The Prodigies [First Draft]

Fourteen

Kenny nodded, and Miss Kaylee handed her the ID card. The woman then went to find the young girl's schedule. Kenny took this time to look at the picture in her card. An unsmiling girl with fair skin and stringy brown hair gazed back at her, her dark eyes serious. The lighting was quite awful, and Kenny couldn't help but compare herself to a convict. Once she was done analyzing her photo, the young girl slipped the ID card into her pocket with her stack of index cards and waited for Miss Kaylee to come back.

"Alright, Kendall, I've brought you your schedule, dorm room information, and backpack." Miss Kaylee came back into the room with several papers in hand. She placed them in a stray folder and handed it off to Kenny. "Everyone here has the same backpack design, so make sure you're aware of your bag's location at all times. It's easy for someone to just walk off with your bag, thinking it's their own."

Miss Kaylee looked over Kenny to make sure she had given the young girl everything she needed to begin her day. She gasped after a moment of thought and exclaimed, "I forgot to give you an extra uniform! I'll go get one and bring it to your dorm. Can you get to the Dining Hall on your own?"

Kenny nodded and started out the door. She was already on her way out of the Main Office when she heard Miss Kaylee call, "Goodbye, Hawking! Have a good first day!"

The young girl hurried out of the office and away from the eyes of the nosy administrators. When she had traveled a few minutes away from the building, Kenny realized Miss Kaylee would not be there to help the girl through her trials during the day. Kenny was expected to make friends of her own to guide her.

Which meant, unless Kenny suddenly became more open to making acquaintances, she was on her own.

****

After several tries at holding her ID card up to the scanner to the Dining Hall, Kenny finally entered the large building. She bought a tray of pancakes and sausages and looked around for somewhere to sit. It wasn't long before she spotted Color, Fins, and Clay. The young girl moved towards their table, worry seeping into the marrow of her bones.

What if Color was only being nice yesterday, and they don't want me to sit with them today? Kenny wondered anxiously. I barely know any of them, anyways. It's best for me to sit by myself.

However, just as Kenny was about to head to an empty table near the end of the hall, Color called the young girl's nickname out and beckoned for her to come over. Kenny was filled with relief as she sat next to Color. It was hardly fifteen minutes into her first day, and the young girl was already more nervous than she had ever been in the short six years of her life.

"Thought you could skip out on us, did you?" Fins chuckled at Kenny's blush, despite his own face being blue. "I'm just joking. So, did you see the radiologist?"

Kenny nodded.

"And did Dr. Anderson tell you about the Z-area?" Clay asked loudly.

Kenny nodded again.

"She probably didn't tell you much if she's the Dr. Anderson I remember," Color said. "I asked her how to get to the bathroom once, and by the end of the conversation, I knew more about reclaimed water than I did about how to find somewhere to relieve myself."

Fins laughed. "I bet ten dollars she didn't even tell you what the groups are."

Groups? Kenny thought. What groups?

"Don't worry; we'll tell you in case she forgot to," Color reassured. After the teen swallowed a forkful of food, she told Kenny, "Dr. Anderson explained that Z-areas are larger in some people than they are in others, right? She probably compared one of us to someone else you've seen with a cooler Gift."

Kenny blushed in embarrassment and Color nodded.

"She's done it to all the primary school kids to help them understand all this, including Clay. She told you about the variety of Z-area sizes, and that's all that matters to her. However, we students are grouped into categories based on how many centimeters long that little fold on our brains is. The categories start with Group A and go all the way down to Group G. For example, my Z-area is about half a millimeter long, and it took Dr. Kane thirty minutes to find it. That's extremely small, which means I'm in Group G."

"And me, too!" Clay beamed. "Fins is an F grouper."

Fins nodded and took it upon himself to continue the explanation. "If you haven't noticed already, the Dining Hall is quite large, but there seems to be a small number of students. That's not true, though. If everyone here would sit at a table instead of pulling chairs up to already-full ones, we'd probably fill up over three quarters of the room. However, everyone here wants to sit with their group. Those guys over there are the F groupers. I would sit with them, but they aren't fond of people who hang out with kids from other groups."

Fins pointed to a group of students that seemed to be huddled over a table when, in reality, they were just squeezing together to fit. The tables in the Dining Hall were conjoined, so several children could have sat at the table next to Kenny's own and still been able to speak with the occupants of the other table. However, they pretended that the surface beside them was as nonexistent as a perpetual motion machine and packed themselves tighter than sardines in a can.

The same went for the next group Fins pointed out, the E group, and the D group after that. They all stuck to themselves and said not a word to the members of the other groups. Fins then pointed to the C group, B group, and, finally, the A group.

Color rolled her eyes at the mention of the A group. "The A groupers, or A-listers as they call themselves, are cocky, arrogant blockheads. Just because they have Z-areas more than three times the size of an average G grouper, they think they're entitled to some sort of special treatment. They call us G groupers" —Color poured as much abhorrence into her next word as she possibly could— "Geeks. But that's not what we think. What do we think, Clay?"

"G stands for Gifted!" Clay cried with his mouth full.

Color laughed, nodding, and the conversation moved on to other things, such as what Kenny's first day would be like and what classes she would have. As Fins and Color argued which science class Kenny would have (Color assumed it would be physics; Fins thought chemistry would suit the young girl better), Kenny took another look at the surrounding cliques.

The girl was dismayed to find Einstein sitting with the A-listers. Unless Kenny was in Einstein's group, he would never be seen with her.

As if he had read Kenny's mind, Clay asked, "What group are you in, Hawking? It's on your card."

Kenny hesitantly took her ID card out of her pocket, her serious eyes staring back at her as she read the information listed underneath the barcode. The young girl's sex, birth date, physical features, and Gift were recorded, and finally, at the bottom of the card, the words GROUP: A were written.

"Holy trash cans," Fins murmured in awe.

Color's eyes widened. "And here I was, calling A-listers blockheads."