The School for the Insanely Gifted

by Dan Elish

  “Here it is,” Daphna said.

  “Do you remember the combination?” Harkin asked.

  Daphna caught her breath.

  “What’s wrong?” Cynthia asked.

  Daphna swallowed hard. “It’s my mom’s birthday.”

  She took the lock in her hands and lined up a nine for September, her birth month, then a two and a six for her birthdate: the twenty-sixth. When the lock clicked open, Daphna looked nervously at her friends, then pulled the bin open. She had expected it to be piled high with books and papers. Maybe even a few notebooks or a diary. Instead, the bin was filled with four wooden folding chairs, an old air mattress, three pillows, and a deflated soccer ball.

  “Wow,” she said.

  She couldn’t hide her disappointment. Daphna secretly wanted to find a private note from her mother: a deeply personal, loving last message sealed in a flowered envelope with the words “Read Only in Case of Death” written on the front.

  “Sorry, Daph, dude,” Harkin said. “This rots.”

  “Yeah,” Cynthia said. “Not much here.”

  Daphna leaned into the bin and pushed aside the folding chairs. Still nothing. Frustrated, she picked up the deflated soccer ball and threw it hard onto one of the pillows, knocking it sideways into the air mattress. Then she saw it: a glimmer of red where the pillow had lain.

  “Wait,” she said. “Give me a hand with this stuff.”

  Daphna and her friends cleared out the bin and placed the chairs, pillows, mattress, and soccer ball out on the floor. Lying on the bottom was a red folder. Daphna leaned over as far as she could, snagged it by an edge, then plopped herself on the floor.

  “Do you think there’s anything inside?” she asked. “I mean anything good?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Cynthia said.

  “But you never know,” Harkin said.

  As if to answer her question, ten or so pictures slipped out of the folder onto the floor. Daphna’s spirits soared. Maybe there would be more photos of her mom? The first few pictures she looked at were of her mother, all right, but they were baby shots. The rest were of Daphna’s grandparents. Inside the folder itself, there was an old electric bill, a second-place ribbon from a camp horse show, and a high-school diploma with a gold certificate reading “Valedictorian.”

  “Nice,” Cynthia said. “Your mother was first in her class.”

  “She was smart, all right,” Daphna said. “But I already knew that.” She glanced back into the bin, disappointed again. “That’s all there is.”

  “Nothing about the Flex-Bed,” Cynthia said.

  “Ditto the antelope,” Harkin said. “Or the mysterious Billy.”

  “I wonder if he had the wrong apartment?” Cynthia asked.

  “Maybe,” Daphna said. She sighed. “All this time I was so worried about coming down here and finding out strange stuff about my mom. But there’s nothing.”

  Harkin and Cynthia exchanged a glance, trying to find the right words to cheer up Daphna. Then there was a loud squeak from the far side of the room. Daphna sat up with a start.

  “Is that a mouse?” Harkin asked.

  Daphna nodded. “Let’s get out of here.”

  As Daphna placed the pictures back in the red folder, she noticed something else. At first glance, the thin pencil markings on the back cover looked like nothing more than random squiggles. But with a hard look, Daphna saw that the markings were a drawing.

  “Wait. What’s this?”

  She held the back cover closer. On either side of the page stood two tall trees, drawn with a few well-chosen lines and a couple of elegant swirls. In between the trees stood a simple bench. Slightly behind the bench to the right was a sharp X. Underneath the drawing was a name, written in curly script: Snods.

  Daphna felt a chill. Not a light tingle up her spine, but a genuine shiver that ran all the way from her toes up to the back of her neck.

  “What’s Snods?” Cynthia asked.

  “Me,” Daphna whispered.

  “So this is a message for you?” Harkin said.

  Daphna nodded. “Must be.” She pointed at the picture. “It’s my mother’s bench.”

  A year or so before her disappearance, Daphna’s mother had donated a bench to Central Park in her parents’ memory. It stood back from the bridle path, underneath a copse of trees just in from 101st Street. Daphna had been there only a few times, but her mother had visited the bench at least once a week—even in the middle of winter.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Cynthia said. “The X in the picture must mark where your mom left you something!”

  “Something she didn’t want anyone else to find,” Harkin said.

  Daphna ripped off the back of the folder and dropped the rest of it back into the storage bin.

  “Come on, kids,” she said. “Next stop, Central Park!”

  Chapter 10

  Race to Sheep Meadow

  By the time Daphna, Cynthia, and Harkin reached the entrance at 100th Street, the sun was just beginning to set, casting a bright orange glow over the park. They hurried past a lake and playground, turned down a wooded path, then cut across a small field. Just like in the drawing, the sturdy green bench stood between two majestic oaks. On the middle of the bench was a small silver plaque reading: “This bench was donated to Central Park in memory of Franklin and Joan Whispers.”

  Daphna knew she should get right to work digging at the spot where the X was in her mother’s drawing, but she couldn’t keep from leaning back and staring up through the trees before she got started.

  “It’s so peaceful,” she said. “I almost forget I’m in New York.”

  Daphna watched a bird flutter between two branches, then followed its flight back toward the north of the park. To her surprise, a new melody came to her—the second phrase of her symphony.

  Da, da, dum, dum, dee!

  “Oh, no,” Harkin said to Cynthia. “She’s at it.”

  “What?” Daphna said.

  “I know that look,” he replied.

  “How can you compose music at a time like this?” Cynthia asked.

  Daphna shrugged. “It just came to me.”

  She stood and surveyed the terrain behind the bench. The ground was covered with leaves. Daphna took her mother’s drawing out of her back pocket, studied it for a moment, then looked back to the ground.

  “The X is right about there.” She pointed to a spot to the right of the bench, close to the taller of the two trees. Harkin looked over her shoulder to check her sense of distance.

  “I think you’re right,” he said. “Let’s dig.”

  Cynthia was already down on her knees, ready to paw at the dirt.

  “Come on, slowpokes.”

  A squirrel leaped down from a tree and stood on the back of the bench a few inches from Daphna’s head.

  “Oh, hey there,” she said.

  As a New Yorker, she was used to the comings and goings of squirrels and pigeons. The animal leaped back to the ground, sprinted for the woods, but then stopped on a dime, a few feet from where Cynthia was about to start digging.

  “You won’t find any nuts down there,” she said.

  By that point, the squirrel was scraping at the ground with its front paws. Harkin got down on one knee.

  “Maybe the little dude sees something we don’t?”

  Daphna took a step toward the squirrel. When her shadow crossed its path, it looked her up and down, then sprinted up the closer of the two trees. Without wasting a moment, Daphna dropped to her hands and knees and scraped away dirt at the squirrel’s spot. She quickly uncovered what appeared to be the top of some sort of box. Cynthia and Harkin joined in, tossing away handfuls of leaves, sticks, and muddy dirt. In less than a minute they had dug out a wooden box, a foot across and close to six inches deep. Wide-eyed, Daphna looked at her friends.

  “It’s my mother’s old letter box.”

  “Go ahead,” Cynthia said. “Open it!”

  Daphna gl
anced up to make sure no one was snooping. In the distance, a mother was pushing a stroller toward a playground. In the other direction, through the trees, she could hear a group of boys playing soccer.

  “Coast is clear,” Harkin said. “Go for it.”

  The top pulled off more easily than Daphna expected. Lying at the bottom of the box was a single sheet of yellowed paper with neat typeset print across the page. Daphna held it up to the light.

  “It’s a page from a published book,” she said.

  But it was more than that. Across the typeset lines was a pair of musical staves—one bass, one treble clef—filled with a series of large notes, almost as if they had been written by a child.

  “I didn’t know your mom wrote music,” Harkin said.

  “She didn’t,” Daphna said with a laugh.

  “What are you saying?” Harkin asked.

  “I thought this handwriting looked familiar,” Daphna said. “My mom copied my first sonata, ‘The Sad Sandbox.’”

  Her friends looked more closely.

  “Why would she hide a copy out here?” Cynthia said.

  “And why copy it over a novel?” Harkin asked. “Here, lemme see something.”

  He took the paper. Though Daphna’s piece was printed in dark ink, the text underneath was still readable. Harkin read:

  “‘Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngàje Ngài,” the House of God.’

  “Let’s see what my search engine, Get Thunked, has to say.”

  Harkin typed the passage into his wristwatch computer.

  “That’s the opening passage from ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’ by Ernest Hemingway,” Harkin said.

  “What do you think?” Cynthia asked, turning to Daphna. “That your mom went to Kilimanjaro?”

  “Could be,” she said.

  She took the music back from Harkin and examined the first line.

  “What are you thinking?” Cynthia asked.

  Daphna pointed at the first three notes in the G clef.

  “See those?” she asked Cynthia.

  Her friend held the music up to her glasses. “Yeah, they’re quarter notes.”

  “Not their length,” Daphna said. “Their pitch.”

  Cynthia looked again. “Three Bs.” She frowned. “So what?”

  Harkin got it. “B. B. B,” he whispered. “Billy B. Brilliant.”

  “Do you really think that’s why she picked this piece?” Cynthia asked. “The three Bs?”

  Daphna nodded. “Mom knew I’d eventually look for a clue in the notes. It has to be.”

  “So now we’re getting somewhere,” Harkin said, standing up to his full height. “If we put it all together, your mom went to Kilimanjaro to find Billy B. Brilliant.”

  “It’s possible,” Daphna said.

  “Mount Kilimanjaro is a big place,” Cynthia said. “Even if she and Billy Brilliant are there, how would we find them?”

  It was a good question.

  Just as Daphna set her mind to solving the problem, she had the strange sense that she and her friends were being watched. She looked up from the letter box and back over her shoulder.

  There he was, standing by the edge of the path, no more than thirty feet away. The antelope man.

  “I’ll take that,” he said.

  Daphna rose slowly to her feet. Harkin took the yellowed paper and shoved it into his back pocket. Daphna held the letter box.

  “Who are you?” she asked, voice shaking.

  The man began to walk toward them. Under other circumstances, Daphna might have been amused. After all, here was a grown man dressed in a costume that would have drawn stares at Halloween. But as the strange man—almost more ghoul than human in the trees’ shadows—seemed to glide toward them, Daphna knew that she had never been more terrified in her life.

  She noticed he was moving with a distinct limp.

  “You hurt your leg,” she said.

  “You pushed me out a window,” the man replied.

  Shaking now, Daphna held the box behind her back.

  “Give it here, and you won’t get hurt,” the man said.

  “One hour,” Harkin whispered. “Sheep Meadow.”

  Daphna knew it well, a large field located in the south end of the park.

  “You won’t get away this time,” the man called out. He was no more than ten feet away now. He laughed, a raspy guffaw that filled the woods. “There aren’t any refrigerators out here.”

  But there was a squirrel—the same one that had helped discover the letter box. With a single leap it was back on the bench. With another it was flying through the air, paws outstretched. Then it was scurrying to keep its balance on the antelope man’s head.

  “Run!” Harkin called.

  Cynthia and Daphna didn’t need to be told twice. They broke for the cluster of trees behind them, then sprinted back up toward the park exit. Though the animal was still on his head, the man took a few steps in their direction but stopped when the squirrel jumped down and dug its claws firmly into his shoulder.

  “Arrrgghhh!”

  The man doubled over, grabbing wildly for his shoulder. By that time, the squirrel had leaped to the ground and was barreling for the woods.

  A safe distance up the path, Daphna stopped.

  “What are you doing?” Cynthia said.

  “Making sure Harkin gets away,” Daphna said.

  Daphna turned to see Harkin take the yellowed sheet of paper out of his pocket and hold it up to the masked man.

  “Looking for this?” he said.

  “You’re dead!” the antelope man called, and rushed toward him, arms outstretched. For a split second, Harkin remained perfectly still. He then calmly rolled up his sleeve and pressed a purple button on his wristwatch control pad. Bright orange flames shot out of his sneakers. With a giant whoosh, he shot straight up into the air, his ponytail flapping in the late-afternoon breeze.

  “Say hello to my jet-propelled high-tops!” Harkin called.

  The man dove for the boy’s rising feet, missed, and did a somersault into one of the oak trees. Another burst of flames shot from Harkin’s sneakers, rocketing him across the copse of trees toward the playground.

  “Yes!” Daphna said. “Let’s cruise!”

  Daphna and Cynthia sprinted for the 100th Street exit, arriving just as Harkin touched down.

  “Can I have the paper?” Daphna asked.

  Harkin nodded. “Yep! Here. Take it.”

  Daphna shoved it into her mother’s letter box and looked over her shoulder. In the far distance, the antelope man was already back on his feet, hurrying their way.

  “Where to now?” Harkin asked.

  “Keep to the plan,” Daphna said. “Split up so we’re harder to track. Meet at Sheep Meadow in an hour.”

  “Got it,” Cynthia said. She was off, headed uptown. Harkin fired up his sneakers and took to the sky.

  “Later, Daph, dude!”

  Satisfied that her friends were safe, Daphna ran across Central Park West. But she stopped smack in the middle of the street. Were there really two more men in antelope masks? Running right at her? And two others crossing the street, hightailing it after Cynthia?

  A cabbie screeched to a halt and leaned on his horn.

  “Move it, girl!” he yelled.

  He honked again, a blast that shocked Daphna back into action. Two masked men really were after her—and they were closing fast. Tucking the letter box under her arm, she ran for her life.

  Chapter 11

  Return of the Thunkmobile

  While running for her life down Central Park West, Daphna found herself smiling, amazed at her mother’s cleverness. Along with the three Bs, her first piece of music contained another clue. “The Sad Sandbox” was named in honor of a sandbox at the 97th Street playground where she had played as a little girl. Next to the sandbox was a tree—a place where she and her mothe
r used to bury treasures, such as dried leaves and Popsicle sticks. That’s where the final missing directions had to be.

  As exciting as it was to figure out where the next clue was likely hidden, Daphna still had to get away. With the antelope men gaining, she cut into Jimmy’s Bar, a pub with an old upright piano in the corner where she had an open invitation to play show tunes for the patrons whenever she wanted. After playing a quick medley of songs from her favorite musical, 13, she slipped into the bathroom, then climbed out the window to a back alley. Finally free, Daphna doubled back to the tree by the sandbox. It didn’t take much digging to uncover an empty glass bottle. Inside was a sheet of lavender construction paper. On it, in light green ink, almost impossible to read, was a drawing of the globe.

  “Got it,” she said out loud.

  What was that? A movement in the underbrush? Had the antelope men tracked her down?

  Daphna shoved the lavender map into her mother’s letter box, then leaped over the playground fence and hit the ground running.

  Forty-five minutes later, Daphna hurried into Sheep Meadow from the west side of the park. Clutching her mother’s letter box under her right arm, she stopped by the chain-link fence that surrounded the giant field and looked over her shoulder, heart pounding. Though it was hard to tell for sure in the rapidly fading light, she didn’t see anyone following her. In the far distance, a group of school kids was finishing up a game of touch football. On the other side of the field was a vigorous soccer game. Daphna knew that in a matter of minutes the players would finally succumb to the darkness and head home to dinner, homework, and bedtime.

  Daphna sighed. Exhausted from all the running, she plopped down on a bench. For a moment, she longed to be one of the kids playing sports—a kid with a normal family, who went to a normal school and had a perfectly unexciting normal set of talents. As a light wind blew, she wrapped her arms around herself and looked more closely at the lavender map. Two lines intersected the middle, over what appeared to be an African mountain range. Instantly, Daphna thought of the clue from the letter box. The short story by Ernest Hemingway.

  “Kilimanjaro,” she said out loud.

  Then Daphna scanned down to two numbers listed in the corner: –3.065274, 37.359076—longitude and latitude markings.