. That everything he did afterward began right here.

  That was exactly the way Mr. Quinn’s face looked, minus the glasses. He had the same kind of head as Botvinnik’s, and his right arm was crossing the top of his chest, squeezing his ribs. He looked like a tense hunting dog about to spring forward and go for a squirrel. Quivering, even. Trembling, like Aquinas.

  Emma Q walked over to her father, breaking the spell. He took her hand. His eyes were blinking crazily.

  “What does it mean, Daddy?” she asked, taking in the trifold. Her puzzled frown deepened. Xander’s stomach burbled as he watched Q begin to understand the truly life-changing significance of his discovery. Her forehead smoothed, her face went blank with surprise.

  “There you are,” said a low voice behind him.

  “Hello,” Xander said to his sister, hearing his own voice tremble on the two syllables, like Mr. Quinn’s hands. His lenses wobbled as a piece of tape gave way.

  They stood there together, looking at Gareth and Emma Q. Father and daughter, their lives changing by the moment.

  “I am indubitably grounded,” said Xander.

  Tessa held up her phone.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  ROSE

  Is Q with you? Rose texted Gareth as she speedwalked with Q’s trifold pressed to her side. Descending to the second floor, she ran into Azra.

  “Have you seen Emma Q?” Rose asked, breathless.