Gifted Read Free

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 barsto 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. Iwasn’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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œI thought you’d be home sick.”
    â€œYeah, 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.
    â€œWell, 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