Gifted by Beth Evangelista

doing?” I asked. She was sifting dirt through a little mesh apparatus.
    â€œWe’re separating the soil from all the other junk so we can test it for non-point-source pollutants,
if you must know!”
she whispered frostily.
    Mrs. Love eyed us sharply through her goggles, but seeing that it was me and not just
any
student creating a disturbance, she nodded a greeting my way and went back to her work. I can’t say Mrs. Love ever actually fawned over me the way most teachers did, but she always treated me with the kind of respect one scientist would naturally bestow upon another.
    Anita was scooping the soil up with her fingers now and spilling it into a little plastic bag, and somehow, without losing a single particle of dirt, she managed to shove her right shoulder back hard so that it almost caught me in my chin. “Will you get lost!” she hissed.
    I got up quickly. She was getting physical now. But before I walked away, she whispered, “Is it true you smeared Mr. Zimmerman last night?”
    So, word had gotten round
. “Yes,” I said, “it’s true.” I figured that if I had to take all the blame for the deed, then I might as well take all the credit, too. Anita just shook her head.
    â€œYou know your new friends, George? Well, I think it’s a good thing you found them. You guys were made for each other.”
    She was wrong, of course, but only I knew that. Anita’s problem is that she leaps to conclusions all the time and never gives a person a chance to explain himself. I would have told her that They weren’t really my friends, that it was all just an evil plot to ruin my life, but I could tell she didn’t want to talk to me when she said, “Buzz off and leave me alone!”
    I marched over to the stupid wheelbarrow and decided that I would first go to the stupid parking lot and pick up the stupid lumber before I would check out thestupid bunker. But check it out I
would
. Because now more than ever I was determined that Sam Toselli and his brainless band of primates receive the full force of my revenge.
    Even if it took me all day.

Chapter 16
    But it didn’t take me all day. And looking back at it now, I’d like to tell you that it
had
taken all day and that I’d thought the thing through carefully, and that any holes in the scheme had been sealed watertight, but I can’t. Looking back with the clear perspective only time will give, I see that chief among my shortcomings had been a tendency to be a little overimpulsive. And it was partly Anita’s fault. What I’d needed right then was a best friend’s loyalty, and she’d gone and treated me like dirt. No, come to think of it, she’d treated the dirt a lot better.
    I pushed my way along the edge of the campground, en route to the parking lot, and I had the odd sensation of what it must be like to stagger across a lonely desert, finding certain death to one side of you and a life-giving mirage shimmering away on the other. The forest was on my left, a population of loblolly pines, yucca trees, and mixed vegetation growing dense and lush out of the fertile soil; on my right was nothing but parched beach grass anddried-up scratchy-looking bushes that had apparently sprung to life and clawed their way out of the sand. Quite a contrast. But I hardly noticed the weird landscape at all because I was too mad. I turned fuming onto the trail leading into the forest, hardly knowing what I was doing. Anita should have known me better than that! What was the point of having a best friend if the best friend thought the worst of you all the time? There was
no point
, I decided, trudging on, and then I realized that I had no idea where in the hell I was going.
    Cape Rose, as the name suggests, is a cape, “an area of land poking into a large body of water,” and the terrain of this coastal nightmare was entirely at sea level. There were no hills, no high places I could