The Gifted

Chapter One

I walked out of School House with my quiz in my hand.  I spotted my two best friends a little ways in front of me and ran to catch up with them.  "Hey, guys!"

"Hey!" they both replied.  We kept walking along the brick path leading to Residence Area.  I looked up at the blue sky and admired the clouds that always seemed to be in the same place.  I had named the clouds when I was a First-Level.  The names were Reese, George, Tori, Riley, Christi, Cecelia, and Sammy.  Those were the biggest ones.  They were always there, always in the same place, never changing, but I never got tired of seeing them.

"How did you guys do on the math quiz?" Karly asked.

Charlie laughed.  "How do you think we did?  We always have the same scores."

"I know," Karly sighed.  She paused, then asked, "So 92%?"

Charlie and I both nodded in confirmation, then chorused, "Yep, 92%."

Karly laughed, and we kept walking and talking about the day.

"I'm glad we're finally doing something other than WMCE in Exercise Period.  That got old the third day of doing it," Charlie commented.

"Yeah, what was that all about?  I mean, I'm not complaining, but we've been doing the Weight Measurement Control Exercises since we were First-Levels," I said.

Karly shrugged.  "I don't know, but it probably has something to do with the fact we're having a guest speaker tomorrow to talk about something 'extremely important'."  Karly put air quotes around "extremely important" and said it in a tone that mocked our overly-strict professor.

Charlie and I laughed.  I said, "The only time any of our professors have been right about a talk being extremely important was when we learned about punishment for misbehavior when Eddy stepped out of line in the third year of being First-Levels."

Charlie nodded and said, "Yeah, he didn't get his meals for the rest of the week--only a piece of bread and a cup of water at snack times."

Karly nodded.  "It was cruel, but it worked.  Eddy never misbehaved again, and neither did we after seeing the punishment."

Eventually, we made our way to Residence Area.  We were forced to go down different paths to each get to our own Home Quarters.  I meandered down the familiar brick way and mindlessly kept kicking a stone farther down the path as I walked behind it.  I kept thinking of how we had finally stopped doing our WMCE in Exercise Period after nine years of doing it.  Maybe Karly was right.  Maybe the talk tomorrow was actually going to be important.

Losing myself in thought, I didn't even realize when I had made it to my Home Quarters.  I walked up to the entrance.  I typed the four-number password and gave my thumb print on the projected screen.  The machine chirped and the door in front of me rushed upwards to the tall ceiling.  I walked straight through the Entrance Hall and then walked into the Dining Room.  As I left the entrance hall, another door slid down in the opening behind me.

"Hi, James," my mother said.  "How was school?"

"It was good."

"Anything interesting?" she asked.

"Yeah, actually.  We stopped doing our WMCE in Exercise Period," I explained, wondering if she would know anything about it.

My mother looked a little surprised and stared at me hard.  I could tell she was thinking about something.  "Really?"

"Yeah.  Do you know why?  They didn't tell us."  I was really hoping she would be able to tell me what was going on.  By the expression on her face, it looked important.