The Gifted Read Online Free PDF Page A

it got easier. Of course I
was sore at the beginning. I could hardly even walk on the second
day, but by a week and a half, the running felt good and the memory
exercises were getting easier. Greg started having me do more than
just memorize things, now I had to figure out what it meant. For
instance, I would walk into a room for 20 seconds and when I came
back out, he would ask me questions about what was in it, such as,
“So, was it a room for a man or a woman? How old do you think they
were? Was it a smoker? Do they have kids? What was their hobby?”
Things like that. He taught me how to read the signs for these
kinds of things.
    Later he taught me some Tae Kwon Do, Jujitsu,
Aikido, and other ways to disable an opponent. One day we were
resting after a particularly brutal practice session. “Do you know
the best strategy when you realize you might get in a fight?” he
said.
    “Kick ‘em in the nuts?” I answered.
    “That works too, but what I was going to say,
was don’t be there when it happens. Why do you think we spend so
much time running?” He gave his smile with the missing tooth, and
for some reason, it scared me.
    I learned a little about basic weapons. I
fired my first gun, which I had no idea could be so loud, or hurt
your hand so much. I learned the right way to hold a knife and how
to sharpen it. I even learned how to throw it a little.
    For a few days he taught me how to scuba
dive. It turns out they had a whole area with a deep pool and a lot
of scuba supplies. He taught me how to put on a wet suit and how to
use all the gear.
    One day he brought me to this huge garage,
bigger than a football field, with only one old car in it. “Get
in,” he said. I walked over to the passenger side and got in. Then
he came over to my side, opened the door again and said, “Get
out.”
    “But you just told me to get in,” I said.
    “You misunderstood me,” he pulled out a set
of keys and jingled them.
    “But I'm only ten!” I said. “I'm not legal to
drive.”
    “What if I said there's a guy with a gun
after you and you have the choice between driving or dying?”
    “I'd probably scream, ‘ahhh, I’m going to
die, where are the keys?’”
    It was not easy learning to drive. It was an
old Toyota, before they were all electric. It took a several days
to begin feeling more comfortable behind the wheel. Even then I
thought I was unsafe. About a week later when I came to the garage
there was a different car waiting for us. “What happened?” I said.
“You didn't like the old one?”
    He only said two words, “Stick shift.”
    “Oh,” I said. I got behind the wheel. This
took days and days to get used to. It was a good thing I was a
little tall for my age or else I couldn’t have even reached the
pedals.
***
    During this time I picked up chess. It was
Guido who first got me into it. He had a chess set in his room and
brought it out to play. “Do you play chess?” he asked.
    “A little,” I said. “But I haven’t played for
a while. My mom and I did it for a while, but I got bored of
it.”
    “Bored of chess?” said Guido. “I don’t think
that’s possible. Let’s play.”
    “Okay.” He got out the wooden pieces and we
set them up on the board. I was brown and he was white. I moved my
pawns out slowly, careful, to protect my king. He, on the other
hand, started moving all over the place, getting his main players
out in the open so they could fight. Each move I did was in fear
that he would get my king. He was more focused on the attack.
    After about half an hour I had taken his
queen and both rooks, and his king was exposed.
    “Your king is right in the open,” I said.
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll get it?”
    Guido laughed. “Andy, if I was always afraid,
I’d never accomplish anything!” In a surprise attack from two
bishops and a knight, he put me in checkmate. The game was
over.
    I was shocked, “Wow! I didn’t see that
coming!”
    “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to take