Yes, he was helping out at the houses, but when it came to chores around their own place, Atik had a habit of squirming out of them, and too often his mother let him.
Silea shrugged. “I can do the washing up. Or I can take him myself.”
“No driving,” said Ch’ayña, wagging a finger. “Not with that arm.”
“You’ll take him, then?”
Ch’ayña shrugged an assent and looked over at Atik. “Get something for yourself, at least. Some of that chicken. A good hunk of bread.”
Atik went to the counter and opened up the chicken container.
“Rip off a leg,” said Ch’ayña. “Take the other leg too. Both legs.”
Atik worked the drumsticks from Tiago’s bird, tore off some bread, used a knife to cut himself a wedge of lettuce. He put it all in a plastic square from the drainer.
“Wash your hands,” Ch’ayña ordered him. “And get some paper towel.” He obeyed. “Now get in the truck.” She kissed Silea on her forehead and followed Atik out.
“Is Kyler going to the test?” she asked her grandson. The gravel crunched beneath them in the dark.
Atik sniffed but didn’t respond.
“Does he have a ride to the school? We could drive him.”
“He’s not going.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not his strength, Awicha.”
They reached the truck. She boosted herself up onto the bench and started the engine, letting it cough a few times before releasing the brake and edging down the row.
“Is it a numbers test?”
In the truck, when it was just the two of them, they spoke only Quechua. Silea didn’t like it, wanting him to sharpen his English, but that was her problem.
“It’s an everything test,” he said.
“Eh?”
“Math. Shapes. Words. Everything.”
The truck rumbled out onto the highway. “Well, you’ll get an A for certain,” she said. In Peru they had number grades, but in the schools up here it was all letters. “My wawa always gets an A.”
“The test isn’t for a grade.”
“No?”
“It’s for a school.” Atik bent over the supper in his lap and took a bite of chicken. “A new school in Crystal,” he said around his food. “The teachers are talking about it all the time. If you beat the test, you might get in.”
She was convinced she’d misheard him. “Thirty-five miles, just for school?”
“Tiago said there’ll be a bus.”
“What does Tiago know?”
“He looked it up.”
“What about Kyler?”
He laughed shortly and a tiny piece of bread flew from his mouth. “He could never get in.”
Ch’ayña looked back at the road, and while Atik ate she told him a story. There’d been a boy she fancied back in Huánuco, before she’d met Atik’s jatunpapa. The boy’s father was a zinc miner, but the boy wanted to be in tourism. He even went to school for it in Lima. So glamorous, he was like a man you’d see on television. But when he came back to the village, he had changed. He acted like a mine boss, haughty and cruel. He would hardly glance at Ch’ayña anymore, and when he did, he looked down at her as if from the peak of Gagamachay.
“You have a good school now, Atikcha,” she told him, “and your teachers like you. Listen. You don’t want to be like this man, this false, newborn Limeño.”
Atik crunched his lettuce like a little rabbit. “It’s not that kind of school. It’s not for tourism, or like that.”
“What kind of school is it, then? What sort of kids will go there?”
He crunched some more, thinking about it. Finally he swallowed and answered: “Crystal kids,” he said, in English.
TWENTY
BECK
COGPRO TEST REGISTRATION. The printed sign hung from a cafeteria table in the lobby of Donnelly Elementary School. Three signs in a smaller font indicated where to stand, depending on the first letter of your child’s last name: A–H, I–P, or Q–Z. The line was only four deep at Q–Z, so Beck figured he’d reach the front inside of two minutes. Meanwhile Aidan hobbled over to a display case filled with trophies, plaques, and other memorabilia archiving the history of Donnelly. Charlie followed him.
Beck glanced at the guys and did a double take. The twins were staring up at a framed newspaper spread high on the lobby wall, a Crystal Register from last spring featuring a banner headline:
THE EMMAS EMCEE!
Below it appeared a huge color photo of Emma Holland-Quinn and Emma Zellar, leaning in with their ponytailed heads touching. They looked for all the world like conjoined twins, microphones clutched to their mouths, running the end-of-the-year talent show. He remembered Azra saying something about that night, how she’d taken the boys because they had wanted to see their friends onstage. When she’d dropped them off afterward, she had been crying and he hadn’t understood why. Next morning, boom! The Emmas on the front page of the city paper.
Cute girls. Beck had known them since they were babies, maybe six, seven months. He hadn’t seen them since Thanksgiving and they already looked older than they did in the newspaper shot from just a few months before.
Time. Shit.
“Sir, your child’s name?”
A haggard teacher sat planted behind a box of file folders. “Names, actually,” he said. “Charlie and Aidan Unsworth-Chaudhury.”
“That’s quite a mouthful.”
He stared at her.
“And their grades?”
“Solid-B students, like their dad.”
She looked unamused.
“Fifth grade. They go to St. Bridget’s,” he added unnecessarily.
A mom standing in the next line whipped her head around and gave him a lofty glare. Beck smirked, ignored her. To some parents around here, sending your kids to private school made you worse than a child molester. The teacher slid a short stack of forms across the table. Three for each kid, standard boilerplate about disclosure, confidentiality, reporting of test results. None of which Beck bothered to read as he scribbled his signature and filled in his email address.
“So when do we find out if they’re in?” Beck handed her the forms.
She clipped the papers together and tucked them back inside their folders. “Oh, this is just the first cut,” she said.
“Seriously?”
“This is the CogPro. The Cognitive Proficiency test, for the initial round.”
“This isn’t the actual admissions test?”
“It’s a process, sir.” She leaned to the side and looked at the growing line behind him. “Once the results come in, there will be portfolio review, perhaps interviews. Now if you wouldn’t mind stepping aside—”
“Interviews? But Crystal Academy’s a public school. You can’t have an interview to get into a public school.”
“It will all be covered in the orientation sessions.”
“Well, it’s bullshit,” he huffed.
She looked up at him as if he’d just pulled out a gun. Charlie had a huge grin on his face and Aidan was slumped on his crutches, wide-eyed and embarrassed. Beck scanned the small crowd of tight-ass Crystal faces.
He whirled toward the trophy cases. “Come on, guys, we’re out of here.”
“Excellent.” Charlie looked like he’d just dodged a prison sentence. “Can we get ice cream instead?”
“Hell yes.”
“Dad,” said Aidan.
Beck ignored him. He waist-bumped the panic bar and pushed out to the circular drive in front of the school.
“Dad!”
Beck rehearsed what he was going to say to Azra. He pulled out his phone. Remembered she was at a concert or something in Denver. Texted her 911 anyway.
“DAD!”
Beck stopped. Aidan stood on the
curb with his arms dangling down along his crutches, scowly and pissed.
“What is it?”
Aidan shifted onto his good foot. “I’m taking the test.”
“Are you serious?”
“Try-hard,” Charlie muttered.
For once Aidan ignored his brother. “Mom said I could.”
Beck stared at his sons, marveling at their differences. Charlie wore every emotion on his face, never hesitant to blare out his thoughts. Aidan had this wordless reserve, a waiting distance on the world, as if he’d made a conscious decision not to talk about his inner life.
“She promised, Dad.”
Beck looked down at his phone, thinking it through. If Charlie didn’t take the CogPro, he couldn’t fail it. If he didn’t fail it, he wouldn’t lose face if Aidan somehow scored high enough to get in.
“Well, if she promised,” he said reluctantly. The thought of going back in there, though.
“Do I have to take it?” said Charlie.
“We’ll go get ice cream while your brother’s testing.”
“Do I get ice cream?” Aidan asked.
“Not if you take the test,” Charlie said, and gave his brother a satanic smile.
“That’s not fair.” Aidan was now close to tears.
“He’s kidding.” Beck ruffled Aidan’s hair. “Now let’s go back inside.”
* * *
—
You nine-one-one’d me,” Azra said ten minutes later. Beck walked angry circles in the parking lot, phone in hand. “What is going on?”
“We’re at Donnelly. For the test.”
“I’m at a show, Beck. What is the emergency?”
“You said it was one test. You did not tell me everything that was involved in this.”
“Yes, I did. Two times.”
“They’re not going to that entitled school, Azra. I will chain myself to the panic bars to keep them from walking in. I will lie down in front of the fucking bus if I have to. I will go Tiananmen.”
“Right.”
“This is about privilege. You can’t see that?”
“Listen to yourself, Beck. Our sons go to St. Bridget’s on your trust fund, and you’re squawking to me about privilege?”
“That’s totally different,” he sputtered. And what trust fund?
Azra said, “Let’s get you off that high horse, cowboy. Let me know once you’ve dismounted.”
He spun and kicked a lamppost, hurting his toe. She’d said the same thing to him at therapy one time and he’d screamed at her, but then they’d both started laughing and couldn’t stop until the end of the hour. Their best session ever. Since then Azra had pulled out that comeback whenever she needed to quash one of his frequent rants about bourgeois values, rampant capitalism, and white privilege. (“But never your own, Beck,” she liked to point out. “Have you noticed that?”)
“Okay, boots are on the ground,” Beck said, chastened.
“Good.” Azra’s voice changed when she was calming him like this. Sounded more like his mom’s. “Now look. The CogPro is just the first test, okay? Chances are they won’t score high enough to make the first cut, and even if they do, we have choices. They could get an admission offer, and we could still decide to send them back to St. Bridget’s next year. It’s just one test they’re taking.”
He used his free hand to trace diminishing circumferences around the mound of his gut, like tree rings. “Not they, technically.”
A few seconds ticked by. “What did you just say?”
Charlie was in the courtyard, kicking a soccer ball off the school wall. “So Aidan wanted to take the test. Charlie refused.”
“Wait, he’s not in there?”
“No.”
“But Beck, Jesus. This is the makeup session! If he doesn’t test tonight, he has no chance.”
“Okay, high horse aside, Aidan’s the one who got tapped for that VisionQuest thing,” he pointed out. “Plus there’s no way in hell Charlie would ever go to Crystal Academy. Nine to four every day with a bunch of dweebs?”
She exhaled loudly. “You’re probably right.”
“Thank you,” he said. Azra rarely conceded a parenting point to him, but when she did, it felt like a bong hit.
“I need to go. And Beck, never ever nine-one-one me again unless one of the boys is in the hospital. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I’m serious. It’s not okay.”
“I get it. I’m—”
—sorry, he’d been about to say, but then she was gone, phone probably dropped in her big bag, already breezing back to whatever Tinder-swiping motherfucker she was dating right now.
Five years since the divorce and still he hated disappointing her. He stood by the lamppost looking off into the dark and felt a yearning for something he couldn’t name.
Beck kept an old photograph in his basement, hidden beneath the keyboard of his docking station. Nothing porny, just an old shot of him and Azra at Burning Man the summer before their engagement. Azra wrapped in a lavender sarong and Beck at his muscled best, barefoot rock climber in some old jean shorts low-riding on hip bones that were actually visible back then. They’d eaten mushrooms half an hour before the shot was taken, and this DJ wearing a papier-mâché donkey’s head was playing an electronic dance mix inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
But mostly Azra. The smooth slide of that bare arm over his shoulders. The sun dancing through her hair in that desert heat.
In college Beck had taken a course on medieval dream visions, and the professor had taught them this old idea of the Wheel of Fortune. Not the game show but a symbol for changing circumstances and fickle luck. Everyone was stuck on this slowly turning wheel that could bring you up or take you down. Even kings and emperors sitting on top of the world would be brought low once the wheel started its inexorable rotation. King Lear, Julius Caesar, Richard Nixon, didn’t matter. Sometimes Beck looked at himself in that Burning Man shot and thought, That was it, man. Look what you had. You were perched like a fucking eagle on top of that wheel and you didn’t even know it, did you? And he’d never made it back to the top, not even close. Despite his sons, despite Sonja, despite the way his whole spoiled existence had gifted him with so much to be thankful for. And now here he was, watching someone else go through the motions of his pathetic, shrunken life. Stuck near the bottom of the wheel and dangling there, waiting for a final drop into the trough.
He wriggled his toes. When he turned around, Charlie had his soccer ball tucked under an arm, the other hand planted on his waist, staring blankly at his dad.
Beck rubbed his palms together. “Ice cream?”
“Awesome.” Charlie broke into his youngest smile. That grin: maybe that’s what he needed. Beck opened the car door and held it for his son.
TWENTY-ONE
ROSE
Wild Horse Stables occupied a patch of flat grassland at the far northern edge of Beulah County with an expansive view of the Rockies low to the west and, to the south, a not-so-great vista onto Mountain View, a sprawling trailer park one had to pass before turning off the rural highway. The whole area was a world away from Crystal. Rusted remains of trucks and tractors sulked in front yards, pawn shops and McDonalds the sole businesses in a string of two-stoplight towns with names like Sandy Bend and Dry River.
That morning, though, the forty-minute drive to the county’s upper reaches was a luxurious pleasure for Rose, riding high in a Buick Enclave, the highway smooth and muted beneath the brushed leather seats and fluid suspension. It was a loaner car—their battered VW wagon was in the shop, the transmission acting up again—and one thing she noticed immediately was the quiet. Their regular car was thin-skinned, reacting to every bump. A passenger sitting in back had to raise her voice to be heard by the driver. Not so in the new Buick: like headphones on wheels, the outside
world muffled, shut away. Only as the big SUV glided gently over a set of train tracks did Rose’s temporal lobes process what this difference between the two vehicles allowed.
In this car she could hear the Emmas.
* * *
—
Since before they acquired language the girls had carried on a running stream of commentary whenever they got in a car together. Babies in backward safety seats goo-gooing and touching hands. Toddlers playing tug-of-war with stuffed animals. Little girls making worlds with dolls and toy horses. Car Talk, Kev Zellar had once called their chatter; the label stuck. The Emmas shared so many interests and activities that they were in someone’s back seat at least three times a week, and Car Talk had become a sweet fixture in their intertwined lives.
Recently, though, the girls’ chatter had begun a slow decrescendo: more often private now, whispered and secretive rather than voluble and open. When they lowered their voices, Rose often couldn’t make out a single word.
A natural part of growing up, Samantha had avowed. They’re eleven now, genuine tweens, heading for middle school. Of course they have secrets. Of course they don’t want their parents listening in while they talk about their annoying teachers, or the gross boys they’re finding new ways to despise.
But Rose missed it, the sweet babbling of those little girls. So now, sitting in the front of an unexpectedly quiet vehicle, she listened eagerly.
Two words stood out right away: Crystal Academy.
Emma Z brought it up, asking Emma Q, straight out: “So what was your best practice score? On the CogPro?”
Rose felt a spasm in her lower spine.
“One-twenty-five?” Q said, with a soft question mark, perhaps a twinge of conscience about the lie. Q’s highest score on any practice test had never exceeded one-twenty. She’d added a full five points.
Z pushed harder. “Your average or your best?”
Q hesitated. “Um, my average.”
In the rearview mirror Rose saw Z wriggle, a tiny tense uncoiling. “That’s really good, Q,” she said, her intonation so much like her mother’s when Sam was in Lady Bountiful mode. “My average is one-thirty. But once I got a one-thirty-five.”
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