The Schooling of Claybird Catts by Janis Owens

Author:Janis Owens
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061877445
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER TWELVE

The seeds of a great humanitarian,” he said with all his old pomp and certainty, and such was the depth of my infatuation that I didn’t even roll my eyes or laugh: I believed him. That’s the pity of it: I really did, the summer stretching out before me, ripe with promise, my oral-history project going on to regionals, where Bobo snagged a first-place trophy, though me and Kenneth only came in second and third respectively, good enough, on that level.

I couldn’t complain, for in the meanwhile, I’d gotten my final report card from Lincoln Park, where by some miracle of God, I made the honor roll and got my name in the paper for the very first time. That was glory enough for anyone, though it was only a couple of weeks later that a pale blue envelope from the school-board office finally winged its way to our mailbox, summoning Mama in for a meeting to change my Individual Education Plan.

Now, Mama’s about as swift as me about reading legal documents and didn’t know quite what to make of it; neither did I. We knew it was Big News, but had to wait for Gabe and Missy to come home from one of her softball games before we found out that this handful of flimsy yellow photocopies was the official results of the IQ test I’d taken back in January.

“Did I make it?” I kept jumping around and begging as Gabe stood there in the doorway and impatiently scanned the legal jargon and signatures, searching for something that he must have found on the top of the third page.

For he suddenly shouted: “Yes!” in triumph, then held out the paper to me, boomed: “Clayton Michael Catts, come and read the Magic Number!”

He pointed at a number scribbled in a box in the corner that I read aloud in a hesitant little voice (because I still sometimes read numbers backwards): “A hundred and forty-two?” then looked up. “What does that mean?”

Before he could answer, Missy, who was standing in the door of the laundry room, stripping out of her sweaty jersey, let out a noise of disbelief, called in this taunting little singsong: “Uncle Ga-be. You cheat-ed—”

“Did not,” he returned, though it wasn’t until Mama snatched the paper from me that I understood the significance of the enormous number, when she looked up in amazement, asked: “That’s his IQ? A hundred and forty-two?”

“A hundred forty-two, my behind,” Missy called from the laundry room, for being the Resident Genius of the Catts family was her Claim to Fame, and she didn’t much like sharing the glory.

Even after Mama went down to the county offices and changed all my paperwork and I was officially transferred from special-ed to Gifted, Missy remained a skeptic, which wasn’t what you might call an isolated opinion in the larger Catts family. Even Grannie looked kind of suspicious when I told her the Big News.

“Well, shug,” she asked after a moment, “how come them to send

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