Earlier that day…
The phone rang, and Donatello - he was finally beginning to think of himself that way - crawled out of bed to answer it.
"Hello?" he mumbled, as he leaned against a cabinet in the cramped kitchen and rubbed his eyes. He hadn't slept very well. He'd been up late talking to his brothers, and then he'd lain awake worrying about Splinter and going around in circles about all the ways the current situation might play out. He needed breakfast. He reached for the drawer he'd stuffed his insulin supplies into the day before.
"It's Hector," said the person on the other end of the line, and Don remembered - the security guard. "If we send the van, will you come back to the lab?"
"Um." Don threw the bag of supplies onto the tiny counter and rummaged for the glucose meter. "Can you give us an hour or so? It's been a rough night."
"Lynn is very eager to get started today," Hector said. Don glanced at the clock on the microwave. It was barely 8:00 AM. Clearly Lynn had risen early in her own new quarters, and had told Hector to retrieve her research subjects.
"We'll be there," Don promised. "We just need a little time to pull ourselves together. An hour, okay?"
"Okay," Hector said, though he didn't sound too happy about it. "Black van, an hour." Then he abruptly hung up.
That was fine with Don. He threw the phone back in its cradle, did a quick blood test, and dosed himself with insulin. He didn't even need to read the chart. He'd memorized all the numbers.
While the hormone worked its way around his bloodstream, he went to wake his brothers, who were sleeping clustered together on the living room floor. "Get up," he ordered them. "We're already late for our first day of being honorary humans. We're failures and we suck."
Raph bolted awake. In the past few weeks Don had learned that his brothers' training enabled them to detect all kinds of signals while they were fast asleep, and to wake up already in the midst of some appropriate response. But he wasn't sure what exactly was causing that reaction in Raphael.
"Get the fuck up!" Raph yelled, slapping Mikey in the head. "What's the matter with you?"
Mike yelped and leapt to his feet. Leo rolled to his knees, his hands up in some kind of battle-ready position, before Raph could slap him too.
"What's happening?" Mike squeaked.
"It's 8:09 in the morning and you've overslept," Don informed him. "Your ride to work is coming in fifty-one minutes. You need to get ready."
Mike looked around wildly, seeming at a loss for what actions he should take to deal with this information.
"Get dressed," Don snapped. His brothers, unsurprisingly, had all ditched their clothes last night, left shirts and pants scattered all over the apartment, and slept in the nude. "Eat breakfast. Move."
That seemed to kick Michelangelo's brain into motion. "Dibs on shower!" he yelled, and zoomed into the bathroom.
"Showering before work," Don said approvingly, as Leo and Raph just gaped at the slamming door. "I like his initiative."
"I got initiative!" Raph said quickly. "I'm gonna… uh…"
"I'd help you," Don said, "but I'm pretty sure that's not what initiative means. I'm going to eat something."
He headed back to the kitchen, and, after what he was pretty sure was some kind of quick conference, Leo and Raph joined him in raiding the cabinets. The staffers who had been sent on the initial grocery run had been thorough. Leo and Raph had clearly never seen such a well-stocked pantry, and even Don was a little overwhelmed by the choices. He consulted his stomach - hunger levels, blood sugar trends, and nerves - and decided on a banana and some bran flakes.
Raph was still puzzling over the frozen pancakes when a creaking door hinge announced Mikey's exit from the bathroom. "Second!" he shouted, dropping the box on the counter and racing for the shower. It was only a moment later when he was back, yelling something incoherent about the lack of hot water.
"Don't blame it on me," said Mike, who was busily breaking eggs into a frying pan. "I was in there for literally ninety seconds."
"Not my fault this time," Don said. "I haven't sabotaged a single thing since we got here."
"It's probably the building," Leo said. "There's just not enough hot water for all the apartments."
Raph glared at all of them, made it clear that he was extending that glare to whoever or whatever was actually responsible for the icy shower, and stormed back into the bathroom.
"Don't know what he's proving," Mike said, as he filled the tea kettle and set it on the other burner. "Stove bath, D?"
"What is a stove bath?" Don asked suspiciously. He'd heard about this at the farmhouse, but he hadn't quite learned what it was.
"Hot water," Mike said, gesturing to the kettle. "Bowl. Washcloth," he added, as he dug in cabinets and set a large mixing bowl and a small dish towel on the counter. "Stove bath."
"Privacy included?" asked Don, who could see where this was going.
Mike shrugged. "Whatever's cool for you, bro."
"You can have first water," Leo said, and Don didn't know what that meant either, but it sounded like a generous offer.
"… Thanks," he said, and tried to concentrate on his cereal.
Raph was back again a minute later, fuming over his unpleasant shower experience, but Mike pacified him with a plate of hot scrambled eggs. "Living room is nice, right?" he said, somehow looping Raph around in a circle and pointing him back out of the kitchen. "Let's eat there."
"Let me know when you're done," Leo said over his shoulder, as he followed them out.
"Huh?" Don replied, and then he realized that they were all vacating the room to give him a chance to bathe in private.
It was already 8:32, so he didn't waste any time. Having no pajamas with him, he'd slept in his clothes. He stripped quickly, hung everything over the edge of a drawer, and grabbed the dish towel. He was familiar with sponge baths, and made efficient work of pouring the hot water into the bowl and wiping himself down. It wasn't very satisfying - especially without clean clothes to change into - but it was better than a freezing spray.
He dressed in a hurry and took his banana out to the living room. Without a word, Leo headed back to the kitchen.
"Are you guys taking stove baths?" Raph asked. He'd already cleaned his plate. "Pansies."
"I've had cold showers before," Don replied. "Stove baths are new. I feel a little adventurous."
Mike just shook his head. "You've had a boring life, dude."
"You shut up," Don replied cheerfully. "I've been saving my excitement quota for this."
"What is exciting?" Leo asked, as he came back from the kitchen and started putting his clothes on. His skill with buttons and zippers had already improved noticeably.
"Stove baths," Mike said.
"Becoming legally human," Don corrected. He ate the end of the banana. "Get it together, guys. We have work to do today."
That got Raph to sober up. "What's the plan?" he asked.
"I'm guessing Lynn will want to finish the IQ tests today," Don explained. "I don't know how she's going to keep us busy during each other's sessions. But whatever it is, we should represent ourselves as well as we can."
"Wait," Raph said. "We don't all take the test together?"
Don blinked at him. "No, of course not."
Raph shoved his empty plate at Mike. "But I'm going to get all the answers wrong!"
"The test will try to outsmart you," Don said calmly. "Don't let it. A lot of the questions are much simpler than they look."
Mike furrowed his brow as he juggled the plates. "What do you mean?"
"Look, I'm not going to give you the answers," Don said, and he shot a look at Leo, just in case Leo had forgotten their earlier conversation about not cheating. "Just this piece of advice: think about what the question is really asking, and think about what information you need to answer that. Ignore everything else."
"Focus on the opponent in front of you," Leo said, in what Don supposed was a kind of translation. "Don't be distracted by anything else that's happening."
"Aw, man," Mike said. "I suck at not getting distracted."
"I'll do the dishes," Leo said, taking the plates from Mike. "You still need to get dressed."
"See, I totally would have forgotten that," Mike said, as he cast around, trying to figure out where his clothes had gone.
"Well, that's something we'll work on," Don sighed. He glanced at the clock. 8:46.
"Those are mine," Raph said, as Mike picked up a pair of black pants from the floor next to the TV.
"How can you tell?" Mike asked, as he shook out the slacks and held them up.
"Just give 'em to me," Raph snapped, snatching the pants from Mike's hands.
"But then where are mine?" Mike whined.
"You know what?" Don said. "Tonight, lessons in How To Hang Up Your Clothes So You Know Where They Are The Next Day."
"What's with all the academics?" Raph asked, as he put his pants on. "When do we do the physical testing?"
"Yeah, what he said," Mike added, as he dug out his own pants from under a shelving unit. How they had gotten there, Don could not imagine. "I am so good at physical testing."
"Yes, I know you're all elite athletes and you like to show off," Don said. "But I don't really see how your ability to bench-press each other adds anything to our case."
"What, like you're not showing off in those IQ tests?" Raph said. He had found his shirt on the lone dining room chair, and was putting it on. "Not all of us are going to get jobs being super-brains, Donnie. But we got other skills we bring to the table. We want to show them what we do. We want to show them why they want us on their team."
"… Point taken," Don said, after a pause. "Ask Lynn about it. I get the feeling she's a little single-minded as to what kinds of tests she wants to do."
"There's a sketchy van outside and I seriously have no idea where my shirt is," Mike reported.
"Is it black?" Don asked.
"No, it's orange," Mike replied. "Duh."
Don just raised a brow. "I'm talking about the van."
"Oh, yeah," Mike said. "That's black."
"That's our ride," Don told him.
"But yesterday it was a white van," Mike said.
"Complain to Stockman about the lack of consistency in his van pool assignments," Don suggested. "Your shirt is in my bed."
"Oh yeah," Mike said. "I totally left it there last night."
"Dishes are done," Leo said, coming out of the kitchen and narrowly avoiding a collision with Mike as the half-dressed Turtle careened towards the bedroom. "Are we ready?"
"We should put our coats on," Don said. He glanced out the window; the van was waiting just across the narrow sidewalk from the apartment building's front door. "I don't want to walk even that far without some insulation."
"Seriously," Raph said. "Pansies." But without elaborating on that comment, he went to the front closet and retrieved everybody's coats.
It was a little easier to squeeze into the ill-fitting outerwear without the rice bags adding to his bulk, and Don was able to pull up the zipper without any help. By 8:57, they were all ready to go.
"Who has the key?" Don asked, as they headed out the door. When all he got was a round of blank looks, he said, "You don't live in the sewers anymore. You have to actually lock your door when you go out." When nobody suddenly realized they had the key in their pocket, he sighed and went back into the apartment. The key was on the table next to the envelope of money. He stuffed the cash under the mattress - his brothers probably would have come up with some genius ninja hiding place, but this was good enough - grabbed the key, and locked the door as he went back out again.
"Now are we ready?" he asked.
"I've been ready this whole time," Raph replied, and Don probably would have given him a stern talking-to about the accuracy of that claim, except just then the door of the neighboring apartment opened and a person walked out.
She was heavyset, with dark skin and long hair. Don had never seen anyone quite like her before. The feeling seemed to be mutual. They all stared at each other.
"What… happened to that young girl?" the woman asked after a moment.
"She had a small problem at work," Don replied.
"It was us," Mike added, in his slightly-too-honest way.
The woman looked vaguely horrified. Don couldn't blame her. It wasn't too difficult to invent some terrifying stories to fill in the blanks around what he and Mike had just said.
"We're just going to be living in her apartment for a little while," Don said quickly. "While she lives elsewhere. Sorry about the noise. Move-in day, you know."
"… Right," the woman said. She reached under her opposite elbow and, carefully and firmly, locked her door.
"If there's anything we can -" Leo started, when nobody else quite dared to ask the obvious question. This was the first real stranger they had met - the first person who had no connection to them, and whose opinion about them couldn't be guessed - and they were all on tenterhooks as they waited for some clue as to whether she was pro- or anti-mutant. As if that were somehow the deciding factor that would foreshadow which way the whole country would fall. As if this were the moment at which their entire future would be decided.
"Listen," the woman said brusquely. "I don't think this -" and she made a gesture encompassing the four mutants "- is right. But I have three jobs and two kids and I ain't got time for politics. Long as you're not putting holes in my walls or selling drugs to my boys, you can be any kind of alien you feel like. Now I got to get to work."
"And so do we," Don said. For sure they were late. Maybe some other time they'd be able to engage their new neighbor in a conversation about how they were mutants, not aliens, and it wasn't because they felt like it. But right now, they really needed to be in that black van.
They let the woman go down the stairs first, then followed at what they hoped was a non-creepy distance. The van was still waiting, running its engine, puffing smoke into the chilly air. "You're late," Hector said, as soon as Leo hauled the rolling door open.
"Sorry," Don said. "We're new at this."
"How's that help me?" Hector asked, as he checked his mirrors and pulled out into traffic. "I'm the one who's going to get written up for not delivering you on time."
"You came to pick us up on time," Don said. "We'll vouch for that. It's our fault we were late leaving. We were waylaid in the hall. And -" He glanced back into the third row of seats. "- some of us are still learning to put our pants on in one try."
"Not true," Mike said indignantly. "We're late because the shower ran out of hot water, and we had to boil more."
"We're late because Leo and Don wouldn't just take a cold shower," Raph opined.
"Do we need to argue about this?" Leo put in. "I'd rather talk about what that woman said."
"What?" Mike asked. "That mutant rights aren't on her priority list? I gotta admit, I wasn't expecting that."
"We should have been," Raph said, which was as close as he was ever going to get to admitting that he hadn't anticipated it either. "We ain't the center of everybody's universe. I mean, who does it even matter to whether we're people or not? Wasn't that part of our argument in the first place?"
"Right," Don agreed. "Big deal to us, no difference at all to most other people. It's -"
"Are you having a political strategy meeting?" Hector interrupted, as he navigated an intersection.
"Yes," Leo said. "Why?"
"I'm no scientist," Hector replied. "But this question of whether you're intelligent or not seems stupider every time I talk to you."
"See?" Don said. "This whole thing really should be simple."
Hector just shook his head and kept driving.
It wasn't long until they pulled into the garage at the lab. They piled out of the van, and Hector led them to an area of the building Don hadn't seen before, where Lynn was impatiently waiting.
"It's not my fault and they're going to tell you why," Hector said, before Lynn could complain that it was nearly ten o'clock already.
"Nice of you to show up," Lynn said to the four Turtles. "I've been here since - oh, that's right, I didn't go home last night, because I live here now, because I gave you my apartment. Stockman is on my case, the public conversation isn't waiting for the data to come in, and you guys are malingering. Care to explain?"
"We're doing what?" Raph whispered to Leo.
"Just give me the battery," Don said. "Literally no one will remember anything else that happened this morning."
"I'm counting on you," Lynn said, and with a quick word to Hector she took Don to a small inner room.
"Okay," Lynn continued, as she closed the door, "and please remember that anything you say can and will be used in the landmark research paper that I am going to publish. How did you get into my computer?"
"It was easy," Don said. He settled into a chair. He felt like he had done this a million times before. He was not at all worried about his ability to perform.
Lynn dropped a stack of papers on the table, and raised a brow.
"I spent a lot of time on an online hacking forum," Don said, "until I got banned for being a mutant. For a community that attracts a lot of outcasts, not as accepting as I would have thought."
"But how did you get into my computer?" Lynn asked.
"Sorry," Don said. "It's against the hacker code of ethics to teach hacking skills to people who aren't serious about learning the craft. Suffice it to say, there are ways to unlock a computer that have nothing to do with knowing the password."
"And what were you doing in there?" Lynn asked.
"Checking you out," Don said, and then he grimaced. "That came out wrong. I was looking at your files. Documents, spending patterns, browsing history. Making sure it all fit with your story. I think you're being honest."
"Thanks," Lynn said. "I guess. But what about your history?"
Don shrugged. "You've already read my notebooks. You can ask me anything."
"What are you?" Lynn asked immediately.
Don's face fell. "I wish I knew," he said.
"What do you think you are?" Lynn asked. "You obviously have a self-concept. Can you explain it to me?"
Don looked at the tabletop. He hadn't been prepared for this. "I've been someone's experiment for as long as I can remember," he said at last. "I had a family, but they didn't know what I was or where I came from. They wanted to find out. So did I."
He paused, gathering his thoughts. "My mom doesn't like to talk about this. But at first, they thought I must have been a turtle that someone experimented on. When I started walking and talking and reading, they thought I must be a human that someone experimented on. They very quietly recruited a team of doctors and experts to try to fix what had been done to me. You've read the files. Success was… limited."
He pushed away that part of his life and went on. "I studied. I got good grades. I learned to use the internet and I made some friends - or, at least, I thought they were my friends. I worked in the clinic. I started to have normal adolescent ideation about adult life. Only, for me, it didn't seem that any of that would be possible."
He took a breath and continued. "That's when I met my brothers. Their self-concept is that they are turtles who were mutated, but they don't know why or by who. Somehow they wound up being raised by a rat who had also been mutated. You know this from the TV interview."
He rearranged the threads in his mind, keeping track of who knew what and when and how, and plunged on. "They tried to convince me that this was the right story. I didn't believe them. But their DNA, and some emerging technology in the field of genetics, showed that it was probably true. And it showed that we were not so far from being normal humans."
He couldn't look at anything but the table as he told the next part of the tale. "I couldn't accept being anything less than fully human. I contemplated extreme surgery to fix everything about me that wasn't human. I… I more than contemplated," he admitted. "I was starting the process. But my brothers asked me to wait," he said, carefully sliding over the months at the farmhouse, the vision quest and his rocky integration into mutant Turtle society. "They asked me to think about this more carefully. And after a while, I decided that they were right. The surgery was too dangerous. And… I shouldn't need it."
He paused again as he approached the end, the present. "What I want is to be accepted, the way that I am. And the way that I am is…" He looked up, finally, in anguish. "My parents are turtles. But my mind is human. I'm Donatello. I'm a mutant. If I didn't have a self-concept, none of this would matter. But I do. And…" He trailed off. He had no more words with which to convey his own understanding of himself.
"Does it hurt?" Lynn asked softly.
"It's a kind of torture," Don replied, almost in a whisper.
They sat in silence for a moment. Then Lynn opened a folder, pulled out a newspaper clipping, and slid it across the table. "Would you respond to that?" she asked. "It was an editorial in yesterday's Times."
Don scanned the article quickly. It repeated some talking points about how mutants were abominations, then spun off into an argument that, living in such unnatural and deformed bodies, mutants must be in constant pain. And, if they were suffering in this way, then surely it would be no mercy to push upon them the demands and stresses of a human life. Rather, it would be kinder to simply euthanize them.
Don's jaw dropped.
"Okay," he said, when he had recovered his voice. "First, this is one of the most horrifying examples of 'I'm suggesting this because I really do care about those people' that I've ever seen. But second, this is factually, may I say, horseshit."
"The premises are not accurate?" Lynn paraphrased.
"No," Don replied emphatically. Then, realizing how some things he had said earlier might have led Lynn to believe otherwise, he tried to explain. "Being like this - being a human in an animal body - is constant psychological torment. I don't think anyone who hasn't experienced this can even begin to imagine what it's like. But I know it would be so much easier to bear if the mismatch didn't matter - if I was treated like a human even though I don't look like one." He glanced at the article again, then quickly looked away. "As for physical pain - it's true that I'm in physical pain a lot, because I have real medical issues, and because I've been treated for medical issues that truly well-meaning people thought I had. And I think my brothers are in physical pain a lot because they're athletes and they injure themselves in training. But is being a mutant inherently a life of physical pain and suffering? No. And would we prefer to be euthanized?" He leaned forward across the table. "Read my weird turtle beak thing: Fuck no."
"Duly noted," said Lynn, who seemed to have no further questions on that topic.
Don sat back in his chair. "Shall we get to the Wechsler, then?"
Without exactly replying to that, Lynn swept the newspaper clipping back into the folder, and handed Don a sheet with ten words printed in large type. "Please memorize that," she said. "I'll test you on it later."
Don skimmed once down the list, then handed back the page. "Done," he said.
Lynn frowned at him, not reaching to take the paper. "Donatello."
Don continued to hold out the sheet, making clear that he wasn't still looking at the words at it. "Please record how long I just spent looking at that," he said. "You'll test me later."
"Suit yourself," Lynn said, and she made a note on her scoresheet before tucking the list of words back into the folder.
She laid out the first page of the Wechsler battery, and they got to work. Don whizzed through the Performance index. He struggled more with the Verbal index. Then he watched Lynn try to add up the factors.
"If you're so smart," she said, after making pencil marks here and there and not seeming to arrive at an answer that satisfied her, "you calculate your score."
Don took the page she handed him, and quickly tallied up the numbers. "No, that's correct," he said.
"It can't be," Lynn replied.
"I can get you documentation of my previous results," Don offered. "This isn't my high score."
"But this score would mean you're smarter than 99.99% of humans," Lynn said.
Don put the sheet back on the table. "Someone has to be," he said quietly.
"I am aware of how percentiles work," Lynn snapped, and with sharp movements she began clearing away all the test materials.
Don watched her work. "Are you angry at me?" he asked.
"I'm angry at myself," Lynn said. "I must have confounded the test somehow. I'll have to have the senior researchers review the tape and see how I was cuing you. I bungled the key experiment and I'm going to get fired."
"Why am I the key experiment?" Don asked.
"Because you're obviously the smartest," Lynn replied. "I let myself get biased, I didn't conduct the test impartially, and my sloppiness inflated and invalidated your score."
Don leaned back in his chair, a little hurt by this. "You're kind of invalidating me right now," he said. "If you were inadvertently helping me get the right answers, then every other researcher who ever ran me through this did the same thing. And they were all a lot more experienced than you are."
Without answering, Lynn stood up and stuffed the papers back in the filing cabinet.
"Plus," Don felt compelled to add, "the last few years I've been taking these online college classes. Nobody reviews my work before I turn it in. And after I turn it in, it's reviewed by someone who doesn't know anything about me except for my name. If my test scores up to that point had been artificially inflated, I would have failed those assignments hard and been totally surprised. But what actually happened was that I got As."
"Are you done talking?" Lynn asked.
"Not the first time I've been asked that," Don sighed.
"Kind of can't believe I just said it." Lynn sat down and ran a hand through her hair. "What competent scientist - what human being with any sense of awe at the world - would ever ask a talking turtle to shut up?"
"Now I feel invalidated and tokenized," Don informed her. "Fetishized, maybe."
"Is speaking difficult for you?" Lynn asked abruptly.
Don blinked. "Huh?"
"Mentally?" Lynn asked, without repeating the original question. "Physically?"
"Uh," Don said, demonstrating how articulate and eloquent he was. "I know what I want to say and it comes out. As you've noticed, sometimes I can't seem to make it stop."
"But your vocal tract -" Lynn said.
"Yeah, I know," Don interrupted. "Maybe someone should study how I'm doing it."
"We have an MRI machine here," Lynn said. "I want to put you in it and see what's happening neurologically when you do these tasks."
"That would have sounded totally creepy if I didn't understand science," Don said.
"I know," Lynn replied.
Before Don could point out that that sounded actually creepy, Lynn went on. "I need you to get out of my testing room now. I did plan extra time for Digit Span. I still gained some time against the allotted session because you were so fast at everything else. But then I lost time because you talk a lot. So now I'm behind schedule and losing valuable research opportunity for measuring Raphael's intelligence."
"He'll surprise you," Don said.
"Now you're biasing me," Lynn said. "And you're still in my testing room."
Without another word, Don went out. Lynn followed him, then led him to a nearby room full of office-style cubicles.
Don couldn't help himself. "Is this your way of offering me a job?" he asked.
"No one would want to work with you," Lynn replied. "You're an insufferable know-it-all." This was also criticism Donatello had heard before. "Please demonstrate same by sitting in one of these cubicles and taking this test of factual knowledge." And, from a folder she had grabbed on the way out of the testing room, she produced a thick packet.
"I would be glad to," Don replied.
Lynn handed him a pencil.
"It's impossible," said a loud voice from one of the cubicles. "I swear every one is a trick question."
"Thank you for that feedback, Raphael," Lynn said calmly. "Would you come with me?"
"Usually I'd say no," Raph said, as he emerged from one of the small workspaces. "Right now, though? Anything but this."
"You can leave the packet and come back to it later," Lynn told him.
"I'll do something with it later," Raph muttered.
Lynn wisely chose not to follow up on that comment. She merely gestured Raph back the way she and Don had just come.
After they left, Don settled into one of the empty cubicles and flipped quickly through the packet. It contained hundreds of multiple-choice questions about math, history, geography, literature, and science. It included obnoxiously detailed instructions for how to mark answer choices on the sheet provided. It was going to take hours. But it looked like fun.
"What did you get for number one?" a voice hissed from another cubicle.
"Nothing, yet," Don replied. "And I'm not helping you anyway. Where were you a minute ago?"
"Hiding," replied Michelangelo, who popped over the divider wall now to stare at his brother with pleading eyes. "Who would have guessed Lynn was so good at torturing people?"
"It's a standardized test," Don pointed out.
"I know!" Mike replied, in a strangled voice. "And it goes on forever! A, B, C, D! A, B, C, D! A, B, C - I'd take a hundred reps of Gojushiho Dai over this any day!"
"Then maybe higher education is not for you," Don said consolingly.
"Definitely not," Mike agreed. Then he smiled. "So what did you get for number one?"
"Sit down, Mikey," Don replied, and then he refused to respond to any more of his brother's attempts to get his attention.
It was a couple of hours later that Lynn returned Raphael and invited Michelangelo to accompany her to the testing room. Since the end of the day was approaching, she requested his completed testing packet. Mike gave it to her. Don doubted it was completed. Filled in with cartoon drawings, maybe. But not completed.
He was making good progress through the materials himself, but it seemed as though Raph had really meant it when he said he didn't intend to go back to his own packet. Instead he loitered over Don's shoulder, watching him fill in the bubbles on the answer sheet.
"Do your own work," Don snapped, raising an elbow to block Raph's view.
Raph was strangely quiet. He didn't go back to his own cubicle, but he also didn't ask Don to help him, nor did he complain about how stupid the test was.
"Where's Leo?" Don asked, taking a break from trying to remember what little he knew about nineteenth-century British novelists.
"Dunno," Raph replied. The answer obviously made him unhappy.
"If you're not going to take the test," Don said, "then go look for him."
Raph seemed startled by this suggestion. "You want me to take down the guard?"
"Hector?" Don blinked. The surly security officer had been standing outside the door of the cubicle room every time said door had been opened, leading Don to surmise that he had been standing there all day. He hadn't done anything other than observe the goings-on. "No, that seems unnecessary."
"Then what are you saying?" Raph asked.
Don marked an answer, then erased it and read the question two more times. "I think I said that you should go look for Leo."
Raph flung an arm towards the door. "But the guard!"
Don leaned slowly back, disengaging from the exam and switching his attention to Raphael's erratic behavior. "Raph," he said, "do you think Hector is going to try to stop you if you go look for Leo?"
"He said he would stop us if we tried to escape," Raph reminded him. "And I guess I'm not too good with words, but if I walked out of here to try to find where Leo is, I would call that escaping."
"I'm not great with words either," Don replied. "But I would call that asking a reasonable question."
Raph frowned. "You want me to ask Hector where Leo is? Is that before or after I o soto gari him?"
"You know what?" Don said, as he pushed back from the cubicle's little built-in desk. "On the assumption that o soto gari is a form of violence, I will go ask Hector where Leo is."
Raph clearly felt that this was a dangerous task that Don could not handle alone, so he stuck close behind as Don opened the door and approached the guard. "Hey, Hector," Don said. "Do you know where Leonardo is?"
"Sure," Hector said, as he conspicuously made no move to attack or restrain the two mutants. "Funny story. The whitecoats were all patting themselves on the back last night because usually scientists study animal intelligence by making animals do things that humans think are important, but they had decided that they were going to ask you what you think is important. This morning they asked Leonardo what he thought was important, and he said he would show them, but he needed a big empty space. So they've been in the robotics testing room all day."
"He's doing kata enbu without me?" Raph bellowed. He raised his hands, clearly suppressing the urge to grab Hector by his shirtfront and shake him. "Where's the robotics testing room?"
"You want to go there?" Hector asked. His eyes flicked down and up, noting Raphael's aggressive move, but still he didn't act as though he intended to get into an altercation with the mutants. "I can take you."
"Take me right now!" Raph demanded.
"And then can you bring me some food?" Don asked. "I think I broke Lynn a little and she forgot about lunch."
Hector nodded. "You got it," he said.
Don put a hand on Raph's arm, just for a moment, just to remind him to keep it together and not overreact. Then he went back to wrestling with difficult questions about famous books in history.
He was interpreting maps of fictional places and finishing a sandwich when Lynn and Mike returned from the other room. "Raphael, have you finished the exam?" Lynn asked, over the three-quarter walls of the cubicles.
"Nope," Don said. "He ditched." He scribbled a note in the margin of the testing packet, then looked up. "He ran off to do whatever Leo is doing."
Lynn sighed. "Did he finish any more of the questions?"
"Not a one," Don told her.
"Then I'll have to score it as it is," Lynn said. "If he continues tomorrow, we won't know whether he did any studying overnight."
"Raphael is not going to do any studying overnight," Don said. "But I'm saying that just to defend his honor, which I understand is important to him, and which I subsequently understand your team wants to learn about. I completely agree that letting him continue the test tomorrow would invalidate the results."
"So glad you're on board with the research plan," Lynn said, as she walked down the line of cubicles to collect Raphael's packet. "By the way, what was that list of ten words I asked you to look at earlier?"
A simple mental flick, and Don had it. "Colt, Hunt, Otis, Bell, Westinghouse, Morse, Goodyear, McCormick, Edison, Tesla."
Lynn circled around the other side of the cluster of cubicles, looking at a page in a folder she had brought with her, her face a picture of shock. "How did you do that?" she asked in a thin voice. When Don only shrugged, she pressed, "Are you one of those memory wizards? You've trained yourself to retain information this way?"
"No," Don said. "I've just always been able to do it."
Lynn just frowned at him, clearly trying to figure out the trick. "I feel like I shouldn't even bother asking the planned follow-up question, but do you know how these ten words are related?"
"They're the names of famous inventors," Don replied. "Would you like me to tell you what each of them went down in history for?"
"Not really," Lynn said.
"Yeah, me neither," Mike said. "When can we go home?" He looked at the remains of Donatello's meal. "Why didn't I get applesauce?"
Don smirked. "You don't finish your test, you don't get dessert."
"Have you finished?" Lynn asked, which was an entirely fair question. Don colored a little.
"Give me five more minutes," he said.
"I wouldn't," Lynn said, "because I don't get paid for overtime. But since I'm living here anyway, I guess it doesn't matter."
Don looked around the room, but there hadn't been a clock all day, and there wasn't one now. "It's five?" he asked in surprise.
"A little after," Lynn said. "And I'm wiped. Giving an IQ test is harder than it looks."
If that was true, Don hadn't known it. "Why don't you find Leo and Raph and arrange our ride home?" he suggested. "By the time you do that, I'll be done with the test."
"I don't take orders from you," Lynn replied. "But you propose a reasonable course of action and it's hard for me to say no." And so saying, she exited the room, leaving Don alone with Mike.
"Dude," Mike began, as he fidgeted with his own hands, "this is kind of awkward to say. But you talk to her the way you talk to your mom."
"Don't be gross," Don said. "I talk to everyone that way."
Mike didn't seem sure that he agreed with this, but he kept quiet while Don finished the last few pages of the test. When he was done, he stacked the papers neatly and left them facedown on the desk.
"How did you do?" Mike asked.
"I don't know," Don replied. "It's not a self-scoring exam."
"I mean on the other one," Mike said.
Don hesitated. "Let's all talk about it tonight," he said. "I'm ready to get out of here," he added, in a low voice. "Let's find our coats while Lynn is finding Leo and Raph."
Another quick word to Hector, and it didn't take long for the guard to locate everything the four mutants had left scattered around the lab during the day. Don and Mike had hardly sorted out the pile when Leo and Raph came down the hallway, looking frustrated with Lynn and with each other.
"It's not about physical skill," Leo was insisting. "It's about discipline, commitment, and self-mastery."
"You're wrong," Raph told him. "It's about testing yourself against the other guy. Who wins? Not the guy with more commitment."
"Yes the guy with more commitment," Leo replied. "The guy with less commitment is never going to have the superior skills."
"Bullshit," Raph said. "Commitment doesn't win against strength and talent."
"I beat you all the time," Leo pointed out.
"I beat both of you," Mike put in, as Raph turned an unusual shade of purple, "and nobody's ever said I'm committed to anything other than pizza and cartoons."
"Yes, okay," Leo conceded. "Strength and talent are worth a lot. But in the long run, technique beats both of them, and anyone who isn't completely committed to the art will never become hanshi."
"How would you define that word?" Lynn asked.
Leo frowned. "Talent?"
"No, hanshi," Lynn said.
Leo scratched his head, and looked to his brothers with furrowed brow. "What is hanshi?" he asked, in Japanese.
Mike and Raph seemed similarly unsure. They tested some potential definitions in a kind of collaborative lexicographical project, and finally Leo said, "An expert. A person who has achieved the highest possible level of skill."
"See," Lynn said, "this is why I want you to take the test in… whatever language that is."
"Wait, what?" Don asked.
"Unless I'm missing something," Lynn told him, "you're a monolingual native English speaker, as weird as that is to say about someone who shouldn't be able to speak at all. The point is -" She tilted her head towards the other three Turtles. "- they're not. And I'm certain their scores suffered for it."
"I would think so too," Don agreed, ignoring the way his brothers were exchanging glances and clearly communicating something amongst themselves. "But we'll talk about it later."
"That's fine," Lynn said, as she turned to go. "Just - try to be on time tomorrow, would you? Everything I've learned so far is only raising more questions, and I've got a research plan a mile long."
"Sure," Don said, and then Lynn was striding off towards wherever she would be spending the night.
"Is that it?" Mike asked after a moment. "We made it through day one of pretending we have real jobs?"
"We still have to get home," Raph reminded him. He raised a brow at Hector. "You driving?"
"For all I know," Hector said, "you guys can drive."
"Never have before," Raph said, and the wicked grin that anyone who knew him might have expected to appear on his face at that moment didn't quite materialize. "But apparently I got a capacity to learn."
"Yeah, well, do it when I'm not in the vehicle," Hector replied, and he gestured them all towards the garage.
"You could have given us the keys," Don said, after they had all piled into the back of another van, just to probe what else Stockman's employees might be willing to do for them.
Hector glanced in the rearview mirror, making sure his passengers had all put their seatbelts on, and then started the engine. "Not a chance."
"We're very responsible," Mike said. He folded his hands in his lap, the picture of innocence. "Some of us, at least."
"Donnie, you're not expecting us to learn how to drive, are you?" Leo asked.
"Do you know anyone who drives?" Don replied. "We live in New York."
"April drives," Raph pointed out.
Don flushed a little, but he was pretty sure no one could see him in the strobing streetlights. "I don't have to learn everything April knows."
"Are you going to learn Hamato Japanese, though?" Mike asked quietly. "Cuz… I don't want anybody else trying to translate that test for us."
Don sighed, settling deeper into his coat. "We think about, Little," was all he said.
Before long, they were hurrying across the icy sidewalk, Hector's admonishment to be ready at eight o'clock sharp tomorrow ringing in the cold air behind them. Up the stairs, and then a watchful huddle in front of the apartment door, as Don fumbled for the keys.
Inside, all seemed secure. The place was more or less trashed, but that was how they had left it. They spread out slowly, turning lights on, refamiliarizing themselves with the space they had really only spent a few hours in so far.
"Mike," Leo said, when they had all congregated back in the living room. "Would you start dinner?"
It wound up being a family affair. Nobody seemed to want to do anything other than hover in the warm dampness as Mike started steaming gyoza. Since they were all standing around anyway, Mike put them to work mincing vegetables and mixing seasonings as he made the pastry shells, a task which everyone seemed to agree no one else should be trusted with.
"Okay," Don said, when the silence had gotten too tense. "I got 158."
"No fucking way," Raph snapped immediately.
"Totally fucking way," Mike replied, equally quickly. "Our bro is a mega-brain, dudes. Don't be jealous. Donnie, high-three," he added, and they exchanged a celebratory gesture, Don's skinny hand against Mike's thickly-corded one.
"102," Mike said, when he had gone back to kneading the dough. "Plus strength, talent, charm, and incredible good looks. I'm just above average at everything."
Raph put down his measuring spoon. "109," he said, and seemed to almost hold his breath.
"Way to go, Raph," Don said, flashing his brother a genuine smile. "See, I told you."
"… Fearless?" Mike prompted, when Leo remained absorbed in chopping cabbage, a task which shouldn't have required very much of his mental energies.
"105," Leo said abruptly, as he scooped up the cutting board. "Where do you want this?"
Mike gestured towards an oversized bowl near his elbow, but Raph was not distracted by Leo's attempt to change the subject. "For real?" he said. "I'm the smartest?"
Don cleared his throat in a questioning kind of way.
"I mean, aside from Egghead over there," Raph added. "He don't count."
"Thanks," Don mumbled.
"It's not really important," Leo said. "We all have our own abilities. And we're not really sure how accurate that test is. This doesn't change anything."
"Yeah, sure," Raph said. He dumped his bowlful of seasonings into the larger bowl, a little less carefully than he could have. "Strength, talent, high IQ score… anything I have is just not that important."
"Raph -" Leo said.
"No, I read you, Leo," Raph said loudly. "Call me when it's done, Mikey." And he stomped out to the living room, where he commenced to make sounds that Don had learned to associate with Raphael's personal physical training regimen.
"Guess it's official," Mike said morosely, as he began to scoop the vegetables and seasonings into the little circles of dough. "I'm the dumb one. It was nice to not know for sure whether it was me or Raph."
"All of you knock it off," Don said. "That test measures your intelligence only under a certain narrow definition of the concept. Plus, it's not unusual for scores to slide around by ten points or so, just depending on testing conditions and how on-the-ball you are that day. So the three of you are close enough together that your rankings - if you even want to call them that - could be completely different the next time you get tested."
"Easy for you to say," Mike replied. "You beat Raph by -" His beak moved silently as he worked out the numbers. "Like, sixty points."
"Forty-nine," Don corrected, without even thinking about it. Mike's face fell as soon as the words were out of his mouth, and he quickly added, "But mental math ability is a lousy predictor of success in life. And it doesn't make you any friends."
"Taste this," Mike said, and poked a little bundle of seasoned cabbage into Don's mouth.
"See," Don said, when he was done chewing, "now that is a talent that people care about."
Mike smiled, and went back to putting neat little fork marks along the edges of his dumplings.
"But how did you do so well on the test?" Leo asked. He was leaning against the wall next to the tiny kitchen window, watching the darkened street. "Are you really just that brilliant?"
"No," Don said. "This is what I was trying to tell you last night, before I got sidetracked by showing you -"
"I really don't need to hear about that again," Leo interrupted quickly.
"Agreed," Mike added.
"As I was saying," Don said, "I had meant to tell you guys why I know about IQ tests. But I didn't quite get to it." He drew a breath, savoring the spicy steam that was coming out of the pot as Mikey dropped the dumplings in. "The truth is, I've been taking that test - or some version of it - at least once a year since I was five or six. Over time, you get better at it." He settled back against the counter. "I told you this morning that a lot of the questions are designed to distract you with extraneous information. What I didn't tell you, because in a lot of ways the test really is more accurate when you don't know any of its tricks, is that it's scored partly based on how quickly you finish it. And I finish fast partly because I've gotten really good at ignoring the irrelevant garbage."
"Wait," Leo said. His brow furrowed again as he struggled to winnow out the key points of what he had just heard. With practice, he would get really good at those trick questions. Don was sure of it. "So our scores are more accurate than yours?"
"No," Don said. "Our scores are inaccurate in different ways." He paused there, waiting to see whether Mike or Leo would figure it out. His brothers were smart. No test score was going to make him think otherwise.
"Your score is higher than it should be," Mike said slowly, as he worked through the logic, "because you're basically cheating on the test from having seen the questions so many times before. And our scores are lower than they should be because our English sucks. So we should really all be scoring, like, 130." He looked up, waiting for Don to finish interpreting this for him.
"Exactly," Don said, "which would put all of us right at the entry point to the gifted range."
"Wow," Mike said, his eyes wide. "Nobody has ever called me gifted. Not in the brains department, anyway."
"But how did you all do on that other test?" Leo asked.
"Bro," Mike said, crossing his arms. "You skipped town on that before anybody even mentioned it. How do you know what kind of torture I was suffering all day?"
"Because Raph told me when he decided to skip out also," Leo replied.
"Yeah," Mike said, "and then the two of you went and did kata enbu without me. Way to leave a bro out."
"How do you know what Leo was doing all day?" Don asked in puzzlement.
"Well, duh," Mike said. "I'm gifted."
Don wasn't sure how Mike had boomeranged so quickly from lamenting his lowest-in-the-family IQ score to casually mentioning his status as an atypically intelligent individual, but Leo at least had not lost sight of where he had been trying to steer the conversation.
"Your scores on the other test?" he asked pointedly.
"Don't know," Mike said. "They'll tell us tomorrow, maybe."
"They'll tell me tomorrow," Don said. "Seeing as I'm the only one who bothered to finish it. The discipline is weak in these two, Leo," he said, making a gesture that encompassed Michelangelo, as well as Raphael in the other room.
"The test was stupid," Mike shot back. "I mean, I'm basically a genius, but I didn't know any of the answers, so it must have been the test that was stupid."
Leo raised a brow at his long-absent brother. "Donatello? Explain."
"It was an academic test," Don replied. "My better performance on it reveals that I've had access to a formal education and you haven't, a fact we all knew already."
Leo ran a hand over his head. "Don," he said, "what does it mean? How does this affect… everything?"
Don sobered, and he could see that Mike was listening closely as he pulled the gyoza out of the pot. "In the short term, it proves that all of us have intelligence on par with an average human. That's crucial. In the long term, I think it underscores that none of us are prepared to enter the workforce. We need more education first. I need to learn how to write an acceptable sentence, and you three need to study like hell. If you want to get into a decent college, you'll need to take - and pass - a test like the one you all found excuses to avoid completing today. But," he added, as Mike passed him a plate, "I hear that one of you is disciplined and one has a capacity to learn, so the studying shouldn't be a problem."
"Hey," Mike said, as he dished out the rest of the dumplings. "What about me?"
"Keep cooking like this," Don said, around a mouthful of gyoza, "and maybe nobody will care whether you know what Wilson's Fourteen Points were about."
"It was a framework for the peace negotiations at the end of World War I," Leo said, as though this were a basic fact that he would have expected anyone to know.
"Well," Don said, "then maybe you should have taken that test today, because it seems you would have done very well on it."
"Raph!" Leo yelled, which was in no way a response to this suggestion. "Food!"
"Anyway," Don said, when they had all sated themselves on Japanese home cooking, "I'm going to call my mom. Because," he went on, "before you say anything, our other options would appear to include running out of food in about a week, strolling into a local grocery store by ourselves, or reverting to your former lifestyle of ninja scavenging. I'm vetoing that last one, and I'm guessing I'm not going to win a majority vote for the other two."
"Right," Leo said, with surprising speed. "Call your mom. She can bring groceries for us."
"Not what I'm suggesting," Don replied.
"Then what are you getting at?" Raph asked suspiciously.
"What I'm saying," Don said, "is that I am going to ask my mom, a human who took care of me every single day from before I can remember right up to when you three kidnapped me from my room in the middle of the night, to come live in our apartment, and go to the grocery store with us, and generally teach us how to be functioning human analogues."
"Where is she going to sleep?" Leo asked, in his practical-minded way.
"I'm getting demoted to the floor," Don replied evenly. When his brothers reacted to this pronouncement in disbelief, he said, "That's how serious I am about this. If commitment wins," he sighed, as he put his plate in the sink, "I am going to be the best damn human who ever lived."