Hypergifted, p.11
Hypergifted, page 11
“You’re some piece of work, you know that?”
I had a full mouth, so I had to chew and swallow before I could defend myself. “What did I do this time?”
“You lied.”
The fear resurfaced for a moment, and I had to reassure myself: I might not have been the most honest guy in the world, but I didn’t actually lie that much. When I played fast and loose with the truth, it was usually more about what I didn’t say than what I did. For example, I definitely never told anybody that the number of pigs living in my bathtub was zero. And luckily, the subject didn’t come up in a lot of conversations.
“Lied? About what?”
“You told that camper you never climbed a mountain,” she accused.
“And I never did!”
She slapped her phone onto the table in front of me. A video was playing—a steep slope covered in ice. The caption read: YOUNG CLIMBER CONQUERS EVEREST. A figure in a bright orange wind-suit hammered a piton into the ice and heaved himself up on it. He wore spiked crampons on his feet and he was connected to a rope by a body harness. A howling wind buffeted him, blinding him to his surroundings.
He reached into his hood and pulled his oxygen mask aside to take a high-altitude breath.
I gawked. I goggled.
It was me.
I mean it wasn’t me, obviously. But it was my face! How the heck did it get to Mount Everest?
Raina paused the video with a piston-like finger. “What do you have to say about that?”
I struggled to keep my cool in front of her. “Nothing! Because it isn’t me!”
“Of course it’s you. Look—you can even see that scar over your left eyebrow!”
I squinted through the blizzard on the screen. She was right! That scar was left over from a Rollerblading accident in seventh grade. “I know it’s my face, but it isn’t me!” I insisted. “Don’t you think I’d remember if I did a nothing little thing like climbing Mount Everest?”
“That part I believe,” she assured me. “You’ve never been to Everest. But have you been to some cheesy video joint where they’ll help you make a phony clip to post on social media to show everybody what a big hero you are?”
I looked at her, stunned. It was bewildering enough to see a video of yourself halfway around the world, in a place you’ve never been, doing something you’ve never done. The last thing I was expecting was to have Raina accuse me of faking the whole thing. I knew she wasn’t exactly my biggest fan. She never missed a chance to remind me that I was only a counselor-in-training, not a full counselor like her. She was the ultimate Wilderton insider, the daughter of two professors; I was only here because I knew Noah. But to have her call me a fraud really hurt.
“It must be somebody else.” My voice wasn’t as strident as I’d expected because I was so taken aback. “Somebody that just looks like me.”
She waved the phone under my nose to make sure I could see the frozen picture of me on Mount Everest. “Right,” she said sarcastically. “Definitely somebody else.” And she stormed off.
I pushed my chair back from the table but stayed rooted to the spot. A few of the college kids were looking at me. I couldn’t be sure if it was the argument with Raina that had attracted their attention or the fact that they recognized me as the star of that viral mountain-climbing video.
I didn’t even blame Raina or that camper or the college students for thinking that was me. I thought so too. It was me—except for the fact that it couldn’t have been. Conquering the world’s tallest mountain wasn’t the kind of thing that just slipped your mind.
So who was that in the video? Whoever it was looked exactly like me, right down to the scar on the eyebrow. Did I have a cousin somewhere who could be my twin? There was only one source for that information.
Sticking the rest of my sandwich in the to-go bag with Porquette’s bagels, I left the cafeteria and found a secluded bench along one of the paths. I sat down between the fading gavel image and the bright white Fibonacci spiral, took out my phone, and dialed my dad’s cell number.
It took a few seconds for the call to get through. Then I heard the long beep of a European ring tone, and finally my father answered. “Hi, Donnie!”
The sound was terrible, like I was talking to somebody in the middle of a hurricane. “I can hardly hear you, Dad!” I exclaimed into the phone. “Is it windy where you are?”
Mom’s voice came on the line. “We’re in a hot-air balloon over the Loire Valley!”
“It’s beautiful here!” my dad added.
“Uh—nice,” I said. “So the reason I’m calling is—do I have a cousin who looks exactly like me?”
The French wind blasted through the phone while they thought it over.
“I don’t think so,” my mother replied finally. “Why would you ask something like that? Is everything okay at that university?”
“Everything’s fine.” Okay, sometimes I did lie—but only because the truth was too complicated for a long-distance call to a hot-air balloon. “It’s just that there’s this video—the guy looks exactly like me. I mean, I don’t have a twin brother you didn’t tell me about, right? And you never had me cloned or anything like that?”
My dad laughed. “You’re a funny kid, Donnie.”
“We don’t miss home, but we miss you and your sense of humor!” Mom added.
Then another blast of wind broke the connection. Either that or my own parents hung up on me.
21
Hypercurly
Darius Marshall
The spot on the ceiling was shiny wet. The plaster was crumbling and the ancient wallpaper was coming away at the corner. There was no question about it. The Gamma Kappa house roof had a leak.
Eddie was mystified. “Didn’t we just clean the gutters?”
“We didn’t clean the gutters,” I reminded him. “Noah cleaned the gutters. And he did it the way he does everything else—badly.”
“Yeah.” A distant nostalgic grin appeared on Eddie’s face. “He did his best and his best was always, you know, garbage. It was a miracle he didn’t fall off the ladder and land on his head.”
“How could somebody so smart be so clueless at life?” I added, shivering a little as a water droplet fell down the back of my neck. “I miss the little guy. It was fun having him around.”
Eddie was convinced that Noah was ghosting us because he was sore about the time we sent him in there with Hal the Honey Badger at Pee-yew. I thought there was a simpler explanation. With his IQ, sooner or later, he was bound to figure out that neither of us was a member of the Society of the Gavel. Maybe we’d never know the reason. In the end, it didn’t matter. Noah had moved on.
“I guess we can kiss our party deck goodbye,” Eddie mourned, peering out the window to the backyard where four posts lay, still waiting to be hammered into the ground. A colony of termites had already moved into one of them.
Life was pretty boring at the frat house without Noah around. I wasn’t just saying that because we had to do our own laundry and take out our own garbage. We didn’t do those things anyway. But a kid like Noah got under your skin. Girls were impressed when we showed them the New York Times crossword, done and dusted, and Noah always knew the really hard words.
“I guess we were pretty rotten,” I sighed. “We should find the kid and make it up to him.”
* * *
Noah practically lived in the Tech Center these days. I’d read about it in the Wilderton Wire. Something had gone wrong with his big AI project, and he was burning the midnight oil trying to straighten it out.
“Would you believe I’ve never been in this building before?” Eddie said as we let ourselves in the Tech Center entrance.
“Sure, I believe it,” I replied readily. “It’s for smart people. I haven’t been here either.”
This being Sunday, the building was deserted, but we found a lone light burning in a small computer lab near the back. There was Noah, swiveling between notes, screens, and keyboards, his skinny fingers just a blur as he typed.
“Noah—buddy! How’s it going?”
“Fine,” Noah replied automatically, never breaking his concentration. This must have been the genius showing through. We’d never seen it beyond truly sick crossword answers, but the kid was a machine, impossible to distract.
Eddie and I exchanged a look. It was time for an intervention. We had to save Noah from his own brain before he ended up even more bent over than he already was. Flanking him on either side, we literally lifted him from his seat and marched him to the door and out of the building.
At first, we thought Noah was going to yell at us. But when he spoke, his words were “Thanks, guys. I needed that.”
“It’s okay to be smart,” I told him, “but you don’t want to overdo it.”
“I always overdo it. I’m just built that way.” He seemed pretty glum about it. “My biggest problem is excellence.”
“It’s not as big a problem as you think,” Eddie said kindly. “Remember when you cleaned our gutters? Not excellent.”
I took a shot at it. “You know, we’d still love to have you in the Society of the Gavel. You were really close when you dropped out.”
“That’s okay. I’m not interested in being a Gaveler anymore. Anyway, there’s a new secret society that’s even better.”
“Really?” As far as I knew, the Gavel guys had been at Wilderton since the days of the dinosaurs.
Noah stood up and gestured toward his spot on the bench. “Look!”
The Gavel symbol was there. And next to it, in fresher paint, was another drawing—a spiraling line. I’d been seeing it around campus for a while now, but I’d never given much thought to what it might mean.
“What is it?” Eddie asked.
“It’s so obvious!” Noah exclaimed.
And that’s when it came to me. What was the biggest thing on everybody’s mind at Wilderton? There could be only one answer: our missing mascot!
“It’s Porquette!” I blurted. “That symbol is the curly tail of a pig. The Society of the Curly Tail must know what happened to Porquette!”
“No!” Noah howled, horrified. “It’s not a pig’s tail! It’s a Fibonacci spiral!”
“A Fibo-what?” Eddie echoed.
“The Fibonacci spiral comes from graphing the Fibonacci sequence! Everybody knows that!”
Before I could respond, the roar of an unmuffled engine drowned out any attempt at conversation. A gleaming Harley-Davidson motorcycle came hurtling down the path and screeched to a halt right in front of our bench. A hulking biker clad from head to toe in black leather swung a leg off the seat and stood opposite the three of us. He pulled off his helmet, revealing a bearded face, purple with rage, and said the last thing we expected: “I’m looking for Noah Youkilis.”
“Me?” Noah asked in surprise.
The response only seemed to make the guy even madder. A vein on his throat bulged, distorting the crocodilian tattoo on his neck. “You think I’m stupid enough to believe a little kid like you is moving in on my girl?” He turned on Eddie and me. “Which one of you is it?”
“Listen, you’ve got the wrong guys,” I protested. “We don’t even know your girl.”
“Yes, we do,” Noah piped up.
“Quiet—” Eddie muttered under his breath.
But Noah could not be stopped. “You’re Gator, Arlene’s boyfriend.”
“I’ve got nothing against you, kid,” Gator informed him. “If you tell me which of these two clowns I’m looking for, you can walk away from this.”
“You know, you should be careful how you treat Arlene,” Noah warned. “She’s a lady.”
There was a moment in every horror movie where the victim waits just a second too long so that when the monster turns, it’s already too late. That moment was almost here. Gator was losing patience with Noah’s lecture. It was impossible to know whether he would turn on Eddie or me first, but one thing was sure: I couldn’t wait around to find out.
I spun off the bench and hit the path running. At that, I was half a step behind Eddie, who must have been thinking exactly the same thing. We were brothers in more than just a frat. We were brothers in not wanting to get our butts stomped by a crazed biker. It didn’t matter that we were 100 percent innocent and had never even heard of this Arlene person. The name of the game was self-preservation.
“Hey!” Gator came after us, his heavy motorcycle boots making the ground shake—at least that’s how it felt when you were the object of the hunt.
We heard Noah’s creepy little voice hollering, “Come back! It’s not them! It’s me!”
Eddie steered us in the direction of the woods. No one was going to find us there. Wilderton was our home turf. Still, we kept on running long after Gator’s angry shouts had faded away.
At last, we slowed to a walk.
“Why was Noah trying to take the rap?” Eddie gasped. “Does he want to get himself killed?”
I shook my head. “Maybe he was paying us back for saving him from getting arrested at Pee-yew. Anyway, the kid was never in real danger. No jealous boyfriend ever had to worry about Noah.”
Eventually we came out of the woods in front of the student union and decided to go in for a couple of water bottles. Running for your life was thirsty work.
We pulled our drinks out of the machine by the wall of bulletin boards. Eddie saw it first—a sign-up sheet with that spiral symbol Noah had showed us on the bench outside the Tech Center.
“You know, that really does look like a pig’s tail,” I commented. “I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of message about Porquette.”
“But what message?” Eddie challenged. “It doesn’t say anything.”
“Only one way to find out.” I stepped up to the bulletin board, took the pencil that was hanging on the end of the string, and signed my name on the first line.
I handed the pencil to Eddie. He looked a little reluctant, but he signed too.
“We may have been fake Gavelers,” I announced. “But we’re totally legit in the Society of the Curly Tail.”
22
Hyperluna
Donovan Curtis
The beanbag struck the board at exactly the right angle, slid up the slope, teetered there for a second, and then dropped down the hole.
Group Baloney celebrated, cheering “Baloney power!” and exchanging high fives. Didn’t it figure? After half a summer of stinking at everything, our kids finally found something they were good at. Spacey, delicate Luna turned out to be a cornhole master. No, seriously. She barely missed a shot. All the kids were pretty good at it—and even when they couldn’t find the hole, Luna could always be depended on to knock their beanbags through with a perfect throw of her own.
Five-on-five cornhole had become the hottest game in the Explorers Program, and Baloney was wiping up the competition at camp. We skunked Taco Tuesday by twenty points and left the Candy Crushers in our dust. Today’s match-up was a close call until Luna, with impossible wrist action, knocked in misses from both Victor and Manny, all while pushing an opposing beanbag away from the hole. Now Baloney was pulling away from A la Mode, building an insurmountable lead.
“You mess with Baloney, expect the wurst!” Claire crowed out her latest trash-talking catchphrase.
Manny tried to bellow “Baloney power!” but he’d lost his voice half an hour ago.
“We’re really good,” Victor added. “I can’t believe we’re actually good.”
Even Jalen seemed to be pretty excited about our winning streak.
Raina jumped on his enthusiasm. “See how much fun it is when we stick together as a team?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jalen agreed. “Like always!”
Either he didn’t get her not-so-hidden message or he was misunderstanding on purpose.
“Nice try, Raina,” I told her in a low voice. “But if you’re expecting to get through to Jailbreak Jalen, forget it.”
“Why do you always have to be so negative?” she complained. “Don’t you see how great this is for our kids? Camp’s been such a downer since Porquette disappeared. To see the kids happy and excited again is amazing!”
“I’m glad to see you’ve rediscovered your Baloney spirit,” I said sarcastically.
She made a face. “I admit that I still don’t love the name. Fine—if the kids are happy, I’m happy. One thing this summer has taught me is when you find the fun, you hold on to it. Maybe we’ve got some oddballs. Maybe one of our kids is a runner. Maybe we’re all worried about Porquette. But this cornhole thing is a gift! To them, it might as well be the Olympics. And if you spoil it with your lousy attitude, I’m never going to forgive you.”
That hurt, especially after she accused me of faking that climbing video. Was I ever going to be perfect enough to satisfy Raina? Or would she keep on chewing me out for things I hadn’t even done? I never asked for this job in the first place. I was only here as a favor to Noah. He was the one with a future at Wilderton. Me? I’d be starting plain old high school in the fall. If I never saw this campus again—and Royal Princess Raina—it would be too soon for me!
But as soon as the thought had crossed my mind, I realized I was lying to myself. I liked Raina, no matter what she thought of me. Well, maybe liked was too strong a word, but I admired her and her dedication to this job and our campers. Which was the only reason I didn’t get right in her face at that moment. For one thing, I could have told her that one of the main reasons the kids were standoffish to her was that they thought she wasn’t very nice to me.
Instead, we stood side by side watching the cornhole match unfold, cheering our campers like this really was the Olympics, and gold medals and national pride were hanging in the balance.
When I saw the golf cart out of the corner of my eye, I groaned inside. That was never good news. It was either Dean Kendrick, which could mean something was up with Noah, or Mr. Arthropod, coming to complain that he hadn’t been left alone enough. But when the driver unfolded himself from behind the wheel of the small vehicle, I saw it was C.T. Beldner, that student reporter from the Wilderton Wire. I waited for Noah to get out of the passenger side, but C.T. was alone. That was weird. The reporter was interested in the thirteen-year-old genius, not the ungifted sidekick. Was the Wire doing an article on the Explorers Program? I couldn’t imagine that a cornhole league for eight-year-olds would get much interest from college students.
