“No, I was just coming to look for you. Beck took off with the boys, so—”
“What about Samantha? It’s important.” Rose could hear the desperate clawing in her own voice.
“I saw her just now, with Kev. Coming up from the main floor.”
“Will you show me?”
“Of course.” Azra led her along the hallway. By silent agreement they took the classrooms on opposite sides, keeping pace as they went along.
First room: no Q, no Sam.
Second room: no Q, no Sam.
Third room—
“Rose!” Azra called, waving her over. “They’re all in here.”
Rose dodged around a few parents and kids on her way to the door. Through the glass panel she first saw Xander, standing with his back to a wall, Lauren in front of him with her hands on his shoulders. Farther in were Kev and Samantha, walking slowly toward Gareth, who stood at the far side of the room with Emma Q pressed to his side, her face buried in her father’s ribs.
Rose felt her stomach lurch. She knew Q was upset, but the scene was wrong somehow; she sensed this on her skin and wanted to turn and slink away.
“What the hell?” Azra pushed unceremoniously on the door.
Rose had her eyes drawn first to a large monitor showing a gymnast doing an impressive routine on the uneven bars. The familiar arpeggios of a Bach cello suite lilted from a speaker somewhere. Across the room her husband and daughter stood in front of a trifold. The look on Gareth’s face was sober, almost funereal.
The door opened again to a wave of hallway noise, and Emma Zellar burst into the room, her pretty face lit with a smile that remained fixed despite the presence of the disgraced Rose. She started skipping over to her parents.
“Where’s my trifold, Mommy? I can’t find it anywh—” Z stopped in mid-skip. One look at her father’s glowering scowl and the joy dropped from her face.
Around the far table Rose could see them all: a tableau of pale familiar faces running a gamut of strange emotion. Xander pressed against the wall as Lauren gripped his shoulders; Gareth, an arm clutched around his middle, almost cowering now and casting up a furtive, ratlike glance at Rose; Samantha with her palms pressed against Kev’s heaving chest, holding him back. Tessa, ignoring everyone as she stared at her phone. (Filming again? Rose wondered.)
And the Emmas, looking never more alike.
“What’s going on?” Rose said, and the eight heads turned as one.
* * *
—
Gareth was the first to break the silence. “Rose?”
“What is this?” she said, cutting him off.
“Rose?” he said again.
Samantha detached herself from Kev’s chest and held up her palms at Rose. “Wait—Rose—please—”
Gareth reached for the trifold. At the same moment Kev lunged forward and knocked her husband’s arms away. Gareth brought his hands to his mouth, cupping his panic-heavy breaths.
“Don’t you touch it,” Kev seethed. His eyes darted back and forth between his wife and Gareth. “Let her fucking see it. Let everybody see it.”
“See what?” Rose asked.
Kev’s mouth contorted into a broad smile, the familiar shape of his public face, yet not the same at all: furious, threatening. “Why, it’s Xander’s goddamn science project. Brilliant piece of work.” He beckoned her with an old-fashioned gentleman’s flourish, then, as she stepped forward, stormed past her toward the exit. “It’s all yours, Doc. All yours.” His voice cracking as he threw open the door. “Enjoy!”
The others made room for her, as if honoring a mourner approaching a casket. Her grip on Emma Q’s trifold loosened, and it fell from her hands to smack on the floor.
Once in front of Xander’s presentation—its pictures, graphs, charts, lines—Rose felt her scientist’s brain kick in instantly, a familiar detachment that allowed her to focus on what was before her.
Hypothesis, data collection, experimentation, results, conclusion. Allowance for error.
Evaluate, she told herself. Across the top of the trifold’s middle panel stretched a banner title:
CHESS PERSONALITY:
HEREDITARY OR LEARNED?
By Xander Frye
Rose scanned the left panel, a statement of the project’s guiding question and hypothesis, printed on separate squares of paper and glued to the trifold.
QUESTION: Is a player’s chess personality determined by genetics or environment? Is chess personality hereditary or is it learned?
HYPOTHESIS: Chess personality is determined in part by heredity. Players who are closely related genetically will display similar personality traits in their tactical and strategic approaches to the game, even if they live in separate households.
A bizarre proposition, and as she scanned down through the predictions, research plan, and project description, she summoned her initial objections. Parents and siblings will play each other more often, absorb one another’s tendencies through repeated encounters at the chess table. There was also no way to determine whether any given behavioral tendency was genetic or learned: the notion was absurd. Plus—
Yet Xander had controlled for these problems, or at least attempted to. As he argued in his longer description of the project, which Rose read and absorbed in mere seconds, his data analysis would consist of a combination of algebraic chess notations and genetic testing. The notations would be put through an algorithm Xander had designed himself to map a set of behavioral tendencies through the data: aggression, deference, defensiveness, fear, indifference, carelessness, and so on. The genetic analysis would be used to confirm whether the familial relations suggested in his data analysis correlated with the evidence garnered from DNA testing.
The amount and quality of raw data from the chess side of the project was evident from the large middle panel and the stacks of paper piled in front of it. Xander had played every child and adult in every family multiple times—in some cases many dozens of times; had remembered and recorded every move of every game he’d ever played.
One hundred seventy-nine games with Aidan Unsworth-Chaudhury. Two hundred twelve games with Charlie Unsworth-Chaudhury. Sixty-seven games with Emma Zellar. Ninety-four games with Rose Holland. And the list went on. He had also recorded the many matches between others that he had observed over those same years: Charlie and Emma Z, July 5, 2012; Beck and Kev, Best of Seven, Thanksgiving Day 2014 (a pitched battle, Rose remembered, fueled by testosterone and single-malt Scotch).
In all Xander had more than three thousand chess matches transcribed in algebraic notation, every one of them churned through his algorithm to yield a written “assessment of chess personality type” for each member of the families.
Rose, deaf to the rising mumbles around her, scanned quickly through them, catching the odd phrase here and there, lingering on her own assessment.
Azra Chaudhury: very smart player . . . overly accommodating . . . avoids sequential exchanges . . . steers clear of conflict . . .
Aidan Unsworth-Chaudhury: crafty but aggressive . . . avoids sequential exchanges . . . retreats when necessary . . . discourages concession . . . cruel to inferior opponents . . .
Rose Holland: deceptive and sneaky . . . ruthless but insecure . . . squanders pawns, hoards opportunity . . . unwilling to sacrifice for tactical advantage . . . tendency to risk everything in pursuit of a weak endgame . . .
For the lower part of the middle panel Xander had created a chart of familial relationships based on what he’d gleaned from these personality types: the unwritten code binding brother to brother, father to son, daughter to mother, patterns that altered somewhat yet remained largely stable as children grew and parents aged.
Rose’s eyes blurred and focused and blurred again as she scanned the chart, absorbed its meaning, saw the obvious error at its center. Because—
“Oh,” she said,
and blood rushed and throbbed in her ears as she awoke to the room and the people around her. Behind her someone coughed.
Without moving her head, she forced her eyes to look at the right-hand panel, an organized presentation of the genetic data Xander had compiled to test his chess algorithm. Thumbnail photographs of the samples he’d collected, from strands of hair taken from Rose’s hairbrush to semen collected from a used condom in Beck’s master bathroom. A series of DNA-matching results, all from a national lab called GenSecure. Xander had included his “lab notes” as well as several explanatory bubbles of prose.
Finally, a series of abbreviated family trees. Paired photos of six discrete sets of parents linked with poorly drawn branches to images of their children. Gareth and Rose in a black-and-white wedding photo, matched with Emma Q in her fourth-grade school picture, their nuclear family unthreatened and secure.
An old beach photo of Julian and Lauren, linked to a picture of Tessa in a bikini and Xander at a chess tournament.
A glorious color photo of Beck and Azra years ago at Burning Man, a shot Rose had never seen before but that Xander’s caption revealed had been found in Beck’s basement study. They were linked to Charlie and Aidan with photos snipped from a shot of their soccer team.
Then a more heavyset Beck, linked to Sonja in cobra pose and a newborn Roy, connected with a dotted line to the twins, his half brothers.
And at the bottom of the middle panel was the final tree. On the left, the same wedding shot of Gareth but with Rose cut out of the photo—and in her place a beaming Samantha Zellar, holding up a glass of champagne and blowing a kiss over the crystal flute. Their tree revealed them as the biological parents of Emma Zellar—linked to Emma Holland-Quinn, her half sister, with a dotted line that ran from the bottom of the panel all the way to the first family tree at the top.
* * *
—
Rose could sense the millions of nerve cells that coated the tissue of her retina absorbing the images and sending their electrical pulses to her optic nerve and through it to her frontal lobe, which started a cool assessment of the visual information in front of her, as if one of her postdocs were presenting lab results to her skeptical eye. She leaned slightly forward and looked at the side panels again, assessing the probabilities, costing out the damage to her marriage, her friendships.
Her daughter. Samantha’s daughter.
Everything.
Finally she straightened. “Is this—Gareth—is this true?”
But she already knew it was, and even as the question left her mouth she felt the gulf that was their marriage widen, its cliff walls finally begin to crumble and plunge.
Around her a dozen strangers murmured and softly questioned. The confrontation was harvesting attention now.
“Oh, Rose,” she heard Samantha say as the ringing faded in her ears. “It happened before I knew you, over a year before we even met. I never thought—”
“Stop,” Rose said.
Gareth again: “Honey, I don’t—”
“Just stop. And tell me if it’s true.”
There was a thick and short silence, broken by Xander’s squeaky rasp: “The results are accurate to within 99.99998 percent.”
Rose’s head spun toward the boy, who was staring wide-eyed through the broken and taped-up mess of his glasses. Lauren had already clapped her hand over his mouth.
“But how did you know?” Rose said, still somehow a scientist tangled in the mystery of hypothesis: the spark of thought that made knowledge possible. “What made you do this in the first place?”
Xander simply shook his head, saying nothing between his mother’s fingers.
Rose felt like a spectator at the scene of a violent crime, except she didn’t know whether she was a victim or a witness—or both at once. Ten feet away Samantha, hands over her face, wept openly, shoulders humping with emotion.
Azra was the first to risk touch; sweet Azra. She put a hand on Rose’s arm. “Oh honey,” she said tentatively, “maybe we should go. Do you want to go?”
“Listen, Rose,” Lauren began. She pushed Xander behind her protectively. “I feel horrible about this.” A practical tone that infuriated Rose more with each syllable. “I just wasn’t keeping track of Xander’s portfolio. You know how he’s so independent with his schoolwork, he always has been, really, and I tend to let him do his own thing, which obviously in the case of this science project—”
“Wait.” Rose’s open hand snapped up with a will of its own, silencing Lauren. “You’re . . . you’re actually trying to tell me this is—you think this—”
For two seconds no one moved. Then Rose grabbed Xander’s trifold, clutching it by its side panels and thrusting it toward Lauren’s face.
“That this shit is science?”
She shook the trifold at Lauren.
“This isn’t science,” she seethed, “this is a few drugstore DNA kits and a malicious little sociopath who decided to ruin a bunch of lives.”
“Rose—” Gareth started to say. With a burning stare she shut his soft mouth.
She went on: “As if—as if we’re chess pieces he can just knock over however he wants. Are you proud of your profoundly gifted son, Lauren, for what he’s done?” She threw the trifold on the tiled floor and stomped on it with her flats, shoots of pain up creeping up her rubbery legs.
“Rose, stop,” Samantha said.
Rose whirled on her. Samantha backed off a step, but Rose moved forward and put a finger in her heart-shaped face. “Oh, don’t you start, you evil bitch, you lying, cheating—with your perfect precious little brat of a dau—oh, wait, I’m sorry, your perfect precious little brat of my husband’s daughter. I mean, you and Gareth? Seriously? And what’s her gift? What? What’s her ‘spike’? Leadership? How many millions did you have to give to Darlton University to get them to give you what you wanted? Or did you have to fuck a dean or a provost like you fucked him?”
She pointed at Gareth, ignoring the gasps.
“Because guess what, you two? Guess what, everybody?” She pointed with both hands at Gareth and Samantha. “Their daughter didn’t even score high enough to make the first cut. How about that? Your fake family shouldn’t even be here today.”
More gasps, murmurs, a harsh laugh somewhere.
Then Emma Zellar’s quiet voice:
“Well, you stole my whole History Day project.”
Rose was about to scream a response down into the little brat’s face when Z stooped to the floor and picked up Q’s trifold, which Rose had dropped minutes before.
“She did, Mommy.” Z held the horse project up and open so Samantha and everyone else could see. “Her and Q. Rose only put Emma Q’s name on it when I did half the work. At least half. Q doesn’t even know how to type. See?”
Rose stared at the trifold.
“She’s right,” Rose keened, throwing up her arms. “She’s absolutely right. Oh god oh god oh god.” Her face sank into her open hands. A long, wretched moan escaped her chest. “It’s this school,” she said into her palms; then, looking up through her tears, “It’s this goddamn school, it’s—it’s made us all—just—I mean, look at this, just look at all this.”
She lunged toward a nearby table and picked up a random trifold. “Chrissy Baker,” she said, “on the geochemistry of volcanoes.” She showed it to the many gawking witnesses to her unraveling. “But I know Dave Baker. He’s a geochemist at Darlton. He chairs the goddamn department! You don’t think he gave her the idea, did ninety percent of the work?”
She dropped the trifold and cast her eyes around the room. “And how about this one, our little cello prodigy right here.” She stomped over to the speaker playing Bach and lifted up the framed photo of the cellist, showing his downcast eyes and the elegant bend of his bow arm.
“I happen to know that Carter Stanhope hates the cello, okay? The poor kid�
��s been complaining for the last two years about his lessons, but it doesn’t matter, because his mommies insist he’s a prodigy when actually he’s just a diligent kid who can’t say no when they tell him he needs to get his goddamn ten thousand hours.”
With one movement she smashed the frame on the edge of the table. The glass exploded in a hundred pieces that scattered across the table, tinkled to the floor. The noise and the sensation of breaking stirred something deep within, and for the first time since seeing Xander’s results she felt a faint ping of self-consciousness, a sense of how she must look to everyone else in that room.
But she couldn’t stop. Not yet.
“And look at me!” she cried, jamming her knuckles into her ribs. “Look at me! I’m the worst of all! This is the worst person I have EVER BEEN! I forgot to turn in a portfolio for the son of my housekeeper. I made up a bogus research project and risked my career. I literally deleted the name of my little girl’s best friend from a trifold, just erased her, and now she’s—”
“JUST SHUT UP, ROSE!” Emma Zellar screeched, stamping her foot on the floor. “NOBODY CARES!”
Rose’s head snapped back, and during the horrible gasp of silence that followed she saw the reddened face of Emma Z, the tight little fists held clutched at the top of the girl’s chest. In the same awful moment Xander’s assessment of her own personality spangled through her skull.
. . . deceptive and sneaky . . . ruthless but insecure . . . squanders pawns, hoards opportunity . . .
Emma Z, her daughter’s best friend practically since birth. This girl whose life was changing beneath her little feet, altered so much more profoundly than Rose’s could ever be by such a revelation.
Because Rose had just learned that her husband cheated on her over twelve years ago. A revelation that was almost a confirmation, and came as a kind of relief.
Emma Zellar, on the other hand, had just learned that Kev wasn’t her biological father—a fact that even Kev hadn’t known until minutes ago.
The Gifted School Page 38
