Hypergifted, p.7
Hypergifted, page 7
The sun was already setting as I slogged home and let myself into our room at Butternut Hall.
Donovan waved at me from his bed, where he was on the phone. “Listen, Raina. I vote we play a four-one defense from now on. One of us covers the other four and one of us sticks like glue to Jailbreak Jalen . . .”
I sat down at my desk and tried to stretch out my shoulders. I was aware of a sharp pain in my exterior deltoid muscles. I must have hyperextended them when the sledgehammer dragged my arms backward. I was going to have to get a lot stronger if I wanted to be ready to build that deck when the time came.
“Fine—I’ll take Jalen first,” Donovan was saying. “We can switch every hour. Unless he’s got a transporter from Star Trek, if he runs, we’ll be right on top of him . . .”
At that moment, he let out a terrible groan. Shocked, I glanced over to see if he was all right. He looked completely normal, still chatting with Raina. No way could that sound have come from Donovan. It was the agonized lamentation of a soul in torment.
Then it came again. This time I knew it wasn’t Donovan. It wasn’t anything in this room. It was coming from outside.
I ran to the window and threw open the sash. The next groan was close enough to rattle my molars. I looked down and beheld a sight so upsetting that I momentarily forgot the awful noise. My elderberry plants had been destroyed, the branches crushed, the berries gone!
“Who could have done such a terrible thing?” I cried aloud.
In answer, a terrifying pair of dark eyes squinted up at me.
12
Hyperpoisonous
Donovan Curtis
“. . . Well, okay,” Raina complained over the phone, “but I hate that we have to spend so much energy on one kid when there are five in our group.”
“Donovan!” came an urgent call from Noah at the window.
“I get it,” I told her. “But like it or not, we’re stuck with Jalen and we have to prevent another jailbreak.”
“Donovan!” The voice was sharper and higher pitched.
“I’ll be with you in a sec,” I called.
“I need you right now!” he practically squeaked.
“Gotta go.” I hung up and joined him at the window. “What gives, Noah? What’s so important that it can’t—?”
What I saw in the broken bushes nearly stopped my heart: the slitted eyes, the pointy ears, the flat snout, the curly tail—
“Porquette?” I gasped. “What’s she doing here?”
“She—she ate my elderberries!”
As a longtime veteran of being in trouble, I immediately switched into self-defense mode. “That’s not our problem! The university’s supposed to keep her penned up. It’s not our fault she got loose!”
At that moment, Wilderton’s mascot let out a long rolling burp and collapsed on top of what remained of the elderberry bushes, grunting in misery.
“It’s all my fault,” Noah moaned. “I did this!”
“No, you didn’t,” I insisted frantically. “All you did was look out the window!”
Noah turned to me, his face a mask of horror. “Uncooked elderberries are poisonous to humans, not to pigs. But I modified their genetics. What if I created . . . a pig killer?”
“Don’t say that!” I snapped. “Porquette isn’t dying! I’m pretty sure she’s getting better! Look—she’s about to get up and zoom back to her pig house!”
Porquette heaved another burp, rolled onto her back, and lay there, little feet waving in the air.
“I only wanted to make the berries grow faster,” Noah quavered. “How was I supposed to know they would kill Porquette?”
“Stop saying that!” I exclaimed. “She’s not dead! She’s plenty healthy enough to go die someplace else.”
“What are we going to do-o?”
I had to face facts. Noah was going to be zero help. A 206 IQ looked great on a school record. But it was pretty useless when its owner was immobilized with panic. If there was going to be a plan of action, it had to come from me.
We went down to the basement of Butternut Hall and got one of the move-in carts. Then we rolled it around to the spot under our window where Porquette lay.
“Where are we taking her?” Noah asked.
“Anywhere but here,” I replied. “Far enough away that nobody connects our elderberries with how sick she is.”
“And we just leave her there to die?”
I shook my head. “We’ll make an anonymous call to the athletic department and tell them where to find their mascot.” Noah was a picture of misery. “Listen, Noah, everyone on campus is in love with this dumb pig. ‘Fine swine, top of the line’—you hear it twenty times a day. If people think we poisoned her, who knows what they’ll do to us? We have to protect ourselves!”
Noah nodded, his complexion practically gray. “What do we do next?”
We took the side off the cart and tried to roll Porquette onto the flatbed. We couldn’t budge her. Not even close. It was like trying to move a mountain.
“Come on, girl,” I rasped, straining with all my might. “Help us out a little bit.”
And—amazingly—the pig seemed to understand. As we heaved, she wriggled her big pink body just enough for us to push her onto the cart.
“Good girl!” I approved. Now all we had to do was wheel her far enough away that she could be somebody else’s problem.
But just as we were about to set off, Porquette looked up at me with liquid, almost human eyes full of suffering, and I was lost. The strategy popped before me like a soap bubble, and I only knew one thing: We had to help her.
“Change of plan,” I told Noah. “Is your big brain smart enough to save a dying pig?”
Noah’s eyes were wide with amazement. But he said, “I can try.”
* * *
Even out in the open, Porquette didn’t smell like a bouquet of roses. But inside the tight corridor of Butternut Hall, you had to multiply that by ten.
Luckily, Wilderton was pretty empty during the summer semester, so no one was around to witness our struggles rolling the move-in cart up the wheelchair ramp and into the dorm. The last thing we needed was to run into JoJo halfway to room 115. What would we tell her? Oh, this is my cousin, visiting from Poughkeepsie. Anyone on campus would recognize the famous Porquette on sight.
My heart didn’t start beating again until the door of our room had closed behind us.
Porquette raised her giant head, took in her surroundings, and spat up a little onto the cart.
Noah was grossed out. “Eww! Eww! We can’t keep her here!”
I had a brainstorm. “The bathtub!”
We wheeled her into the bathroom next to the tub. We didn’t have the strength to lift her over the side. But like before, she sensed what we were trying to do and aided our pushing by scrambling with her short, fat legs. She tumbled over the edge in a drumroll of hoofbeats and settled onto the smooth acrylic bottom, groaning softly in exhausted complaint.
“She hates it,” Noah mourned.
“I’m not too thrilled about it myself. It wasn’t exactly my ambition to be roommates with a big stink.”
Then I got a flash of inspiration. I turned on the shower and brought a spray of warm water down on our new houseguest. I was worried about Porquette’s reaction, but she actually seemed to enjoy it. Her piggy eyes closed and she relaxed against the surface of the tub. Even better, the barnyard smell subsided almost immediately. I turned off the tap and the water trickled down the drain.
“Now what?” Noah asked.
“Now you take your 206 IQ out for a spin on the internet,” I replied. “We need everything there is to know about taking care of a sick pig.”
* * *
I was pretty resentful of the fact that Noah was able to sleep like a baby that night. He lay curled up in his bunk, mumbling scientific formulas while I tossed and turned.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the closed bathroom door. Just the thought of what was on the other side of it was enough to give me stomach cramps. What if Porquette didn’t like confined spaces and came blasting out to attack us?
When I finally dozed off, I woke up again to the sound of Noah snoring. Only it wasn’t him. It was grunting coming from the direction of the shower.
I got out of bed and tiptoed over to the bathroom door. It took a lot of courage to open it a crack and peer inside. Porquette was still there—still in the tub, munching on some of the salad we’d snuck her from the food hall last night. Noah had come through like the master researcher he was, so we now knew exactly what a pig should eat: fruits, vegetables, bread products, and grains. It wasn’t easy walking home with my pockets full of apricots and six raisin bagels jammed in my underwear. The cafeteria ladies gave us some strange looks, that was for sure.
There was one more problem: I had to use the bathroom and I was shy to do it in front of Porquette, her being a girl and all that.
“Go to sleep,” I whispered, and the pig closed her eyes. There was something highly intelligent about our third roommate. Maybe she had the porker equivalent of a 206 IQ.
I did my business and went back to bed, where I finally got some decent rest until morning. We ran the shower on Porquette again and this time it was absolutely necessary. You’d think the mascot of an elite university would be toilet trained, but no. Luckily, everything went down the drain, including what was left of last night’s dinner.
“How long do we have to live like this?” Noah asked in a horrified tone.
“Only till Porquette gets better,” I promised. “Then she’s going straight back to her sty-sweet-sty.”
“She doesn’t look better to me,” Noah commented glumly. “And how come she eats so much? My research shows that porcine creatures, when ill, have depressed appetites.”
“Pigs never have depressed appetites,” I shot back. “That’s why they call them pigs.”
It was an argument that could have gone on all day. But I had to get to work and Noah had class. I put him in charge of getting Porquette’s lunch and maybe giving her another shower, depending on the smell situation. I’d take over porker duty as soon as camp was over.
I was a little late getting to the football stadium, so I ran to join our group under the Baloney sign.
“Sorry to keep everybody waiting,” I puffed. “What’s our first activity?”
Luna regarded me like I was an ax murderer. “How can you talk about activities at a time like this?”
I was stymied. “We always talk about activities.”
My eyes traveled from face to face to face. They were all just as distressed as Luna.
Raina shot me a sharp look. “The kids are pretty upset, Donovan. Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Porquette is missing!” Victor wailed.
“She wasn’t in her sty when the Ag school came to feed her this morning,” Raina went on. “People have looked everywhere. She’s just gone!”
“Well—uh—” I almost offered, I’m sure she’ll turn up. But how could I be certain of that? Porquette was poisoned. She might have been dying. So I said, “Maybe it’s not that bad.”
I thought Raina was going to jump down my throat and come out with my tonsils. “Not that bad? Porquette is more than just a mascot! She’s who we are! Fine swine—”
“Top of the line,” the campers chorused, pushing up their noses.
As Raina raged on, it sank in that she was even more agitated than the kids. She was the child of two professors, born and bred on the Wilderton campus. To her, Porquette was family.
For a wild instant, I was tempted to blurt out the truth—that Porquette wasn’t lost at all. She was wallowing in a bathtub in room 115 of Butternut Hall.
Still, another truth was dawning on me, a darker one. When I took in the tension in the stadium—not just from Raina and the kids, but from the other groups, the other counselors, even the university staff—I knew I didn’t dare tell the truth.
If anything terrible happened to Porquette and the cause was traced back to our elderberries, Noah and I would instantly become public enemies one and two here at Wilderton.
13
Hyperfierce
Darius Marshall
Summer at Wilderton might have been low-key, but there was nothing relaxed about the atmosphere on campus today. People were freaking out, and could you really blame them? Porquette—mascot of the Wilderton Wild Hogs—had gone missing.
Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t one of those rah-rah school spirit guys. We Gamma Kappas couldn’t have cared less if the Wild Hogs went undefeated in the Cropland Conference or went 0 and 12 and got humiliated by a Pop Warner team. Porquette was different. She was more than just a sports mascot. She was our symbol. Her face grinned out from the tuition bills our parents paid twice a year. You couldn’t take three steps on campus without seeing her meaty profile on a sign somewhere. And one day, when we graduated—are you there, God? It’s me, Darius—her snout-print would be in the wax seal of the diplomas we received. Fine swine, top of the line.
The normally sleepy campus was alive with students searching for Porquette, poking bushes with sticks and calling her name. Alumni were driving from hours away to help comb the surrounding woods in case Porquette had wandered off and couldn’t find her way back. Even Gwendolyn Aberfoyle, the wife of the university president, was out on one of the golf carts. I saw her myself on my way back from the cafeteria.
“We should get out there too,” Eddie told me. “If we find Porquette, we’ll be legends in this place!”
“They’re all wasting their time,” I scoffed. “You think a three-hundred-pound pig just disappears? If she was still on campus, someone would have spotted her by now. Face it—she’s been pig-napped.”
Eddie was wide-eyed. “By who? IHOP?”
I snorted a laugh. “That’s a year’s worth of bacon right there. But seriously—if Porquette got kidnapped, there’s only one name that pops into my mind: Pershing Union.”
Eddie’s eyes widened in wonder. Pershing Union College—known to everyone at Wilderton as Pee-yew—was just on the other side of Conifer, about fifteen miles away. They were our archrivals. The two schools had been kidnapping each other’s mascots since before World War I. And it had nothing to do with good, clean fun. We hated them and they hated us.
“I bet you’re right!” he exclaimed. “We should go over to Pee-yew and get her back.”
I shook my head. “It wouldn’t work. You think they’re holding Porquette on their front lawn? We’d never find her.”
Eddie was distraught. “You mean we give up?”
“No. We kidnap their mascot and engineer a swap.”
He nodded. “It makes sense. We’re going to need a plan, though. Those Pee-yew guys are nasty. If they catch us breaking into their field house, we’re dead.”
“I’m not worried about that at all,” I informed him.
He was aghast. “Are you nuts? Their football team might be there for summer workouts. They’d murder us!”
I smiled. “Maybe they’d murder us. But they’d never dare touch . . . a thirteen-year-old kid.”
* * *
I sent the text a little before midnight:
Gaveler Alert! All hands on deck.
Meet us outside your dorm in ten minutes. TOP SECRET!
“What if he doesn’t come?” Eddie asked, wheeling his old VW off Fraternity Row and onto the main campus roadway.
“Are you kidding?” I chortled. “Noah? He’d dance naked down Fraternity Row if he thought it would get him into the Society of the Gavel.”
He looked a little reticent. “What’s he going to do when he figures out we’re not in it either?”
“It’ll never happen,” I promised.
“Yeah, but isn’t he supposed to be some kind of Einstein?”
“That’s the problem with these geniuses. They don’t believe they could ever be wrong, so when they get an idea in their big brains, they stick with it.” I pointed. “Look—there he is!”
Sure enough, the VW’s headlights illuminated a slight figure with bad posture waiting in front of Butternut Hall. We pulled over to the side of the road, and Noah clambered into the back seat.
“Oh, thank goodness,” he said breathlessly. “When I saw ‘Gaveler Alert,’ I didn’t know if I should come because I’m just a trainee. But if I stayed home, what if I missed out on something important and hurt my chances? But on the other hand—”
If Noah ever got a real chance at the Gavelers, he’d better hope they didn’t have a “No blabbermouths” rule. “Chill out,” I tossed over my shoulder. “You were supposed to come. This is going to be your biggest challenge so far.”
“You can depend on me,” he assured us.
But when I told him about our plan to grab Pee-yew’s mascot and trade him for Porquette, he got this weird stricken look on his face, like he’d swallowed a bowling ball and he was on the verge of barfing it up again.
“Problems?” Eddie asked him.
“No problem,” he said in a high-pitched voice. “It’s just that—how can we be so sure these people have Porquette?”
“They’re not ‘these people,’ ” I said bitterly. “They’re Pershing Union, a two-bit reform school full of backstabbers and jerks. Everything bad that happens here is their fault. If it rains on Founders Day, it’s because they salted the clouds. The chances that anybody besides them has Porquette are zero percent.”
“Actually, according to probability theory—”
I cut him off. “Zero percent! Now, let’s all shut up and save our strength. We’re driving into enemy territory.”
Noah kept quiet for the rest of the twenty-minute ride, but I could tell that he was really upset about something. Eddie noticed it too. He kept glancing at the rearview mirror, and we shared some nonverbal communication about what might be on the kid’s mind. But there was no turning back now. Worst-case scenario, he’d chicken out on us, and we’d have to kidnap the mascot on our own. But I was pretty sure I could convince him that the Gavel thing was worth it.
