Hypergifted, p.5
Hypergifted, page 5
He frowned at me. “Noah, you have to forget about that girl. She’s a college student and you’re thirteen.”
I sighed. Arlene wasn’t easy to forget.
“Besides,” Donovan persisted, “there are plenty of fish in the sea. My co-counselor, Raina, is dying to meet you.”
“Three-point-five trillion,” I told him.
“Huh?”
“Fish,” I explained. “Scientists estimate there are approximately three-point-five trillion fish on Earth.”
And despite the spectacular biodiversity of our oceans, I was positive none of them could be as perfect as Arlene. But I couldn’t expect Donovan to know that. He’d never even met her.
I hadn’t experienced a crush before, but of course, I’d seen a lot about them on YouTube. Still, I never could have imagined that the reality would be so intense. It was literally crushing, as if the weight of my feelings for her was pressing down on me, like I was on Jupiter, where the gravity was stronger. I could barely think of any other topic—and I did a lot of thinking.
The only way to keep my mind off Arlene was to throw myself into my work. And that was impossible because college courses were so easy—barely harder than my middle school classes at the Academy. The only challenge came from computer science, not because it was difficult, but because the AI system I was creating was dizzyingly complex. It was a quantum leap ahead of anything that existed so far, capable of far more than merely playing chess or writing limericks or generating pictures.
I called it AIDAN, which stood for Artificial Intelligence, Donovan And Noah. Naturally, Donovan had nothing to do with it. I only let him be in the title because he was nice enough to come to Wilderton with me.
AIDAN was loaded onto the massive mainframe computer in the Technology Center, but I didn’t have to go there to access it. I had installed a remote portal on my laptop so I could use the system from anywhere. For the past week, I had instructed AIDAN to suck up every byte of information it could on the Society of the Gavel, crunching and analyzing the data in ways even I couldn’t imagine.
Now I sat down at my computer and typed in a simple instruction: Find active Gavelers who are currently on campus. I hit enter and sat back in my chair to wait for my answer.
Nothing happened for a long time, but I knew that, in the Technology Center, AIDAN was working furiously to obey my command, sifting through a quantity of information that, if it were printed on paper, would form a mountain more massive than Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The task was so difficult because a secret society published no membership lists. You only found out who was a member when they died. AIDAN had to take in everything it could about those dead Gavelers and then predict who at Wilderton today was most likely to be a member.
Donovan thought I’d fallen asleep. That’s how hard I was concentrating on the blinking curser on the screen. He went to take the garbage down to the trash room, and when he came back, I was still staring.
“Maybe you made a mistake,” he suggested.
I sighed wanly. “If only.”
And at that moment, the curser moved, spelling out two names.
Darius Marshall
Edward Zhao
He squinted over my shoulder. “Who are those guys?”
I couldn’t hide my delight. “They’re in the Society of the Gavel.”
“I thought all that was top secret.”
“Nobody can keep a secret from AIDAN.” As I told him about my project, I could see his eyes glazing over about 3 percent of the way through my explanation of how the program worked. It was pretty advanced stuff. I didn’t think Dr. Menzies understood it either.
“So what happens now?” he asked.
“I find Darius and Edward and get them to let me join up.”
He exploded in my face. “I knew it! The minute I saw you staring at those dumb gavel pictures all over the campus, I knew you were going to be obsessed with getting in. What do you care if a bunch of college doofuses want to paint rocks and play secret society?”
“Secrets only exist to be discovered,” I informed him. “Every human endeavor is based on that principle. Plus I really want to be a member. It sounds so cool!”
All the exasperation suddenly disappeared from his face and he snorted a laugh. “I give up. Go water your elderberries. But remember—no manure.”
“You have my word as a Gaveler.”
8
Hyperboring
Darius Marshall
I thought it would be fun to post up at Wilderton for the summer, but it turned out to be a giant yawn. The minute the regular students cleared out in May, the whole campus turned into a morgue—totally dead. The only new blood to come in was a bunch of visiting professors and grad students, the whole vibe being super old. Some of them even brought their kids—so many that the university was running a summer camp to keep them busy.
So there I was, bored out of my skull at the frat house with my roommate, Eddie—the only other Gamma Kappa deluded enough to think this summer was a good idea. During the school year, the frat house was the most happening place on the face of the earth—packed with guys going nuts, twenty-four seven. When it was empty, though, like now, you couldn’t help seeing what a dump it was, with fluff bleeding out of the furniture, dust everywhere, and dirty laundry strewn to the four walls. I mean, we all came to college to get away from our mothers nagging at us to clean up, but this was pretty depressing.
Eddie came down the stairs shambling behind a mountain of empty takeout food containers. He sidled up to the kitchen trash and released his load, but the can was so full that most of it slid off the pile and landed on the floor.
He looked like he was considering picking it up, but then shrugged and looked over at me. “What’s up?”
“What’s ever up?” I returned.
The answer, we both knew, was nothing. Zero ever happened during summer semester. I wouldn’t have complained if Godzilla had come up out of the pond and stomped the campus flat just because it would have been something.
And then there was a knock at the door.
“It’s not locked!” I called, hoping it was a cleaning crew looking for a chance to perform a good deed.
The knocking continued. Eddie seemed too stunned to move—that’s how unusual it was to have an actual visitor during the summer. So I took the extreme step of getting up, crossing the room, and opening the door.
At first I thought no one was there. But then I looked down to see a kid. Not a little kid—I mean, he wasn’t five or anything like that. More like a middle schooler, with Coke-bottle glasses and bad posture.
“Yeah?”
“I’m looking for Darius Marshall and Edward Zhao,” he announced, sizing me up.
“I’m Darius. That’s Edward over there.”
While I turned around to point to Eddie, the kid stepped past me and barged into our living room. “Noah Youkilis,” he introduced himself. “Pleased to meet you.”
That’s why he looked so familiar! Noah Youkilis was the boy genius Dean Kendrick had lured to Wilderton starting this summer.
“Wow,” I commented. “We’ve got a celebrity in our humble abode. I saw the article about you in the campus paper.” Not that I ever read the Wilderton Wire, but this summer was shaping up to be so boring that I was doing a lot of things for the first time.
Noah made a face. “C.T. Beldner isn’t a very good reporter. He wrote a lot about my academic record but didn’t mention a word about my favorite YouTube videos.”
I started to laugh but held it in when I realized the kid wasn’t joking.
“Is it true that Dean Kendrick keeps the old mascot stuffed and mounted in his office?” Eddie asked the newcomer.
“I never saw his office,” was Noah’s bland reply. “I met the new mascot, though. I’m not sure I’m a pig person.”
Noah Youkilis might have been a genius, but if you asked me, he was more than a little weird. “What do you want, kid? What are you doing here?”
He looked me straight in the eye, which required an upward tilt, since I was about a foot taller than him. “I want in.”
“In what?” Eddie asked. “The frat house? Don’t they have you set up in one of the dorms?”
“The Society of the Gavel,” he persisted. “I know you’re both members. I want you to get me in.”
If he’d asked me to pick the frat house up off its foundation and balance it on my nose like a trained seal, I couldn’t have been more flabbergasted. The Society of the Gavel? I was a lot of things, but a member of an exclusive secret society wasn’t any of them. I figured snobby types formed clubs like that just to keep people like me out.
“Listen, Noah,” my roommate began. “I don’t know where all this is coming from—”
At that instant, I had a flash of inspiration. “Anything this important has to be discussed between the members!” I exclaimed, cutting Eddie off.
“I understand,” Noah said solemnly.
We settled Noah on the broken armchair, and I hustled my bewildered roommate into the kitchen for a whispered conference.
Eddie was wide-eyed. “What are you doing, man? Why didn’t you tell me you’re one of those Gavel guys?”
“Of course I’m not!” I hissed. I pointed out to the living room, where Noah sat patiently. “But he doesn’t know that!”
“What’s so great about having some pint-size Einstein think we’re Gavelers?”
“Just follow my lead,” I told him. “And no smiling. We Gavelers are serious people.”
We marched back into the living room. Noah looked so nervous that I almost blew my cover and laughed in his face.
“Eddie and I have talked it over and we decided you just might have what it takes to be in the Society of the Gavel.”
He practically hit the ceiling. “Hooray!”
“But,” I went on, “the initiation is long and grueling. Once you start, there’s no turning back.”
“I-can-do-it-I-can-do-it-I-can-do-it!” Noah promised.
“That’s the gaveling spirit!” I approved. “Now, your first task is . . . take out the garbage!”
He seemed a little disappointed, like he was expecting to be asked to defeat a Minotaur or something.
“The jobs get harder as you go along,” Eddie assured him.
And anyway, our garbage was no small thing. It took three extra-large Hefty bags for the pizza boxes alone. Genius or not, the kid wasn’t exactly Superman. By the time it was over, he was bathed in sweat, huffing and puffing, and covered from head to toe with everything from hoisin sauce to mummified taco meat.
“Good job,” I approved. “Tomorrow—laundry.” I probably should have thought of that first. I’d been cycling through the same four pairs of underwear for two weeks.
He looked up at us, sauce-smeared but determined. “I won’t let you down.”
Eddie nodded. “Spoken like a true Gaveler.”
We fist-bumped and he headed out of the frat house.
“We’re never going to see him again,” Eddie predicted. “If this kid’s as smart as they say, it isn’t going to take him too long to figure out we’re pulling his chain.”
“Just watch,” I said smugly. I wasn’t sure why, but I was positive we were at the start of something epic.
Maybe this summer wasn’t going to be such a waste of time after all.
9
Hyperhelper
Raina Overbrook
Porquette pressed her broad, flat snout against the chicken wire and peered out of the sty at us.
Victor stood, frozen in fear, the marshmallow clutched so tightly in his hand it was half squashed. “I can’t do it. He’ll bite my fingers off.”
“Porquette’s a girl,” I said gently. “And she doesn’t bite. She’ll just stick her tongue out and take it from you.”
Luna made a face. “I don’t do pig germs.”
“Come on, guys,” Donovan prompted. “Somebody feed the pig so we can get away from here and breathe again. All the other groups have done it. Nobody’s lost a finger yet.”
“The other groups?” Manny didn’t like that. “You mean we’re losing?”
“There’s no winning and losing,” I lectured. “We’re just feeding Porquette.”
“Like this,” Donovan added. He reached out, dislodged the sticky marshmallow mass from Victor’s hand, and stuffed it through the chicken wire.
None of us had ever seen Porquette move so quickly. The treat was gone before it ever hit the ground.
“Ha!” cheered Claire. “Nobody feeds Porquette like we do! Baloney power!”
“Baloney power!” chorused the others.
Oh, how I hated that.
On top of it all, Donovan cheered right along with them. He didn’t seem to notice that our campers were way too competitive and needed us to help them turn down the heat a couple of notches. Privately, I’d started thinking of him, not as my CIT, but as my sixth eight-year-old.
“I think I heard somewhere that baloney is part pig,” Jalen put in.
“Don’t say that in front of Porquette,” Donovan cautioned with a big grin.
“That’s all right,” Luna decided. “She doesn’t know our group name.”
“Or even that she’s a pig,” Victor mused.
I tossed the last few marshmallows into the enclosure. “Let’s move on.” This conversation was giving me a headache. I’d been too excited about being a full counselor this summer. I should have known the reality was doomed to be less than perfect.
Our next stop was the soccer field, where we had a game against the Crunch Bunch. As we crossed the campus, all the talk was about how we were going to beat, destroy, clobber, rinse, overwhelm, crush, and annihilate the competition. With every step, Claire’s pronouncements were getting louder and darker, and I could see Manny’s shoulders coming up to envelop his neck as he wrestled with the possibility that we might—God forbid—lose.
We were passing by Fraternity Row when Donovan suddenly broke away from the group and charged across the lawn like a rampaging triceratops was on his heels. He stopped in front of one of the houses—Gamma Kappa. There was a figure perched atop a tall ladder, cleaning dead leaves and debris out of the gutters. Donovan started yelling at him to come down, but the guy on the ladder just kept on cleaning.
I would have ignored the whole thing and let Donovan catch up to us at the soccer field, except that the kids went after him. At this point, they would have followed him to the ends of the earth. He was a terrible counselor, but he was obviously great at inspiring loyalty in the hearts of eight-year-olds.
Throwing my arms up in exasperation, I joined them at the base of the ladder. “We’re supposed to be meeting the Crunch Bunch! How is it our business if some frat guys want to clean their gutters?”
Donovan was really upset. “I wouldn’t trust that kid to step down from a curb, much less hang off the side of a house!” He looked back up at the eaves. “Don’t pretend you can’t hear me, Noah! Get down here this minute!”
Noah? That was Noah Youkilis? What was he doing up on a ladder, clearing leaves?
There had been pictures of him in the Wilderton Wire, but I definitely wouldn’t have recognized the windblown mess at the top of the house, smeared with mud and crushed leaves. He was also smaller than I expected him to be. Or maybe he just looked small because he was so high up. In my mind, he was always ten feet tall because I knew what his IQ was—206. One of the highest ever measured.
Now he was descending the ladder one rung at a time, oozing as much as climbing down. You didn’t need to be as smart as Noah to understand how badly hurt you could get falling from the second story of a house, but I still considered it a sign of superior intelligence.
Donovan turned on him as soon as he reached the ground. “What were you doing up there, Noah? And it better not have anything to do with YouTube!”
Noah’s answer was evasive. “You know I can’t talk about this. It’s top secret—”
At that point, their argument dropped to whispers, so I couldn’t hear much except the occasional word: fraternity, initiation, Darius, Edward, and gavel. I couldn’t make sense of any of that. At Wilderton, gavel could only mean the Society of the Gavel, a secret organization that dated back more than a century. If the Gavelers were recruiting Noah at age thirteen, that would be historic!
I pushed past Donovan and held out my hand. “Hi, Noah. I’m Raina Overbrook. My parents are both professors here. Everybody is so excited that you chose Wilderton.”
“I didn’t really choose Wilderton,” Noah told me honestly. “It’s more like Wilderton chose me.”
“Not to clean the gutters, they didn’t,” Donovan challenged. He added, “This is Raina—that other counselor I told you about.”
“And we’re Baloney,” announced Manny, stepping forward. “Not the food, the group.”
A college-age boy, very tall, wearing a Gamma Kappa T-shirt, came out of the house and frowned at Noah. “Is there a problem?”
“No problem,” Noah said quickly, starting for the ladder.
Donovan grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him back. He addressed the newcomer. “You haven’t got enough insurance on this house to send him back up there.”
The answer came, not from the fraternity guy, but from Noah himself. “You know what I’m doing and you know why I’m doing it. And if you ever become a student at Wilderton, maybe I can get you in too. Wouldn’t that be great?”
I could almost see steam coming from Donovan’s ears. “What do those Gavel guys have to do with cleaning the gutters on this jerk’s house?”
“Hey!” The Gamma Kappa turned on Donovan. “I’ve got nothing against you, pal. Step off.”
Instead, Donovan got right in his face. My CIT was tall for a middle schooler, but the fraternity guy still towered over him. “If you want your gutters cleaned, clean them yourself!”
I wasn’t the biggest Donovan fan, but at that moment, I was proud of him. He was kind of fearless—and absolutely determined to stand up for his friend.
It was a really tense moment. Donovan was practically nose to chest with this college creep. Noah was holding his breath, which made his pale face turn red. Even the campers were wrapped up in the drama—Manny, Luna, Claire, Victor, and—
