Gifted (17 page)

But even as I said this, I knew it wasn't true, for at that very moment the building produced a huge shudder. It wobbled back and forth, the framework creaking like an old rocking chair, before it sagged even more against the tree.

The building was going to fall.

I had to stay calm. Any minute now the walls would fold in on us like a house of cards and we would be crushed, but I had to stay calm. Somewhere deep in my mind I realized that I could always save myself. I could always jump into the sea and take my chances. But somewhere even
deeper
in my mind, I knew that that was wrong. Without me Sam had no chance. I would never leave him.

“Sam,” I said, turning to him calmly, “we've got to get out of here!”

His eyes were closed. “But I like it here.”

God
, I thought,
he's delirious!
“You need to stay awake now. Pay attention!” I gave his face a little shake. “I'm going to try to make a raft.” I looked frantically about me. “But I have no idea how.”

“George, you're the smartest guy at school. The whole world, probably. You'll figure it out.”

Okay
, I thought,
maybe he's not so delirious
. There
seemed to be only one possibility, namely a long, rectangular folding table anchored against the high wall. I dragged the table over, wondering how I would ever manage to get Sam onto the thing, and then wondering how on earth I would lower him into the water without hurting him, when I dropped it top down on the carpet and saw that I needn't have worried at all. The table had a crack in it! It wouldn't have floated for two seconds!

“Why can't you be more like George?” crooned Sam, in a sleepy, singsong voice. “George never flunked Beginner Finger Painting.”

Beginner Finger Painting? I couldn't remember having taken that course.

“Sam!” I said sharply, “Stop babbling!”

Like a maniac, I began rooting through the junk pile, looking for something, anything, we could use for a raft, but there was nothing!

“God!” I buried my face in my hands. “I'm trying! Can't You see that I'm trying? I know all this is my fault! All because of that stupid Junior Scientist fair. I could've helped Sam then, but I didn't because I was a jerk, and now look. He's going to die! And it doesn't matter that I'm not a jerk anymore. It's too late!”

“George,” Sam breathed, “stop babbling.”

“It's not like Bernoulli's principle is even used anymore!” I shouted up to Heaven. “It's obsolete! It's friggin' obsolete now!” I looked around the devastated room again, my gaze landing on the fluttering red welcome banner. I shook my head sadly, stooping beside Sam, tears streaming down my face. “You know where you went wrong? You forgot that air resistance is proportional to velocity. I could have told you that! If I hadn't been such a jerk, I would have told you that, and you
wouldn't be dying now! I have only myself to blame, only myself!”

I ignored Sam's bewildered stare and continued to brood on the subject, vaguely drumming my fingers on his buzzed head and weeping quietly at the hideous banner. The hideous blood red banner with its words billowing out just to mock us. Just to mock
me
. Welcome to Cape Rose. Welcome? It should have read Cape Rose: Enter at Your Peril for what it was worth!

And then I gasped. I felt my mouth flop open. I felt my eyes fairly leap from their sockets as I gawked at the banner, at the big beautiful Cape Rose red banner—the merry pennant that had been billowing outward the whole time just to mock us. Because now it was billowing upward, and it was curling up high enough to allow me a full, uninterrupted view of the watchtower in the distance, and of the pair of blurry yellow objects at its bottom.

“They're here!” I cried. “The boats! The boats are here! We're going to be rescued!” I whooped with joy and sprang lightly to my feet, hurdling Sam's inert body so that I could climb the broken wall and tug the banner out of the tree. “See? I told you I wouldn't let anything bad happen! I'm just going to flag them down now.”

I wrenched the bright fabric free of the tree and flapped it hard above my head, shouting at the top of my voice. I danced wildly around and around, and I jumped high up and down, flapping and shouting all the while, until disaster, which I'd felt sure had finally quit looming and taken its evil business elsewhere, decided to strike.

Moving about so violently in my flagging-down efforts, I wasn't aware of how much the room had begun trembling again. It was the sound of a sharp crack, as loud as a gunshot, followed by a prolonged creaking, as of a hundred rusty gates swinging open one by one, that made me stop jumping and drop the banner.

Events took on a nightmarish quality. The floor started buckling, first in one spot, then in another. Floorboards came ripping through the thin brown carpeting. A ragged hole started forming near Sam, leaving me no time to think. If I had had time to think, I would have thought that with the walls about to cave in on us, there was not a blessed thing I could have done to keep us from getting killed. Instead, I scuttled thoughtlessly around the hole and spread myself over Sam, a skinny human shield, with my arms stretching the width of his wall-panel splint, my hands gripping the edges and my cheek squashing tight against his. I was stretching and gripping and squashing
him so tightly that when we fell through the floor to the water below, we fell as one body, with a hard and heavy slap. Then we plunged underwater.

Seconds later we plunged right back up. We rocked and dipped on the surface, and then the current jerked us and we drifted out into bright sunlight. It would have amazed me to find I had wasted so much time searching for what I had already taped Sam to, the perfect raft, if I hadn't already been amazed we weren't smashed to smithereens. Crashing noises told me that the walls were falling down. We'd drifted safely out of range of the walls, but not far enough to avoid getting hit by the air strike. Pieces of broken glass and fragments of the building were hitting me like hailstones.

Then everything got quiet, strangely quiet. There was nothing to hear except the sound of waves lapping and the soothing hum of two motorboats coming in closer. There was nothing to hear of Sam. He was strangely quiet. I put my ear to his lips. He wasn't breathing.

“Breathe!” I yelled. “Sam, please breathe!”

“I can't,” he sputtered. He coughed several times. “You're … squeezing … my … chest.”

I rolled a little to one side, overcome with relief. He was alive! Sam Toselli was alive, and it was because of me! I could have left him. I could have chosen to save myself and simply left him there to die, but I didn't. Instead, I seized fate by the throat and put my life on the line, and I saved him!

I told him all this, adding, “but you don't have to thank me, because that's what friends are for. I know I let you down once, back when I was a jerk, but I want you to know that I will never let you down again. No matter what. We're going to be friends for life now. It'll be George and
Sam forever. Through thick and thin, through fair weather and foul, and till death us do part. This,” I declared, so near to him that our eyeballs were almost touching, “is my solemn promise.”

Sam did not reply immediately. He must have been moved by my words. Then he let out a groan, a long, deep groan of contentment, louder than the droning of the nearby motorboats, and settled back peacefully on our raft to wait for help to arrive.

The rescue men, three strapping emergency medical technicians with Cape Rose Volunteer Fire Department across the backs of their orange coats, plucked us out of the sea. As I watched the men in Sam's boat minister to his injuries I found that I was suffering the same sort of pangs a new mother must feel on handing her baby over to a teenage sitter for the first time. I felt … protective, like Sam still needed me to look after him. I was afraid to take my eyes off him. Afraid to let him go.

“You did that?”

I whirled around to the voice behind me and nearly tipped my boat. A big, strapping specimen of a fellow with Viking-length hair braced me with a burly arm.

“You put that splint on him? You must be one special kid.”

“It wasn't hard to do,” I told him honestly. “I'm sure anyone could have done it.” All I did was stop thinking
about myself and start thinking about someone else. I would have to remember that in the future.

He shook his head, whistling softly. “Son, you must be in terrible pain right now.”

Pain? He must have meant my cut. “Oh, that's just a flesh wound. It doesn't even hurt anymore.” Naturally my hand flew to the spot to investigate, and I was rewarded with a burning pain that shot straight through my skull. The man took a thick wad of white gauze from a metal box marked First Aid. He applied it to my head, saying, “Hold it like this, with your fingers flat, and keep pressing on it.”

We headed off, following Sam's boat, which was already cruising through the Compound at a fast clip.

“Your teacher'll be glad we found you,” the Viking continued over his shoulder from his position at the helm. “He's been crazy with worry, and driving everybody else crazy, too.”

I sat up tall, forcing my thoughts away from the roar in my head. “My teacher?”

“Short man, not a lot of hair. Said he was your music teacher.”

“MR. ZIMMERMAN!”

“Right, Mr. Zimmerman. We picked him up a little while ago. That's how we knew you were out here.”

“Picked him up? Picked him up where?”

“About a half-mile up the coast.”

I was stunned. “What was he doing there?”

“Looking for you, from what I heard. You were on a class trip that had to evacuate, right? And your friend and you got lost? Well, Mr. Zimmerman volunteered, no, he insisted on staying behind and rounding you boys up so he could bring you home in his truck, but then the storm
overtook him. Chopper spotted him up the coast hanging onto some sort of homemade surfboard.”

I was speechless. Mr. Zimmerman had stayed behind to rescue us? He'd insisted on combing the Cape himself, thereby jeopardizing his own safety instead of putting the task in the more capable hands of trained professionals, just to save our skins? My God! The man was not only stout, he was stouthearted! I needed to tell him that!

“Where is he?” I cried. “I've got to see him!”

We were navigating through the forest, an obstacle course of downed trees and power lines. A siren wailed in the distance, Sam's ambulance on its way.

“No,” the man hollered, “don't take that off! Keep putting pressure on it!”

In my excitement I'd let the gauze slip away from my head. I picked it up. Then I dropped it immediately because it was dripping with my blood, a dark, sticky, nauseating sight that set off a roar in my stomach bigger than the one I'd felt in my head. I saw the Viking's arm fly out to catch me as I swayed in my seat, but it was too late. I keeled over, toppling onto the floor of the boat in a dead faint.

And until I was safely installed in my own ambulance, with siren blaring and a heavy-duty painkiller inserted in my arm, I stayed keeled.

Yes, I was hurt, but compared with Sam my injuries were few and trifling. A three-and-a-half-inch crevice splitting my forehead in two, which required thirty-six stitches to close! But I had very little pain to speak of, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine.

I stayed in the hospital for three days, mostly for observation, and Sam for three weeks, during which time he underwent surgery and began a lengthy term of intense orthopedic care. But his prognosis was encouraging. No football in the near future, of course, but perhaps in the distant future if everything went well. I know holding on to that hope got him through some very long days.

It felt strange being without him. I thought about him constantly during my stay in the hospital except, of course, when I was receiving visitors, which by early evening of the first day, I seemed to be receiving nothing but.

They were the usual suspects. My dear, wonderful mother, just as wonderfully choked up and fretful as was nice to see. And my dear dad. My dear, hearty dad. Only
not so very hearty these days. He was a sad dad, sad he'd ever let me go on the trip to Cape Rose, blaming himself, as if he should have known instinctively the danger I was about to face. So it fell to me to cheer him up. I let him know his parting words of wisdom had come true, that I was decidedly
not
the same boy who'd left Conrad T. Parks Middle School on Monday morning and that I
had
learned a thing or two. Actually three things, as I counted them.

The first from Mrs. Love. A lesson called Get All the Facts Before You Leap to Conclusions.

A mixed bag of teachers had arrived en masse to take turns gushing over me, and you can readily imagine how standoffish I was with the not-so-Love-ing lady when she perched on my bedside and peered at me through tearstained bifocals. I allowed her to press my hand, holding in my resentment, just barely, but when she said, “Oh, George, what a hero you are! And I'd always thought of you as, shall we say … delicate?” I opened the hatch and dropped the bomb.

“I can't imagine why. I'm usually thought of as a pompous snot with a superiority complex.”

Mrs. Love lurched. “Where did you hear that?”

“I have my sources,” I said, smiling. “My agents, you know, are everywhere. But not to worry.” I patted her hand. “I'm letting bygones be bygones.” It was really the only way.

“You must have overheard us talking! But we weren't talking about you, George. We would
never
talk about you that way.” She lowered her voice. “I'm afraid we were talking about … Mr. Zimmerman.”

“MR. ZIMMERMAN!” I cried. My face froze in an expression of joy.