Standing Up to Mr. O.

by Claudia Mills

  Ms. Bealer kept on talking. Maggie had learned how to listen to Ms. Bealer with part of her mind while thinking her own thoughts with the rest.

  On a blank piece of paper at the back of her notebook, she wrote, “Dissection—Against.” She’d probably have to do some research in the library, but she could at least start out by gathering her thoughts. She began writing:

  1. Thou shalt not kill. Not: thou shalt not kill except to do dissections.

  So far, so good. How could anybody disagree with the Bible?

  2. Everything has a right to life.

  Even better. It sounded like the Declaration of Independence. How could anybody disagree with the Declaration of Independence? The only problem was that Maggie wasn’t sure that this particular self-evident truth was actually true. Did everything have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Did mosquitoes? Did bacteria? Did germs?

  3. Biology is the science of life, not the science of death.

  That sounded snappy, almost like a bumper sticker. Maggie could imagine wearing it on a button. Not that she ever would. Mr. O. wouldn’t like it, and Maggie would never want to do anything to disappoint him. But it seemed right, nonetheless.

  By the time the bell rang, Maggie had covered three pages with notes. She was going to try to do the rest of the worm experiments; she had promised Mr. O. that she would. But, promise or no promise, she wasn’t going to do the worm dissection. And if that disappointed Mr. O.—well, maybe if she wrote a good enough opinion essay, he would somehow understand.

  4

  On afternoons when Maggie didn’t have a piano lesson and Alycia didn’t have basketball practice, they usually did their homework together, either at Alycia’s house or at Maggie’s. Maggie liked Alycia’s house better, and Alycia liked Maggie’s better.

  Alycia’s house was in the Pinewood Preserve subdivision, about half a mile from the middle school. Alycia had told Maggie that there was a rule in the subdivision that your mailbox had to be painted the same color as your house and have the same cedar shingles on its little roof. Alycia’s sprawling, split-level house was gray. Her mailbox was gray. The basketball hoop next to her driveway had a gray backboard.

  Maggie and her mother lived in a tiny apartment built in a converted two-car garage in the old neighborhood right next to the university. Downstairs, they had a living room and a kitchen; upstairs, their two bedrooms and a shared bath. No dining room, no family room, no rec room, no mud room, no study, no two-story entrance hall. Not even a garage, because their apartment was already somebody else’s garage. No basketball backboard, of any color.

  Maggie loved Alycia’s house because it was spacious and elegant, and Mrs. Eagen was always there, baking something yummy for Alycia’s lunches.

  “But your apartment is cozier,” Alycia had told Maggie. “And I like that it’s messy. And that your mother isn’t there.”

  That day they went to Alycia’s. Mrs. Eagen served them a plate of homemade gingersnaps and hot chocolate made from real milk and cocoa and sugar, not from a powdered mix.

  When Alycia’s mother had finally disappeared into another part of the house, Maggie said meaningfully, “Three more days.”

  “Three more days?” Alycia looked as if she honestly didn’t know what Maggie was talking about.

  “To W-day. Worm day.”

  “Oh, that. I told you, let Matt do it. That’s what boys are for.”

  With Mr. O.’s lunchtime conversation still echoing in Maggie’s ears, Alycia’s remark sounded pretty sexist. But Maggie didn’t say anything.

  “Speaking of boys,” Alycia went on, “I saw Jake after school yesterday, and he was smoking. It didn’t look like it was his first time, either.”

  “That’s dumb,” Maggie said automatically. But as Maggie pictured Jake smoking, she imagined him, through the haze of his cigarette, staring at her wordlessly with those dark, intense eyes.

  “Well, you know Jake. He has to be Mr. Cool.” Alycia lowered her voice, even though no one else was listening. “I heard his dad left.”

  “Left?” Maggie felt her throat tightening.

  “Just took off. Kip told me. So maybe that’s why—” Alycia broke off. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” Maggie said. She could have finished Alycia’s sentence for her: I didn’t mean that everybody whose father leaves is a budding juvenile delinquent.

  Lots of kids at school had divorced parents. It was hardly a big deal. Unless you were the one whose parents were divorced. Then it was a big deal, at least to you. And it felt strange to think of people, other kids, saying to each other about her, Maggie, “I heard her dad left.” It was strange to think of the biggest, saddest fact about your life being a piece of gossip told by one kid to another, over hot chocolate and gingersnaps, in somebody’s country-style kitchen.

  “What are you writing your opinion essay on?” Alycia asked Maggie, obviously to change the subject.

  “Guess.”

  “Why knitting is more fun than crocheting.”

  Maggie whacked Alycia with her gingham napkin. “Dissections. And why they’re not fun at all, at least for whoever gets dissected.”

  Alycia looked impressed. “You picked a hard one. I’m doing mine on recycling. Well, really on precycling, they call it. How people shouldn’t buy stuff that has too much packaging. Like those individually wrapped slices of cheese. Or juice boxes. And they shouldn’t. I feel like stopping people in line at King Soopers and saying, ‘Don’t buy that!’”

  Alycia took another small bite of her gingersnap. She always nibbled around the edges of a cookie, like a mouse. Maggie sometimes squeaked like a mouse; Alycia ate like a mouse. It was plainly a sign that they were meant to be best friends. Plus, they were both perfectly happy to sit for hours, knitting afghan squares or figuring out how to make woven bracelets from a craft kit or working a complicated pattern in counted cross-stitch.

  “Well, I don’t think people should do dissections,” Maggie said. It was far worse to kill another living creature than it was to buy individually wrapped cheese slices.

  “Lucky for me that boys aren’t people,” Alycia said. She laughed, and Maggie smiled. Maggie couldn’t help appreciating the way that Alycia was always in control where boys were concerned; it was amusing to watch hapless males like Kip scurrying to do her bidding. But boys were people, and if dissection was wrong, it was just as wrong whether you did it yourself or made your lab partner do it for you.

  “Should we get started?” Maggie asked, a bit too abruptly.

  “Sure,” Alycia said, pushing the plate of gingersnaps aside to make room for their books. When Maggie and Alycia studied together, they really studied. Both girls liked to do well academically, even though some of their other friends thought it was dumb to care about school. It was another main thing Maggie and Alycia had in common. They had done homework together for so many years that Alycia’s round handwriting was as familiar to Maggie as her own.

  Maggie opened her English notebook and read over her notes for her dissection paper. Then she picked up her pen and began writing.

  * * *

  In biology class on Wednesday, Maggie decided to force herself to get over her fear of worms. When Matt set the worm motel on their lab table, Maggie didn’t let herself shrink away in her usual horror. Instead she looked at the worm, calmly and carefully. It really wasn’t very terrifying, at least not when safely contained in the mayonnaise jar.

  Maggie felt Mr. O.’s eyes on her.

  “I think—I want to touch it,” Maggie said to Matt.

  “Be my guest.” Matt pushed the jar closer to Maggie.

  Now what? Maggie thought that she could stand touching their worm with the tip of one finger if Matt took it out of the jar and put it on the paper plate, but she didn’t think she could pick it up, just like that.

  “Would you put it on the plate for me?” Maggie asked meekly. She was sure Alycia didn’t sound so humble and apologetic when she got Kip t
o do things for her.

  Matt looked disgusted, but he obliged. On the plate, the worm stretched, as if relieved to be out of the cramped quarters of its glass prison.

  It was now or never. Maggie readied her right index finger. She brought it within three inches of the worm before she lost her nerve. She thought of Mr. O. again. Will you try to get to know your worm? He’s really not such a bad little guy. She had to do it. She couldn’t disappoint Mr. O.

  Maggie touched the worm.

  Her heart racing with exhilaration now, not terror, she looked up at Mr. O. He gave her an approving grin.

  She touched the worm again and felt a fierce kind of triumph surge through her. There was nothing in the world, she suddenly knew, nothing at all, as powerful as facing a fear and overcoming it. Right then, in that moment, Maggie felt she could touch a hundred worms. She could touch a hundred snakes.

  She turned to Matt, wanting to share this moment with someone, even with him. To her surprise, he was smiling, too. His was a superior, condescending smile, not like Mr. O.’s grin of congratulation, but it was definitely a smile.

  “You want to put it back, or should I?” Matt asked then.

  Maggie didn’t hesitate. “I’ll do it. I just pick him up? Like by the middle?”

  “That’s all there is to it.”

  Maggie reached down, with thumb and forefinger this time. She grasped the worm around the middle, firmly enough so that he couldn’t wriggle away, but not so firmly that she squished him. There! She dropped him back in the jar. He wasn’t such a bad little guy.

  “Let’s give him a name,” Maggie suggested. “What’s a good name for a worm? How about Squirmy?”

  “You don’t name worms.” Matt looked disgusted again. Their brief moment of camaraderie was apparently over. “It’s not a pet. It’s not even going to be alive two days from now. We’re dissecting it Friday, remember?”

  Unbelievably, Maggie had, for a few moments, forgotten.

  “Not me,” Maggie said. “Maybe you, but not me.”

  “Are you going to keep up this squeamish stuff all year?”

  “I’m not squeamish.” Well, as of five minutes ago, she wasn’t. “I touched him. You saw me. I just think it’s wrong to dissect animals, that’s all.”

  Matt snorted with annoyance. “Come on, you eat animals, don’t you?”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Why not? You kill animals to eat them, you kill animals to dissect them. Either way, they’re dead. What’s the difference?”

  “I don’t kill animals to eat them. I’ve never killed any cows or pigs.” Besides, though Maggie didn’t say it out loud, it was hard to think of hamburger as really having come from a cow, or bacon as really having come from a pig.

  “So you have someone else do your killing for you. That’s admirable. I’m sure the cows and pigs are appreciative. ‘We’re getting slaughtered, but Maggie McIntosh didn’t do it. She’s only going to eat me, she’s not going to kill me.’”

  Maggie tried to think back to the arguments she was working on for her dissection essay. Thou shalt not kill. Everything has a right to life. Matt was right. Even if she wasn’t killing cows and pigs and sheep and chickens, somebody was. And if everything had a right to life, cows and pigs and sheep and chickens did, too.

  But still …

  “Wait a minute,” Maggie said. “You aren’t a vegetarian. Why are you trying to make me feel guilty about eating meat?” She had Matt there.

  “I’m not a vegetarian,” Matt agreed calmly. “I’m also not claiming that dissections are immoral.”

  “But eating meat—I mean, people have to eat. They don’t have to do dissections.”

  “Did you ever hear of tofu? Or peanut butter? Or vegetables? There’re plenty of other things to eat.”

  “It’s different to kill something just to see what it looks like inside,” Maggie insisted. “To kill something out of curiosity.”

  “It’s called science,” Matt said. “It’s probably the reason you’re alive today, instead of dead from smallpox, or TB, or a strep infection.”

  “All right, campers.” Mr. O., who had been helping some kids in the back of the room, was standing next to their lab table. “What seems to be the problem here?”

  “Nothing,” Maggie said, hoping Mr. O. hadn’t overheard their conversation. She wanted to have her thoughts all worked out before she explained to him—tried to explain to him—why she wouldn’t be doing the dissection on Friday.

  “We were having a philosophical discussion,” Matt said loftily.

  “I touched my worm again,” Maggie said, wondering if Mr. O. would give her another approving smile. He did, and Maggie once more basked in the glow of his good opinion. Then he moved on to another lab table.

  It had been a momentous morning, all right.

  Maggie had touched a worm.

  And she had become a vegetarian.

  5

  Maggie wasn’t sure how to tell her mother that she wasn’t eating meat anymore. In one way, it shouldn’t matter. Maggie could hardly remember the last time her mother had gone to the trouble to cook a real meal—the kind where you plan a menu, and shop for groceries, and use a recipe. Usually the two of them foraged in the fridge together like roommates. But Maggie still felt uneasy. Her mother didn’t seem to like those vegetarians at the university very much. What would she say now that her own daughter had become one?

  At least her mother seemed to be in a good mood that evening. “Guess who got an A on the chemistry exam?” she warbled as she burst into the living room. “Ninety-six out of a hundred!”

  “That’s great, Mom,” Maggie said. It was funny watching her mother’s agony and ecstasy over her grades. She cared about her own grade point average even more than Maggie and Alycia cared about theirs. It was as if every A she got at college were proving something, retroactively, to Maggie’s father.

  “Celebrate! Celebrate!” Her mother was dancing around the living room, looking more like a crazy older sister than a thirty-four-year-old mom. Maggie couldn’t imagine Alycia’s mother dancing like that, with her coat still on and her shoes kicked off and her long hair flying.

  At last her mother dropped down beside Maggie on the couch. “Seriously,” she said, “we should celebrate. He only gave seven A’s. How much homework do you have? Want to go out for dinner?”

  “Sure.” In a restaurant, Maggie could order whatever she wanted. All restaurants had some vegetarian food.

  But an hour later, when Maggie studied the menu in their favorite Thai restaurant, her uneasiness returned. What would her mother say when she ordered curried tofu and eggplant? Or vegetarian delight? She always ordered beef with ginger and mushrooms. And she always shared her mother’s chicken in peanut sauce.

  “What looks good to you, Maggiola? Should we stick with twenty-four and thirty-seven?” They had ordered the same entrées so often that they had memorized their numbers from the menu.

  “I might try something different,” Maggie said offhandedly. “Maybe forty-eight.”

  Her mother checked her menu. “Curried tofu? And eggplant? You don’t like tofu, remember? Tofu, the food without texture?”

  “Well, fifty-one, then.”

  “Vegetarian delight? I hate to tell you, but that has vegetables in it.”

  In deciding so suddenly that morning to become a vegetarian, Maggie had overlooked the small fact that she disliked almost all vegetables.

  “Well, you see,” Maggie said uncomfortably, “I’ve sort of—pretty much—decided to be a vegetarian.”

  “What?” her mother said, although Maggie knew she had heard her the first time.

  Maggie did her best to explain. Her mother replied with the same arguments Maggie had tried to use against Matt. “But, Maggles, everybody has to eat.”

  “I can eat tofu.” She’d get used to those bland, deathly white, Jell-O–like, quivering squares.

  “Tofu isn’t food,” her mother said. �
�How about fish? Do vegetarians eat fish? The curried shrimp here is extra-yummy.”

  Did vegetarians eat fish? Maggie had been one for only seven hours, so she was hardly an expert on vegetarianism. She found herself wondering what Matt would say. The answer wasn’t too hard to figure out. Matt would say that if she wouldn’t kill a worm, she shouldn’t kill a shrimp.

  “No,” Maggie said, twisting her napkin miserably in her lap.

  “But promise me—you’re not going to be a vegan, are you?”

  Maggie didn’t think she was going to be a vegan, but she couldn’t remember exactly what they did and didn’t eat.

  “No dairy products? No milk, cheese, butter, eggs? No honey, because it exploits the bees?”

  “I’m not a vegan.” You didn’t have to kill a cow to get milk. Maggie wasn’t opposed to exploitation, just to murder.

  The waitress came for their order.

  “Number twenty-four. Chicken in peanut sauce. Mags?”

  “Number forty-eight,” Maggie said firmly. “Curried tofu and eggplant.”

  It wasn’t too bad, actually. The curry gave the tofu some flavor, and the eggplant was cooked so much that it was barely recognizable as a vegetable. Maggie had survived her first real meal as a vegetarian. (The peanut butter and jelly sandwich she had eaten for lunch didn’t count.) But it was depressing to think how many more meals she had to go. Three meals a day for—eighty?—more years. That added up to a lot of tofu.

  * * *

  Thursday night, Maggie had trouble sleeping. At one o’clock in the morning, she was still wide awake, staring up at the low ceiling that sloped in over her old-fashioned wooden bed.

  She didn’t have to worry anymore about deciding what to do. She wasn’t going to do the dissection, and she wasn’t going to pretend to do it by letting Matt do it for her. She’d get an F on the lab, but she could accept that—although Maggie wanted an A in biology as much as her mother wanted an A in chemistry. Still, Maggie knew that grades weren’t the most important thing in the world. She wouldn’t cheat for a grade. She wouldn’t kill—even a worm—for a grade.