The call came on a Friday afternoon.
Judith was reading a book when the phone rang.
"Mrs. Harper, this is Dr. Reeves."
"Dr. Reeves." Judith set the book aside. "How did the evaluation go?"
"That's why I'm calling." A brief pause. "I'd like to schedule a meeting with you and your husband to go over the results in person. Are you available early monday?"
"Sure, can you tell me how was Jake's test before that?"
"Mrs. Harper I want to be careful about how I present this because numbers without context can be misleading. What I can tell you is that Jake's scores are among the highest I've encountered in my career. Across nearly every scale he hit the ceiling of the instrument." She paused again. "I'd also like to recommend that you pursue an independent evaluation with a private psychologist who specializes in profoundly gifted children. I can give you a referral."
Judith was quiet for a moment.
"Hit the ceiling, does that mean he cleared the test?" she said.
"Correct, in fifteen years, this is the firts time im making this calling" Dr. Reeves said
They came in Monday morning. Dr. Reeves laid the results out in careful professional language, walking them through each scale, each score, each ceiling hit. She had a printed report in a manila folder and a second copy for Judith and Alan to take home.
Alan sat with his copy open on his knee and looked at the numbers.
"So what does this mean exactly," he said. "In regular language."
"It means Jake's cognitive abilities are significantly beyond what we can accurately measure with the tools available to us at the school level." Dr. Reeves folded her hands on the desk. "It also means his current academic placement is almost certainly not meeting his needs."
"How far off is it," Judith said.
"Quite far." She opened her folder. "His academic achievement scores place him at roughly tenth grade level in math and reading comprehension. Most likely higher, again we ran into ceiling issues."
Alan looked at his copy again. Then at Judith. Then back at the report.
"He's in third grade," he said, mostly to himself.
"Yes."
"And he's testing at tenth grade."
"At minimum."
Alan sat back in his chair. "Huh."
Judith was already writing something in her notebook. "The private psychologist you mentioned. Who do you recommend?"
Dr. Reeves slid a card across the desk. "Her name is Dr. Sarah Halpern. She's based in Encino. She specializes specifically in profoundly gifted children and has access to extended assessment tools that go beyond what we use here." She paused. "I've already called her. She's expecting to hear from you."
Alan picked up the card and looked at it and put it in his pocket .
"One more question," she said. "In your professional opinion, based on what you've seen — what level of placement would be appropriate for Jake?"
Dr. Reeves considered this for a moment.
"I think Dr. Halpern's evaluation will answer that question more precisely than I can. What I will say is that the gap between where Jake is and where he's currently placed is significant enough that incremental steps may not be adequate."
Judith nodded and closed her notebook.
Alan was still looking at his copy of the report.
"Tenth grade," he said quietly, one more time.
Dr. Halpern's office was in a low building on Ventura Boulevard in Encino, between a dental practice and a travel agency. The waiting room had good furniture and framed prints on the walls and a small bookshelf with titles Jake recognized.Silverman, Hollingworth, Gross. Literature on profoundly gifted children.
He looked at the shelf while Judith filled out paperwork at the front desk.
He had read two of those books in his previous life, out of curiosity rather than personal relevance. At the time he had found them too abstract.
Dr. Halpern came out to meet them herself. She was a trim woman in her mid forties with short dark hair and the alert unhurried manner of someone who was rarely surprised by anything. She shook Judith's hand and then crouched slightly to Jake's level, which he found courteous rather than condescending.
"You must be Jake."
"Yes."
"I'm Dr. Halpern. Do you know why you're here today?"
"More testing," he said.
She smiled. "More testing. But different testing than before." She straightened up. "Come on back."
Her office was larger than Dr. Reeves' and smelled like coffee and old books. She had a proper desk and two chairs across from it and a separate worktable where she'd laid out her materials. Jake sat at the worktable and looked at the stack of folders and booklets and immediately understood that this was going to be a longer session than anything Dr. Reeves had run.
"Dr. Reeves sent me her report," Dr. Halpern said, sitting across from him. "So I have some context for where you are. I want you to know that today there are no ceilings to worry about. I have enough material here to keep us busy for a while." She opened the first folder. "I also want to be straightforward with you. I'm going to be asking you some things that are harder than what you've been asked before. If something doesn't make sense just tell me. There's no expectation that you'll know everything."
"Okay," Jake said.
She looked at him for a moment with the alert expression she'd worn since the waiting room.
"Alright," she said. "Let's start."
She opened with the Stanford-Binet Form L-M.
The questions started at a level that was already beyond anything Dr. Reeves had administered and moved upward steadily from there. Vocabulary that required genuine precision to define. Abstract reasoning that required holding multiple concepts in relation simultaneously. Analogies that operated at several removes from their surface meaning.
Jake worked through them carefully. Not underestimating them, he wasn't managing his performance anymore, there was no longer any reason to.
He gave complete answers and showed his reasoning where reasoning was relevant.
Dr. Halpern wrote steadily and said very little.
An hour in she reached the upper range of the Stanford-Binet and kept going.
The questions in this range were designed for the top fraction of a fraction of the population and she administered them with the same even pace she'd brought to everything else.
Jake answered them.
She reached the last page of the section and closed the booklet and made a note on the cover.
"Let's take a short break," she said.
She came back with two glasses of water and set one in front of Jake and sat down and looked at her notes for a moment before looking up.
"How are you finding this compared to the testing at school?"
"Better," Jake said.
"Better how?"
He considered what to say. "The questions are more interesting."
She nodded slowly.
"I'm going to switch instruments now. Have you ever seen a Raven's Matrix before?"
"No," he said, which was true in this life.
She opened a new folder and placed the first matrix in front of him.
A grid of patterns with one piece missing. He looked at it for a moment and filled in the answer.
She placed the next one.
He worked through the Raven's at a steady pace, the matrices becoming progressively more complex, more layers of pattern nested within pattern.
These he found genuinely satisfying in the way that clean logical problems were always satisfying, no ambiguity whatsoever, no interpretation required, just the pattern and its completion.
He hit the end of the Advanced Progressive Matrices and set his pencil down.
Dr. Halpern looked at the completed booklet.
Then she put it aside and opened a third folder.
"Jake," she said. "I'm going to give you something a little different now. This is a test that high school students take when they're applying to college. It's called the SAT. Have you heard of it?"
"I've heard of it," he said.
"I'm just going to give you parts of the math and verbal sections. There's no pressure. I just want to see how you approach it. Okay?"
"Okay."
She set the booklet in front of him and started the timer.
The SAT math section took him eleven minutes.
The verbal took slightly longer because he read each passage fully before answering.
He set his pencil down with eight minutes remaining on the timer.
Dr. Halpern stopped the clock and picked up the booklet and looked through it without expression.
She spent longer on it than the previous instruments.
Then she set it face down on the table and picked up her pen and wrote something at the top of her notepad.
Then she looked at him.
"Jake," she said. "I'm going to ask you something and I want you to answer honestly. Not the way you think I want you to answer. Honestly."
He noted that she was a very sharp women and waited.
"Is there anything on any of these tests today that you've found difficult?"
A long pause.
"The processing speed tasks," he said. "My hands aren't as fast as I'd like."
She looked at him for a moment.
"Right," she said quietly, and wrote something else on her notepad.
Dr. Halpern collected it without looking at it immediately.
She set it with the others in a neat stack and sat back in her chair and looked at Jake with the expression of someone taking stock of something they hadn't anticipated encountering that day, or possibly that year.
"Thank you Jake," she said. "You did extremely well. I'm going to need some time to score everything and put together a proper report for your parents. But I want you to know—" she paused, choosing her words. "You should be somewhere that challenges you properly. That's going to happen."
Jake just nodded.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Of course."
"How long will the report take?"
"Two weeks maximum," she said.
"Maybe ten days."
Oh, god. While jake was grieving spending more time stuck in clasroom with kids, he just nodded again and picked up his jacket.
Ten days was fine.
He just had to be patient.
He was getting better at that.