Free Ungifted by Gordon Korman Page A

and Development, so he wouldn’t have to go to summer school. And he had a sister who didn’t exactly look thrilled that he had volunteered her unborn child as our class pet. So he was probably going to pay for it at home.
    Abigail said Donovan was a self-centered jerk, not gifted at all, who was laughing at us behind our backs. I didn’t agree. Maybe he wasn’t gifted in the way we were, but he had an uncanny knack for making a difference. Take the robotics program. From a scientific standpoint, Tin Man hadn’t changed at all since his arrival. Donovan had contributed a name, a few pictures from the internet, and his joystick skills. Yet somehow he’d transformed our entire team. We were focused, excited, united. Cold Spring Harbor had better watch out.
    << Hypothesis: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Especially if one of those parts is Donovan .>>
    â€œWelcome to the robotics lab, Katie,” Oz greeted the newcomer warmly. “We’re so grateful to you for helping us out by allowing us into your life.”
    She glared in her brother’s direction, then turned to the teacher. “I have only one rule, and this one’s a deal breaker. When you’re seven and a half months pregnant, you go to the bathroom every time the wind blows. So when I have to run, nobody had better get in my way.”
    Oz seized the teachable moment. “What happens is the growing baby expands the uterus, and puts pressure on the bladder.”
    â€œWhatever the reason,” Katie continued, “when I’ve got to go, everything else is on hold. I don’t care if I’m performing CPR and have to leave one of you gasping and suffocating. Are we clear?”
    << Hypothesis: The Belly Rule—whoever has the belly makes the rules .>>
    â€œFirst off,” Katie told us, “being pregnant is the weirdest thing that’s ever going to happen to you. It’s like growing a whole extra body part that doesn’t seem to do anything except bump into furniture, and slowly get bigger so you can bump into even more furniture.”
    I raised my hand. “But aren’t you excited?”
    â€œI was,” she admitted. “But then six months go by, and you stop believing that it’s ever going to happen. It’s hard to maintain the fever pitch for almost a year.” Her expression grew sad. “And it’s hard to think that, when this baby is born, its dad won’t be there to see it.”
    â€œWhen did he die?” came Noah’s nasal voice.
    Donovan brayed a laugh right into his face. “He’s not dead, wise guy! He’s a tank commander in Afghanistan, and he won’t be home in time!”
    Oz jumped in. “You get used to Noah,” he said quickly. “He’s not being insensitive, I assure you.”
    Katie nodded. “Another thing about being pregnant—your body, which used to be your own private business, is suddenly a hands-on theme park for total strangers. Everybody in a white coat pokes, prods, or examines you in some way or another. And for what they can’t see, they have plenty of sophisticated machines that can look inside you. I brought a few of my sonogram pictures if anyone’s interested in having a look.”
    We all were. I think Katie was kind of surprised about that. She was used to Donovan and, let’s face it, he was pretty different from the average gifted kid. None of us knew anything about pregnancy, or sonograms, but it was natural for us to take everything seriously and to do our best with it. We wanted to know about this because we wanted to know about everything. We were just knowers.
    I scoured the black-and-white images, searching for anything that resembled a baby. I think I spotted a set of ribs, and maybe a foot, but I also saw something that looked like a bust of Abraham Lincoln, and that definitely wasn’t in there. Abigail thought she’d found the head, but