15
Sam
Sam held it together until she got back to the suite, but as soon as she closed the bedroom door behind her, she threw herself onto the bed, buried her face in a pillow, and screamed her frustration into its infuriatingly plush depths.
She was not in the mood for a soft, goose down pillow. She was more in the mood for a prison-issue, burlap-sack, sorry-ass excuse for a pillow that you could sling at someone in a convincingly threatening, non-comedic sort of way, but instead, this elegant thing that her mother simply would have adored was going to have to do. She would just have to suck it up and add it to her list of grievances about this day that was already promising to be the absolute worst day of her life, and here it was not even lunch time.
How had everything gotten this bad, this quickly?
She had been so proud when the invitation had arrived in the mail. The moment she had opened the letter, she had felt it again, for the first time since the morning of that crazy test: an overwhelming certainty that the huge, momentous thing she had been waiting for all her life was finally starting to unfold.
She had begged her mother to let her go, explaining (with as little eye rolling as she could manage) that attending a Homeland Security summer camp was not the same thing as joining the military and that a five-star resort lodge in Wyoming was not a likely target for acts of terrorism. Fortunately, her father had taken her side, and she had called the ICIC to accept the invitation, practically leaping out of her own skin with excitement.
But within a day or two, that feeling of impending destiny had already begun to fizzle out. Once again, her life felt perfectly ordinary, and she expected her stay at the ICIC to be nothing more than a temporary distraction in a long line of days between sixteen and ninety-six, the meaning of it all once again having been lost, if there had ever been any meaning to it in the first place.
She had clung, however, to the hope that once she arrived, things would turn around again—that the overarching purpose of her life would be revealed, some larger way in which her existence on the planet would actually matter.
Sadly, this had not been the case.
At no point yesterday had she felt any of that former sense of destiny, and then this morning, on her very first day, things had already devolved from bad to downright nauseating. She was doing nothing meaningful here whatsoever, and apparently she was going to be doing it from the very bottom of the class, her worst fear having been decisively and incontrovertibly confirmed.
There was, in the final analysis, nothing exceptional about her at all.
Sure, Professor Mubarak had said he wouldn’t give up on her, but he was a kind man, far too nice to tell a teenager to her face that she just shouldn’t be here. He had said to think about the things she enjoyed doing, but she had already gone over everything she could think of. Nothing was going to rescue her from the looming prospect of failure.
She liked jigsaw puzzles, but she did them consciously, looking for shapes and colors. She didn’t intuit the position of each piece by glancing at it like some kind of two-bit psychic. She liked crosswords and logic problems, but she solved them by deduction, using established rules and the occasional thesaurus. She even had a system for word searches, which were highly intuitive kinds of puzzles, and which she hated because she sucked at them.
Now, she was going to have to endure a whole afternoon of pitying glances and awkward silence while the other kids explored their grand, unconscious talents in the face of her own obvious mediocrity.
Sam heard a tentative knock at the door, but she didn’t respond. She was not in the mood for company and certainly not in the mood for talented company that was going to rub her nose in her own failures just by their very existence.
The knock repeated itself, however, followed by Kaitlyn’s voice.
“Sam? We’re going down to lunch, if you want to come?”
Sam ignored it.
“Sam?” Kaitlyn tried again.
“Come on,” Sam heard Mackenzie say. “Just leave her alone.” But apparently Kaitlyn chose not to take this advice, knocking a third time, just for good measure.
“Samantha?” Kaitlyn called out gently. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Take a hint, Susie Sunshine!” Sam finally shouted. “I’m not buying your crazy Kool-aid!”
“Hey,” Mackenzie fired back, “she’s just trying to be nice! Don’t be such a—”
Kaitlyn cut Mackenzie off before she could finish voicing precisely what it was she felt Sam was being.
“Don’t be mad,” Sam heard her say. “She’s just upset.”
‘About being a total loser and the only kid who shouldn’t even be here,’ you mean, Sam thought. Thanks a lot, Kaitlyn, cause yeah, that’s just what I need on top of everything else today, to be the guest of honor at your little pity party. Well, forget you, forget this stupid program, and forget your swimsuit edition bodyguard. I’m still smarter than all of you. I never needed any ‘pathway’ to be a genius before, and I don’t need one now.