Wednesday, April 6

The classes here are brutal. The loads of homework that Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Jones dump on me make the workload of the college level classes I was taking at my old high school feel like preschool worksheets in comparison. I can’t say I hate it though. It’s better than my old school in a lot of ways. The two of them are miles ahead of the best teachers I’ve ever had. The way they explain things, it’s impossible not to understand them even when they’re moving at a blistering pace. I’ve never felt like school was much of a challenge until now, but with them both working me over, I’m finally pushing the edges of what I’m capable of. I swear we’ve done like a year's worth of material in the week since I got here.

I definitely made the right call in throwing the computer science section in that first test that Mrs. Hastings gave me. It gives me one part of my day that I can breeze through, and enough extra time in the computer lab that I can almost keep up with everything else. Almost.

I get myself logged in and breeze through my programming assignment before any of my sibs get to the lab, then pull out my tablet to get started on Mr. Johnson’s homework. He’s decided I’m weak on biology and he’s going to correct that if it kills me. So now I need to memorize all the functional areas of the brain by tomorrow morning on top of the chemistry, math, and physics that he’s been force-feeding me.

“What’s going on man?” Evan asks, walking in and taking the seat next to mine. “You look tired.”

“Apparently my old AP Bio teacher didn’t get the memo that I was supposed to arrive here with a doctorate in human anatomy,” I tell him, flipping my tablet so he can see the diagram I’m committing to memory. “This rote memorization is trashing me, especially when it's for terms I’ve never heard until this week. I’d rather calculate a moon landing than have to remember where to find every lobe and sulci of the cerebral cortex. Is it sulci? Sulcus? Now I can’t even remember the term, and my memory always used to be awesome. The brain groove things I learned about yesterday.”

“Sulcus in the singular, sulci is the plural. And sorry, no moon landings for us,” Evan says, “that’s six years down.”

“Wait, what?”

“Nevermind.” He gives me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “Just learn the brain stuff. I promise it’ll be more useful than you’d think. If it’s giving you that much grief, get Louise to help you. She lives and breathes biology, especially neuroscience.”

“Good to know,” I say, and go back to studying the colorful diagrams from the neuroanatomy text until Louise strides in a couple of minutes later.

“Hey, sister,” I greet her. It’s still weird to me to use words like that, but I’m working on getting used to it.

“Morning, boys,” she says as she settles in on the other side of Evan.

“I hear you’re really good at biology,” I say, rolling my chair back from the table to see past my huge brother.

“Evan, did you tell him that just so he’d ask me for help and not you?” Evan just laughs so she gives him a shove. “I thought so. Yeah, I’m pretty good at the life sciences, but this slacker is too.”

“Want to help me with my homework today?” I ask her with my very best smile. She gives me a reluctant look and slides her chair away.

“Come on,” I beg. “I’ve seen Evan doing all the Marc-helping in here. Maybe share the load on carrying your slower brothers?”

She laughs and scoots forward to poke a slender finger into my chest. “I’ve seen how fast you knock out your work in here, Noah. You’re anything but slow.”

I guess a nice side effect of pretending that I didn’t know anything about computers coming into this school is that my sibs think I’m some kind of crazy fast learner. Well, the ones that pay attention anyway. Chad still treats me like I’m an idiot.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Got time after lunch? Please?”

“Maybe. What would we be working on?”

I show her the diagrams on my tablet.

“Hmm, I do like the brain stuff,” she says. “OK, yeah, I’ll help. But we start during lunch. If you haven’t had a neuroscience class before, you’re going to need the extra time.”

“See, I told you she was into it,” Evan says, which earns him another shove that sends his chair rolling out into the middle of the room. For such a little thing, she packs a lot of power. Or maybe she’s using her nanobots. I really can’t tell and none of my sibs have been willing to tell me anything about them since that first day.

With help secured for later, I put away the biology homework and start reading the excerpts from Jefferson and Hamilton that Mrs. Jones assigned me for history. It’s interesting enough that before I know it, the bell is calling us to lunch.

Louise walks with me and Evan out the doors of the Learning Center, but then dashes off toward the dorms. I wonder for a second if she’s trying to weasel out of helping me, but by the time we get to the cafeteria she’s caught back up to us with a shoebox under one arm.

Inside, we get our trays with roast beef sandwiches and celery sticks, then grab a table. Louise pops open the box and pulls out a model of the human brain made of some kind of squishy foam.

“Well that’s cool, where’d you get that?”

“I made it,” she says simply, then her tone changes. “Frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, occipital lobe,” she declares, pulling off colorful detachable parts of the model’s surface as she names them. She puts them back as I take a bite of my sandwich, then pushes the whole thing my way. “Now you do it.”

“Frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, occipital lobe,” I repeat, saying the name of each part as I pull it off.

“Good,” she says. “Occipital handles vision processing. Now reassemble it and do that again a dozen times, then we’ll start on the deeper structures.”

I comply while she eats and watches me, tossing out the function of another piece of the brain with each iteration and adding it to the growing recital. Then she drills me on the next layer down of the three dimensional jigsaw puzzle. By the time we get down the brain stem, she’s not only got me reciting the names of all the parts perfectly, but I actually have a decent idea of what they all do. Finally, she takes the whole thing apart, puts the pieces in the shoebox, shakes it up, then makes me put it all back together, naming each part as I go and giving its function. I get so involved, I don’t ever get past that first bite of my sandwich. At some point, Evan loses interest and wanders away. I think he cleared my tray for me when he left. Someone did, anyway. Everyone else has cleared out of the cafeteria by the time he comes back.

“You using the cheat sheet?” Evan asks Louise casually as he sits down next to me. She doesn’t have any papers out, but she gives him a sly look and nods.

“What are you talking about?” I ask, squeezing the last piece into the cerebellum.

“Nothing,” he says. “You’ll see one day, maybe.”

I shrug it off. As much as I like Evan and most of my other siblings here, they’re weirdly secretive about some things. Mostly anything to do with the implant, so I don’t bother to pry any more.

“So what did you end up choosing for your first project?” Louise asks me.

I put the model back in the shoebox and put the lid on it. “I was thinking something like what Evan’s doing, but backwards. Instead of pulling clean water out of a solution like seawater, I want to selectively pull other things out. You know, for pollution filters or whatever. My mom was a big environmentalist, so I feel like it’s something she’d like me to do.” Louise nods, with that same uncertain look they all get whenever I mention that I had a parent who wasn’t Father. Like the whole idea seems alien to them. “Anyway, I ran it by Father yesterday and he approved it. Then he gave me a bunch of books to start reading for it, so I’m going to be researching for a while before I can start on plans or designs.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad,” she says. “At least it’s not something boring like Chad’s.”

“What’s his project?” I ask.

“Improving the power output yield on SynTech solar panels,” Evan says in a forced monotone.

I nod. “Sounds riveting. What are you doing for yours, Louise?”

“Top secret. No one knows but Father and me and it’s going to stay that way until it’s done. Now, come on,” she says. “We’ve still got twenty minutes of free time left and I want to school you in foosball again.” I let out a groan, more to razz her than because I don’t want to play. She waggles a finger at me. “Shush! I spent all of lunch and most of free time helping you. You owe me now, new guy.”

“New guy? I’ll have you know, I’ve been here a full week today!” I declare in mock indignation. “That practically makes me a regular.”

Evan laughs and Louise smiles, then they haul me down to the rec room where they proceed to take turns thrashing me mercilessly in tabletop soccer until the bell rings again.