Book Three: The Emperor’s New Clothes
Pinocchio looked at Candlewick. To his astonishment he saw that Candlewick’s teeth had grown very large, and that his ears were growing longer.
Pinocchio looked at his own face in the mirror, and saw that his ears were growing longer too, as were his teeth. He looked down at his hands and saw that they were turning into hoofs. So were his feet.
Pinocchio cried out in terror. But his cry came out as the braying of a donkey.
– PINOCCHIO
May 15Aboard the cruise ship Crescent Queen Somewhere west of Crete
It begins with a fairy-tale prince and an open sea …
‘Look at the way he moves.’
‘He’s sexy.’
‘Look at the way his ass moves when he jumps.’
‘Don’t you two ever think of anything else?’
The Crescent Queen, a charter cruise ship of American ownership staffed by an English crew, was sailing smoothly on a calm sea, her decks bathed in Mediterranean sunlight.
Three girls, all thirteen years old, were standing on the promenade deck, their eyes riveted to a volleyball game being played by eight boys their own age. The boys were sweating from their exertions, calling out encouragement to each other as they changed position and dove for the ball. The deep blue of the waves made a brilliant backdrop to the game.
The prettiest girl, Gaye, was also the shyest. She had a crush on the dark-haired boy who was now serving the volleyball. She lacked the confidence to approach him or even to smile when their eyes met, but she had made no secret of her feelings to her two friends.
Their names were Alexis and Shanda. Alexis was a tall girl with unruly auburn hair and a determination to wear as much makeup as she could get away with. Shanda, whose parents were both physicians, was the most aggressive of the three. Her mother, back home in Connecticut, had already endured many sleepless nights over Shanda, who seemed to be on a fast track leading to cigarettes, alcohol, and perhaps pregnancy.
The present cruise had been chartered by the National Talented and Gifted Scholarship Association, whose acronym was TAGS. The purpose of the Association was to encourage achievement by junior high school students around the country by sponsoring events that would reward the students for good grades and challenge them intellectually.
There were eight hundred students aboard, along with sixty-five teachers from around the country and a crew of sixty. The cruise was six weeks long, with extended stopovers in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. En route the students were given intensive course work in language, science, and history. There was to be a competitive exam given on the way back to New York, the winners to be honored with scholarships and a guaranteed return cruise next year.
A less-than-publicized fact about intellectually gifted children is that they tend to be sexually precocious. This was particularly true of Shanda, whose career in junior high had already included some amorous adventures that she had managed with considerable difficulty to keep secret. Shanda had quickly gravitated to Alexis the day the Crescent Queen set sail from New York Harbor. The two had co-opted Gaye into their friendship because they envied her beauty and were beguiled by her sweet, gentle personality.
An only child, Gaye had been lively and rambunctious until the onset of puberty dropped a shroud of self-consciousness over her personality. For a while she was so withdrawn that her mother sent her to a child psychiatrist. Then it was discovered that her IQ was 164. Her moodiness was chalked up to her high intelligence and the routine identity crisis experienced by gifted children. It did not help that she was the only daughter of Kemper Symington, the United States secretary of defense, a highly visible architect of the current administration’s foreign policy.
Like everyone else on board, the three girls had become aware of handsome Jeremy Asner, a tall, athletic boy from Riverside, California, who was the sole representative of his school district on this cruise. Jeremy was a junior high school all-American in soccer, and had dreams of a career in politics.
A well-spoken, polite boy whose gray eyes had a dreamy and somehow withdrawn quality, Jeremy had quickly become the most popular boy on the Queen. Shanda and Alexis had coveted him from afar for several weeks, but had made