by James Ponti
We looked around the cemetery for a little while longer, but found nothing else that seemed out of the ordinary. Since it was our last Friday of the summer, Dr. Hidalgo treated us to lunch at Carmine’s, where we shared big bowls of pasta and laughed at the retelling of my descent into the Blackwell crypt.
Despite Dr. H’s promises, I did have a couple of bad dreams. But over the next few days the worries that kept me up at night went from severed fingers and robbing graves to fitting in and making friends. The first day of school was looming, and even in a student body filled with science geeks, I wasn’t particularly skilled at social situations.
Every year more than a thousand students from across New York’s five boroughs apply to MIST.
Only seventy get in.
Applying never would have occurred to me if not for the fact that my mother was a MIST grad. She’d always talked about me maybe going there, and just filling out the application made me feel closer to her. Even though I’m a good student, I was totally shocked when I was accepted. So now, in addition to our mismatched eyes, MIST is something special that the two of us share. Sometimes during lunch I like to sneak into the library to look for pictures of her in old yearbooks.
The student body isn’t the only thing that makes MIST unusual. The campus looks like something out of a horror movie. The school is made up of four buildings that originally housed a mental hospital in the late 1880s. (That little tidbit is left off the brochure.)
In other ways, though, MIST is just like every other school—filled with cliques and rivalries, which is why I had an uneasy feeling as I got ready that morning. I even ignored all scientific reasoning and brought along a good-luck charm: a necklace with a little horseshoe on it that I had found in my mom’s old jewelry box.
The first few classes went fine, but the moment I’d been dreading was lunch. That’s where my solo status was at its most glaring. Unlike most middle school girls, who traveled in packs and coordinated their lives and wardrobes with their BFFs, I tended to do things by myself. This hadn’t always been the case. For one three-and-a-half week period, I was part of a group.
I’m embarrassed to admit how much I liked it.
It started last year, right around Thanksgiving. Every day at lunch I sat at a table with the same six girls. We were all new to the school and were pretty intimidated, so we found our strength in numbers.
One day one of the girls, Jessica, said that our group should have a name. I wasn’t sure if she was joking or not, but some of the others agreed with her, and suddenly finding a name became a big deal. Everyone tried to come up with one that would fit us.
Surprisingly, I was the one who did. It was the holiday season, and I had Christmas carols in my head. I blurted out, “Seven swans a-swimming.”
“I love it,” Jessica announced. “We’re the Swans.”
Pretty soon the bell rang, and I didn’t think any more about it. But the next day when we sat down, Jessica had a surprise for us. She opened her lunch box and pulled out seven silver swan charms. She gave us each one and told us we should keep them in our backpacks. They would mark our secret sisterhood.
For reasons that I still cannot fully understand, I thought this was the coolest thing ever. Suddenly I was part of something special. Something secret. Sometimes I’d walk into a classroom and see that another one of the girls had drawn a little swan in the corner of the chalkboard, and I’d smile. It was our code.
Everything was great until Olivia came along. She wanted to join the group, which seemed easy enough. We all liked her and, after all, there were eight seats at each cafeteria table. No one would even have to move.
But that’s not how Jessica saw it.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “She’d make eight, and there are only seven swans. Eight would make us maids a-milking, and I am not a maid.”
Seriously, that’s what she said.
I told her that the song didn’t really matter. I reminded her that I had been the one to make up the name in the first place. But her mind was set. Seven swans, not one more or one less.
My mistake was thinking that all swans were created equal. I didn’t realize that some were more equal than others and that Jessica had become our leader. In a show of protest I reached into my backpack, pulled out my swan, and slapped it on the table. I thought five other girls would join me in pointing out how ridiculous this was and do the same.
No one did.
They just sat there and stared at me like I was the world’s biggest traitor. Before I knew it, Olivia had my swan charm and was sitting at the table with the other girls while I was all alone in a corner of the cafeteria. I was living a reverse fairy tale. I’d gone from swan to ugly duckling.
At Christmas, Jessica even gave me a nickname. She started calling me Partridge. “Because in ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas,’ the partridge is the one that’s all alone.”
Nine months later, I still felt anxious as I walked past their table to my corner spot.
When I sat down, I noticed Jessica giving me her usual superior look. But then a funny thing happened. Her smirk became a look of surprise with maybe even a hint of jealousy mixed in. I turned to see what had caused this and was amazed to find Natalie and two of her friends standing by my table, holding their lunches.
“Mind if we join you?” she said.
Lunch is one of the rare times when Upper School and Lower School students are together in one place. Even so, they hardly ever mingle. A Lowbie sitting at a lunch table with high schoolers is practically unheard of.
“Not at all,” I said with a smile as I looked back at Jessica.
Natalie sat down and did some quick introductions.
“Molly, meet Alex and Grayson. Guys, this is Molly Bigelow.”
“Nice to meet you,” Grayson said.
“We heard you like to hang out at the morgue,” Alex added with a smile. I wasn’t sure if he was teasing me, but at the moment, just knowing that it was killing Jessica was all that mattered. Suddenly, I thought of Jamaican Bob, the security guard with the bad jokes.
“Well, you know what they say about the morgue,” I said as coolly as I could. “Everybody’s dying to get in.”
It took a moment, but they all actually laughed. Although I had never met Alex or Grayson, I knew both of them by reputation. Alex was a boy version of Natalie. He had supergeek brains in a quarterback’s body, and I wondered if they might be boyfriend and girlfriend. Grayson, on the other hand, looked more like you’d expect a science geek to look. A ninth grader, he was known as the school’s resident computer genius, which is saying something at a place like MIST.
When he sat down, the first thing he did was look at me and say, “You’re heterochromatic.”
“What?” I asked.
“Heterochromatic,” he repeated. “It means your eyes are different colors.”
“I know what it means,” I said. “It’s just kind of an odd way to start a conversation.”
“Grayson doesn’t have much of a social filter,” Natalie warned. “You get used to it.”
Alex, meanwhile, was busy pulling out an amazing array of food from what had to be the world’s largest lunch box. He had two ham-and-turkey sandwiches, a bag of chips, string cheese, two bananas, a box of crackers, raisins, and a can of soda.
I don’t know if I actually said “wow” out loud, but I certainly thought it.
“Oh yeah,” Natalie added. “And Alex eats more than any three people you’ve ever met. Try not to stare, he’s very sensitive about it.”
“I am not,” said Alex as he chewed off the end of the string cheese.
“You should be,” Grayson interjected.
“Is that so?” Alex said with a laugh. “You think my eating habits are embarrassing. You won’t eat any food that’s white. As if color affected the taste.”
Grayson slumped. “We just met her.”
Alex ignored him and turned to me. “I’m not joking. He won’t eat mayonnaise, milk, eg
gs, vanilla ice cream, sour cream . . . anything white.”
“I eat bread,” Grayson offered.
“Only if it’s toasted.”
Grayson laughed and then added, “It tastes better toasted.”
“So, now you know a little something about us,” Alex said. “Let’s find out about you.”
“I eat almost anything,” I said. “Except I don’t like pickles or peaches.”
“Because they both start with the letter p?” Grayson asked hopefully.
“No,” I answered. “Because I don’t like how they taste.”
“How very reasonable,” Alex said.
The joking and friendly teasing continued throughout lunch. I have to say that this group was a lot more fun than the Swans. I couldn’t quite figure out how the three of them became friends, but I could tell they really were.
I also couldn’t help but feel a little self-conscious. Throughout lunch, they kept asking me questions like they were interviewing me for the school paper.
They asked me about my friends (what friends?) and my taste in music (anything with a girl who plays guitar). They even wanted to know about the Junior Birder program. Part of me liked the attention but another part was exhausted by how relentless it all was.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Grayson asked.
“A doctor.”
“Why?” asked Alex.
“That’s kind of personal, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Is it?”
“It is to me,” I explained. “A few years ago my mother died from cancer. During those last six months, I spent a lot of time in hospital rooms watching doctors work.”
“And now you want to be like them?” Grayson asked.
I looked him in the eye and shook my head. “Didn’t you hear me? I said she died. I’m going to be better than them.”
And with that both Grayson and Alex smiled, and the questions stopped.
Natalie gave them a look and said, “Didn’t I tell you?”
They both nodded.
“Tell them what?” I asked.
“Just that you were cool and that we should get to know you,” Alex said.
Okay, no one ever called me cool before.
“We’re really glad to have met you,” Grayson said.
“Definitely,” added Alex. “We’ve got to go help set up for the assembly, but we’ll see you around. I promise.”
They got up and left me alone with Natalie.
Once they were gone, I asked, “You want to explain what that was all about?”
“They’re just a couple of friends of mine,” she said. “I’d been talking about getting to know you over the summer, and they wanted to meet you. Don’t worry. They’re good guys.”
Then something caught her eye. She leaned over and looked at my necklace. “Where’d you get that?”
“I found it in my mom’s old jewelry box,” I said. “Why?”
She looked a little concerned and then seemed to force a smile. “No reason. I just didn’t remember your wearing it this summer.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I thought a horseshoe might bring me some luck.”
She nodded. “Let’s hope so.”
After lunch everybody went to the auditorium for the start-of-the-school-year assembly. As always, it began with an inspirational speech from our principal, Dr. Gootman.
“Immortality,” he intoned as he gripped the podium. “The pursuit of science is the quest to render obsolete the boundaries of our mortal beings. It is the search for immortality.” (No one talks like this, right? But Dr. Gootman really pulls it off.)
“Although scientific advancements have dramatically increased our lifespan, death is still inevitable. You cannot live forever.” He took a long dramatic pause before adding, “Or can you?”
He held up a test tube so that it shimmered in the light. “This vial contains a strain of the bacterium Saccharomyces cerevisiae.”
A girl sitting next to me gulped like it was some deadly form of anthrax.
“It’s more commonly known as yeast,” he continued, much to the girl’s relief. “And as long as yeast is fed a steady diet of flour and water, it will live forever.
“This particular strain was created here at MIST as part of a chemistry experiment . . . in 1904.”
He let the words sink in.
“Today we will do what has been done on the first day of each fall semester since then. We will eat bread made from this yeast. In doing so we will continue a meal that has included every student and teacher in this school’s history.”
He stopped and looked at the test tube for a moment. There was a touch of emotion in his voice as he continued. “The students from that chemistry class died long ago. But more than a century later, their experiment still thrives. Immortality.
“At most schools the mascot is some sort of cartoon animal—a ram or a bear on a football helmet. Welcome to the only school whose mascot is a single-celled bacterium. Welcome to MIST.”
Why I Floss on a Daily Basis
Before I go any further, I should probably explain my intense fear of heights. It started with the scariest moment in my life. One evening when I was five years old, my mom and I had just left a movie theater and were walking down the street when a lunatic charged up to us and grabbed her purse. They had a quick tug-of-war, and when the purse strap broke, he fell to the ground. In a flash, my mom swooped me up into her arms and started running. Even though he had the purse, he still chased after us.
I was crying my eyes out, but Mom stayed cool and calm. She was concerned, but she was in control. First she ran into a building that was brightly lit. When he continued toward the building, she started to run up the stairs. I can still remember the sound of his shoes echoing in the stairwell as he ran up after us. Because I was facing back over her shoulder, I got a good look at his face.
I will never forget that face.
When we got to the top of the stairs, we burst through a door and onto the roof. My mom was still cool and calm. She set me down and picked up a brick. At first I thought she was going to use it to hit him when he came through the door. Instead, she used it to smash the door handle, breaking it so it wouldn’t work.
Seconds later we could hear him pounding on the other side of the door. Her trick worked, and he couldn’t get it to open. Eventually, he went away.
We were no longer in danger from the lunatic, but we had another problem. My mom had done such a good job of breaking the door, we couldn’t open it either. And since her phone was in the purse that was stolen, we couldn’t call anyone for help. We wound up stuck on the roof for the entire night. It was cold and rainy, and I was terrified. I was scared that if I fell asleep, I would somehow fall off the top of the building. Ever since, I’ve tried to avoid anything higher than our third-floor apartment.
This is why I’ve spent my entire life in New York without ever stepping foot in the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. And it’s why, when the assembly ended and school let out, I wasn’t one of the kids headed for the Roosevelt Island tram.
The tram is the most popular way for people to get on and off the island. Up to a hundred and twenty-five people at a time get into the tram car (I like to call it the death cage) and take the four-minute ride over the East River. My problem is that along the way, the tram dangles from a cable about two hundred and fifty feet in the air.
I get ticked when people say I have a phobia. Phobias are based on irrational fears. My fear is rooted in a true scientific understanding of gravity. That’s a big tram and that’s a big drop.
Luckily, Roosevelt Island also has a subway station. It’s not very busy, but the F train runs through it on the way to Queens, so it works perfectly for me. Well, it would be perfect if it weren’t for the escalators.
Roosevelt Island Station is the second deepest in the entire subway system. It’s like an upside-down ten-story building, and you have to ride a trio of unbelievably st
eep escalators to get down there. It’s not the ideal thing for someone terrified of heights, but still way better than the tram.
That day, like most others, my solution for dealing with the escalator was to grab the handrail as tightly as I could and close my eyes until I reached the bottom.
If my eyes had been open, I might have seen the creepy guy a little bit sooner. Instead, I didn’t notice him until after I had just missed the train and plopped down onto a bench to wait for the next one.
Or, put another way, I didn’t realize he was there until I was completely alone and unprotected in a subway station one hundred feet below ground.
Once the rush of the departing train died down, the station fell virtually silent. The only noises were the buzzing of the lights hanging from the ceiling and the occasional crackle of electricity along the train’s third rail.
Looking around, I noticed this guy sitting on another bench, staring right at me.
He was tall like a basketball player, and superthin. His hair had been dyed shoe-polish black, and he had dark circles under his eyes. He wore mismatched earrings and, judging by the splotches along his jawline, he also wore makeup. Very bad makeup. Even by New York subway standards he was weird.
Then he smiled and got even weirder. His teeth were an unforgettable blend of orange and yellow. Not one of them was straight. I suddenly realized I had seen them earlier that morning. He’d been standing on the platform and smiled at me when I got off the subway on my way to school.
Now it seemed like he had been waiting all day for me to come back. I know that sounds paranoid, but that’s what it felt like.
I smiled politely as I stood up and headed for the escalator. I wasn’t moving particularly fast because I didn’t want to alert him and also because my backpack was loaded down with all the new textbooks that had been handed out on the first day of school.
Even though I was going away from him, I could hear his boots thud as he walked across the floor behind me. He was moving faster than I was, and the sound was getting closer.
I needed to slow him down, so I decided to use all those textbooks to my advantage. Just as I heard him about to reach me, I swung around with my backpack at the end of my outstretched arm to build as much force as possible. I was going to slam it right into the side of his head.
