The Gifted School Read online

  ALSO BY BRUCE HOLSINGER

  A Burnable Book

  The Invention of Fire

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Bruce Holsinger

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The excerpt from the article “Inside the 5th Grader’s Brain” by Hank Pellisier was published on GreatSchools.org and reprinted by permission of the author.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780525534983

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Holsinger, Bruce W., author.

  Title: The gifted school : a novel / Bruce Holsinger.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018057642 (print) | LCCN 2018061217 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525534976 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525534969 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Psychological.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.O49435658 (ebook) | LCC PS3608.O49435658 G64 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057642

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Jaya Miceli

  Cover image: CatLane / iStock / Getty Images Plus

  Version_1

  For my father, Harry: teacher, builder, badass

  CONTENTS

  Also by Bruce Holsinger

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Question 15

  Part I: SchoolingChapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Episode #28: Alone at Last!!!

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Episode #34: Happy Fucking Thanksgiving

  Chapter Ten

  Part II: The First CutChapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Episode #129: Pandora’s Box—or Pandora’s Bust?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Episode #138: Breck with Beck

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Episode #159: A Big Surprise!!!!

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Part III: The Whole ChildChapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Episode #172: Tessaracks!!!

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Episode #186: Um, Wtf?

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Episode #196: Hits

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Part IV: SpikesChapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Episode #201: Tomorrow

  Part V: The Final CutChapter Sixty-one

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Chapter Sixty-five

  Chapter Sixty-six

  Chapter Sixty-seven

  Chapter Sixty-eight

  Chapter Sixty-nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-one

  Chapter Seventy-two

  Chapter Seventy-three

  Chapter Seventy-four

  Chapter Seventy-five

  Chapter Seventy-six

  Episode #202: The Envelope, Please . . .

  Endgame

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  There is something so tantalizing about having a gifted child that some parents will go to almost any lengths to prove they have one.

  —Sheila Moore and Roon Frost, The Little Boy Book

  QUESTION 15

  A girl of eleven sits hunched over a test booklet, the cold room hushed around her. In her left hand she holds a pencil and beneath her forearm is a bubble sheet speckled with gray dots. A constellation of what she knows and doesn’t, can’t and can. Her elbows rest on either side of the open test. Framing her work, giving it bounds.

  She starts to fill in the next circle but at the first soft scratch of the pencil her hand freezes in place. She frowns at the booklet. Because the answer can’t be C—

  Or can it?

  She glances up at the wall clock, hears its soft pulsing.

  Two minutes left.

  Another dart of pain shoots through her tummy. She erases the mark and reads the question again.

  15. There are four boxes below and five figures to the right. The pictures in the upper two boxes fit together in a particular way. In the second row there is an empty box. Which of the five figures to the right goes with the pictures in the lower-left box in the same way the pictures in the upper boxes go together?

  She stares at the lower-left box. The colored shapes swarm on the page.

  A square, a circle, a trapezoid, a cone, a rhombus.

  Blue, red, green, yellow, purple.

  She twists a length of hair around a knuckle and tugs until a s
mall patch of pain forms on her scalp. She imagines one of those coin-operated claws from an arcade reaching down into her skull to pull the correct answer from the jumble-jellied mess in her brain.

  Her lower lip slips into her mouth. Taste of salt. Her teeth compress the soft ribbon of flesh. Hard. Harder, until it hurts.

  But the answer won’t come.

  Next to her at the table sits a boy taking the same test. His hair is black but his skin is even paler than hers. He keeps rubbing sweat off his pencil hand by swiping his palm against his pants just above his right knee, where the khaki fabric has darkened. It’s very annoying and it’s very distracting.

  Another glance at the clock. One minute.

  There is a bad quivering part of her that wants to look down at the boy’s bubble sheet but so far she hasn’t seen their proctor blink once.

  Ms. Stark is her name. She warned them about cheating before the test. About keeping your eyes on your own work.

  So the girl decides not to look down at the boy’s bubble sheet. Instead she looks past Ms. Stark’s enormous owlish glasses to the far end of the cafeteria, closed off from the foyer by a wall of mirrored windows. Several panes have been covered in posters, one of them detached at an upper corner and hanging askew. Even without the posters you aren’t supposed to be able to see through the glass. Mostly you can’t.

  What you can see is the faint, swaying silhouettes of parents. They’re trying to stay quiet but she can hear their mumbling, their hissing, their breathing. They look like ghosts.

  One of them is her mother.

  As her gaze wanders across the glass she notices the rectangles and squares of the window panes and especially the shape formed by the folded top of the loose poster and the steel frame above. A square, a rectangle, a trapezoid—

  The answer is D.

  It comes to her like the bang of a gun, so suddenly she almost says it aloud. She looks down at Question 15 and sees the pattern in the lower-left box. How it goes with the pattern shown in D the same way the patterns in the two upper boxes go together.

  Her shoulders relax and her nose tingles with the sweet smell of her own sweat. She starts to fill in the bubble but the moist yellow wood slips through her fingers, rolling across the desk and off the edge. A moment later she hears the whack and clatter as the pencil bounces on the floor.

  She leans over to retrieve it, grasping the rubber edge of the table with her right hand. The move requires her to push up slightly from her chair and take an awkward half step as she bends forward. She pincers the eraser between two fingertips and drags it back toward her. The whole maneuver takes no more than a few clock ticks, but by the time her head rises above the level of the table Ms. Stark is walking forward and clapping her hands.

  The bell rings.

  “Pencils down, booklets closed,” Ms. Stark calls out over the rattly clanging. Through the big glasses her eyes scan the room like a lighthouse beacon sweeps the shore.

  The girl looks down at her bubble sheet. She glances at Ms. Stark. At her bubble sheet again. Her hand glides over the surface of the table until the tip of her pencil has nearly reached the four empty circles for Question 15.

  “Emma Zellar, put your pencil down this instant.”

  The girl’s hand freezes with the tip of the pencil poised less than a centimeter above answer D. The ringing stops. She stares at the empty bubble, willing the cone of lead to lower and fill.

  “Now.”

  Voices in the lobby, growing louder. Someone out there laughs.

  The parents know. The test is over.

  The girl follows the strange movement of her knuckles as she tilts the pencil down and sets it neatly on the booklet. The unfilled circle gapes at her until Ms. Stark comes by and sweeps the bubble sheet away.

  PART I

  SCHOOLING

  Gifted children are used to doing very little work to get the results they desire.

  —VICKI CARUANA,

  Educating Your Gifted Child

  The New York Times

  Education Life

  Sunday, November 5, 2017

  Crystal Academy / Head of School

  The combined Colorado school districts of Wesley, Kendall, Madison, and Beulah Counties, along with the City of Crystal, are seeking a highly motivated and experienced educator, administrator, and advocate to serve as founding director of Crystal Academy, a new public magnet school for exceptional learners. Position to begin February 2018 in advance of initial admissions process. Duties and responsibilities to include the following:

  Deep understanding of and passionate advocacy for the special circumstances and needs of accelerated and exceptional learners

  Administrative oversight of a complex and challenging educational environment with statewide and national visibility

  Supervision of a large body of teachers and administrative staff at two locations (Lower School grades 6–8, Upper School grades 9–12)

  Service to a large student population along Colorado’s Front Range, characterized by wide racial, ethnic, religious, geographical, and economic diversity

  Commitment to helping us forge a visionary, equitable, and inclusive admissions process that accounts for difference, diversity, and overall excellence

  To apply, visit www.crystalcolorado.gov/humanresources/apply now and search for position #41252. All applications posted by December 1, 2017, will be considered. The City of Crystal is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin or ancestry, gender, age, religious convictions or affiliations, disability, sexual orientation, or genetic profile. The City of Crystal maintains compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

  ONE

  ROSE

  It was on the second Thursday in November that Rose got her earliest inkling of the gifted school. Months later she would swipe back through the calendar and finger that day as the beginning of it all. The hours that planted the seed, traced the faint shape of things to come. The school was still no more than a whisper in the air when she saw her friends late that afternoon, a mere ripple of unease as she settled into bed that night with her husband. But it was already a presence among them. A lurking virus, its symptoms yet to show.

  She spent that Thursday in the neuro ward, where her most severe case, a girl of fourteen, lingered at the tail end of an induced coma. Brain trauma with swelling, another helmetless cyclist felled on a city street. Her face was uninjured and serene, with good and improving color. Strong pulse, normal blood pressure, lungs ready to take over; on the edge of consciousness, though yet to return. Rose ran through the rest of the teen’s vitals, searching for something she might have missed.

  The parents hadn’t left the room for hours. The mother lay sleeping on the pullout, and the father sat slumped by the bedside. The crescents of skin beneath his eyes had darkened over the last three days, bruised with his fatigue.

  “When will she wake up, do you think?” he asked, only half-aloud. His hands stroked his knees, as if petting twin cats.

  “Hard to say.” Rose touched his shoulder. “But we’ve weaned her from the pentobarbital and she’s breathing on her own. The rest is up to Lilly.”

  At the sound of his daughter’s name he looked up wanly. Rose answered more questions while bending to wipe a line of drool off Lilly’s cheek. The moisture had scooped out an indentation on the pillow, a soft cup of foam, and the girl’s parted lips vented a sour smell.

  When the father closed his eyes, Rose slipped out and strode down a row of rooms to check on an epilepsy case. Though reluctant to leave her patients behind, she would, in less than an hour, be rotating off her autumn cycle as inpatient attending in pediatric neurology, a hospital duty she performed for three two-week stretches each year. Her department chair had tried to limit Rose to shorter stints, deeming her time in
the lab more valuable, but Rose loved this part of her job and refused to surrender more of it. On-call weeks were her only chance to heal in the moment, to put a brain scan to a face. There was a part of her that thrived on the machines and the murmured consults, the cleaning agents and the collodion, even the rotten-egg stink of a GI bleed down in the ER.

  The admit was an eight-year-old boy with an undiagnosed seizure disorder, doing fine now, though his latest episode had been alarming. Rose left detailed notes in the electronic file, demonstrating a few shortcuts in the new software system to a medical student on neurology rotation. She was back at the nursing station filling in a chart when a text from Gareth shook her phone.

  How about Shobu?

  ??? she replied.

  For tonight. Rez at 7:15.

  Rose stared down at the screen, longing for a bath, a cuddle with her daughter, a movie—anything but date night. Canceling again, though, would only make things worse. She texted Sounds good but had to remind him of her earlier, more agreeable plans: a round of drinks with friends, to celebrate a birthday. Then she would be home by six-thirty for some time with Emma Q before the sitter came.

  Did Q practice? Rose texted.

  Yes.

  Do her math worksheets?

  Yes yes. Love u. ☺

  Rose set down her phone, even the lazy u a mild irritant these days. She didn’t like casually texting about love, not anymore, and her nerves were too dulled for an emoji.

  Minutes before end of shift a nurse’s voice summoned Rose back to Lilly’s room, and there she found the parents weeping and their daughter, glassy-eyed but with a weak smile, returned to a world she had almost left forever.

  * * *

  —

  A skin-slapping wind whipped down from the Continental Divide and scared up puffs of dust from the bricks. The brittle November air lifted Rose’s spirits as she speed-walked up the Emerald Mall toward RockSalt. Pleasingly dark, not too loud, the bar served craft cocktails featuring spherical ice cubes with flower blossoms suspended inside; lavender martinis, hibiscus gimlets, daisy petals melting into gin. The place had become the favored haunt in recent months for the quartet of old friends. Inside, the youngest of the four, Azra, was already perched straight-backed at a high table, busy on her phone.