by Meg Wolitzer
When he came back to reality he was stunned to look down and see bread crumbs at his feet. Lucy had put a few other people into trances, too, including her cousin Wayne, and Ms. Gibney, the art teacher at school.
But not April. Even now, on the bed in April’s room, with Lucy holding the spinning toothbrush in front of her face (she had it with her because she’d slept over the night before), saying, “Watch the toothbrush, April,” it was clear that it wasn’t going to work.
April just lay staring at it. “No offense, Luce,” she said, “but is this going to go on much longer?”
Lucy finally clicked off the power switch. “Forget it, April,” she said. “You’re totally unhypnotizable. You’re going to have to come up with another way to find him, wherever he is.”
Chapter Five
THE CURSE OF THE ZYGOTES
The following week, far from April Blunt and far from Duncan Dorfman, on a cold, windy New York City street at eight A.M., Nate Saviano rode his skateboard toward the gates of school, his long dark hair sticking out beneath his helmet. All around him kids carried backpacks, or clutched science projects. A city bus rumbled past, and in it Nate could practically see down the throats of yawning kids. He could nearly see their uvulas, those things that looked like little punching bags in the back of everyone’s throat.
UVULAS was a good Scrabble word to know, Nate thought.
It seemed that everyone in New York between the ages of five and eighteen was heading to school. But not Nate. The backpack strapped to his own back, covered with buttons and pins about skateboarding, was just for show; there was absolutely nothing inside it. He wanted people to think: Oh look, there goes an ordinary kid heading to school. But this wasn’t true.
The wind picked up as Nate coasted toward P.S. 585 in lower Manhattan. Across the street from the school was a small and not particularly nice skate park where kids often went before and after the school day. A crowd had collected, and Nate joined them, just the way he used to when he was one of them.
He’d never expected that would ever change, and he’d been shocked when, before school started in September, his father had announced that Nate wouldn’t be returning to P.S. 585. Instead, he was going to be homeschooled. “You’ll learn a lot more at home,” his father said.
“What?” said Nate. He couldn’t believe it. “Who’s supposed to be my teacher?” he asked.
“Me.”
“You’re not a teacher!” Nate shouted. And after that day, he began shouting at his father more and more. Larry Saviano was a science-fiction writer who had published a series of novels about the adventures of two astronauts traveling to the planet Zax, and who are whisked back in time. (ZAX was a Scrabble word; that was how Larry had come up with the name.)
Very few people had read the Zax novels. Even though Larry’s books didn’t make any money, the Savianos were far from poor. There was “money in the family,” as his father sometimes said.
“I’m not a teacher, that’s true, but I know a lot,” said Larry.
“What does Mom say about this?” Nate asked.
“Oh, you know . . . She didn’t love the idea at first, but I made her see that it could be a very positive experience for you.”
Nate’s mother lived uptown and had remarried a few years after the divorce. Her husband was a pediatrician, annoyingly known as “Dr. Steve.” They had a baby named Eloise, and though the baby required a lot of attention, Nate’s mother tried very hard to devote whole days to Nate. Once in a while she took him to the movies, or to Chinatown for soup dumplings, which actually had soup inside them. But often she was extremely busy.
“I wish I could be two places at once,” she said as she fed the baby or made lunch or hurried off to her job as a pastry chef at a French restaurant.
So when Nate’s father first offered to have Nate live at his apartment during the school week, and stay at his mother’s on weekends, the arrangement seemed like a good idea. The brainstorm about homeschooling had come later and had changed everything even more.
All around Nate now, kids tossed their backpacks into a pile and skated in the skate park during the narrow slice of time before school began. Nate added his own backpack to the pile and then turned and found himself face to face with TJ Wiles, who used to be his pretty good friend. “Yo, Nate!” said TJ, and the two of them slapped hands. “You’re back?”
As he asked this, Maxie Roth zoomed over on her board. She had magenta hair and five tiny studs in one earlobe. She was as skinny as a boy, and she dressed like a boy, too, a skater boy, but her face was sharp and delicate. Her skateboard was pink with black stripes. She and Nate had started hanging out a little bit last year. They’d sat together in math class—both of them could do math in their heads superfast, and they both considered themselves skate freaks. Then the school year ended and Maxie had gone away to skate camp, and he hadn’t seen her since then. She looked the same, but a little older, and maybe a little more . . . magenta.
“Is it true?” she asked Nate. “You’re, like, back?”
“Nah,” said Nate. “Just taking the skateboard out for a ride.”
“Oh. Too bad,” said Maxie. “It would’ve been fun to hang in math again,” she said. “It would’ve been, like, fun to the tenth power,” she added.
“The eleventh power,” he said.
The other kids were starting to collect their things and head for school. “Hey, Roth; hey, Wiles—come on!” someone called, and TJ hurried off. Maxie gave Nate a crooked smile, pushing a bright piece of hair behind her ear, and then she said, “See you around, Nate,” and was gone, too.
The cold and crummy little skate park was empty, and Nate felt as if he were the last kid on earth. His backpack was the only one that remained on the ground. Nate picked it up, looped it on, and headed home by himself. He didn’t know why he felt as bad as he did. By the time he arrived at the front door of his apartment building, the streets of the city were quiet, all the kids off in school. All except one.
“Nathaniel Armstrong Saviano, is that you?” called his father as Nate let himself into the apartment.
It was, everyone said, an amazing place: enormous, with high ceilings and sunlight everywhere. After his father had come up with the idea of homeschooling Nate, he had added some features to the apartment that made it like a teenaged boy’s dream house. The goal was to turn it into a place where Nate would want to spend all day. For starters, Larry had built an indoor skate park. There was room here to do ollies, heelflips, and half-cabs. It was so much nicer than the skate park across the street from the school, yet without other kids around, it seemed pointless.
Nate’s father had also installed a sound studio with a little glassed-in room, some serious recording equipment, and a bunch of electric guitars that had once been owned by elderly rock stars Nate had never heard of. Larry had gone to such great lengths to make everything special that it was hard for Nate to let him know that he would have traded it all in if only he was allowed to go back to P.S. 585.
“Yeah, it’s me, Dad,” said Nate now, and he dropped into the ramp, then roared along the floor.
“Whoa, nice,” said his father, who watched from the open kitchen, where he stood in his rumpled pajamas, making coffee. “I thought you were still asleep, kid.”
“I got up early. Just wanted to get some air.” Nate swung himself out of the skate park section of the apartment and flopped onto one of the low white couches that floated like islands in the middle of the room.
“Shoes off, please! Why do you have your backpack?” his father asked.
“I don’t know,” Nate said, working his sneakers off his feet and tossing them aside. He was too embarrassed to say that he had wanted to seem like a normal kid on his way to school.
“So let’s pick up the lesson where we left off,” said Larry. “What were we doing yesterday?”
“You mean, last night at midnight?” Nate asked, for his father had encouraged him to stay up late playing an online Sc
rabble game with a player from New Zealand called kiwiguy22. All evening Nate had been playing games online with anonymous people around the world.
Both of them knew the reason that Larry Saviano wanted his son to succeed. For twenty-six years, Larry had carried around the pain of having lost the Youth Scrabble Tournament when he was twelve. Larry and his partner, Wendell Bruno, had gone to Yakamee, Florida, together, and had made it all the way to the final round, which, to everyone’s shock, they then lost. Their opponents had been a team of girls who had made the bingo ZYGOTES for their final move, leaving the two boys stunned and defeated.
The next time they sat down to play Scrabble, at Wendell’s kitchen table back in Arizona, the game had literally made Larry sick. He had run to Wendell’s bathroom and thrown up into the toilet and all over the little round blue bath mat on the floor. Larry vowed never to play again, and over all these years, he never did. Just the idea of sitting in front of a board made him want to throw up. His moment had come and gone.
But now his son’s moment had arrived.
Of course it was immature that all these years later Nate’s father had never gotten over it. But all Nate wanted now was to get him off his back, and the only way to do that was to go to the YST on December twelfth in Yakamee and avenge his father’s loss. If he won the whole tournament, then Nate could be done with Scrabble forever. He would never have to look at another stupid tile. He would never have to think about bingos, or bingo-bangos, or bingo-bango-bongos.
One thing he needed was a partner. Nate didn’t care who it was, since he’d only be going to the tournament to please his father. As far as he was concerned, he could have taken his skateboard with him, propped it on a chair, drawn a face on it, and called it his partner. But he would have to come up with a real person pretty soon, and it didn’t even need to be someone who really played Scrabble.
Nate was planning on doing all the heavy lifting. His partner just had to sit there next to him. And then at the end, the two of them could split the ten-thousand-dollar first prize. Second prize was five thousand, and third prize was twenty-five hundred. Nate didn’t need the money, and if his team won—which he knew they had to, and first place, not second or third—he planned to hand his winnings to one of the lowest-ranked teams. Then Nate Saviano would turn and head out the doors of the hotel ballroom where the tournament was held. His father would finally get over the past, and would allow Nate to return to P.S. 585.
But for now, Nate had to practice. “Yesterday,” he wearily told his father, “we were doing singular Q words that don’t take a U.”
“Ah, yes,” said Larry. He went to the refrigerator and poked his head inside. “How about some eggs?” he asked. “Brain food.”
“So you’ve told me, Dad.”
“You come up with a partner yet?” Larry asked.
“No.”
“Well, please do. We have to send in the name. And now, while I cook, you recite.”
“Do I have to?” Nate asked, but he knew the answer. “Okay,” he began. “Now, this list is totally incomplete, but it’s where I am so far. ‘Singular Q words that don’t take a U . . .’” he said, and he began to rattle off some words from memory:
“QABALA
QADI
QAID
QANAT
QAT
QI
QINDAR
QINTAR—”
“QINTAR!” his father cut in. “The things you know. It’s just incredible.”
“‘Incredible’ isn’t the word I’d choose,” Nate muttered. He was thinking more of “unbearable.” Other kids his age often told Nate he was very lucky, and in some ways this was true. There were very few rules in the home school his father ran. If his mother ever found out how much freedom he had, she would make him live with her and Dr. Steve and Eloise full-time, instead of just on weekends.
Nate’s father claimed that Nate was getting a great education. But the only learning that Larry Saviano really cared about was Scrabble. Sometimes in the evening, when Nate and his father were sitting around before bed, Nate could hear his father sadly say to himself, “ZYGOTES. Plural of ZYGOTE: a cell produced by two gametes. If only that girl had picked one different tile from the Scrabble bag! If only she had reached in and picked . . . MYGOTES.”
“MYGOTES isn’t a word, Dad,” Nate would remind him.
“That’s my point. If only she had picked MYGOTES, then Wendell and I would have won. My whole life would have been different.”
Instead of being a writer whose Zax series had sold very few copies, Nate’s father imagined that he would have been a famous author of bestsellers. “How would this have happened, Dad?” Nate wanted to ask, but he never did.
At first, homeschooling had been fun and interesting. One day a woman from the Board of Education came to the apartment to check out the situation. She had been impressed by the elaborate space that Nate’s father had created, and she’d loved the science lab. “My! A skate park, too, Mr. Saviano,” she’d said, shaking her head. “This will give Nate a chance to blow off steam during recess.”
Recess? There was no recess! But she and Nate’s father kept talking to each other as though this was actually a real school. Larry showed her the new talking globe he’d bought for Nate. You touched any country and a voice said something like, “I—AM—YEMEN. MY—CAPITAL—IS—SANAA.”
On the kitchen table was an abacus. “I thought I would inject a little ‘Asian flair’ into math,” his father told the woman. She nodded and said that the whole place seemed like “a magical exploratorium of learning.” Whatever that meant.
But after the first couple of days the globe was never used, and the high-tech microscope grew filmy with dust. Even the sound studio remained an empty glass room, and the guitars of those former guitar heroes stayed silent. True, the skate park was still used frequently, but that didn’t count.
Nate thought about how he and Maxie Roth used to work on problem sets together in class. He felt a twinge, missing that time. Other than math, very little actual schooling went on in his home once Scrabble took over. Nate didn’t think his father had exactly planned it this way, but soon his days were Scrabble-filled.
Recently, Nate’s father had taken him to a homeschooling convention to meet other kids and their families. One family lived in a van and traveled around the country attending indie-music festivals. “The road is our school,” said the mother during a meet-and-greet session. She said her name was Sasha, and she introduced her “fellow life-traveler, Kick, and our kids Angelfire, Domino, and Burnt Sienna.”
There were suburban families there, too, and ones who lived in neighborhoods where it was unsafe to walk to school. There were families who didn’t want their kids learning about evolution. Other families simply thought their homes would be far more interesting environments for their kids than an actual school would be. Some families were very religious. Some were very unreligious. In one family, the girls all wore bonnets.
“Hello, everyone. My name is Abigail,” said a twelve-year-old girl in a bonnet. “My family and I bring thee good tidings and an offering of homemade jam.” She held out a sticky jar with a slightly swollen lid, and passed it around with a bunch of spoons. Nate didn’t really want to touch the jar when it was handed to him.
Mostly, though, the homeschooled families in the room seemed like anyone you would meet anywhere. When Nate thought about the old days—when his parents were still married, or even when he went to P.S. 585—his throat felt thick and a little choked.
During the week it was just Nate and his father. Larry Saviano would get up every so often during the day, pace around the apartment, and say in a vague voice, “How about history? Did you do any of it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You didn’t give me an assignment, Dad.”
“My bad. Read a few chapters in your history book,” his father would say. “And once you’re done with that—what was the subject, the Native Americans?�
�when you’re done with the Native Americans, get back to studying.”
“But that is studying.”
“You know I mean studying Scrabble words.”
Once, as a joke, Nate made a sign and taped it up facing outward on one of the windows in the apartment. It read, HELP!!! I AM A CHILD BEING FORCED TO PLAY SCRABBLE ALL DAY WHEN I SHOULD BE IN SCHOOL!!!!
A neighbor who’d been out walking his dog came upstairs and knocked on the door. “Everything okay in there?” he asked. He insisted on poking his head inside, as if he’d imagined he might see a kid handcuffed to a Scrabble board. “Wow, this is quite a place,” the neighbor said. He turned to Nate. “You must be like the opposite of a prisoner in here!”
“Yes, my son’s just a big, hilarious joker,” said Larry. “He cracks everyone up, especially me! Thanks so much for your concern, but as you can see, everything’s great.”
When the neighbor and his dog left, Larry turned to Nate with a hurt expression. “You know that I give you plenty of freedom, right?”
But Nate didn’t think that was true. He didn’t care about Scrabble—actually, more and more, he hated it. It didn’t make him sick the way it made his father sick, but the games he was going to play at the YST would be his last. All he wanted now was to win first prize and be done for good.
Maybe, then, his father would let go of the lifelong pain of having lost his own tournament—his glory stolen away all because of the word ZYGOTES. Maybe his father would finally agree that it was time to let Nate back out into the world.
On the weekend, Nate Saviano took the subway to his mother and stepfather’s apartment uptown. There was no indoor skate park, no recording studio. It was just an ordinary household centered around the raising of a baby. Ugly plastic toys were scattered around, and kiddie music played.
