by Patrick Ness
The genius of the project was that the class would split into two equal-sized groups (of which there has already been some discussion) who would each design a civilization and construct various artefacts and ruins from it. The nature of the civilization each group created was to remain secret from the other group, because the artefacts would then be buried in separate plots. Each group (and this is the part we loved so much) would then switch plots, dig up the other group’s artefacts and attempt to reconstruct their civilization based on those artefacts. After a week’s analysis, reports would be written and presentations made before the entire class. We would then be graded on how well we had guessed the civilization the other group had created.
We were not particularly worried about the actual grades. We were gifted students and invariably either got top marks or offers of counselling to help us get top marks. What we were interested in was how well we could flummox the other group, how well we could disguise our intentions from Jasper Wheeler and his ilk. There were, of course, strict guidelines from Miss Privet as it would have been all too easy to make the artefacts impossible to guess. We were required to give the other group a fair chance, making this war all the more appealing as it would have to be undercover.
Jasper Wheeler seemed to feel the same. Even on that first day, even before we had officially split into two separate (though preordained) groups, he and his Jasperlings had looked over at us with excited opportunity on their faces. ‘This is the best idea you’ve ever had, Miss Privet,’ he said, ignoring her completely.
Miss Privet actually blushed. ‘Why, thank you, Jasper,’ she said. ‘That’s very sweet.’ And she obviously meant it, poor woman.
WE DUG. ACCORDING TO THE rules of the project, we could go no deeper than eighteen inches. Any further would have made it too difficult for the other group to find our artefacts. We, of course, were hoping we could dig down six or even ten feet, but we soon discovered that digging down eighteen inches in a fifteen-by-eight-foot rectangle was more work than we and perhaps even Miss Privet could have imagined.
Somehow, somewhere along the line of this project, we had all decided to wear khaki shorts for the dig, some of us even buying new pairs for the occasion. There had been no discussion about it, but we were all also wearing minor variations on a light-blue, long-sleeved digging shirt. None of us had ever mentioned wearing the same shirt, but there it was, an impromptu uniform that made us look like a real team.
As we slowly, laboriously removed an impossible amount of dirt and still only managed a depth of infuriatingly gradual inches, Larry Patmos and Linda Zhang began plotting out exactly where our artefacts were going to go. We had an original plan of course, but tree roots, immovable boulders (including one the size of a labrador) and an unexpected stripe of rusted plumbing we were afraid to touch, all required some modification to our blueprints. We buried our small symbolically-painted chariot along the eastern wall of the shallow pit to emphasise its relation to the rising sun. We put our mosaic right side up in the fingers of a tree root and placed the various scales at each of the four corners. The manuscripts were set alongside the rusted piping at regular intervals to make it look like we had planned for the piping all along. Deepest of all, we buried our Rosetta stone, the bit that would unlock the rest of the artefacts, in a mischievously devised cavern dug out from underneath the concrete foundation.
‘They’re never going to find that,’ said Richie Goldstein, the one of us who got car-sick on every field trip.
‘I know,’ said Dagmar, savouring the thought. ‘They’ll -’
‘How’s it going, campers?’ Miss Privet’s voice boomed through our little glade like an invasion force.
‘Very, very well, Miss Privet,’ said Dagmar.
Miss Privet stopped. ‘You’re allowed to say cool, Dagmar,’ she said, the look on her face pleading for us to be her friend. ‘Or awesome. Or tubular.’ Stifled laughter from Pratip and David Middleton. Miss Privet gave them a look. ‘Or whatever words you use among yourselves.’
Dagmar looked slightly put out. ‘But it is going very, very well, Miss Privet.’
‘Yes, but you don’t have to say it like that. You don’t have to be so formal, Dagmar. This is fun. You’re allowed to act like it’s fun.’
Dagmar made sideways glances at Tom Hulver and Terry Yotter. ‘Thank you very much, Miss Privet,’ she said. ‘We’ll all do our best to keep that in mind.’
THERE WERE MORE WAYS IN which we, the gifted, were different than the normal run of things in the Tacoma Public School District. Apparently, and it really did seem incredible even then, despite there being over 18,000 students in the greater Tacoma metropolitan area, the requirements were so strict for this new gifted pilot project that a full three grades had to be scoured before thirty qualified students could be found. Instead of just a class of sixth-graders starting out the program, the founders felt the need to pick the cream of the crop from grades four, five and six. The thirty of us in Miss Privet’s class spanned three different years. The first year, there had only been a small number of sixth graders anyway, and when most of us moved up a grade and returned for this, our second year (again with Miss Privet), there was a fresh intake of minuscule fourth graders to take their place.
This démocratisation of the normal grade hierarchy effectively blurred many of the distinctions normally present in the escalating grades as we approached junior high. And to a point, we were all equal, despite ranging in age from an especially young eight (Dale Rowan, who cried all the time and smelled funny) to a nearly pubescent 12 (our beloved Dagmar Hewson-Hill, who had started school late due to a minor diplomat father waiting for his appointed government to fall so his daughter could go to an American school rather than a Somali one). But democracy is rule of the majority, and that first year there was a plurality of fifth graders (14) with an easily cajoled coalition government in the second-in-command fourth graders (nine), leaving the sixth graders (seven) to talk amongst themselves.
Both Jasper Wheeler and Dagmar Hewson-Hill had been fifth graders the first year of the gifted class. Dagmar was our tallest student, but not to the point where she required ostracization. Jasper was of average height, but his braininess and alarmingly mature ego marked him out as her natural opposition. But rather than battle for supremacy over the entire class (excluding the ineffective sixth graders that first year), they instead felt forced to rally their own support.
Dagmar was bright, teacher-pleasing, demonstrably intelligent. She naturally attracted acolytes from the rest of us. Jasper, meanwhile, wore black every day, even at 11, felt himself smarter than Miss Privet, and took an immediate hatred to Dagmar Hewson-Hill. He also, naturally, attracted his own acolytes - Laura Mariotti, for example, his main deputy. The first day of the first year of our class, Dagmar thought she spotted a potential friend in Laura and based a friendship offering on an account of the novels of Judy Blume.
‘They speak to me as a young woman,’ Dagmar said. ‘They talk about things you can’t say to your parents. Menstruation—’ (‘I actually used the word menstruation,’ Dagmar told us later. ‘I would have hated me, too.’) ‘- and real issues concerning girls our age. There’s even one that talks about nocturnal emissions in boys, which I’m not quite sure about, but it was fascinating.’
Laura remained silent through Dagmar’s lecture, then said, ‘Yeah, I read all those last year. I only read Stephen King and Dune now. Judy Blume is for insecure whiners who know nothing about the world.’
Rude, right to her face, just like that. No preamble, no pretence of friendship, just rude, immediately. We did not (and do not) understand that kind of attitude, especially when there were so few of us against the hostility of a larger school of hundreds. But Dagmar’s experience was not unique. David Middleton was the one in our group (there’s always one) who liked ballet and dressing up and once referred to one of Miss Privet’s shirts as a ‘blouse’. Derek Bartlett, who claimed to not only smoke cigarettes but could tell the differences
in brands, refused to call David anything but ‘faggothands’. Linda Zhang was taunted as an ‘ignorant sky-god lover’ for mentioning The Chronicles of Narnia to Rainer Schlossberg, a friend of Jasper’s from their first school together. Tom Hulver, the closest our group got to an athlete, got into the first fight of his life when Neil Corbett threw a basketball at his face during a game of slaughterball in P.E.
Within a month of that first year, lines were drawn. We were part of Dagmar’s group. They were part of Jasper’s. As we neared the culmination of our second year together, the separation remained. This would prove to have consequences that we naturally now wish we could have predicted.
‘WITH ALL DUE RESPECT, MISS PRIVET,’ said Jasper Wheeler, leaning back in his seat the day after both groups finished the first phase of digging and burying, ‘do we really need yet another set of lectures on how to use a shovel?’
‘It’s more than just using a shovel, Jasper,’ Miss Privet said from the blackboard. ‘There are ways of digging so you don’t damage your artefacts in the act of uncovering them.’
‘Yes, I know that, Miss Privet,’ Jasper affected the air of someone trying very hard not to lose his patience with a small child, ‘and you’ve taught us how to use those techniques already over several weeks of lessons -’
‘Retrieval is an entirely different process,’ spoke up Dagmar, eyebrows creased in defense.
‘Yes, Doggy,’ said Jasper, ‘thank you for your contribution.’
‘It’s Dagmar,’ she hissed.
‘I’m sure it is,’ said Jasper. ‘My point, before Dag Mar interrupted me, was that you already went over the process of the delicate and sublime retrieval of artefacts when we watched the video on Tutankhamen.’
‘Did we?’ Miss Privet seemed to genuinely ask.
‘Yes,’ said Jasper, flatly, ‘and it was very illuminating. It is, perhaps, less illuminating now.’
‘Don’t talk to Miss Privet that way!’ snapped Dagmar.
‘Don’t talk to Miss Privet that way,’ Jasper mimicked. ‘As a grown woman, I’m sure Miss Privet is capable of fending off a verbal riposte from an eleven-year-old boy.’
‘Show off.’
‘Suck-up.’
‘Children, please.’ Miss Privet had promised never to address us as ‘children’. ‘I know you’re eager to get on with things, but I just wanted to re-emphasise how important it is that you don’t destroy what you’re trying to uncover. Imagine how you would feel if your fellow classmates, in their excitement about digging, destroyed an artefact that you yourself had worked very hard to create.’
‘It would serve them right,’ said Jasper.
‘They’d deserve to lose,’ said Dagmar.
‘Well,’ said Miss Privet, ‘there we have it then.’
ON THE FIRST DAY OF the assignment, camped at the far end of the classroom from Jasper Wheeler, and after our group, based on Dagmar’s own idea, had whispered our equal society into being -
(‘Miss Privet’ll love it,’ said David Middleton.
‘She’ll probably cry again,’ said Linda Zhang.
‘Remember when she cried over your poem, Pratip?’ said Tom Hulver. ‘What was it? “U.S. Spells Us” or something?’
‘She cries over everything,’ said Pratip.
‘She’s definitely going to cry over this,’ Dagmar said.)
- we set to work on the nuts and bolts. Chris Tyler and Pola (not Paula) Armstrong were the top artists in our group, though of completely different styles: Chris preferred cartoon dragons and satirical caricatures; Paula was devoted to shadowy silhouettes of unicorns and environmental disasters. Somehow, they pooled their resources, and we began with some very strange sketches of early ideas for artefacts that would reflect absolute equality for everyone. A symbol was our breakthrough. Chris designed one that looked like two orcas chasing each other in a circle. Only later, when all circumstances became as they are, did Chris own up that he had merely stolen a yin and yang symbol from a tattoo on the arm of the uncle he was never supposed to talk to alone. None of the rest of us were old enough to recognise it.
From the symbol flowed everything else: Pola designed coins we could make (from aluminium foil and paper) that had scales as their main motif. She also drew an early sketch for a mosaic she would end up painting herself that emphasized equality and democracy in various ways: a senate made up of equal representation from all parts of society, a map of the main city that had equal buildings in equal-sized sectors, an alternating rota of kings and queens, et cetera.
David Middleton outdid himself creating an entire alphabet based on letters made up of identical halves. Dagmar assigned him to make the required Rosetta stone so that the other group could decipher our (also required) manuscripts of laws and proclamations. Miss Privet gave us crinkly yellow paper to use for these, and David and Linda Zhang spent days perfecting the final versions.
Everyone contributed something. There were those of us who made papier-maché weighing scales intended to be theological idols. Some of us sewed sashes for the annually rotating king and queen of our equal society (what with the presence of Dagmar, none of us thought to question the idea of a thoroughly equal democracy having a monarch). Others built a chariot from reinforced construction paper and balsa wood that was intended to be the main religious artefact symbolising the journey of the civilization’s gods between the equivalently worshiped sun and moon.
Even with our gifted status, it was very difficult not to grow bored with such a patently bland over-riding theme, but we remembered how disappointed Miss Privet had been at the collapse of the recent Equal Rights Amendment; she had mentioned it several times with what we sincerely hoped was only temporary bitterness. We knew our society would please her. Our parents, too, would no doubt receive glowing reports at parent-teacher conferences about how children like us, with our generously humanitarian outlook, were the real hope for the future, that there was much in our flawless characters for our families to be proud of as we were clearly future leaders of this country.
Many of us, if you were able to ask us now (but you can’t, you can’t), would remember it as a very lonely time.
* * *
WE WERE MORE EAGER FOR Phase 2 than we had been for Phase 1. At last we could find out what Jasper Wheeler and his minions had been up to for the past weeks. Group B took our needly glade of pine trees, and we took over their scoop of earth at the base of the short hill. It was cloudy but not rainy (as it often is in Tacoma) and surprisingly warm, even for spring. The air felt wet, hot and heavy, the sweat of a nap that has gone on too long. We again had our shovels and spades, brushes and spoons. Pratip was once again enlisted to string a criss-cross pattern of quadrants along the border of Group B’s area. We were to name these (Al, A2, etc) and detail the exact layout of where and at what orientation we found each of Group B’s artefacts. Just like real archeologists.
Miss Privet, who spent the day disappearing from our consciousnesses, left us to it.
Again without consulting any of the rest of the group, we were dressed almost identically. We all wore khaki shorts, even though shorts were not technically allowed in the school’s dress code. We all had the same suede boots, some of which had obviously been purchased the night before but none of which had ever been discussed. We all wore painter hats as well; true, it was a briefly-lived fashion statement in the early 80s, but no one among us had owned one before today. The feeling, if any of us had asked, was that they were the closest we could each come to a proper sun visor. But we did not ask. We merely knew. As Group A, we looked like a specially organised team of professional diggers.
‘I found a knife,’ said David Middleton, almost making it a question.
‘A real knife?’ said Richie Goldstein.
‘Can’t be,’ said Dagmar. ‘There’s no way that’s allowed.’
‘It’s real, all right,’ said David.
‘But that’s …’ said Dagmar, looking irked and confused. ‘That can’t be right. How i
s that an artefact? How is that creating anything? We were supposed to make everything. You can’t just stick a knife in the ground and call it an artefact.’
‘Maybe it’s part of something,’ said Tom Hulver. ‘Keep digging. Maybe it’s part of a set.’
‘Miss Privet wouldn’t have let them just bury a knife,’ said Linda Zhang.
‘Would she?’ said Terry Yotter.
‘No,’ said Dagmar. ‘Keep digging.’
‘Here’s another knife,’ said David Middleton. ‘And another. And … Oh, I see. Look.’
We looked. The knives, which seemed to be just ordinary steak knives with painted handles, were arranged in a circle, points inward, a radiating sun of knives.
‘What’s that in the middle?’ asked Larry Patmos.
David Middleton brushed away the surrounding loose dirt. ‘It’s a little person. A little carved person.’
‘What’s that supposed to be?’ asked Pola Armstrong.
‘Who knows?’ said Dagmar, scornfully. ‘Probably something stupid like a torture device, knowing Jasper. Just mark down how we found it. We’ll figure it out later.’
‘I found their mosaic!’ called Chris Tyler from a far corner.
We gathered around him as he uncovered it, blowing the dirt away from the paint with light puffs from his mouth. ‘Wow,’ he said.
‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ said Tom Hulver.
‘How did Miss Privet let them get away with that?’ asked Linda Zhang.
‘Pathetic,’ spat Dagmar, scowling at the mosaic. ‘Pathetic and childish and stupid. It was obviously a waste of time to care so much about our civilization if that’s all Group B was doing.’ She made a scoffing sound and shook her head, summoning up her worst insult. ‘Immature,’ she said, ‘just so immature.’
THAT WAS NOT THE FIRST time we had been pitted against Jasper Wheeler’s group. The year before, the class had gone through another major scientific project designed to be fun and challenging to gluttonous minds. That time, the subject had been geology, and in a remarkable reflection of the early Reagan years, each group pretended to be an oil company searching for suitable drilling sites on a made-up continent. The continent - called, as all fictional continents seem to be, Atlantia - only existed on the green computer screen of an Apple lie. Divided up into sectors with different monochrome patterns representing different terrains and geological conditions, we had 180 different squares from which to select oil drilling sites, a very few of which would produce gushers (of 100 million barrels), others lesser levels of oil production, and still others providing nothing at all. The challenge was that we were only allowed to select five different squares in total, so we had to base our decisions on careful research.
