Ungifted by Gordon Korman

Author:Gordon Korman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Humorous Stories, General Fiction
ISBN: 9781443119207
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Published: 2011-12-31T18:30:00+00:00

UNSORRY

NOAH YOUKILIS

IQ: 206

For all the eight hundred million videos on YouTube, you had to figure there were at least another eight hundred million that never got filmed.

YouTube had its conundrums too:

A) The best stuff comes when somebody does something awesome.

B) Awesomeness is unpredictable, so it isn’t practical to have a camera in hand at all times to capture it.

Me being the hero of the Valentine Dance, for instance.

One day it might be possible to hardwire a person’s optic nerve to a tiny memory chip implanted in the base of the skull. You’d just need a simple internet connection to upload the images to YouTube.

With our best minds focused on curing diseases and stuff like that, I wasn’t holding my breath.

Speaking of the dance, Friday night had not been kind to Tin Man. Oh, the scratches could be buffed out, the dents repaired, and the broken forklift arm reattached again. But the motor that ran the lift mechanism had suffered permanent damage, and Oz said our budget for new materials was exhausted.

Abigail was distraught. “But if we don’t have a lift mechanism, we’ll have to withdraw from the competition!”

This prospect had Jacey so stressed out that she started talking about South American butterfly migrations. If anyone knew more random facts than me, it was Jacey.

But today it was getting on my nerves. “My blunt-trauma anterior epistaxis is better, thank you very much!”

“Who cares about your dumb bloody nose?” Abigail snapped.

“I care!” I shot back. “It really hurt! I didn’t see any of you guys single-handedly rescuing Tin Man in the riot.” For some reason, I was getting no credit at all for sacrificing my body. If it isn’t on YouTube, it might as well have never happened.

“More like you caused the riot,” put in Latrell sourly. “When you jumped on everybody from the top of the deejay booth.”

“It wasn’t a jump,” I explained through clenched teeth. “It was a takedown. It was a textbook wrestling move.”

Chloe turned to Donovan. “Your two friends named Daniel—why did they do that? Why would they want to mess with our robot?”

Donovan shrugged. “A lot of kids have an attitude about the gifted program. And those guys definitely have an attitude now that I’m in it. Look at this place—Hardcastle’s an ancient ruin compared to here. They’ve got about a sixteenth of the stuff we do. They may call us nerds, but it’s pretty cool having your own robot.”

I didn’t agree. A robot wasn’t cool; it was just complicated. Like the LEGO Star Wars Imperial Snow Walker. (Consumer Reports said that not even a genius could put one together. They were wrong. I’d already assembled six.)

In my opinion, having a robot was a lot less interesting than having a riot. Riots were unforeseeable and chaotic—very YouTube-like.

Oz tried everything to get money for a new motor. He requested funds from the athletic budget, but he couldn’t convince them that Tin Man was more important than badminton. He even took apart his own lawnmower in the hope that the engine would be the right size.

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