Gifted, p.1
Gifted, page 1
part #1 of The Morley Stories Series Series
Gifted
Jacquelyn Johnson
©2020 Crimson Hill Books/Crimson Hill Products Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book, including words and illustrations may be copied, lent, excerpted or quoted except in very brief passages by a reviewer.
Cataloguing in Publication Data
Jacquelyn Johnson
Gifted
Description: Crimson Hill Books ebook edition | Nova Scotia, Canada
ISBN: 978-1-990291-70-8 (ebook – Draft2Digital)
BISAC: YAF000000 Young Adult Fiction: General
YAF022000 Young Adult Fiction: Girls & Women
YAF058020 Young Adult Fiction: Social Themes – Bullying
THEMA: FXB – Narrative Theme: Coming of age
YXO -- Children’s / Teenage personal & social issues:
Bullying, violence, abuse & peer pressure
YXHB -- Children’s / Teenage personal & social issues:
Friends & friendship issues
Record available at https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/Pages/home.aspx
Front Cover Image: Cristina Zabolotnii
Book Design & Formatting: Jesse Johnson
Parts of this story formerly appeared in the novel Sam’s Christmas published in 2019.
Crimson Hill Books
(a division of)
Crimson Hill Products Inc.
Wolfville, Nova Scotia
Canada
Sam’s Christmas Wish…
The whole world, it seems, is getting into the Christmas spirit.
Stores play Christmas music. Neighbours hang up lights and gather in the town square for the lighting of the giant Christmas tree. At school, kids talk about what gifts they hope to get.
Sam plays Christmas carols at Youth Orchestra concerts and at her school concert. She hears about presents under the tree and turkey with stuffing and Christmas with all the trimmings, all the while wondering what’s it really like to have a family Christmas?
But as Sam’s Korean mother points out, their family doesn’t “do” Christmas. Or Hanukah. Or Easter. Or Eid. Or any of the other happy holidays that might be celebrated by other people.
Her family avoids the Holidays, no matter how much she wishes this wasn’t so. And nothing can change that.
Or can it? Something magical happens, meaning that maybe Sam’s Christmas wish might come true in a way no one could have expected; not her friend Morley, not Sam’s mother and especially not Sam!
Gifted is about being a girl caught between two cultures and finding her own gifts and unique voice and the courage to share them, third in the Morley Stories Series of novels for modern girls age 10 to 13.
Also In
The Morley Stories
Series:
Just Me. Morley
Feather’s Girl
Gifted
Rules for Flying
Find them all at www.CrimsonHillBooks.com
The challenge of your life is to find your gift. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.
- Ben Heppner, CC, opera tenor
and radio show host
one
I hate airports.
They’re cave bubbles connected by hallways. You walk and walk and walk and still it seems you’re never getting to where you need to be.
You’re always practically running to somewhere, only to stand in another line-up before you can move on. Just hoping you’re going to finally get to the right place. At the right time.
After all that rushing, you have to just wait. Sitting in one of those hard plastic chairs. Feeling all jangly and sweaty.
Or you just stand around. Being bored.
There are so many better things you could be doing, if only you weren’t stuck here in this stupid airport. You could be hanging out with friends. Riding horses at Jayden’s ranch. Making jewellery with Morley. Making enchiladas with Tia Margaret.
Practicing.
Listening to music.
Reading.
Thinking.
Swimming!
But no, you’re stuck in some stupid airport.
Where there’s all these rules about what you can and can’t take with you. Or do. Or say. It’s as if, in airports, you’re supposed to stop being a person and start being a robot that looks like a person.
One who has to carry too much stuff.
And never needs to pee because you always have to search for the washrooms. When you finally find one, it’s probably closed for cleaning. Or there’s a line-up.
All of this is bad enough. But it’s the sounds of airports that make me want to scream. There’s a lot of noise bouncing around and banging into your ears in those hallow buildings.
It’s like crackly static in your head, taking up all the space so you can’t think.
Or hear the music in your head.
Or just be quiet.
Airports are just about the coldest, unfriendliest, noisiest places I’ve ever been. Nobody there ever looks happy. Nobody smiles. They all just look like I feel, which is too hot and worried and wishing I could get out of here.
There’s no point in saying any of this to my mother, who’s standing next to me in line, fiddling with her phone. She’s a person who’s always too cold, even in summer. And she doesn’t seem to mind waiting around. She isn’t a fan of being inside a plane, even in the front seats where she always sits, but she doesn’t mind airports.
“No whining,” is what she says to me now, even though I haven’t said a thing. “Stop acting like a spoiled child, Park Sam Hae. And no sad face!”
She says this in Korean, even though her English is a lot better than my Korean. She says she only ever speaks Korean when we’re together because that way I won’t lose my heritage. She means her heritage, because South Korea is where she grew up.
Not me. I’ve never been there. Don’t even know a single Korean person, except her.
I think the real reason she does this isn’t to make me get better at speaking her language. It’s just so other people won’t know what we’re talking about.
As if anyone cares. They’re just trying to get to somewhere else. As fast as possible. While more or less ignoring everyone else.
Which is what we’re doing. Though I think it’s fun to look at other travellers and make up stories about who they are and where they’re going. And why.
And what might happen next.
It helps to pass the time.
I don’t ever share these thoughts, or any thoughts, with my mother. She’ll just say it’s stupid. That I don’t need to think. Just do what she says and we’ll both be fine. She’s always telling me that.
The line shuffles forward a few feet. My mother shoves her tote bag along with one foot, not even looking up from her phone screen.
I have my violin case over one shoulder and my new backpack over the other. You can’t kick them along in line.
Or you could, I guess. If you didn’t care about them.
The airport we’re in is the one in Paris. But it could be any airport in any city. In any country. Anywhere. They all look the same to me.
And sound the same.
And smell the same.
They all have the same shops with the same stuff that costs too much and moving sidewalks and shuttle busses or trains to get from one terminal to another.
The only real difference is what languages the signs and announcements are in. And what kind of money you have to use, if you even use actual money. Which you usually don’t because debit cards and credit cards work everywhere.
Airports are nothing more than a useful tool, my mother says. It’s high time I get used to travelling intelligently and using the tools responsibly. Soon, very soon, we’ll be travelling constantly, to piano and violin competitions. And then, when we’re successful in winning them, to guest appearances to perform. With only the world’s top orchestras, she adds. Because that’s the life she says awaits us.
And I better start being smart about it.
It’s her plan. That I’m a successful musician, a virtuoso on both piano and violin. What she calls “world-class.” Performing everywhere. And she is my manager and constant companion.
I will travel and practice music, as I do now. And play. And be beautiful and gracious and smile all the time and be shiny and perfect.
And modest.
She’ll do everything else. “All the real work of making a successful music career,” as she puts it in Korean.
Because that’s what musically-gifted prodigies are born to do. And can, if they’re lucky enough to have a mother like mine to, as she says, “make the best possible success happen.”
Even if, like me, they’re not really sure they want this. After all, I didn’t choose to be a prodigy. I don’t think of myself that way. It was just kind of an accident that I’m good at music. Though I love music and can’t imagine living without it, I’m not sure I want to do all this travelling and performing all the time. Spending every day, or just about every day in airports and on planes. Or trains.
Always rushing to somewhere else to get to another hall, another piano, another stage, another orchestra, another audience.
Playing is the good part. I enjoy playing music. It makes me happy when the audience enjoys it, too.
It’s all the other parts of this future I don’t much like.
Always trying to get around in different cities, staying in different hotels, sleeping on different beds, talking to different peo ple. Never quite sure of where you are right now.
Always rushing from here to there.
Never, or just about never, being at home.
Where I have my piano, my room, my things. My friends. Tia Margaret. And Tippy, my puppy. Everyone I love.
I miss them. Which isn’t even worth mentioning to my mother. Because this is the life she wants for us. The life she says she’s made so many sacrifices for and worked so hard for, because it’s what we’re meant to have. Worth what she calls, “minor inconveniences necessary to gain important achievements and reap major rewards in life.”
So that’s her plan for her life. And mine. Everything’s already decided.
Before enjoying all the big rewards, she says, I still have so much to learn.
She doesn’t mean music repertoire, which is all the pieces I know how to play and I’m learning now. She says she pays my teachers to be in charge of that.
I must work harder to be more charming with people. And not have my own opinions, because nobody wants to hear them.
I must be more of the dutiful daughter she expects. Stop being so willful.
Listen to her because she knows best.
Her words, not mine.
Every internationally-acclaimed artist must master the skills of calm and self-control, she says. Playing well is never enough. Virtuosos must also know how to talk to all kinds of people. How to dress. How to smile. How to have pretty hair.
And how to move efficiently and effectively through airports. And conduct myself properly at all times.
I guess she knows, because she was going to be an opera singer. Was one, for a while. Except her parents said she also had to go to university and become a lawyer. So she gave up on her singing career. But then she never went back to work in their family’s business, back in Korea. I don’t know why.
I’ll ask them, if I ever met them.
Margaret says she has no idea what the answer is. She says she’d tell me if she knew.
It’s the kind of question that could bring on a mother meltdown, so I don’t ask. She’d only say that it is very rude to speak about yourself which, in Korean culture, is true.
Safer for me to just concentrate on what she’s been teaching me to do for as long as I can remember. About music, about making famous orchestra conductors want to work with you, about airports.
About sit up straight, smile and play.
There are many necessary tools to success.
We must use the tools in the smartest ways.
We must always stride through airports quickly. With purpose. Eyes directly ahead. Face neither smiling nor unsmiling.
Never looking confused. Or lost. Or upset.
Never slowing down, except to wait in another line or at the departure gate.
Always remaining on guard.
Trusting no one.
These are the airport rules.
Another rule is, if you need something from your backpack, go into the women’s room and lock the cubicle door. That’s for safety if you need to get out money or a credit card or something.
Or go into one of the airport restaurants and order a drink or a snack. There, it’s natural to look in your bag. No one will notice.
Never smile. Avoid looking directly at anyone. Never talk to anyone unless you have to.
At security, only answer questions you are asked. The answer must be as short as possible. Usually, a simple “yes” or “no” is best.
That, at last, is what we do. We show our boarding passes, but they only ever ask Mom questions and ignore me. After all, I’m just the kid.
Umma goes ahead of me, putting her phone and laptop in one of the grey plastic containers that look like a big kitty litter pan. She plunks her plain tote bag with her new designer handbag hidden inside one and her laptop and phone in another. She arranges her suede jacket into a third one.
I do pretty much the same – violin case in one, backpack in another, laptop and phone in the third along with my sweater.
As our possessions trundle along the conveyor and into the machine to be x-rayed, my mother steps through the security arch. A woman guard waves a wand around her, nods for her to move aside and gestures to me to step forward.
I’m dreading what usually comes next, which is the red alarm going off. That always leads to questions. It’s usually because of my violin. It’s old. The glue that it’s made with can be a problem for these security people and their technology.
But that doesn’t happen this time. The bins with our stuff reappear, having passed their photography test inside the machine. We collect our belongings. Mom puts her coat on. I tuck my laptop back into my backpack.
I sigh with relief. My mother is already charging to the right and towards the departure gate for our flight to Rome. She doesn’t notice that I have to race to catch up.
I don’t know how she can do this, on a hot day. She’s got that big tote bag and is wearing her jacket and stiletto booties. But I’m just glad I don’t have to wear them.
It’s a relief to finally get to our departure gate, all the way at the end of one endlessly long tentacle of this terminal. As we race-march past restaurants and magazine stands and bookstores and a kiosk selling snacks and another one with sunglasses and scarves, I wish we could stop. But my mother strides forwards. Super-charged to get there.
I have no choice but to keep up.
At last, we’re sitting down, with an hour to go before our plane boards.
There are dark circles under her eyes. I don’t think it’s because her make-up smudged. She takes out her laptop, saying something about having some work to do, though it looks to me like she’s just fiddling around online.
I could be doing the same. Instead, I offer to go get her a coffee, thinking that might make her feel better. It’s a relief to get away for a few minutes. To just walk normally.
I buy a sandwich, chocolate milk and a chocolate bar for on the plane. I get a small fruit salad and a plastic fork for my mother and pull my credit card out of my jeans pocket to pay. No need to look confused or hesitant, fishing about in my bag for money.
Usually, my mother would make a fuss about me eating chocolate and what she calls junk food. “Very bad for your skin,” she says. “Makes your hair dull. And you get fat. All very bad for any world-class performer.”
When you’re a performing artist, my mother says, appearance matters. You have to look really beautiful for people to like your music.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but it would be pointless to say so. She’s older than me. She used to sing. She knows.
I hand her the salad and coffee, which she accepts with a nod, then sets it down and ignores it. I’m free, for a while, to just sit here and watch people.
And think back on these past few weeks.
How they zoomed by.
Learning music with Madame Boulanger and living at her big sunny Paris apartment with her daughters and what she calls her other “darling and brilliant jeunes filles.” She means her students, like me.
I love it there. Loved it. Awake at dawn. Practicing, then breakfast at the little café across the street. There are always baguettes and jam and gorgeous pastries and sweet tea. We joke and laugh and talk about music.
Piano and violin lessons are in the mornings with Madame, who is brilliant. She has a way of making you play better than you ever thought you could.
“Sam, ma chère,” Madame says one day, “Every artist must find her own voice. Have you found yours yet? I wonder…”
I ask her what she means but she just waves the question away with a smile. “The Chopin now, I think. Nocturne No. 6, s’il te plait.” That means please.
And so I play this lovely night music. Wondering if Madame is hearing it with my voice, or the composer’s?
Some days I practice again in the afternoons. But most days there also are outings to see and hear Paris. It’s a huge, beautiful, thrilling place packed with sights. And sounds. And fun things to do. Especially when you can see it with Amélie and Katharina and Ghislaine, who are Madame’s other students living with her right now, like me. And Josette and Bernadette. They’re two of her daughters.
Of all of us I’m the youngest. But they never treat me that way.
We work hard. There’s just something about Madame that makes you want to stretch your hands and your mind and your heart. Every time I play for her, I want it to be my personal best.
