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all-city. Wasn’t there some kind of huge accident at their last game?”
    His eyes narrowed. “What do you know about that?”
    â€œEverybody’s talking about it. A piece broke off this statue....” My voice trailed off. Why did he seem so suspicious? I was only trying to be friendly, and he was acting like this was a CIA interrogation under hot lights.
    â€œI don’t go to that school anymore,” he said very sharply, almost like he was mad at me. “I’m too—smart.” And he stormed away, leaving me standing in the hall with my mouth hanging open.
    It wasn’t his rudeness that struck me. It was this: Ever since I’d started at the Academy, the one thing I’d been yearning for was somebody normal. Now, finally, he was here.
    << Hypothesis: What if the normal people are even weirder than we are? >>

UNKNOWING
DONOVAN CURTIS
IQ: 112
    W hen the paper airplane bounced off the back of the driver’s head, the man pulled the bus over onto the shoulder. He got out of his seat, picked up the offending aircraft, and waved it at us.
    Honest—it wasn’t me. The last thing I wanted to do at the Academy was draw attention to myself. But I was so used to getting blamed for stuff that I braced myself for the onslaught.
    â€œInteresting experiment,” the driver said in an approving tone. “The air moves with the bus, so the plane flies normally. An open window would interfere with that. The more open windows, the greater the interference. And if the bus had no roof, the plane would be half a mile behind us.”
    Whoa, even the Academy bus drivers were gifted! If you chuck a paper airplane at someone, they assume you did it for science. On my old bus, the driver would have held us all hostage until we gave up the person who did it—probably me. And you can bet that “interesting experiment” wouldn’t have been what he called it. Mutiny , maybe. Or armed insurrection .
    There was a smattering of applause as a seventh grader, flushed with triumph, reclaimed his plane, and we were under way again.
    Soon we arrived at the Academy for Scholastic Distinction, which looked absolutely nothing like a school if you ask me. It was, by far, the most modern building in town. Every inch of the place was covered with solar panels. On sunny days, it was like pulling up to a jewel-encrusted palace. Supposedly, the students had worked with the architects who designed it. The Academy was 100 percent eco-friendly, right down to the bathrooms, where the toilets had different “flush settings,” depending on the kind of waste you were getting rid of. There was no button for “cherry bomb,” which is what the teachers invested a lot of energy preparing for at my old school.
    Mr. Del Rio, the principal, stood outside the automatic sliding doors greeting his students with handshakes. At Hardcastle Middle, you never saw the principal unless you did something wrong—which, in my case, was fairly often. Mom always used to say, “Donnie gets a lot of personal attention at the very highest level at that school.” She was so proud that I was at the Academy now. I felt a pang of guilt for the bogus reason behind it.
    Determination surged through me. Maybe I could hack it here. After all, half of being gifted was just the fact that everybody expected you to be smart. Like that seventh grader on the bus. No way was that any experiment. The guy made a paper airplane, and he couldn’t resist flying it. Well, Couldn’t Resist was practically my middle name. I wasn’t that different from the Academy kids. Obviously, I was never going to star at this place. But with hard work, a little bit of luck, and a lot of good acting, I might just be able to fake it.
    If x represents the vector of variables , b and c are vectors of known coefficients, and A is a matrix of coefficients, determine the maximum value of the objective function c T x