June 18, 4 pm, Prucher Hall Auditorium

I am sitting cross-legged on an uncomfortable seat, waiting for a speech to start. It has been approximately forty-five minutes since Mom and Dad left me here. I am going to be here for the whole summer, and I do not know a single person. I open the big new journal Mom gave me last week. So far all it has is a title page which says "Field Notes" in block letters. I turn to the first blank page and write:

hypothesis: taking an actual class in archaeology will serve to confirm nicola lancaster in her lifelong dream of becoming an archaeologist.

I scratch out "lifelong dream," because it doesn't sound scientific enough, and write "proposed vocation," but that sounds pompous, so I write "lifelong dream" again, and then above it, in larger letters, "ignore: this is dumb." Then I write: "speech notes" just in case I actually take any.

A large pink bald man in a navy blue suit that's slightly too small for him walks up to the podium in the middle of the stage. He taps the microphone until he gets the proper loud staticky clicking sound.

"Greetings, everyone. I'm so pleased to welcome you all to the Siegel Institute Summer Program for Gifted Youth. You are exceptionally talented, and we at the Institute are privileged to serve as guides for this stage of your educational explorations."

if you bottled his voice, you would never have to buy cooking oil again.

scary-looking kids in th e front. guys with bad hair, button-down shirts and ties. girls in perfect pastel floral-print dresses. one redheaded guy wearing a three-piece suit. mostly white, some asians, a few black kids. as usual, each ethnic group member is only sitting with other people from the same ethnic group. four disgusted-looking girls sitting together, dressed in all black with dyed black hair: the goth ethnic group?

Two seats over on the right is a tall, solid girl with gray-blue eyes and a lot of curly red hair. She is wearing a green velvet dress and black sandals, and is carefully painting her toenails the same shade of green as the dress. Her fingernails are purple. I start to sketch her. I want to see if I can get her hair and her look of total concentration. I get her expression but screw up her hair, then ruin her expression in the process of trying to fix her hair.

On my left are a boy and another girl. The boy has wavy, longish, dark brown hair, caterpillaresque eyebrows, and I don't know what his eyes look like; they're closed. He won't notice me drawing because he's asleep. Deeply asleep -- I see drool glistening at one corner of his mouth. I draw his closed eyes and his open mouth. I have a hard time with the drool. It ends up look ing more prominent than it actually is.

I look away from Drooling Boy back up on stage. "It is necessary to understand that giftedness qua giftedness, that is to say giftedness as giftedness, is not sufficient armor with which to attack the modern world."

you don't attack with armor. armor is a defense.

I sketch Large Pink Bald Man: an egg with arms and legs, and a smaller egg on top for the head. The resemblance to Humpty Dumpty is uncanny, so I draw a wall, then a second sketch, of his great fall.

splat.