Hypergifted, p.6
Hypergifted, page 6
“Where’s Jalen?”
It was the one thing that could have distracted Donovan from his conversation with the frat boy. His face whiplashed around and he performed a head count, coming up one short. Jalen was nowhere to be seen.
“Oh, he left,” Victor supplied.
“Left?” My voice was like a police siren.
“He said he had somewhere he had to be,” Claire added.
“There’s no leaving in camp!” I shrilled. “You stay with your group! What happened to ‘Baloney power’?” I practically choked over the name.
“He said he’d be back,” Luna explained reasonably.
“When?” I demanded.
A shrug. “When he’s done, I guess. Anyway, what could we do about it? We’re not the boss of him.”
It hung in the air. I was the boss of him. I was supposed to be the boss of all of them. Which meant this was my fault!
Donovan swung into action. “Okay, guys. You know the drill. We have to find Jalen.”
I was beside myself. “This is the second time we let this happen. We have to report it to the camp office.”
“Wait a minute,” Manny interrupted. “You told us that was the hide-and-seek championship.”
“And it was,” Donovan replied as we all broke into a jog up Fraternity Row. “This is better. It’s real life.”
“Ha!” Claire raised a fist in triumph. “The other groups are playing kiddie games and we’re doing real life!”
“Baloney power!” cheered Manny.
As we turned off Fraternity Row onto the main drag, I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see Noah halfway back up the ladder.
10
Hyperjailbreak
Donovan Curtis
Our first stop was the soccer field. It was probably wishful thinking that Jalen had just gone ahead to our match against the Crunch Bunch, but we had to check it out.
Our missing kid was nowhere to be seen.
Raina was losing her mind. “Oh, no! No, no, no!”
I was none too calm myself. But somebody had to keep it together. “Shhh! You’ll upset the kids!”
“They should be upset! One of them is missing!”
“He isn’t missing,” I insisted. “He just doesn’t happen to be here right now. Didn’t you learn anything from last time? He’s a runner. An escape artist. We were so worried about Victor the Underestimator that we took our eyes off Jailbreak Jalen.”
“But what are we going to do-o-o?”
“You have to look at it from a good-news-bad-news standpoint,” I reasoned. “We’ve already had the bad news—he’s gone.”
“What’s the good news?” she asked bitterly.
“The good news he’s going to come back—like before.”
“We’re not even going to look for him?” she wailed.
“Of course we are,” I assured her. “We’re going to wave ourselves all over the campus so when he wants to find us, it’s easy for him. And we’re not going to panic because he is coming back.”
For a few seconds, she actually seemed to be considering it. But all at once, she shook her head vehemently. “No! I’m the full counselor, so it’s my decision. I say we have to tell Mr. Arthropod!”
There was no sense arguing with Raina when she pulled rank like that. “Okay,” I conceded. “Let’s call the ‘Leave me alone’ guy and tell him we lost the grandson of the president of the university. Jalen will probably wander back just in time to see both of us getting fired.”
It was the only thing that could have made Raina see it my way.
We did make one serious mistake, though. When Raina told the Crunch Bunch counselors we were forfeiting the soccer match, she should have kept her voice down.
“Forfeit?” Manny wailed. “We can’t forfeit! Forfeit means you lose!”
“Not when we would have crushed those guys ten-zip!” Claire burst out, joining in the dismay.
“No!” I jumped in. “She didn’t say forfeit; she said For-Fit. Our group is joining the For-Fit Fitness Challenge, which means we earn points toward the camp championship!”
I thought that was quick thinking, but Raina didn’t appreciate it—especially after Manny scolded her for not speaking clearly enough. She was never going to forgive me for being the campers’ favorite.
Part of the “For-Fit Challenge” was we had to run the pathways while searching for Jalen. The kids were having a great time, but Raina and I were ready to pass out. It was a hot day to start with, and when the sun peeked out from behind the scattered cloud cover, the campus was like a sauna. We took a lot of water breaks to make sure we all stayed hydrated. Claire warned us that we were surely losing points in the For-Fit Challenge, which, Manny fretted, could cost us the camp championship.
At one point, Raina got so desperate with all the complaining that she seemed to be just about to tell them that there were no points, no For-Fit Challenge, and not even a camp championship. I stomped on her foot to put an end to that idea. We had enough trouble with one renegade camper. We didn’t need four more.
I was really hoping that Jalen would turn up in the cafeteria at noon, but no such luck. By unspoken agreement, I took Victor and Luna to one side of the lunchroom and Raina took Manny and Claire to the other. That way, no one would be able to count our campers and come up with four instead of five.
By the time lunch was over, Jalen had been AWOL for more than two hours, which was already longer than last time. Our four remaining kids were anxious to get back out there and resume earning points.
As we passed Fraternity Row, I was happy to see that Noah was no longer up on the ladder at the Gamma Kappa house. Now he was at the curb, painting their mailbox.
Raina frowned. “Why would someone with that kind of intellect act like a handyman?”
“He’s pretty quirky,” I explained. “Most geniuses are.”
By the time the next hour had gone by, I felt as if we’d explored the underside of every blade of grass on the Wilderton campus, walked every underground tunnel, passed every painted gavel symbol, peered into every grove of trees. As the afternoon dragged on, I began having Raina-like thoughts: Just because Jalen had come back last time, did that mean there was absolutely nothing to worry about now? He was just a little kid! Anything could happen to him! What if he stepped into a pool of quicksand and his counselors weren’t there to pull him out? Okay, there probably wasn’t any quicksand on campus, but you get the picture. Raina was right. Jalen was our responsibility. We had to do everything in our power to find him and bring him back to Baloney—and for that we needed help.
It got to the point where I actually pulled my phone out of my pocket to call the camp office. My finger was poised to tap in the number when a golf cart came humming along the path ahead. It was Mr. Arthropod, almost as if I’d conjured him up by thinking of him. The kids all waved at him. He ignored them at first but then pumped the brakes and stopped in front of us.
The words We lost a kid were on the tip of my tongue, but the camp director spoke first: “Hi, Jalen. How’s it going?”
“Really good,” came the reply from behind me.
I did a Looney Tunes double take. There he was, standing with the other campers like he’d been there all day: Jalen.
Raina’s jaw was dropped to knee level, her face as red as a tomato.
Where had he come from? Kids didn’t just drop from the sky or materialize out of thin air. The only explanation I could come up with was that Jalen had been waiting in the cover of the hedges in front of the law library. He must have spotted us on the path and stayed hidden there until we passed by, when he could slip into the group as if he’d always been there. With Raina and me out front, scanning the horizon, we wouldn’t have seen him.
Mr. Arthropod was a class-A sourpuss, but he was superfriendly to Jalen. Raina and I smiled and nodded through the whole conversation. But the minute our boss was gone, I was planning a real CIA-style interrogation for Jailbreak Jalen.
I got a little less mad because Jalen truly pumped us up to the camp director. “We’re having a fantastic time. Donovan and Rihanna are the greatest counselors in the world!”
“He means Raina,” Raina put in quickly. “That’s me.”
Mr. Arthropod ignored her. “That’s wonderful to hear, Jalen. Be sure to give my regards to your grandpa when he gets back from sabbatical.” He putted away in the golf cart.
I turned on our wayward camper. “All right, Jalen, I want to know where you were and I want to know now.”
The kid shrugged. “Nowhere special.”
“That’s what you said last time!” I roared. “And if you think you’re going to get away with that again—”
I had a long list of threats saved up, but Raina ruined it by stepping in and being motherly.
“The thing is,” she tried to explain, “we get very worried when we don’t know where you are.”
He nodded understandingly. “That must be frustrating.”
Raina tried a different tactic. “What about your fellow campers? Is it fair to them to miss out on all the fun because we’re always looking for you?”
“We don’t mind,” Manny interrupted. “We’re piling up tons of points in the For-Fit Challenge.”
“I can’t wait to rub it in when we win the camp championship,” Claire added.
“And he always comes back,” Luna added.
“You see?” Jalen beamed. “It’s all good.” He reached into the pockets of his shorts and pulled out two handfuls of toothpicks. And just like the garbanzo beans last time, he shared them with his fellow campers, who seemed delighted to be getting a prize.
Raina heaved a sigh. “All right, everybody. Let’s get going. If we hurry, we can still make the scavenger hunt.”
And everything went back to normal. As the afternoon went on, Raina and I each tried to worm the truth out of Jalen a couple of times, but it was a lost cause. He was completely disciplined, sticking to his nonanswers. He’d been “around,” doing “nothing much” for “a while.” It was a classic stonewall.
In a weird way, he was turning into my role model, breaking all the rules and getting away with it. I could learn from this kid! Maybe I wouldn’t have spent so much of my thirteen years in trouble if I’d had the iron will of Jalen Aberfoyle.
But the mystery was eating at me. There were only two clues: garbanzo beans and toothpicks. There had to be a connection.
But what?
11
Hyperextended
Noah Youkilis
I was absolutely convinced that my AIDAN system was going to revolutionize artificial intelligence in much the same way that the WWE revolutionized sports entertainment. I even began to think of it that way—AIDAN as an AI gladiator, flexing cybernetic muscles, wielding a gleaming championship belt.
Of course, AIDAN had no physical presence, and therefore could never flex or wear a belt. It was a program, albeit an incredibly powerful one. It existed only on the mainframe of Wilderton’s computer system in the Tech Center. What was so groundbreaking about AIDAN was not so much its ability to think as its ability to learn.
Ever since I’d fed it its first trove of data—the contents of first Donovan’s phone and then mine—the system had been gobbling up vast chunks of the internet at breakneck speed. I chose Donovan as a starting point because he was brilliantly average—or averagely brilliant. While the other students were training their projects on calculus, string theory, and the complete works of Shakespeare, I knew that the key to developing a useful AI lay not in mastering the difficult but exploring the ordinary.
“You just might be onto something, young Noah,” Dr. Menzies commented when I explained it to him.
Of course I was onto something. I was always onto something. I was actually incapable of not being onto something. But I kept my mouth shut because Arlene was there, and I didn’t want her to think I was a show-off—another thing it was hard not to be when you were me.
She put her hands on my shoulders and looked deep into my eyes. “I knew you’d nail it.”
The feeling that came over me could not be explained by any field of science. Maybe buoyancy, because at that moment, my feet weren’t touching the floor. And then she spoiled it by telling me her boyfriend, Gator, bought a new crankcase filter for his motorcycle. That brought me back down to earth with a thud.
What did Gator have that I didn’t have? Besides fourteen additional inches of height, a wiry beard, muscles, tattoos, and a Harley with a brand-new crankcase filter? Was Gator on the verge of becoming a member of the Society of the Gavel? No, he was not. Well, technically, he could have been, since the organization was secret. But the odds were infinitesimal!
When I was a full Gaveler, I’d have something a tall, bearded, muscled, tattooed, crankcase-filter-owning Harley rider could never match. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to break the secrecy oath and tell Arlene about it, but she’d probably know. We Gavelers had an aura.
Darius and Edward said I was doing great, and I was well on my way to membership.
“Really?” I experienced a rush of excitement that academic achievements never gave me. “When do you think I’m going to be in?”
Darius looked around the Gamma Kappa house. “Well, the windows haven’t been washed in a long time. It definitely won’t be before that’s done. And we haven’t even started on the party deck.”
“Party deck?” I echoed.
Darius nodded. “Got to have one. Tell him, Eddie.”
“It’s a deck,” Edward supplied. “In the backyard. For, you know, parties. And, uh, hanging out.”
“And when that’s built, I’m in?” I asked eagerly.
“It’s the final challenge,” Darius confirmed. “You wouldn’t believe how many candidates made it all the way to the deck but then pooped out.”
I walked away from the Gamma Kappa house with my head held high. Others had failed, but Darius and Edward had faith in me.
I worked out the plans during the walk home. It was simple structural engineering—the platform had to be strong enough to hold up all the weight that might be on top of it. Doing the math for all that was kindergarten stuff—at least it was for me. When I was in kindergarten, I designed a model of a simple atomic bomb for show-and-tell. It was the only circle time project in history ever to earn a visit from the National Security Council.
I was anxious to get started right away, but there was a problem. Wood was really expensive. When I computed the amount I was going to need for my plan, I didn’t have enough money.
I decided to start with just the support posts to show Darius and Edward what a worthy Gaveler I was going to be. I wouldn’t be able to build the rest of it until I’d convinced my parents to give me a boost in allowance. It was logical that college life would be more expensive than middle school, so I didn’t anticipate a problem with them.
* * *
The next day, when the lumber company delivered my order to Butternut Hall, I realized I had another problem: How would I get all this stuff to Gamma Kappa house? There were four big support posts plus the sledgehammer I’d need to thump them into the ground. The hammer alone weighed twenty pounds.
So I called C.T. Beldner, the student reporter, and promised him an exclusive if he gave me a ride to Fraternity Row. Twenty minutes later, he pulled up in one of the Wilderton golf carts.
“What’s all this for?” he asked, helping me load the lumber into the back seat of the cart.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Are you pledging the frat?” he persisted. “And all this is part of some kind of initiation?”
“Incorrect.”
We got into the cart and C.T. started the electric motor. “This isn’t much of an exclusive,” he complained. “You’re not telling me anything.”
“Sorry, but it has to be that way,” I apologized.
Although he was disappointed, he was really gracious about it. He helped me unload the lumber behind Gamma Kappa house and even held the first post while I wielded the sledgehammer.
In retrospect, I knew exactly what was happening, yet I couldn’t stop it. A sledgehammer has a long handle to give extra momentum to the heavy head. So when I swung it up in the air, it kept on going, pulling me over backward. A split second after I hit the ground, there was a resounding clang as the sledgehammer smashed into the hood of the golf cart.
I jumped up right away to take in the sight of C.T. staring in horror at a sizable dent in the metal hood of the cart.
The back door of the house flew open, and Darius and Edward came running out.
“What’s going on?” Edward demanded. “Noah, what happened?”
I had to be honest, but I couldn’t talk about the Society of the Gavel in front of C.T. So I just said, “I mishandled the sledgehammer.”
“Look what you did to the golf cart!” C.T. raged. “How am I going to explain this when I turn it in?”
“It was all physics,” I supplied. “Force, momentum . . .”
Darius and Edward managed to get C.T. calmed down. Since he was using the cart as a reporter for the Wilderton Wire, he wouldn’t be responsible for any damages. Even so, when he drove off, he was still pretty rattled.
When he was gone, I faced the two fraternity brothers. “I’m sorry. I wanted to get a start on the party deck. I’m just so eager to be a Gaveler.”
Darius regarded me in disapproval. “That’s not how it works, Noah. You can’t jump to the end by doing the last thing first.”
I was devastated. “Did I hurt my chances?”
“We’ll put in a good word for you,” Edward promised. “But you’ve got to do it our way from here on in.”
“I will,” I assured them. “And thanks for being so understanding.”
What great guys! They even moved my lumber and sledgehammer next to the house so it would be there when the time came to build the deck for real. It was going to be an honor to be in the same secret society as these two.
