Gifted (2 page)

I looked at my camp itinerary. Beachcombing and Seashore Study looked harmless enough. There would be safety in numbers. Orienteering, as well, unless They got me cornered somehow. But it seemed to me that if They were smart (not that They were, but They did have a sort of animal cunning) They'd kill me during Free Time. Or else They'd ambush me at the Scavenger Hunt, Tuesday night's special activity. From what I'd gathered, the Scavenger Hunt would take place in the woods that surrounded the camp on three sides, the Delaware Bay making up side four. Students would be sent roaming about in the darkness, armed with nothing but a flashlight, an empty grocery bag, and an itemized list of all the lame forest materials the science teachers could come up with.

I pictured it … me tripping through the woods in the dead of night, my flashlight cutting out on me after I'd dropped it falling over tree roots, being chased by all those dumb jerks who hated me and wanted to see what my guts looked like, as well as additional miscellaneous dumb jerks who didn't hate me but wanted to join in for fun.

My stomach was churning.
Good
. Pleasant waves of nausea were coursing through my insides. I stretched out on my bed in an attitude of agony and switched off my bedside light. With any luck, in a matter of minutes I would be suffering the tortures of the damned. I closed my eyes in order to concentrate, to think positively.

I am getting sick. I am getting sick. I am getting very, very sick
.

My stomach rumbled as I yawned the words. I nestled peacefully into my pillow, knowing that I was mere minutes
away from spouting like a fountain. Because I was getting sick … getting very sick.

Getting very, very sick.

And wouldn't you know, mere minutes later (well, that's how it
felt
) I bolted upright in bed like a jack-in-the-box, electrified. Dawn's early light seemed to be trickling through my miniblinds. I grabbed my alarm clock. It was seven in the morning! I was going to camp! Instead of heaving, I had fallen asleep!

And now I was going to camp!

“Up and at 'em, George! Big day today!” my father's lupine head came poking in through my doorway, his hearty voice shattering my thoughts like a lit stick of dynamite. “Rise and shine! Can't keep happy campers waiting!”

I whimpered, still clutching my clock, and braced myself for his next line. That slogan of wisdom he liked to greet me with in the mornings: “Today, George, is the first day of the rest of your life!” My dad, forever pointing out the obvious to me.

But he didn't say it. Instead, his head vanished and I heard whistling down the hall. I stared, astonished. Even my dad knew instinctively that those words would have been in the poorest possible taste today, not to mention a total lie. Because if the day held a promise for me at all, it promised to be one thing and one thing only. The very last day of the rest of my life.

“I don't get it,” I said to my dad as we drove to school.

“What don't you get?” he asked, not looking at me.

“I'm not getting a grade for this, so why do I have to do it? I'm not part of the regular academic program.”

We stopped at a red light, and my dad turned to growl at me.

“Don't tell me you're getting nervous. You've got nothing to be nervous about.”

“I'm not nervous,” I chuckled. “It's just that I don't see the point of going away for five days just to study the ecosystem of the mid-Atlantic coast. I'll bet I know more about it than the teachers do.”

My dad bared his teeth, the closest he ever got to a human smile. “You probably do, George, and they'll need you to help them this week. But it's more than just a science trip. We put it into the curriculum because at your age …” Here he broke off and started again. “Did you know there are kids your age, George, who have never been away from home before?”

Obviously
, I thought,
he means me and Anita
. Nobody else would have divulged that kind of personal information to my dad.

“Try thinking of it as a growing up experience that no eighth-grader should miss. Not even you.”

Well, there was nothing I could say to that, so I said nothing. We pulled into the school parking lot, eased into his designated space, and as I opened the door my father thumped me on the leg.

“This is how you make new friends, how you bond with people. It comes from spending time with them and getting to know them.
And
by letting them get to know you. That's how it works, George. It's not something you can do by yourself in your bedroom, and it's not something you can do by spending all of your time with Anita.”

Here it comes
, I thought. I had heard it all before. He
had nothing against Anita. He just wanted me to have more friends—“more” as opposed to “one.” And I agreed with him implicitly, only I'd found it kind of hard to make friends with people who wanted to beat me up. He had no idea how hard it was being me.

But instead of the lecture, he opened the trunk and dug out my luggage.

“Mark my words, George. When I see you again on Friday, you will not be the same boy who left. And who knows? Even
you
might learn a thing or two.”

It was one minute after eight on Monday, October the sixth. I kept checking the clock on the side of our school building every minute or so with the bubbly enthusiasm of a condemned prisoner. My fate was sealed, and the minutes were advancing too quickly.

I'd accidentally left my wristwatch at home, my Timex Datalink that not only kept track of my important hypothetical appointments but was programmed to sound any of five different alarms in case I found myself under attack, and I would miss it sorely. Plus my wrist felt nude.

The sun had been up for fifty-nine minutes, but the air was still cool and wet, so I had on my prized black aviator jacket that I'd bought at the Smithsonian gift shop on our last field trip. It had a big fuzzy collar that would have looked perfect with flight goggles, but what made me buy it was the fact that it had four secret pockets underneath the detachable lining, and you could never tell when four secret pockets might come in handy. At the moment they contained a five-days' supply of Hershey chocolate bars
to keep the blood sugar up to speed. My shorts, however, had been a mistake. They were that Girl Scout green color that made my pale legs look kind of sickly out in the daylight. I pulled my socks up all the way so that only my knees would look sickly. And I was wearing my thick, black-framed glasses instead of my contacts for practical reasons. Not my idea, of course, but as Mother pointed out, a single grain of sand beneath a contact lens spells only one thing:
d-i-s-c-o-m-f-o-r-t
.

In the circular drive where they dropped kids off on normal school days, the buses were ready to roll. But these weren't the regular yellow school buses. They were “coach” buses. Apparently we were to ride in style to the death camp. If you've never heard of it before, Cape Rose had been a U.S. Army coastal fort during World War II, and one thing I'd heard they let you do is go up into the observation tower and pretend you're scoping out Nazi submarines trying to infiltrate our beaches. No kidding! I had never done that before, and I felt reasonably sure I never would. Cape Rose was now a Delaware state park, but the old cement army barracks were still there and were going to serve as our “luxurious” accommodations.

The parking lot was teeming with eighth-graders staggering under the weight of duffel bags. I was sitting on the steps to the main entrance watching my father orchestrate the Loading of the Gear into the cargo holds of the buses.
Seems to be going pretty smoothly
, I thought.
Hope nobody packed anything breakable
. I had no idea what my mother had packed for me, but in the backpack that I would keep with me at all times, I had the necessities of life: my favorite book, my CD player, the rest of the Gulden's mustard in case I became desperate, and my swimsuit. Not that I planned on swimming or anything. I
wasn't any good at it, and besides, it wasn't on my itinerary. It was because I'd heard that the boys' shower was a communal one, and if there was one thing I'd learned in this life of mine, it was that a little ridicule went an awfully long way.

“What are you doing here?” Anita asked with feigned surprise, sitting down rather heavily on the step next to me. Her face, I noticed, was especially rosy, like she'd been picking at it. She did that whenever she was worried. (And considering what we were in for, who could have blamed her?) She had on
her
black aviator jacket, the same as mine only a few sizes roomier, and her wiry brown hair was pulled back smooth off her face. It was plastered down with some species of hair gel in an effort to control it, although the strands at her hairline had escaped and were already starting to frizz.

“I thought you'd be home sick.”

“Yeah, I
bet
you did,” I said, fixing her with a frosty stare, as frosty as I could manage this early in the morning, but she missed it as she leaned over to pick up the papers that had slipped out of her hand.

“Well, I'm glad you changed your mind,” she said happily. “I got our cabin assignments!” She held up a paper entitled “Boys,” which I grabbed from her, then ran my finger down the page until I hit “Clark, George.”

Death, despair, and destruction!
I would have been better off not knowing.

Don't ask how our worthy secretarial pool made up lists of this kind, but it sure wasn't alphabetically. Obviously, someone in the school office hated me, too. Ten boys were listed under “Cabin F,” one being yours truly and four being relatively benign characters. The other five, namely Sam Toselli, Jason Barton, Gabriel Arno, Drew
Lewis, and Tim Simpson, weren't the least bit benign. In fact, one could only have described Them as demons from hell. I looked over at Them huddled around the flagpole. The Bruise Brothers. Five apes in captivity. Guerrillas with buzz cuts, standing around in royal blue team jackets and dark sunglasses. Probably grunting at one another.

They were the bane of my existence … football's biggest eyesores … and beginning today … my new roommates.

I can remember when Mr. Caruso, our misguided gym teacher, wanted
me
to join the football team, I guess laboring under the assumption that having all my bones broken would somehow raise my testosterone level and trigger a growth spurt. Or as Mr. Caruso put it,
grow me up fast
. I never took his advice. I'm fundamentally opposed to any sport that gives people who hate your guts permission to hit you. I suppose it's a survival instinct.

Anyway, They must have felt my eyes on Them because all of a sudden They stopped talking and turned in unison to look at me. I turned, too, farther than I had to, so that I was now looking over Anita's shoulder, and said, “So. Tell me. Who's in your cabin?”

Anita rattled off the names. “Monica-Gibbons-I-Don't-Know-Her, Suzanne-Holderman-I-Don't-Know-Her, Meredith-Brown-She's-Okay-I-Guess, Claire-Seifert-I-Don't-Know-Her …” She continued reading the list in silence, grimacing a little when she got to the end. “No-body
too bad.” She wadded up the sheet and stuffed it in her pocket. “Or, at least, only one loser.”

“And who might the loser be?” I asked politely, though truthfully I wasn't all that interested. I was watching the Bruise Brothers out of the corner of my eye, looking my way still and talking again. I thought I caught the gist of Their conversation when Drew Lewis pointed at me, and they all laughed.

“Does the name Allison Picone ring any bells with you?”

Allison Picone!
Allison Picone and the word
loser
uttered in the same breath? Anita had my attention now, in the form of a bitter glare of indignation. Allison Picone was the only girl I'd ever loved! The collection of photographs inside my closet door were almost entirely of Allison, and they dated all the way back to the second grade. Granted, many of them were taken of her in full costume at assorted Halloween parades, and only I could spot her with the naked eye. But I'd become kind of an expert at it, and one day Allison Picone was going to fall madly in love with me. Right after I'd finished saving her life, of course. I'd worked that out in my mind a hundred different ways.

“If you could see the look on your face!” Anita jabbed me rather hard with her elbow. “I was only kidding! I just wanted to see if you were listening. You seemed sort of engrossed.” She looked at the Bruise Brothers. “Don't tell me you got stuck with
them
.”

I nodded miserably.

“That's not good, George. They're going to torture you.”

I nodded again, even more miserably.

“Well, why didn't you make yourself sick the way I told you to?”

“I
tried
to,” I said. “It didn't
work
!”

“Your stomach must be made of steel then. I can't tell you how many times it worked for me.”

“Fine,” I snapped. “Don't tell me.”

We sat there without saying anything for a while, until Anita broke the silence.

“Whatever you do, George, don't fall asleep tonight.”

“I
do
plan on falling asleep,” I said, “and in my own bed, too, because that's where I plan on being when tonight comes.”

And I meant it. The bus ride to Cape Rose would take approximately two hours and fifty-seven minutes, and I was going to devote every single one of those minutes to finding a way out of this mess.

We joined the masses as my father, the Human Bullhorn, assembled all one hundred eighty of us happy campers into six orderly lines and announced that we were now in the capable hands of the eighth-grade faculty (“Heaven help them!”) and that we were to obey them as we would him. Then without so much as a fond farewell to me, his only son and heir, he turned around and, I swear to you,
skipped
all the way up the front steps and into the building, as no self-respecting principal should ever do. Probably to go around giving high fives to the secretaries and to tell them to break out the cranberry punch.