School's not so tough in the future. Unless terrorists from Jupiter detonate your final exams. Or a sister sabotages your cybernetic implants.

Breakfast of Chumps

Mom offered to make french toast that morning. Not from her homemade, whole wheat bread with the special yeast her company engineered, bread that filled the house with warm-smelling joy when it baked. It was the factory-assembled, bleached-flour, fiber-free, snow-white squishy stuff with no nutritional value. She even got out the real corn syrup with artificial maple and butter flavor instead of the usual agave nectar. I ate nine in heavenly syrup-smothered stacks of three, and that's the last good thing that happened all day.

It was exam day. Wait, that looks wrong typed that way. There needs to be a human skull over the X, blood dripping from the Y, and a minor chord playing in the background. Everyone finishing eighth grade is subjected to a day of feeling dumb, a moron, completely out of place. One chance to get into the top high schools that train the scientists and artists and leaders and others who get more opportunities than everyone else. Sure, anyone can be anything they want. This is America. But why not get there years faster and for free and without having to work in food service?

So I'd been skipping PE for months to hide in the library and study chemistry, using my lawn mowing money to hire a calculus tutor on Saturdays, and riding my bike to soccer practice with Amanda. She had passed the exams last year and was training for extra-terrestrial biology. Not to study monster aliens which abduct people and make art in grain fields, just boring microscopic ones scraped off rocks the landers bring back. I didn't care about that stuff, though. I just wanted to know everything about the exam. I mean, the EXAM. Dohm dohm dohm!

Why all the effort? When I was nine, our pet skunk DonJuan got cut on his belly. Belly? I mean abdomen. Right caudal quadrant. Don't remember how, but I do remember thinking he was going to die because the cut was so long and there was so much blood. But Dad looked at it and said for me to hold DonJuan's collar. He came back with upholstery tools from his shop and a bottle of dark brown stuff I'd seen in his locked cupboard. He poured some of the bottle out into DonJuan's water bowl and a little bit on the cut. DonJuan yelped and squirmed, but then he went back to licking his bowl which was already empty.

I held him as he went sleeping-cat limp. Dad doused a needle and some thread in iodine and sewed up that cut like a rip in the seat of an old 2023 Mustang.

“Living upholstery, Leo,” he said, “it's a beautiful thing. Nice pinstripe, and DonJuan will heal nicely.”

That's when I knew I wanted to be a surgeon.

And yes, my name is Leo. Not short for Leonardo, just Leo. Not sure how I feel about that.

I am sure that my major league soccer dreams faded faster than most boys. My interest in being an astronaut took a dive. Even designing video games wouldn't be nearly as great as cutting people open, fixing a problem, and closing them up again.

All I needed was a successful day of answering questions on a computer and in front of a couple of adults. Scary adults probably, with weird hair and a distinctive adult smell. For sixty minutes. Five or six hours total, and if all went well, I would be off to the Health and Medical High School, an accelerated pre-medical university, and then Med School.

Didn't work out like that.

Not even close.

Upgrade

“Don't you ever tell me what I can't do!”

“Hophnia, I’m trying to spare the feelings of my baby sister.”

I said, she said. Then I pushed her into the closet door and punched her in the eye. Because Bruise Violet eyeshadow clashed awfully with her complexion. And with her first prom dress, which she was supposed to wear the next day.

I thought she'd learn her lesson, my stepsister. She probably would have from anyone else. But her jealously of me undermined her considerable brilliance. It made her almost normal.

It made her hate herself.

Now I had to waste time undoing whatever damage she'd caused. Hopefully I could salvage my chances. I wanted cybernetic memory implants so I could carry eight hundred million pages of information around in my head. My mom was all for it, but my ugly-on-the-inside stepsister had been feeding her dad horror stories she'd “learned” ever since she failed to qualify early. If she had to wait until age eighteen, she was determined I wasn't going to pull it off at eleven.

But she forgot the first thing I ever told her. No one ever tells me what I can't do.