n the Titanic.
Corliss jerked her head and shoulders back, recoiling like a cobra. “Did you conveniently forget? You, Donna, and I are going for a jog this morning on the infamous Darwin Trail. Survival-of-the-fittest time, remember? We signed out for it last night after dinner.”
Mayfair groaned. “You two were serious?”
“Yes, we were,” Donna Ramanez said, stepping up beside Corliss. She, too, was dressed in athletic gear and running shoes, wearing a pink scarf gripper without the scarf. Donna was childlike with her diminutive figure. The daughter of a Mexican man and an Irishwoman, she had a caramel complexion and light brown hair, and as far as Mayfair was concerned, both of her new girlfriends were more attractive than she. Seeing them in their workout gear didn’t help matters.
But then again, Mayfair herself was often unexpectedly accused of being naturally beautiful. Accused was precisely the way to describe it; until she had her brief tryst with Alan Taylor, she wasn’t very concerned about her femininity, and then it became seen as a weapon. Being called attractive really did take her by surprise. She wasn’t unduly modest. It simply hadn’t been a priority. Fully understanding a black hole in the universe was more important than perfecting her makeup or getting a hairdo that complemented her facial structure.
“Were you not impressed with Dr. Morton’s lecture on the importance of balancing the cerebral and the physical, the Athens and Sparta syndrome?” Corliss asked, then widened her eyes in feigned surprise.
Corliss was five foot ten, with long, shapely legs. Everything about her radiated health. She looked like she had been poured out of a mold for perfect figures. Lars Stensen, the super-IQ from Copenhagen, was smitten with her the moment he entered the science lab and saw her working with the rats in the maze. Mayfair thought the blond, blue-eyed, six-foot Dane was quite good-looking and almost moaned with disappointment when his eyes washed over her without any reaction and then fixed on Corliss with obvious instant infatuation. She could practically see the bubble over his head go Whack! Bam!
Disappointment tightened Mayfair’s chest, along with indignation.
Beware of the green-eyed monster, she told herself, especially here, where this trio were but three of fifteen, all with IQ scores so off the charts that they were practically incomprehensible. Statistically, each was one in three million. They were all competitors, rising to any challenge at Spindrift, a school with students so superior that a Rhodes scholar wouldn’t meet the entrance test.
Just like all the other drifters, she had never really had a competitor when it came to anything cerebral, right from grade one until now. Everyone here had been capable of achieving a high school diploma at age ten, maximum. All had attained the equivalent of a graduate degree’s worth of knowledge by twelve. David Kantor, from Portland, was actually reading grade-school books at eleven months. The only thing that held any of them back from somewhat intelligent conversations before they were a year old was the physiology of their vocal abilities. Their bodies literally had to catch up with their brains.
“No,” Mayfair said. “I wasn’t impressed with his little talk. I was bored by the time he spoke his third word, as I usually am with Morton’s droning lectures in personality and health management.”
She paused. Her two new brilliant friends were showing deep disappointment in her. Their eyes darkened with their frustration. They wore identical smirks.
“Okay,” Corliss said. “Okay. Don’t blow up a Bunsen burner. My study of the causes of genetic drift in the prairie chicken and its low reproductive success will have to wait.”
The other girls both laughed.
“Get your ass in gear, girl,” Corliss ordered. “Wasting time is worse than wasting money.”
Mayfair groaned emphatically at the platitude and rose to search for her athletic clothes, if they could be called that. She didn’t separate her wardrobe into daily outfits, evening dress, or recreational clothes. Clothes in general were never a high priority for her, something that annoyed her stepmother to the point where the woman would actually have nervous breakdowns wondering how a teenage girl could be bored by shopping, especially when she had deigned to take her along to an expensive, exquisite boutique. It was another nail driven into the coffin her stepmother labeled unnatural, her code word for freak.
“I don’t suppose either of you had any breakfast,” Mayfair said as she plucked a pair of faded blue jeans from her bottom dresser drawer. She held them up and away from herself, as if they crawled with red ants, and shrugged. It was the best she had for this.
“Visions of breakfast will be something to urge us to finish,” Donna said. “Ricompensa for work well done.”
Mayfair lowered her chin and raised her eyes. “Spare me the attempt at motivation. We hear enough of that from Marlowe.”
Motivation was a sore point for Mayfair. Her interest in learning required no stimulants, as it didn’t for almost all drifters, but Dr. Jessie Marlowe, the fifty-year-old head of Spindrift, was constantly referring to it. Her fear was that someone would get so bored with his or her studies that they would procrastinate, which would spread like the flu, infecting all fifteen. Mayfair envisioned Marlowe having nightmares in which her prize students were all doodling or simply staring into space while clocks ticked the time away. Nothing new would be invented or discovered, no ingenious comment would be uttered and recorded, and no new suggestion for human progress in social, mental, or political work would be made.
She slipped out of her nightgown and put on an ordinary bra. Never in her life did she have a sports bra. She found a stretched-out, faded green sweatshirt that she thought was perfect. She did have running shoes, although she hadn’t bought them for that purpose. Her two friends shook their heads when she was finally ready.
“We have a lot of work to do with you when it comes to fashion,” Donna said.
Mayfair knew that was true, despite also knowing that the other girls considered the three of them the most attractive of all the girls at Spindrift. Those girls had already nicknamed them the Supremes, and not because they sang together. Those girls looked at them enviously. That green-eyed monster was having a ball here, dancing gleefully on everyone’s psyche. Maybe that was the true glue that bonded them, others’ reactions to their exceptional and unique beauty.
“Spare me,” Mayfair said sarcastically. “I still have the scars my stepmother imprinted on my sensitive self-image.”
“Do you have your card?” Corliss asked her.
“Don’t one of you?”
“What if one of us decides to turn back or something?” Corliss asked. “As Dr. Marlowe says, ‘Click on your foreshadowing.’?”
As if that remark triggered an automatic response, the three simultaneously recited, “Intuition has replaced instinct. Pay attention to your vision.”
They laughed.
However, the implication about her access card was clear to Mayfair. Corliss thought that of the three of them, Mayfair probably would give up early in the run. It was, after all, a three-mile jog, and not over a level track. The path cleared through the forest went up inclines and down through small gullies, turned, and zigzagged. It was designed to be strenuous. The ground was a little rocky. One had to watch for uncovered tree and bush roots. And there was wildlife—coyotes, bobcats, and an occasional red racer or even a rattler. But nature, after all, was another laboratory for them. They shouldn’t mind any of it.