After Christmas break, Wanda noticed something about Tad.
He apparently could read.
He was playing with alphabet blocks, and he had them arranged to spell FROG.
Nah . . . Wanda thought, and then watched as he spelled ADEE. His word for "auntie".
How can he know, at his age, what letters and words mean? I didn't learn to read till I was five. He's only a year old!
"How did you learn to do that?" she asked him.
Tad looked up. "Essmy 'Eet."
"What?"
"Bih Bihd."
"Oh, 'Sesame Street.'" Wanda looked down at another set of blocks which said CAT.
"Ahdee lahk?"
"Uh . . . yeah," she said. She was amazed at his verbal ability and his thinking skills, and she wondered if anyone else had noticed . . .
"Do you think," she asked Mystique later, "we could get Tad's I. Q. tested?"
Mystique looked at her in surprise. "Why would you want to do that?"
"Because he can spell."
"Tad? You've got to be kidding!" The older woman laughed. "He's fifteen months old at best! He doesn't understand what letters are!"
"He spelled CAT and FROG earlier."
"He was just copying something he saw on TV! There's no way he could spell on his own, at his age!"
"I'm telling you, I saw—"
"Look." Mystique softened her tone a bit. "I love Tad as much as you do, and I'd be really proud of him if he could spell, but the fact is, he's just too young. You just happened to come along at the right time and see him arrange the blocks so that they spelled a word."
"How did you know he did it with the blocks?"
Mystique raised her eyebrows. "Are you saying he wrote it on a piece of paper?"
"You've seen him do it too, haven't you?"
"I've seen him playing with the blocks," Mystique said. "I have noticed how quickly he picks up things. But right now, Wanda, if I were you, I'd be less concerned about Tad's education than your own."
Wanda gaped. She'd almost forgotten that she was due to start school the Monday after New Year's. "Oh, yeah."
"You might want to start reviewing—"Mystique stopped in mid-sentence when she saw Tad reading one of Wanda's textbooks.
He can't be that smart, can he?
Then she noticed he had it upside-down. "Wha dis, Ahdee Babah?" he asked, pointing at a picture of a dinosaur.
"That's a . . . a . . . I used to know all their names. Is Stegosaurus the one with the horns?"
"No, that's a Triceratops," Mystique said.
"Tahsa'tops," Tad repeated.
"Very good!" Wanda pointed to one of the others. "What's that one?"
"T'anosa'us," Tad said.
Mystique looked at the caption under the picture (Wanda had turned the book right-side up): Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Suddenly the idea of getting Tad an IQ test was making more and more sense. The problem was where to get a test for a child this young.
Then it came to her . . .
"Ahgoo Shinee," Tad said the first time he saw Charles Xavier.
"Tad!" Kitty ran up and covered Tad's mouth. "That's not a nice thing to call the Professor!"
"It's all right, Kitty," Xavier said. "I know Tad doesn't mean anything bad."
"Fessor," Tad said, and everyone smiled at him.
"Can you really spell words, Tad?"
Tad nodded.
"Well, would you like to show me?" Xavier handed Tad several alphabet blocks and waited to see what he would do.
Tad took five blocks and turned them over, looking for the letters he needed. Then he picked up three more blocks and looked at those. Then he put some of the blocks down, and shoved the rest away. With the blocks he still had, he spelled out MISEKE.
"What's that supposed to be?" Rogue asked.
"It looks random to me," said Evan.
"Mystique. He's trying to spell Mystique," Wanda said. "He spells phonetically."
"Just like you," Pietro teased her. "Bet you get put in the stupid classes."
"Shut up, you—"
"Am I late?" A woman in an aqua lab coat joined them. Tad looked up at her.
"Hi," he said.
"So this is Tad, is it? Hi, Tad. I'm Doctor McNeil, but you can call me Susana."
"S'ana," Tad said. "Da'ta S'ana."
Dr. McNeil saw the blocks and marveled at Tad's dexterity. She also noticed that he was now spelling out SSANA.
"How long has he been able to do that?" she asked Mystique.
"As far as I know, a few days."
"What's Ibbit?"
"What?" Mystique looked down and saw that Tad had rearranged the blocks again. "Oh, that's his stuffed frog, Ribbit."
Tad, hearing Ribbit's name, took him out and began "talking" to him.
"Charles told me you haven't been able to locate the parents," Dr. McNeil said.
"Personally," Todd said, "I don't care if he falls off the edge of the Earth. He dumped me when I was little, and now he's done the same thing to Tad." He looked up into Susana's warm brown eyes. "How can anyone do that? To their own kid?"
"I don't know," she said. "Well, why don't we get started? I'll just need a few minutes alone with Tad . . ."
"I have an office set up for you," Xavier told her, and he led the way.
As he closed the door, Logan shook his head. "IQ tests for babies. What's next, trigonometry for dogs?"
"Vhy can't ve stay and vatch?" Kurt asked.
"It's easier for Dr. McNeil to run the tests without outside observation," Jean said. "Tad might feel pressured to perform for us if we stayed. Little kids love showing off what they can do . . ."
At first, Susana just let Tad play with the blocks. She was fascinated by his ability at such a young age—her own nephew, who was three and a half, liked blocks, but he didn't know what the letters on them meant.
Tad's spelling, as Wanda had observed, was phonetic; he spelled "baby" as BABEE, and "Toad" as TODE. But Susana knew several people with doctoral degrees who couldn't spell to save their lives.
"Can you spell your name?" she asked him.
Tad picked up the blocks again, scrutinized each one, and then arranged them to spell TAD. Then he took the remaining blocks and spelled FORG BABEE.
"What's that mean, Tad?"
"Og babee. Me," he said proudly.
"Okay . . ." She made a note to ask about that later.
There were a few more things she had to test before they were done, but for now it was more important to watch Tad playing spontaneously with whatever toys happened to be around.
Tad took Ribbit and bounced him up and down, singing something without any general meaning. Dr. McNeil found it interesting that Tad was learning to vocalize at such a young age. Children under two usually couldn't do that; they were limited to a few simple words like "mama" and "dada", which made her realize that she had yet to hear him use either word.
She took a series of pictures out of her briefcase. The picture-story game usually worked better with older children, but Tad seemed to be quite capable of playing along.
"Okay, Tad, I'm going to show you some pictures of people now."
Tad put Ribbit down and looked up at her.
"I want you to tell me what you think the people in the pictures are doing. Can you do that for me?"
Tad nodded and picked up the first picture. "Ahdee swing me," he said. "Ahgoo 'Ance p'ay ball."
She looked down at the picture. "These people remind you of your family?"
"Mmm-hmmm." He pointed to the next picture in the series, which was of two people petting a dog in the park. "Ahdee Babah . . . Ahgoo P'etwo." A short pause. "Buh dat no' Mei."
"Mei?"
"Mei. Kiddee."
"Oh. No, that's a doggie. You don't have a doggie?"
"Uh uh." Tad said. "Jus' Mei."
"Okay, one more." Three would be enough, she thought. She had a pretty good idea already of how Tad's mind worked. "What's going on in this one?"
Tad looked at it and said, "Dat mah big b'udder, 'Od. An' Aht Giggy, an' Ahgoo Kuht, an' Ahdee 'Ogue. We p'ay in pa'k."
"And who's this?" She pointed to the figure of a little girl.
"Don' know."
"What about her?" She pointed to the mother figure.
Tad thought about it for a minute, then said, "Aht Jeen."
"Who's that?"
"He'p Ahgoo 'Fessor at schoo'."
"I see." Dr. McNeil was impressed. "Well, Tad, I think we can go back now."
"Bahk?"
"Go back to your brother and the rest of the family, and tell them how smart you are."
Tad beamed. "Me smaht 'og babee."
When Toad saw his baby brother again, he ran over and hugged him. "Hey, Tad, how'd it go?"
"S'ana nahce," Tad said.
"That's good. So," he asked the psychologist, "how smart is he?"
"His memory is unbelievable, as is his vocabulary. He communicates like a three- or four-year-old. I'd say he's about that level in intelligence. And his reading is light-years ahead of his age group."
Tad hugged Ribbit. "Hear dat, 'Ibbit? Me smaht!"
"The one thing that bothered me," Dr. McNeil went on, "is that I haven't once heard him use the words 'Mama' or 'Dada'."
"That's because he's never met them," Mystique said. "We've been trying to find them ever since he was left with us, but it's as if they just disappeared."
"No big loss," Toad said.
Fred asked, "Did we do something to make Tad really smart?"
"Actually, Fred, listening to adult conversation seems to have helped Tad learn grown-up words. He doesn't have enough teeth to pronounce them correctly right now, but once they come in, he'll be speaking with the same proficiency as a six-year-old."
"Better, since most six-year-olds don't have their front teeth," said Kitty, who had been missing hers in her first-grade photo.
Mystique looked at Tad with affection and said, "You're getting to be quite a smart boy, you know that?"
"Smaht 'og!" Tad said with delight.
Dr. McNeil looked at Toad and asked, "Out of curiosity, where did your brother get the nickname 'Frog Baby'?"
"It's a long story, Doc. Remember when the Weekly World News had that cover story about the frog baby in Kansas?"
"That black-and-white supermarket tabloid?"
"Yeah. Anyhow, we saw that the same day Tad got dumped onus. He looked kind of like the baby in the paper, so we started calling him Frog Baby. He kinda likes it, actually."
"Tad's short for Tadpole," Fred added. "I named him that."
Tad looked at Dr. McNeil and offered her Ribbit to hold. "Ibbit lubboo."
"Aw, that's nice. Thank you, Ribbit." She stroked the plush frog and moved its flippers back and forth. "Maybe Ribbit and I could meet again next week."
Tad looked at Ribbit, who "said" "Ibbit ibbit."
"Ibbit lahke," he said.
"What about you? What do you think?"
"Me wan'," Tad replied, with no hesitation whatsoever.
"Okay then," Dr. McNeil said. Then she looked at Todd. "Uh, if that's okay with you."
"Sure it's okay!" Todd felt like he'd found a new friend. If she helped Tad, maybe . . . maybe she could help him too.
After Dr. McNeil had gone, Kitty decided to do something nice for her on her next visit. She'd bake some cookies.
Unfortunately Kitty did not quite have the knack of cooking down yet, and most of her creations tended to be either hard as rocks or completely inedible, or both. Most of the X-Men were still recovering from her last batch of muffins—she'd followed the directions exactly, but failed to note the expiration date on the carton of eggs.
That wouldn't happen this time, she vowed. She'd personally check every single ingredient to make sure it was okay before she even thought of using it. It wasn't until the cookies were in the oven that she remembered to put the milk away. It had been sitting out on the counter since breakfast—and it was now three in the afternoon.
Oh, well. Milk couldn't go bad that fast, could it?
"Ohhhhhhh . . ."
Kurt had never felt this bad in his life. His insides felt like they were on fire. He was alternately hot and cold all over, and his head was pounding so bad he couldn't keep his eyes open.
"That's the last tahme we let Kitty cook anything," Rogue groaned. She wasn't quite as bad off as Kurt, who'd eaten nearly half the cookies on his own, but at least she wasn't stuck in the bathroom like Evan, or too weak to get out of bed like Jean and Scott. "If she evah goes near the kitchen again, Ah'll break both her arms!"
The professor, who'd had half a cookie to be polite, had a bad headache and an upset stomach. He called Kitty to his office and told her, "Kitty, I admire your persistence in learning to bake, but you have to be responsible as well. Food poisoning is very serious, and could even have killed someone."
Kitty's eyes widened. She hadn't realized that her cooking mishaps could actually be deadly. "I thought they were, like, kidding about that."
"This is no joke. I'll have to ask you to refrain from using the kitchen for a few weeks. Two weeks should do, I think; a month would be excessive—"
Two weeks? Kitty thought, in a panic. But what if no one's home and I need something to eat? What do I do then?
"An exception can be made in an emergency," Xavier said. "But for the most part, you're to stay away from the stove."
Dejected, Kitty sighed, feeling as if she were being sent to jail. "Okay, Professor."
Xavier hated to ban Kitty from something she tried so hard at, but the safety of the other students had to be taken into account.
The phone rang, just as Xavier was about to leave the office. "Hello?"
The voice on the other end said, "Professor, I'm sorry, but I'll be a little late for our appointment . . ."
"Dr. Hill, our appointment isn't until tomorrow—"
"We'll be there in half an hour," she said, as if she hadn't heard, and hung up.
Great. Maybe he could call her back and cancel. But her home phone was picked up by the machine, and he didn't have her cell number. It was probably in Lindsay's file—
Then the doorbell rang.
"Coming!" he called out. He rolled past the ailing students and pushed the button that automatically opened the door.
"Hi, Ahgoo 'Fessor!" Tad called out. He was riding on Todd's hip, but as soon as they got in the door, he jumped down.
Xavier groaned. He'd forgotten today was Tad's session with Dr. McNeil. Another person he'd have to get in touch with. Luckily he had her on speed dial. He turned to go back to his office and call her . . .
. . . and she pulled into the driveway.
"Hi, Tad!" she called out as she emerged from the Lexus. "Hello, Charles."
"Hi, S'ana," Tad said.
"I'm afraid this isn't a good time," Xavier said. "We're having a bit of a household crisis at the moment."
"Crisis?"
"I need another bucket!" Kitty called out. There was a horrible noise from the common room. "Make that two buckets!" Another horrible noise. "And a mop!"
"She cooked again, didn't she?" Todd asked. "She tried to make Lance a special birthday dinner once, ended up putting him in the hospital."
"Oh dear," said Dr. McNeil. "Maybe I should come back another time."
"No!" Tad clung to her leg. "Stay!"
"PROFESSOR!" Kitty screamed. "KURT JUST BARFED ALL OVER THE FLOOR!"
"If you'll excuse me," Xavier said.
"Of course. We'll just wait in here, won't we, Tad?"
Tad looked up at her. "Ibbit say hi. No' come cause bein' wathed."
"Oh, I see."
"He co' nes' tahme."
"Okay. I can't wait to see him."
At that moment, Dr. Hill and her children finally made it, though Lindsay was insisting she had the wrong day.
"Mom," she said, "it's tomorrow! It's Thursday I go, not Wednesday!"
"It's on my day planner."
"You put it on the wrong page by mistake! Can't we just come back tomorrow?"
"I hate this place," Robbie moaned.
"Shut up!" Lindsay told him.
"Don't say 'shut up' to your brother." Dr. Hill was trying to put her keys away with one hand and ring the bell with the other.
"Why did he have to come?"
"Because I can't leave him home by himself!" Keys away, she pressed the doorbell button.
The door swung open by itself, which Robbie always thought was cool and Lindsay was beginning to get a bit bored with. But no one was there.
"Hello?" Dr. Hill called out, as she led the kids inside. "Professor? Anyone here?"
No one answered.
She stepped inside, and headed towards the Professor's office. Maybe he was busy and hadn't heard her.
Tad poked his head out to see what the commotion was.
As soon as Dr. Hill saw this little person . . . she knew him. She hadn't seen him in almost a year, but she knew him.
"My baby!"
Tad looked up at her with a "huh?" expression.
Todd came looking for Tad and found him staring back at this strange woman who had tears in her eyes. "Hi, who're you?"
"Who are you?"
Susana came out to see what was going on. "Oh, hello," she said. "If you're looking for Charles, he'll be back in a moment."
"Is this your baby?" Dr. Hill asked.
"No, he's my baby brother," Todd said.
Lindsay looked at him funny. "He can't be your baby brother," she said. "Mom says he's our baby brother."
"Yeah, well, who are—" He took a closer look and recognized her. "You're that kid we were supposed to recruit a few months ago!"
"Who's we?"
Xavier came back and found the group in utter chaos. Questions and accusations were flying back and forth like tennis balls at the U.S. Open. "Everyone please settle down!" he shouted over the melee. This was making his headache worse. "If you'll all just step into my office, we can sort this out."
"PROFESSOR!" Kitty yelled at the top of her lungs. "NOW ROGUE'S BARFING ALL OVER THE PLACE!"
"Is this a bad time?" Dr. Hill asked.
Xavier rolled his eyes. "If you'll all just have a seat," he said, "I'll be with you as soon as I've cleaned up the vomit."
