On the Road to Find Out

by Rachel Toor

  I started to feel self-conscious about the way I was breathing. Then I spiraled into a bizarre analytical thought process where I decided my elbows were swinging weirdly.

  My nose got all runny in the cold and of course I never brought any tissues with me. So I started using my sleeve to wipe it. Gross, I know.

  Sometimes I’d have to walk. But one day about midway through switching between walking and jogging, I started to feel pretty good. I breathed easily and my legs didn’t hurt and my feet didn’t hurt and it didn’t feel like my heart was going to burst. At one point, I was full-on sprinting and it was great. The sprinting probably only lasted, like, three seconds, but it felt like I covered a lot of ground fast.

  I checked my watch and realized that I’d been running for just over thirty minutes. Thirty minutes of running!

  I was so happy I ran for that long that I gave it a try again the next day.

  Worst. Run. Ever. That run only lasted, like, ten minutes.

  And that’s the way it went. One good run, one (or two or three) bad ones. But the good ones felt so great, it kept me going.

  Sometimes I’d get a song stuck in my head and hear it for the whole run. Usually I didn’t know all the lyrics, so it would be the same lines over and over. Sometimes I noticed the leafless trees along the boulevard I’d never paid attention to before or counted the different colors of houses. I began to recognize people too, other runners. I’d see the older woman with the big poodle, the guy with the blaze-orange hat who went so fast I could hear him breathing as he zoomed by, the heavy man who ran even more slowly than me if you can believe it, wearing a UCLA sweatshirt and thick black sweatpants with long baggy shorts over them. He made me look like a Project Runway model.

  Another time, I saw the tasty morsel with the Toto dog again. They ran really, really fast. And made me feel really, really slow.

  10

  It was one of those late-January after-school afternoons, gray and chilly, with a light dusting of snow on the ground, where all you want to do is curl up in a chair in a closet under a heavy blanket with a rat on your shoulder and read six novels. I contemplated going out for a run for about fifteen seconds, but:

  1. Walter’s cage needed cleaning.

  2. I had to read “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell for English.

  3. A 62.9-kg downhill skier was moving at a speed of 12.9 m/s as he started his descent from a level plateau at 123 m height to the ground below. The slope had an angle of 14.1 degrees and a coefficient of friction of 0.121. The skier coasted the entire descent without using his poles; upon reaching the bottom he continued to coast to a stop; the coefficient of friction along the level surface was 0.623. I had to figure out how far the dude would coast along the level area at the bottom of the slope.

  I opened the door to Walter’s cage to see if the munchkin wanted to come out. Since he’d been sleeping all day, he stretched one paw, reaching like Michelangelo’s Adam trying to touch his finger to the finger of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Then he flicked his wrist in the gay-positive gesture and made the biggest yawn you’ve ever seen. When you see something that adorable it kind of makes your heart hurt.

  Walter’s teeth are orangish yellow. They are big. Part of what it means to be a rodent is that your teeth never stop growing, so you have to do a lot of gnawing. For the uninitiated (“without special knowledge or experience”), his teeth can look kind of scary. Jenni freaked the first time she saw him yawn, but that’s the only time you ever see his teeth. When he yawns. He never bites. He has never bitten anyone. Ever.

  Walter is a clean freak. Not only is he an enthusiastic self-groomer, he also generously offers up his talents as a manicurist. After he’s satisfied he’s clean enough, he will come onto my lap and work on my nails. He thinks I’m slovenly (“messy or dirty”). He may be right. So I let him go about his business.

  “It’s good to have a job,” I say to him. “Work, Walter, work.”

  While he keeps himself pristine (review: “remaining in a pure state”) and he always pees in the same spot in the corner of his cage, Walter’s housekeeping skills leave something to be desired. I had to get him out of there so I could be his maid.

  “Out, damned spot, out!” I said to him, quoting Lady Macbeth.

  He ambled through the door of his cage and I picked him up and we smooched for a while. Then I put him on the floor and went to get a garbage bag. His cage is really easy to clean: there’s a wire part that sits on top of a big plastic tray and I just dump all the litter into a bag, wash the bottom, and fill it up with fluffy fresh bedding. I did research when I first got him about what would be the best and safest environment for him.

  Have I mentioned that I love doing research about rats?

  Walter is a Norway rat, or Rattus norvegicus, also known as the brown rat. This is kind of funny since like many things having to do with rats, it’s completely wrong. Norway rats are not from Norway and they are not necessarily brown. They are from Asia and they come in a Baskin-Robbins assortment of colors and hairstyles. There are rex rats that look like they have bad ’80s perms and hairless rats that look like fetal pigs. There are also Dumbo rats, who are more round than pointy, with big circle ears set far back on their heads.

  The American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association recognizes thirty-eight distinct colors, including champagne, chocolate, cocoa, lilac, mink, platinum, Russian blue, sky blue, cinnamon, cinnamon pearl, fawn, lynx, pearl, and blue point Siamese. Yes, you can have a Siamese rat.

  The splotches on Walter’s back make him, as far as I can tell, a variegated (“having patches, stripes, or marks of different colors”) rat. I got him at the pet store in the mall before I did all my rat research and learned about breeders and ratteries.

  When I brought him home that first day Dad began to recite a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called “Pied Beauty.” Pied means “patchy in color, splotched, or piebald” and is a better word than variegated. I’m not sure I totally understand the poem but I love the way it sounds. It starts out: “Glory be to God for dappled things— / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.”

  When I finished cleaning his cage, my own pied beauty was MIA. I looked around for him. Walter likes to snuggle in bed even when I’m not there. This requires an Olympian feat of scaling the quilt that hangs over the side. He gets a running start, launches himself so he lands a little way up, and then, hand over tiny hand, ascends. It’s a bit like the rope climb we had to do in school: surprisingly hard. But Walter makes it look easy. You’ve never seen a more graceful, acrobatic rat.

  When he arrives at the top, he does a crazy hop, kind of like a victory dance.

  Walter wasn’t on the bed.

  He wasn’t under the desk.

  He wasn’t back in his cage.

  I called him.

  Nothing.

  Usually he comes running when I say his name. At times, I get scared I’ve lost him and walk around the room and yell, “Walter, Walter,” and finally turn around to find he’s been following me the whole time. The truth is, he’s about as likely to run away from me as I am from him.

  I looked over at the door to my bathroom and saw a long unbroken stream of toilet paper going from the bathroom, around the dresser, and continuing into the closet. I walked over to the closet, opened the door all the way, and there was Walter, concentrating so hard he didn’t even hear me, busy making a fluffy bed of toilet paper in the corner.

  I wondered about the coefficient of friction when it comes to dragging bathroom tissue.

  I figured out that the skier would coast for 116 m (115.95, actually, but I rounded up) and then finished up the rest of my physics problem set, which was all about work and energy—balls being thrown, carts getting pushed, mugs of beer gliding along bar counters.

  Ms. Chan had given me an extra-credit assignment for English. Even though I didn’t need any more credit—I had the highest average in the class—we both pretended I did it for the grade and not bec
ause I was a dork who could never get enough homework. Ms. Chan asked me to write a report on George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant.” When she told me the title I was skeptical. I didn’t want to read about dead animals.

  “Trust me,” she said.

  “I thought you were never supposed to trust someone who said ‘Trust me.’ In fact, I thought you told us that.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and said, “It’s your grade.”

  The essay totally rocked.

  Orwell basically says imperialism (“extending the power of one nation over another one”) is evil and then shows you how and why it’s bad by telling a story. The story he tells made me cry. But when I’d gone through it a second time, I realized I’d cried at the wrong place. I cried when the elephant suffered and died but barely even noticed that a person had also been killed. And that’s his point: imperialism dehumanizes the people in power as well as the colonized. After I finished my report, which got long because I wanted to look carefully at how he embeds his argument into what looks like a straight narrative, I settled in for a few rounds of Freerice.

  Freerice is my favorite Web site.

  You get a word.

  You get four choices from which to pick the correct synonym.

  If you’re right, the program donates ten grains of rice to a developing country through the United Nations.

  When you answer a bunch right, you go up a level.

  You get smarter and you feed the hungry!

  Free rice!

  How much do I love this? I can’t even begin to say. I’ve provided a lot of meals to starving people and have learned a ton of new words, which I like to share with Dad. He gets so happy on the rare occasions I find a word he doesn’t know.

  11

  Jenni’s nails had grown in. Though I missed the small bit of raggedness on her otherwise perfect person, I was happy her resolution had stuck. One afternoon when we were at a coffee shop we liked to go to called the Coffee Shop, I said, “Dudette—soon we’ll be going for mani/pedis with my mom. Your nails look great.”

  She held up her cute paws and said, “Yeah, I’ve stopped biting them. Except for my left thumb.”

  And sure enough, the nail on her left thumb was chewed to the quick.

  God, I love Jenni.

  “It’s like the intentional flaw in the Oriental carpet,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “You know—when they make carpets like the ones in my house with all the elaborate designs, the carpet makers always add a flaw because only Allah is perfect, and to try to create something perfect would be arrogant.”

  Jenni said, “How do you know this stuff?”

  “Um, I’m perfect?”

  Then she looked like she wanted to say something else, but didn’t.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, really. It’s just been hard lately. Kyle and I—”

  I sighed really loud and said, “That old Kyle.”

  Whenever Jenni tries to talk about Kyle, I usually interrupt her by sighing really loud and saying, “That old Kyle.”

  And then Jenni tells me to shut my piehole.

  And then I say, “Make me.”

  And then she rolls her eyes and shakes her head.

  But this time, she didn’t tell me to shut my piehole. She just raised a hand and looked into her latte.

  Then she asked, “How’s the running going?”

  I had to stop to think.

  “I didn’t expect to like it so much. Sometimes it’s hard to get out the door. When I don’t feel like going, I can find a whole lot of other things to do, like alphabetize my books or clean my room or play Snood or Freerice. I put it off and put it off and then, finally, I remember it’s my resolution and I need to at least stick to what I’ve said I’ll do. So I pull on my jeggings and once I’m sausaged into them, I tell myself it will still count if I only go for ten minutes. Once I’m out, and I’m running, I start to feel good. It’s like I have to trick myself into doing it, but when I do, I am happy to keep going.”

  Jenni gestured toward my half-eaten raspberry oat bar. I nodded, and she slid the plate to her side of the table.

  “But here’s the thing,” I continued. “My shins are sore.”

  I pointed to the front of my legs. “Right here.”

  “Hmmm,” Jenni said. “Probably a tendon issue, like shin splints. Might be an overuse injury. Some kind of inflammation.” Because of Kyle, Jenni spoke sports. She also had a milk mustache and I pointed to my own upper lip. She got the message.

  “What am I supposed to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. Probably you have to stop for a while. Red shirt. Be on the DL.”

  “Wear a red shirt? Be on the down low?”

  “The disabled list.”

  “I don’t want to stop,” I said, surprised to hear this come out of my mouth.

  “Why not ask your mom?”

  “Right.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want her to know I’m running.”

  “Why not? She said—”

  “She said what?”

  At this point, Jenni had finished her latte and looked over at mine, still half full. She raised her eyebrows. I nodded. She reached over and grabbed it. In that moment, she reminded me of Walter.

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “If I tell her, she’ll get all excited and will encourage me and I won’t want to do it anymore.”

  “Al, she just wants to help. She thinks you spend too much time doing homework and need to develop—”

  “I know. I know what she thinks. But it doesn’t help me to have her breathing down my neck. It makes me not want to do anything.”

  “Alice,” Jenni said, slurping the last gulp in the mug with a noise you would not have expected from a girl so pretty and petite, “sometimes you stand in your own way.”

  She was right. I should tell my mother. I needed to get better clothes and shoes that fit and she was going to have to buy them for me. The experts and nonexperts talked about technical fabrics that wick moisture from the body.

  Wick? (“To absorb or drain.”)

  Each time I wore my T-shirt under my hoodie it would get soaking wet. It made sense there would be clothing designed especially for running.

  Also, I know Mom is only trying to help. I feel bad about not being more grateful to her.

  But the weight of her motherly love makes me cranky and I lash out.

  I want to stop myself even as I am doing it.

  I can’t.

  It’s like something inside me takes over, a little alien, an evil little alien, who pops out periodically to make me say assholic things to people I care about.

  I do this to everyone except Walter, who never does one single thing that annoys me. My mom gets the worst of the alien treatment.

  That night, I waited until after dinner, when she had a glass of wine and was reading Martha Stewart’s magazine.

  “Mom,” I said, “I have something to tell you but I don’t want you to get all excited because if you do, it’s going to ruin everything for me.”

  She set down her glass and the magazine and said, “When you put it like that, I can’t wait to hear.”

  Dad looked up from doing a crossword puzzle on his iPad. When Mom and I start to get into it, he’ll call out questions like, “What’s a four-letter word for ‘writes quickly’?” and since neither Mom nor I can resist being right we’ll both shout out, “Jots,” and sometimes we forget what we’re arguing about.

  My dad is sneaky like that.

  “I’ve been running.”

  I waited.

  Since she can’t raise her eyebrows or furrow her brow, my mom generally has a pleasant expression on her face. If she’s overdone it with the Tox, she can look surprised for three months.

  I could see her eyes getting all shiny, and I knew she felt happy about what I’d said, so I needed to step in and cut her off.

  “Don’t say anything.
Just let me talk.”

  She made the rolling motion with her hand that signaled for me to keep going.

  “I’ve been borrowing your running shoes—”

  She interrupted me. “Oh honey, you know my feet are smaller than yours. You need to have the right shoes, shoes that fit. You’re going to get injured—”

  “—and I need to get running shoes. And clothes. My shins already hurt—”

  “You’re at risk of developing tendinitis and—”

  “Will you please listen to me? I’m doing something you said you wanted me to do, I’m getting exercise, okay, and now you’re telling me how to do it? I was trying to ask you to buy me the right shoes and you wouldn’t even listen to me. You never listen to me.”

  Dad said, “Don’t you know someone who owns a running store, Sarah?”

  Mom and I were locked in silent battle, each replaying previous skirmishes in our heads.

  “We can go on Saturday,” she said finally, and went back to reading Martha.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Fine,” Mom said.

  12

  Sometimes my mother and I get along well. When Dad goes out of town on business trips, we have a tradition. Mom makes breakfast for dinner—the only meal she can cook—and we get a pound bag of peanut M&M’s and watch chick flicks on Lifetime or old episodes of Gilmore Girls. Sometimes Jenni joins us, but often she has a game or is out with the stud muffin.

  During these mostly cozy nights Mom will try to get me to talk to her.

  She’ll ask about school, and when I’m in a good mood, I’ll tell her about a project I’m working on (a lab report on optics; a paper on The Scarlet Letter; reading the Federalist Papers) but when she tries too hard to get personal, when she asks me questions about boys, I get annoyed and say something bratty like, “Why can’t you be more like Lorelai?”

  She gets pissed and says, “Why can’t you be more like Rory?”

  In fact, I wish I was more like Rory. Jenni thought I was excited about Yale because that’s where Rory Gilmore went.

  But Jenni was wrong.

  I don’t make my life decisions based on TV shows.