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  1

  Mayfair Cummings lay in her bed and studied the crown molding in her otherwise spartan room at Spindrift. It had been painted over with the same milky oil-based product used to whitewash the walls in the hallways of the converted Victorian mansion. Every bedroom was the same. The paint obviously had been applied with a roller, and in haste, probably completed by one of the maintenance men, who had no concept of what intricate, hand-carved work he was covering, she thought. He simply wanted to get the chore over and done.

  She could still smell the fresh paint and concluded that it was probably redone for every new student. She regretted that. It was too bland. The paint job stole any character the room might have had and reinforced her theory that the whole place, Spindrift, the institution itself, was some kind of great experiment, a study of the exceptionally gifted, those with IQ scores over 180. It gave her the impression that she, along with the others, was in a giant test tube. Who could blame her or any of the students here for being a little paranoid? They would always be suspect. They all thought too much, didn’t they? And thinkers were dangerous. They challenged the status quo and too often asked “Why?”

  She also would have liked to have discovered revealing personal evidence left by the former genius housed in the room, some etchings on the walls like the scribblings of a prisoner in a dungeon, even if it was only a wry comment about Einstein’s theory of relativity or a brilliant variation of the Pythagorean theorem. What did he or she think about when alone? Was there a thought about the place itself, the teachers? Did someone have a crush on someone? Did someone miss his or her family? Was there a lover left behind? Were they afraid, and afraid to say it in a more direct way?

  Unlike in college dorms, there was no music thumping through the walls, no laughter, and no giggling over embarrassing statements or actions. Silence was the doorway to deep introspection about yourself, about where you were and why you were here. But there was no evidence of that in any of the rooms. It was as if the new layers of paint could cover ghosts as well. When she eventually left, she was sure the new tenant wouldn’t know she had been here either.

  Well, maybe never knowing that she had been here was a good thing.

  It had been more than three months since she had been brought to Spindrift, partly as punishment for how she had embarrassed her stepmother by cleverly planning revenge on her stepsister’s English teacher, Alan Taylor, the man with whom Mayfair had a . . . what should she call it? A brief affair? Sounded too romantic, she thought. It was definitely brief, but brief sex sounded more accurate now—a deflowering or simply a loss of virginity, even better.

  Yet loss didn’t seem to be an accurate term, either. It implied it could be found again. Death was a more precise description. It was something gone forever . . . her innocence. Exciting as it might have been for a while, it left her with a bitter taste for relationships, a taste that she envisioned would last a lifetime in her bank of memories. Would she now always believe that romantic relationships demanded too much trust, too much risk?

  Thinking back, she didn’t regret a moment of her revenge. Should she be proud of that?

  Did every woman grow to hate the man who was responsible for that traumatic event—especially if he was an older man? How rare it was, especially in this day and age, for any of these men to marry the girl he seduces or even to carry on an extended relationship. What was that old expression? Wham bam, thank you, ma’am?

  Maybe it didn’t quite apply, but somehow, even though she had consensual sex, she still felt abused. He should have been ready to give up his career, rearrange his life, and invest his whole future in her. Look at what she had given him. What greater trust could a woman invest in a man? What did he give her in return? Only a memory.

  And one quite disturbingly vague, too.

  Of course, she knew she was being unreasonable and, what was worse, illogical—a dumb, starry-eyed romantic—something she had scorned and ridiculed in other girls her whole life. She sat up, looked at herself in the mirror above her desk, and ran her fingers through her newly trimmed, medium-length wheat-colored hair.

  Oh, poor, poor you, she thought, smirking at herself. Get over it. Leap out of your personal romance novel. You’re not the first, and for sure you’re not the last to feel like a victim of some man.

  But how could she not feel like a victim? She wouldn’t admit it to anyone, certainly not Dr. Lester, the school therapist here, who knew the nitty-gritty details of her background. The bitter truth was that her assignation with Alan Taylor had left her with the fear that loving someone, finding that soul mate, was now impossible. The moment after she felt something for a man, that crust of pessimism surely would form and make her so impenetrable that any man would quickly retreat. Why make the extra effort for her? She wouldn’t even have the echo of his first words bouncing around in the caverns of her memory.

  There was a knock on her door, a welcome interruption of her troubled musings. Indeed, she concluded, we all do think too much, but ironically, that makes us more dangerous to ourselves than to others.

  “Entrare,” she called. She was suddenly feeling Italian this morning. Like almost everyone here, she was fluent in at least three languages.

  A girl named Kelly Boson could rattle off in Latin, the so-called dead language, and was always reading mythology in ancient Greek. “Translators have us by the short hairs,” she declared when Mayfair asked her why she was so determined to read in the original tongue. “I don’t trust them as far as I could throw them. They’re just looking for a quick buck and choose cruddy expressions, losing the images and feelings.”

  Corliss Simon thrust the door open with a deliberately exaggerated flair and stood gazing at her with those piercing black-diamond eyes. She wore a retro flame pre-tied head scarf, a white and black compression sports bra, and a pair of black cotton joggers with her black running shoes. Mayfair’s fellow “drifter,” as they called themselves because they were at Spindrift, this special and rather secret school for the exceptionally gifted, also wore a single pearl rope drop earring in her right ear.

  Such affectation, Mayfair thought, but admittedly quite effective. Why didn’t she have any of those same feminine impulses? Was that where she would go now in retreat, into indifference? She wouldn’t deny it. Lately, Blah was her middle name.

  “Are you in a play or something?” Mayfair asked. She didn’t have to explain; the students were all keen when it came to sarcasm and understatement.

  “Always,” Corliss replied, and assumed a pose. Looking like a black Statue of Liberty, she recited, “ ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.’ ” She then put her hands on her hips and scowled. “We’re all in a play, Mayfairy.” Corliss had been calling her that almost from the beginning, and others had picked up on it. She smiled triumphantly. “It’s simply that most don’t realize it until after the curtain falls.”

  “Don’t I know it?” Mayfair replied in a tone that made her seem aged. She sighed. “I’m not ready for breakfast.”

  She waved at Corliss as though to dismiss her, as though she was on an ocean liner pulling away from the dock, saying good-bye to family and friends.

  But then she was always pulling away from some dock or another, and she was always
on the Titanic.

  Corliss jerked her head and shoulders back, recoiling like a cobra. “Did you conveniently forget? You, Donna, and I are going for a jog this morning on the infamous Darwin Trail. Survival-of-the-fittest time, remember? We signed out for it last night after dinner.”

  Mayfair groaned. “You two were serious?”

  “Yes, we were,” Donna Ramanez said, stepping up beside Corliss. She, too, was dressed in athletic gear and running shoes, wearing a pink scarf gripper without the scarf. Donna was childlike with her diminutive figure. The daughter of a Mexican man and an Irishwoman, she had a caramel complexion and light brown hair, and as far as Mayfair was concerned, both of her new girlfriends were more attractive than she. Seeing them in their workout gear didn’t help matters.

  But then again, Mayfair herself was often unexpectedly accused of being naturally beautiful. Accused was precisely the way to describe it; until she had her brief tryst with Alan Taylor, she wasn’t very concerned about her femininity, and then it became seen as a weapon. Being called attractive really did take her by surprise. She wasn’t unduly modest. It simply hadn’t been a priority. Fully understanding a black hole in the universe was more important than perfecting her makeup or getting a hairdo that complemented her facial structure.

  “Were you not impressed with Dr. Morton’s lecture on the importance of balancing the cerebral and the physical, the Athens and Sparta syndrome?” Corliss asked, then widened her eyes in feigned surprise.

  Corliss was five foot ten, with long, shapely legs. Everything about her radiated health. She looked like she had been poured out of a mold for perfect figures. Lars Stensen, the super-IQ from Copenhagen, was smitten with her the moment he entered the science lab and saw her working with the rats in the maze. Mayfair thought the blond, blue-eyed, six-foot Dane was quite good-looking and almost moaned with disappointment when his eyes washed over her without any reaction and then fixed on Corliss with obvious instant infatuation. She could practically see the bubble over his head go Whack! Bam!

  Disappointment tightened Mayfair’s chest, along with indignation.

  Beware of the green-eyed monster, she told herself, especially here, where this trio were but three of fifteen, all with IQ scores so off the charts that they were practically incomprehensible. Statistically, each was one in three million. They were all competitors, rising to any challenge at Spindrift, a school with students so superior that a Rhodes scholar wouldn’t meet the entrance test.

  Just like all the other drifters, she had never really had a competitor when it came to anything cerebral, right from grade one until now. Everyone here had been capable of achieving a high school diploma at age ten, maximum. All had attained the equivalent of a graduate degree’s worth of knowledge by twelve. David Kantor, from Portland, was actually reading grade-school books at eleven months. The only thing that held any of them back from somewhat intelligent conversations before they were a year old was the physiology of their vocal abilities. Their bodies literally had to catch up with their brains.

  “No,” Mayfair said. “I wasn’t impressed with his little talk. I was bored by the time he spoke his third word, as I usually am with Morton’s droning lectures in personality and health management.”

  She paused. Her two new brilliant friends were showing deep disappointment in her. Their eyes darkened with their frustration. They wore identical smirks.

  “Okay,” Corliss said. “Okay. Don’t blow up a Bunsen burner. My study of the causes of genetic drift in the prairie chicken and its low reproductive success will have to wait.”

  The other girls both laughed.

  “Get your ass in gear, girl,” Corliss ordered. “Wasting time is worse than wasting money.”

  Mayfair groaned emphatically at the platitude and rose to search for her athletic clothes, if they could be called that. She didn’t separate her wardrobe into daily outfits, evening dress, or recreational clothes. Clothes in general were never a high priority for her, something that annoyed her stepmother to the point where the woman would actually have nervous breakdowns wondering how a teenage girl could be bored by shopping, especially when she had deigned to take her along to an expensive, exquisite boutique. It was another nail driven into the coffin her stepmother labeled unnatural, her code word for freak.

  “I don’t suppose either of you had any breakfast,” Mayfair said as she plucked a pair of faded blue jeans from her bottom dresser drawer. She held them up and away from herself, as if they crawled with red ants, and shrugged. It was the best she had for this.

  “Visions of breakfast will be something to urge us to finish,” Donna said. “Ricompensa for work well done.”

  Mayfair lowered her chin and raised her eyes. “Spare me the attempt at motivation. We hear enough of that from Marlowe.”

  Motivation was a sore point for Mayfair. Her interest in learning required no stimulants, as it didn’t for almost all drifters, but Dr. Jessie Marlowe, the fifty-year-old head of Spindrift, was constantly referring to it. Her fear was that someone would get so bored with his or her studies that they would procrastinate, which would spread like the flu, infecting all fifteen. Mayfair envisioned Marlowe having nightmares in which her prize students were all doodling or simply staring into space while clocks ticked the time away. Nothing new would be invented or discovered, no ingenious comment would be uttered and recorded, and no new suggestion for human progress in social, mental, or political work would be made.

  She slipped out of her nightgown and put on an ordinary bra. Never in her life did she have a sports bra. She found a stretched-out, faded green sweatshirt that she thought was perfect. She did have running shoes, although she hadn’t bought them for that purpose. Her two friends shook their heads when she was finally ready.

  “We have a lot of work to do with you when it comes to fashion,” Donna said.

  Mayfair knew that was true, despite also knowing that the other girls considered the three of them the most attractive of all the girls at Spindrift. Those girls had already nicknamed them the Supremes, and not because they sang together. Those girls looked at them enviously. That green-eyed monster was having a ball here, dancing gleefully on everyone’s psyche. Maybe that was the true glue that bonded them, others’ reactions to their exceptional and unique beauty.

  “Spare me,” Mayfair said sarcastically. “I still have the scars my stepmother imprinted on my sensitive self-image.”

  “Do you have your card?” Corliss asked her.

  “Don’t one of you?”

  “What if one of us decides to turn back or something?” Corliss asked. “As Dr. Marlowe says, ‘Click on your foreshadowing.’ ”

  As if that remark triggered an automatic response, the three simultaneously recited, “Intuition has replaced instinct. Pay attention to your vision.”

  They laughed.

  However, the implication about her access card was clear to Mayfair. Corliss thought that of the three of them, Mayfair probably would give up early in the run. It was, after all, a three-mile jog, and not over a level track. The path cleared through the forest went up inclines and down through small gullies, turned, and zigzagged. It was designed to be strenuous. The ground was a little rocky. One had to watch for uncovered tree and bush roots. And there was wildlife—coyotes, bobcats, and an occasional red racer or even a rattler. But nature, after all, was another laboratory for them. They shouldn’t mind any of it.

  The rationale behind the key cards was not that the students were incarcerated, even though it was easy to feel that way, but that they were heavily protected. The complex had a security guard at the main gate 24/7, and there was a ten-foot-high barbed-wire fence all around the property. Of course, there was CCTV around most of the building, with motion lights to spotlight an intruder.

  The worst fear the board of governors for Spindrift had was that one of its prize students would be kidnapped by a foreign agent. After all, many of these students already had mastered nuclear energy and laser technology. The
CIA and NASA employed some of the graduates, and others were in brain trusts, secret brain trusts that dealt with military issues, too. Or they could be kidnapped simply for the ransom.

  “Right,” Mayfair said. She went to her desk and got her key card. She held it up. “Shall we dance?”

  They started down the hallway. Most of the other students were still in bed. The sun was just peeking over the tops of the trees. The shadows below in the lobby were reluctantly retreating as the light drifted in through the panel windows. It was as if the shadows were stuck to the floor, walls, and ceilings and were being ripped away. You could almost hear the sound of them being torn from the cocoa-colored tile floors and rich walnut walls.

  But it was really only the work in the kitchen that interrupted the mansion’s still sleepy morning silence, that and the ticking of the early-twentieth-century grandfather clock that stood beside one of the small dark brown leather settees toward the rear. Above it was a large portrait of the billionaire whose foundation had created Spindrift: Dr. Norman Lazarus, one of the world’s most renowned biochemists.

  Clocks weren’t a big thing at Spindrift. Matter of fact, there was only one other, a rather large, simple, round atomic clock in the cafeteria, a subtle suggestion not to waste time with idle chitchat. There were no specific classes as such. No bells rang for any other reason than a fire alarm test. A student here went from one subject area to another at his or her own pace, often not attending a class for weeks at a time or, if they liked, never. Each was, in fact, encouraged to become a specialist as soon as possible. After all, they all had already mastered most basic knowledge, undergraduate and graduate.

  Mayfair, despite the lecture on the importance of the physical body that Dr. Morton had given them, did not expect to see any of the other drifters dressed and ready to do the Darwin Trail. There was a full fitness center and an indoor pool in a building added onto the large mansion. Some of the fifteen students did something physical for themselves there, albeit more as a token tossed at Dr. Morton and always reluctantly.