by Larry Buhl
She dumped out her bag on the patio table. The junk fell out with an unholy clatter.
“I don’t want to make it seem like I was one of those groupie chicks. I was promoting. It was a job. I didn’t sleep with anyone in the bands. Do not believe what Janet says. Okay, I did sleep with a drummer. Half-slept with him. And I didn’t enjoy it. He kissed like he was trying to clean my teeth. I’m not naming names, because he’s famous. Thanks in part to my work.”
She found what she was looking for. I was surprised that it was a pack of gum, not her pot pipe. She waved a stick at me. I declined.
“I read someplace that if you chew gum you’ll eat less because you’re already tired of chewing before you get to the meal,” she said. “But as you can see, it hasn’t worked. I’ve gained and lost the same fifty pounds for so long. And now, the holidays. Oink oink!”
I told her she didn’t look overweight.
“Aren’t you sweet. Liar.” She popped two sticks of gum in her mouth. “Anyway, my ESL students are my kids now.”
The Hansens’ heads appeared and disappeared, separately, in different windows. Fiona saw them.
“I don’t know what they think they’re going to find,” she said.
There was something about Fiona that made me open up, just then.
“My biological mother was a singer. Her name was Terri Superanaskaia. She went by Terri S. She performed at some clubs in Los Angeles in the 1990s. She sang in a band called the Daisy Chain. But there was a more successful band with the same name, so they broke up.”
“Why didn’t they just change the name?”
“I don’t know.”
She thought about this for about a minute. “Was your dad in a band, too?”
“I don’t know. She indicated that it was a one-night stand.”
“Right. Sounds like a musician. A drummer.”
Fiona asked how I became a science wiz if I had come from musical parents. I shrugged. Except for my minor-league freak out and hospital stay, I wasn’t at all like my BiMo. I didn’t have a musical atom in my body. Possibly my BiFa was a science nerd who met my BiMo at a concert. Or, I took after some heretofore-unmentioned aunt or uncle. Perhaps I would come up with a breakthrough in this area. That could be my great contribution to the world—figuring out why we are the way we are. I guess people through millennia have been working on solving the mystery of personalities. It would be kind of arrogant to think I could do it. I would most likely stick to discovering the root cause of all allergies, and take satisfaction in winning a Nobel Prize for curing autoimmune diseases.
I felt like sharing more. I liked Fiona. She let me talk without demanding anything from me.
“My biological mother was disappointed that she never had a chance to contribute something important to the world. She never had a break.”
“She had you.” At first I thought Fiona meant that I had been standing in my BiMo’s way of success. It’s what I had believed for years. But that’s not what she meant. She meant I was the contribution.
Fiona jumped to her feet and said she hated the gum and that she needed to nibble on something in the kitchen. When she left, she made an oinking noise.
I stayed outside for a while, enjoying the low winter sun as it warmed my back. The curtains on the Hansen’s upstairs window moved again. Mr. Hansen’s head appeared and stayed there. My hand moved up to my face. I slowly unfurled a finger, my middle finger, and pretended to remove something from my eye. Then I let the finger slowly slide over my cheekbone and down. I kept the finger extended while it rested on my chin. The curtains moved again and Mr. Hansen’s head disappeared. I don’t know if a grin crept across my face, but I suspect it may have.
Dinner had an American Indian theme. That would have made far more sense at Thanksgiving. I had no idea why they did this for Christmas. Janet had prepared squab, wild rice, and purple potatoes. At one point I dropped a bit of squab on the table. I wrapped it in a napkin and set it aside. Fiona saw this and raised an eyebrow.
I explained. “If you drop food on the floor, if it’s wet, bacteria will cling to it. Everyone talks about the five-second rule, where food is good for five seconds after you drop it. But it’s only true if the food is dry and the surface is dry.”
“Is this what your science fair project is about?” Carl said.
“Actually, it’s on honeybees.” I was perfectly happy to go on about the science fair, but Fiona wasn’t dropping the squab, so to speak. She asked how many bacteria could be on the dining table. I explained that bacteria, even dangerous ones, lurk everywhere. Janet scowled at me. Then everyone started talking at once, overlapping each other.
Janet: “The table is clean.”
Fiona: You mean I could drop a hard roll on dry ground for five seconds and it would be safe?”
Carl: “Remember when we had food poisoning from those oysters?”
Janet: “If the table isn’t clean enough for you, you’re welcome to clean it.”
Carl: “You don’t have to clean it, Tyler.”
Fiona: “What if you drop it near a swimming pool, where the ground is wet but the water is chlorinated?”
Janet: “He just suggested my dining room is crawling with germs.”
Carl: “I think he was just making a point about science.”
Fiona: “I drank champagne out of a shoe once. Probably shouldn’t have done that.”
Janet: “That’s probably not the worst thing that crossed your lips.”
They should have taken the matter more seriously. Many people die from food poisoning every year. I don’t know how many. I would have to look that up. I said it would be safe if I overturned the bowl of Indian pudding on the floor and only ate off the top of it. Fiona burst out laughing.
“I could make that my science fair project,” I said. “Drop pudding on the floor and let everyone eat it and see what happens.”
It was an amusing image, eating blue-gray glop off the floor, like a cat. It was so funny I had to laugh, too. I laughed at the pudding. I laughed at Fiona’s tales of rock stars’ tongues and at the whole blithering absurdity of everything. I laughed until I was the last one laughing. Then I felt like a dummkopf, so I stopped.
TWENTY-NINE
March 16. I don’t have to write journals for Creative Soul, because the class was eliminated for winter semester, as were other experimental electives, In Stitches, Gangsters, Gamblers and Growth, and Starstruck. Budget cuts. The German program will struggle on for at least the rest of the year, no thanks to me.
I’m writing this very long journal entry because, a. I feel like it, and b. I have some important things to share.
Responses from my fall back universities have begun arriving. I applied to several highly selective institutions under their regular admissions deadlines. Before my breakdown in December, I met with my guidance counselor. She insisted that a Caltech rejection was not the end of the world and some great schools had better financial aid programs. If I were to apply to a second tier school, or even UNLV, I could even win a full-ride scholarship. I choked involuntarily when she said UNLV. I was relieved that she didn’t mention it again. But she did bring up the University of California at San Diego, a school I hadn’t considered. I applied there, and to Johns Hopkins, MIT, Duke, and Rice—basically the top schools for biomedical engineering.
Before I get into that, I want to share some of the things that happened over the past two and a half months. I think they’re important.
I received perfect grades for the fall semester. My teachers granted me dispensation, due to my breakdown and brief hospitalization, and I was able to take my remaining finals after Christmas break. I even did extra credit assignments in every class, something that wasn’t needed, because I aced every final. And I had the sympathy of every teacher, if not the sympathy of Principal Nicks.
Carl and Janet went to bat for me and prevented me from being suspended for the Ritalin. They had to go over Principal Nicks’ head to do so. Principal Ni
cks hated me even more after this, but he could do nothing about it. My previous suspension did not show up on any permanent record that my fall back schools would see.
Janet and Carl didn’t separate after all. I asked Carl how everything was going. That was my casual way of prying. He said they were still patching things up and it would take time. Janet opened a private practice as a life and career coach. To make ends meet while building up a client base, she took a part-time job as an accountant for some businessman. She was sure the guy was laundering money, she said, but she couldn’t prove it.
Between Janet’s jobs and Carl’s new class at UNLV, they have been doing better financially. They stopped selling furniture, which was a good thing. The place has become pretty empty. There is an echo in the living room.
I obeyed Janet’s command not to look for another job. This has been the longest period of my life, since I was fourteen, that I have not been employed. I haven’t even looked for new tutors. Eddie Kim and his mother moved to Korea, quite suddenly. He sent me a well-written note thanking me for everything.
I couldn’t tutor Levi, either. Right after Christmas, he begged his parents for forgiveness and reaffirmed his commitment to the church. They allowed him to move back. He didn’t want to risk his position there by coming over to see me. I still receive calls from him every so often, mostly status updates. He plans to go on the mission. I have offered no advice on this matter, because he hasn’t asked for any. I miss him and Eddie Kim.
My physical relationship with Rachel gave me impetus to accept Carl’s offer to borrow his Sentra. I have been taking her out once a week. She is a cheap date. I don’t mean to be disparaging. It’s the truth. Typically I will park at a restaurant, and Rachel will want to stay inside the car and “talk,” which means a little talking and a little making out. Then she will suggest a more private place to “talk,” which means more making out than talking. Then, she will say it’s too late to eat. Parking in Las Vegas is difficult. Many dark spots are kind of scary—at least Rachel thinks so—and the brightly-lit parking spots tend to be in casino garages. But there is a good thing about half-empty neighborhoods. We can park under street lamps for safety and not worry about being seen.
Rachel’s article was posted on a political blog soon after the beginning of winter semester. The piece contained only one paragraph about Principal Nicks’ stupid reasons for keeping the stall doors off. Rachel didn’t mention me by name. She told me it was a conflict of interest to write about someone she was romantically involved with. In the article she referred to me as an ambitious, sensitive senior at a Nevada high school who just wanted some privacy. I never thought of myself as sensitive, but whatever. She said my stall door stump speech put me on a collision course with an uncaring and authoritative principal. I might have just referred to him as a jerk who looked like a warthog. This was one reason news reporting would not be my contribution to the world.
The bulk of the article covered students who used Facebook to launch a campaign to stop genocide in Darfur. When I read it, it occurred to me that if others could stop genocide, the least I could do was bring back stall doors to the rest rooms of a high school.
I asked Rachel to help me organize a sit-in protest inside the faculty rest rooms, which had stall doors. I thought there would not be enough brave souls to do this, because it would mean a detention, or worse. But during the first lunch period, the faculty rest rooms were full. They stayed full for the second and third lunch periods, as students rotated in and out. I didn’t participate in the sit-in because I was working with Mr. Proudfoot on an eleventh-hour change to my science fair project.
I need to digress a little more. Someone at a high school on the east coast had taken first place in her science fair a month earlier, with a project very similar to my bee-pesticide idea. This wouldn’t have been a big deal if it hadn’t been reported in the New York Times. Mr. Proudfoot was apoplectic. He made me come up with another project, pronto. My experiment, “Cyanobacteria in Our Water: Every Day a Little Death,” merited an honorable mention. I should say congratulations to Charity Singh, who won the Nevada state science fair with “Cell Mutation in Marine Diatom Protoplasts and its Implications for Transformation and Nanotechnology Techniques.” It was highly accomplished, as cell formation from cell mutation in marine diatom-type projects go. I agreed with the judges that she exemplified the “qualities necessary for success in science.” If she were to ask me for advice, which she wouldn’t, I would tell her to choose better names for her experiments in the future.
Here’s the best part about the rest room protest. A local TV station did a short segment on the sit-in, complete with interviews. They didn’t mention my name, but Principal Nicks knew I was behind it. Everyone knew. He did not retaliate against me, because he probably didn’t want the station to do a follow-up story about how poor Tyler Superanaskaia was punished for trying to give fellow students a bit of privacy while they pooped. Within a week, stall doors were put up. For two weeks after that, I received daily back slaps and high-fives from my Firebird High brethren. How’s that for leadership skills, Caltech?
Speaking of colleges…
Thick envelopes began arriving on March 14. Thick envelopes.
The one that interested me most was from University of California, San Diego—ranked third in biomedical engineering, FYI. They offered me a full-ride scholarship, tuition, room, board, and books.
I have not decided where I will go. As much as I have trashed UNLV, I am seeing some value to staying in Las Vegas and going there.
I have one more thing to add. At the risk of anthropomorphizing a venerable institution of higher learning, I must say, IN YOUR FACE, CALTECH. In your freaking FACE.
Seriously. In your face.
THIRTY
September 14. Text messages:
Rachel: I can’t believe I have to work today. I want to see you off.
Me: You “saw me off” last night.
Rachel: Haha. Perv.
Me: You started it.
Rachel: Don’t make me regret it.
Me: Are you going to be all right with all those UNLV guys?
Rachel: Maybe. Are you going to be all right will all those UCSD girls?
Me: Maybe.
Rachel: You better come back at Thanksgiving.
Me: Is that an order?
Rachel: It is.
Me: Okay then.
“Glad to see you’re getting some use out of that phone,” Carl said, looking back at me from the front passenger seat of the Lexus.
Janet reiterated her disapproval of text messages. “Pretty soon the world will stop laughing out loud. We’ll just say L-O-L. When we have sex we’ll scream O-M-G.” Carl gave her a look and they were both quiet for a minute. Finally, Janet said as long as I kept in touch with them, voice or text was all right.
Janet rarely took her eyes from the road as she drove. Occasionally she would have a choice epithet for someone driving too slow in the fast lane. They set the music on shuffle, half her songs and half his. Her choices were 80s Brit pop bands. Carl had chosen all female singer-songwriters, heavy on the acoustic ballads. Janet once derided his taste as “menses music.” I thought that phrase was funny, but I chose not to laugh.
I didn’t expect them to drive me to San Diego. Janet insisted on it. She said she was stressed out from her jobs and needed a little vacation. They wanted to spend a day or so sightseeing and buying me some new things. I planned to dissuade them from spending money on me. There wasn’t much I needed. And I had just spent the last two days divesting myself of junk. As I packed, I went through Milagro Sanchez’s box and decided there was nothing of value. Throwing out her box started me thinking about my own Box o’ Crap. It was already overstuffed. I would be accumulating things at college and would need room. So I culled everything but the photographs.
Forty-five minutes from Las Vegas, the questions started. Did I know who my roommate would be? When would I choose my classes? Would I have my own k
itchen?
“No. Already chosen. No, there’s a cafeteria in the dorm.”
Janet asked me whether I would miss them.
“I promise I’ll call,” I said, which was not really an answer to her question. I followed up with, “sure.”
In a few weeks, on my eighteenth birthday, I would age out of the foster system. My foster “relationship” with Carl and Janet would officially end. They weren’t taking in any new foster kids. They wanted me to come back for holidays. They wanted to pay for the expenses the scholarship didn’t cover. These were things parents did for biological kids, from what I’d heard. I still didn’t quite get it. But I didn’t complain.
Rachel needed to look after her mom, so she didn’t apply to out-of-state schools. She said she UNLV would be fine. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t the top journalism school in the country. Rachel basically insisted that I go to UCSD. She even said she would break up with me if I stayed in Las Vegas just to be with her.
So in April, I responded to UCSD with an enthusiastic, “hell yes.”
I should mention that San Diego had the best weather in the country. One of the best beaches in the world was within walking distance of the campus. Not that I would have much time to spend there.
Carl asked me why I had been determined to go to Caltech. I told him that a middle school teacher said I should consider going there. It was a passing statement, but it stuck in my head for years. This was right after my BiMo died, when I was in my first foster home. I guess I saw Caltech as the right place to land. Plus, at that point, I took everything Mr. Gurganus said as the gospel. Good thing he didn’t tell me I was destined to become a stripper.
As we crossed the Nevada/California border, Carl said the strangest thing, out of the blue. “It’s too bad your mother didn’t see this. She would have been proud of you.”
She certainly would have envied me living near the beach. Proud? That was not clear.
