by Rachel Toor
“No, Alice, I am not saying anything bad about Walter. You know I like Walter, and I know you love him and, yes, I agree, he is a model citizen in many ways. You’re right: everyone should try to be more like Walter.”
She offered him a Mini Oreo, which is okay for rats to eat since:
1. Chocolate is not toxic for rats the way it is for dogs.
2. I’m not sure there’s any chocolate in an Oreo.
3. I don’t allow anything in my room that might be dangerous for rats.
Walter held it with his hands at nine and three, like a perfect driver’s-ed student, and began munching away in careful bites.
“What I’m saying, though,” Jenni continued, “is I think we need to find a way to get you to move on.”
“Okay, how about if I resolve to get rejected from more colleges? Oops. Never mind. That’s going to happen anyway.”
Right after I got the bad news from Yale, I knew I had to submit applications to other schools. The guidance counselor, who never remembered my name, was no help.
She’d told me I had zero chance of getting into Yale in the first place and that I was crazy to even try. No one from our school had ever gone there, she said, and she advised me to apply to the honors college at the U. My English teacher, Ms. Chan, and Mr. Bergmann, my biology teacher, who really liked my paper on the plagued prairie dogs, had encouraged me and volunteered to write letters of recommendation. They both said that I was the best student they’d had in all their years of teaching.
For the first week after Rejection Day I did nothing.
Then I cut-and-pasted my personal statement into the Common Application form and sent it to a bunch of other colleges.
I spent very little time on the supplemental essays. Instead of writing draft after draft the way I did for the short-answer questions on my Yale application, I just typed them in and sent them off.
Walter had crawled up to perch on my shoulder and take a nap. As Jenni popped a handful of Mini Oreos into her mouth I said, “Maybe I could get a job as a spokesperson for the Rejected throughout the world. I could give speeches on the different ways to cry after you’ve been rejected. I could do a YouTube video showing the silent tears, the sniffling, breathy hiccuping gasps, the all-out sobs. I could be the poster child for rejection. I could teach other kids how to wallow.”
Jenni nodded and said, “Yeah, you’ve become a real expert on wallowing. I think you need to find something else to focus on. Before your best friend and your rat get sick of listening to you whine. A hobby. A project!”
She clapped her hands. Jenni is the queen of projects.
“You sound too much like Mom for me to want to talk to you,” I said, and got up.
All year long Mom had been telling me to relax, not stress out so much, take it easy, and I was like, “Oh really? You want me to sit around and smoke pot all day and drink Red Bull and grain alcohol all night like the kids in my school who will end up spending their post-graduation days inquiring, ‘Do you want cheese on that?’”
Relax? Has she never met me? I have never been a relax kind of kid. Cripes.
And it’s not like my mother is some kind of shiny role model of Zen-ed-out calm. Most mornings she leaves for the office before I get up. She spends long days chopping out cancerous moles and shooting wrinkle-paralyzing poison into the foreheads of wealthy women. Some days she puffs up their lips with the medical equivalent of Silly Putty.
My mother injects Botox into her own face the way other people put on makeup. There’s always a bottle of it in the fridge. As soon as her forehead starts to move, she’s in the bathroom with a needle. She says it’s important that patients see her as an example.
My mother thinks a lot about being an example.
She has to be the best at everything. She makes Scrabble into a blood sport. She once got injured in a yoga class because her teacher commended her for being flexible. She said, “Oh yeah? Watch this!” and tried to put her leg behind her head and ended up tearing her hamstring.
About three times a week after dinner, as I head upstairs to lie in my bed with Walter and read, Mom and I enact the same scene.
“Alice, why don’t you go outside and get some exercise?”
“Because I don’t feel like it. I’m going upstairs to read.”
“You’re always reading. You need to move around more. You need to use your muscles, to get out there and do something.”
“I am doing something. Reading.”
“Something physical. Why don’t you try out for the tennis team?”
“I don’t like tennis. And, Mom, I don’t like swimming. And I don’t like soccer. And I don’t like volleyball, basketball, or softball. I don’t like to be in any situation in which a projectile comes flying toward my head, and I don’t like team sports.”
“But it would be good for you. You spend so much time alone.”
“No, Mom,” I say, using her name in italics the way she does mine when she is trying to convey I am making an important point. “I have Walter. And Jenni, when she’s not with Kyle.”
“It’s wonderful that you and Jenni are so close, but really, I think it would be good if you had more than one friend.”
At that point, I get annoyed and may occasionally raise my voice. Okay, so in truth, I end up shouting at her: “AND WALTER, Mom. I have Walter.”
“Yes, you do have Walter.”
Some nights she gives up, but other nights she rallies and keeps going: “How about theater? You loved theater in middle school. I know they are doing a musical this spring. Jenni’s designing costumes for it. You have a beautiful voice.”
“I am not doing theater anymore, especially not a musical. I refuse to participate in something where people, instead of talking like normal humans, all of a sudden start singing and dancing. You may not have noticed but life isn’t like that.”
“What about debate? You do like to argue.”
“No I don’t.”
“Of course you do. Oh—I get it. Ha-ha.”
“No you don’t.”
“Okay, Alice, enough.”
“Look,” I say, “I’d just like to point out that most parents wouldn’t complain about a kid who loves school, is at the top of her class, doesn’t get into trouble, and likes to stay home and read.”
Then Mom says, “Fine.”
And I say, “Fine.”
And she goes back to reading her magazine and turns the pages really loudly.
The more she nags, the more comfy my butt feels in the chair. For a smart woman, my mother is not very savvy (“perceptive, shrewd”—easy word, but hard to spell because two v’s in a row look weird) about motivation. Lately it seems like she’s been enlisting Jenni to side with her. They have been doing more stuff together this year, shopping and messing around with hair products and makeup. I would be jealous except:
1. It gets Mom off my back.
2. Jenni is like a sister to me.
3. Jenni’s mom died when we were little and I’m happy to share mine with her.
While I often get annoyed with my mother and treat her kind of badly, I am much more careful with Jenni.
So on that night, as we crept toward the end of the year of my rejection and greatest failure and toward a new one that offered who knew what, after she told me I needed to stop whining and get a project, I felt bad for snapping at her.
Another of the things a best friend does is call you on your crap.
So I said, “I’m getting another glass of milk. Refill?”
“Yes, please,” she said, and when she handed me her glass I saw she was afraid she’d upset me, so I said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be back in a nanosecond. Keep an eye on my baby boy.”
Walter, at that point, was exploring the hills and hollows made by the quilt on my bed.
“Come here, Walt, little buddy,” I heard Jenni say to him as I went downstairs.
5
Jenni has lots of hobbies and projects.
She sews.
She designs and makes most of her clothes. What she doesn’t make she gets from my mother and me. We have the Jenni Sack, a big cloth bag where we put the clothes we no longer want, which for my mother is pretty much anything after she’s worn it once, and for me is pretty much everything Mom buys me. A few times a year Jenni grabs the sack and takes it home to her sewing room. The things that don’t fit her she alters; the things she isn’t crazy about she transforms. She can turn a dress into a shirt, a pair of pants into capris. We have logged serious hours watching Project Runway and I bet someday, if she wants to, Jenni could be a contestant. She could even win. We love Tim Gunn so much. Sometimes one of us will walk into a room with our left arm cocked at a ninety-degree angle and say, “Designers! How are we doing? Gather around!”
Jenni also knits.
She learned to knit from her mom, who had been our house cleaner. Starting when we were six, they would come over twice a week and Jenni and I got to be best friends.
Then her mom got sick.
She passed away when we were ten.
Not long after that, Jenni’s sister got pregnant, dropped out of school, and moved to Kentucky. Her dad works for a company that cuts down trees for the coal mines. Then he comes home and drinks too much or goes to an AA meeting, depending on whether he’s off the wagon or on.
Jenni often says that without me, without my family, she would be lost. She says she doesn’t know what would have happened to her after her mom died. She loves that I encourage her to try new things, even when it can make her a smidge uncomfortable, and that I come up with ideas and point out stuff that would never occur to her.
She spends a lot of time at our house and joins us on family vacations. In addition to clothes, Mom always gives Jenni the free samples she picks up from the Chanel and Estée Lauder counters. Often when she sees something Jenni would like, a lip gloss or eye shadow or face powder, Mom will buy it. She tells Jenni it was a mistake—the wrong color for her and she’s going to throw it away if Jenni doesn’t want it.
Jenni can get twitchy about accepting too much from our family and says she hates being a charity case. Of course, none of us think of her like that. I’ve wondered whether she tries to be extra nice and helpful all the time because she feels indebted. But then I realize no, that’s just who she is. She’s unselfish to a fault and doesn’t like to be the center of attention. She deflects conversation away from herself—so much so it can be hard to get her to talk about what’s on her mind.
Sometimes, though, when she’s knitting, Jenni will say, “I miss her, Al.”
I know she’s thinking about her mom, the person who taught her to knit, and I’ll say, “I know,” and “I’m so sorry.”
She’ll start crying, and I’ll just hold her hand and stroke her hair and wait until she’s breathing normally again, and then I’ll give her a tissue and talk about what she’s knitting. I’ll try to be upbeat and say, in my best Tim Gunn voice, “Make it work!”
Jenni’s favorite class at school, the only one she ever gets an A in, is something Walter-the-Man refers to as shop class.
“No, Walter-the-Man,” I say, “shop class is the kind of thing my mother would teach. What Jenni likes is called Machinery and Engineering.” That’s where she learns stuff like woodworking, architectural drafting, and how to solder circuits. She made Walter’s sleeping hut after we spent hours discussing the design. After that, in Machinery and Engineering II, she learned how to weld—it was Jenni and five guys wearing face masks wielding an acetylene torch. She made me a metal sculpture of a rat.
Unlike Jenni, the only thing I am good at is school. I’ve never gotten anything less than an A and I always have my papers done days or weeks before they are due. Sometimes, if I do them too early and leave them lying around when Walter is on the prowl, the corners get nibbled.
When I give Ms. Chan a paper that has no teeth marks, she says, “What? Not good enough for Walter?”
The only other person who seems to like school as much as I do is Sam Malouf. He’s my biggest competition for valedictorian, but he’s not that good at math so I’m ranked ahead of him. Even though I don’t love math as much as I love English and biology and chemistry and physics and history and government, I’m still good at it.
Other than Jenni, I don’t really have any close friends. At least, not my own age—or species. Maybe it’s because I am an only child, but I’ve always been more comfortable around grownups and animals than other kids.
Jenni has a group of cheerleaders she sometimes hangs out with. (Did I mention that in addition to being able to make CAD drawings and weld, Jenni is also a Varsity cheerleader?) I call them the Brittanys.
There are three of them: Brittany, Brittney, and Tiffany.
Jenni is closest friends with Tiffany. Being with them makes me feel geeky and shabby. It’s not like I am some disadvantaged kid. I have tons of advantages. Way more than most people. But I just don’t fit in at school and I’ve given up trying.
I wish I could blame it on something other than my personality.
Plus, the Brittanys do this thing girls do that drives me nuts, where all they talk about is how much they suck. I mean, I may think I suck, but I don’t talk about it to anyone other than Walter and Jenni.
But when you’re with the Brittanys, you’d think they were the biggest losers in the world instead of cheerleaders who rule the school.
One of them will say, “I love your hair like that.”
The hair in question will respond, “Oh god, it’s a mess. I couldn’t make it do anything this morning.”
“I like that dress” provokes “It’s too small for me. My belly pooches out. It would look better on you.”
“You’re so pretty!”
“I am not. Look at my hands! I have man hands.”
They parry (“to wave off a weapon or a blow”) compliments the way Captain Jack Sparrow brandishes (“to wave or shake”) a sword.
The worst is when someone says something nice about a piece of clothing Jenni has made—something I know she’s worked hard on and is proud of—and the first thing she does is point out the flaws.
It’s like there’s this code among girls that stipulates (“demands or specifies”) no one is supposed to feel good about herself or anything she’s done. The game is to say, “No, no, I suck and you’re great,” and the response has to be, “No, no, I suck,” and it goes on and on like this.
But sewing and knitting and cheering and welding are not even Jenni’s most important hobbies.
Jenni’s main extracurricular activity is being a girlfriend.
Since junior year she’s been a girlfriend to Kyle, also known as the stud muffin.
Kyle plays three sports and uses a lot of product in his hair. Everyone thinks he’s hot. He barely passes his classes, doesn’t always bother to conjugate his verbs when he speaks, and can get loud and obnoxious when he’s with his teammates. He’s always throwing a bulky arm around Jenni and sort of shaking her and saying, “You’re the best, babe.” He calls her babe and she doesn’t even mind.
What I don’t like is that Kyle holds Jenni back. He keeps her from taking chances and trying new things. He just wants her to be his own personal cheerleader.
The problem isn’t really the stud muffin, though; it’s that Jenni thinks she needs to have a boyfriend, as if she believes there’s something missing from her without a guy. Since middle school, she has never been without one. Me, I’ve never even come close to going on a date.
In the kitchen I refilled our glasses with milk and grabbed more Ritz Bits, the snack favored by discriminating vermin, and more bags of Mini Oreos, Mini Chips Ahoy!, and Nutter Butter Bites.
The minis taste better than the regular-size ones because the ratio of cookie to cream is right, and because everything mini is better.
I love mini-foods, like mini–corn on the cob and mini-muffins, and bonsai, which are mini-trees, and mini-bottles of shampoo, and mini-cars (I want a Mi
ni Cooper but Dad says no way because he thinks they’re too small to be safe). With tiny stuff, imperfections and mistakes aren’t as noticeable.
Every day I seem to be more aware of how easy it is to find imperfections and to make mistakes.
When I came back upstairs Jenni and Walter were reading People. Well, Jenni was reading and Walter was sitting on the bottom of the magazine, and every time Jenni wanted to turn a page she had to move Walter.
I caught her apologizing to him for the disruption.
Jenni reached out for her glass of milk and I snuggled in next to her. Walter crawled onto my lap and I handed him a chunk of Nutter Butter.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. I do need a hobby.”
Jenni flipped another page of People and there was this big picture of Jennifer Aniston running. The woman is like, ancient, but she has a body that looks better than—well, better than anyone’s. She seemed superstrong and happy.
And suddenly I got an idea.
I paused because I didn’t know if this was a good idea and I knew if I said it, I was committing myself. I don’t take things like promises or resolutions lightly.
But as much as I hated to admit it, my mother was right: I needed to get outside more.
And Jenni was right: I needed to do something instead of just sitting around complaining about Yale.
Plus, my thighs. My butt.
“I am going to start running.”
Jenni’s eyes got big for a moment and she blinked a few times, and then, because she always wants to be positive and supportive, she said, “Great idea, Al!”
It was, I admit, an odd choice. I’m basically lazy. I don’t like to sweat. I get annoyed with the rah-rah jocks and am suspicious of anything that smells of team spirit.
But something about that picture of Jennifer Aniston, how she looked so happy and so free, so not like a reject, made me want to try to run.
Plus, her thighs. Her butt.
Jenni said, “Running. Perfect! You can do it whenever you want and you don’t have to rely on anyone else. I know how much you hate waiting for other people.”
