She sighed deeply. “When I met your father, he was working two jobs because his parents couldn’t afford to give him any money, and his scholarships and loans didn’t cover everything. I never let that stop me from dating him. And you shouldn’t let Daniel’s family situation stand in the way, either. I just want you to be careful, that’s all. So far, Daniel has been a very good influence on you.”
“But you wouldn’t want me to get pregnant, drop out of high school, and move to Levittown,” I said.
“True. I don’t think you’d do that, though.”
“Mom.” I drew the word out into multiple syllables. I couldn’t look at her eyes. “I’m confused. I don’t know what you want me to do. Should I go out with Daniel or not?”
She shook her head. “I know you, Missy. If I say black, you say white. If I say don’t see Daniel, you’ll date him. If I say he’s a nice boy and you should go out with him, you’ll drop him. So I’m not getting caught in that trap. You’re a smart girl and I’m confident your father and I raised you right. You make your own decision.”
I glared at her. “Have you been reading a parenting book or something?”
She laughed. “No, sweetheart. I’ve just been your mom for seventeen years.”
“But what about Saturday night. I told him we might have to go to Aunt Rita’s in case you wanted me to say no.”
“I think it would be nice for you to meet his mother. We’ll talk about what you should take after dinner.” She stood up. “Which I’d better get started on, if we expect to eat.”
“My name is Melissa,” I said, as she walked away. “Not Missy.”
“I know,” she said over her shoulder.
Brain Studies
The next day as we were leaving math I asked Daniel if he wanted to sit together at lunch.
He smiled. “Sure, that would be great. You want me to come to your table?”
I shook my head. “I’ll come to yours.”
Brie, Mindy, and Chelsea looked surprised when I passed their table to sit with Daniel. “We’re talking about math,” I said.
“Right,” Chelsea said.
I didn’t deign to respond. I sat down across from Daniel with my tray—a mutant small pepperoni pizza with a Coke and a chocolate-chip cookie. He was eating another one of his sandwiches. “I asked my parents and I can come to dinner on Saturday night. But my mom says I have to bring something. Dessert?”
“Awesome. Can you cook?”
“I can bake if I pay attention. Anything in particular you like?”
His eyes got this faraway look. “When we lived in Nashville my mom worked with a lady who made carrot cake. It was the best thing I ever tasted. Can you make that?”
“I can try.”
We sat there eating for a while, and then I asked, “Have you always been able to, you know, read so fast?”
He shrugged. “I guess so. I mean, once I learned to read. I learned first in Spanish, back in Cuba. Then we came here I had to learn English.”
“Was that hard?”
“Not really. I listened to everybody talking English around me, and watched TV for a while, like Sesame Street and stuff, and then I just started to read.” He looked at me. “Why?”
“This really weird thing happened to me on Saturday night.”
His eyebrows went up and he smiled.
“That wasn’t the weird part.” I hesitated. “When I got home, I picked up the book for English class. I figured I’d read for a few minutes and it would put me to sleep. But I got into it and when my Mom told me it was time for bed I realized I’d read the whole book.”
“What’s weird about that? Sometimes when I’m reading something I like I don’t notice how much time has passed.”
“But it was only like an hour. For the whole book.”
“You don’t usually read that fast?”
“Are you kidding?” I laughed. “In an hour I could read like fifty pages, if I was really into the book. But this was almost three hundred.”
“I can read faster than that.”
“It gets weirder.” I told him about reading the article in the Sunday paper, how all the stuff in it made sense in a way that things hadn’t before.
He chewed the last couple bites of his sandwich as he thought. The cafeteria was noisy all around us, kids laughing, music playing, the sound of chairs scraping and trays banging. But it felt like Daniel and I were in our own little cocoon, separate from everyone else.
“It sounds like the way that I think,” he said. “All the stuff coming together without my having to work at it. But you said this is the first time it’s happened to you?”
I nodded.
“You’re right, it’s weird.”
The lunch bell rang and we walked to history class. Daniel had to leave right afterward to go to work, so we didn’t get talk any more about it.
Brie was already on the bus when I got on. I sat down next to her and she said, “So you’re sitting with me now?”
“It was just lunch. I had to talk to Daniel.”
“Uh-huh. Chelsea wouldn’t shut up about you two.”
“Chelsea’s a bitch.”
“And your point is?”
We both laughed, and then we went on to talk about other stuff. The next day I sat with Daniel again, and Mindy followed my lead, going to sit with a boy named Brandon she liked. That left Chelsea and Brie by themselves, and I felt bad about abandoning my best friend to Chelsea Scalzitti.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday,” Daniel said, as we sat down to eat. “About the brain thing. It made me start to wonder why my brain works the way it does.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve always taken it for granted that I can read so fast, that I can make these connections in my head. I thought that other smart kids must think the same way. But then as I got older and started to know other kids, and study with them, I realized that wasn’t the truth.”
He ate some of his sandwich. I didn’t say anything, just waiting for him to finish his thought.
“So I started to think I was some kind of freak. I wondered if I was a genius or an idiot savant or something. So I read all about them, as much as I could, but nothing seemed to fit. No one described feeling or thinking the way I did.” He looked up at me. “Until you.”
“But this is all new to me,” I said. “I never could read that fast, or think that way, until I met you.”
We just looked at each other. Both of us were completely baffled. “Maybe we should do some more research,” I said. “Like in the library or something.”
He had to work that afternoon at ComputerCo, and I had literary magazine with Miss Margolis, so we agreed to meet in the library the next afternoon and see what we could figure out. They didn’t have a big selection of books, but at least there were computers there and Internet access.
I walked to history with him, and he whispered something to Mindy as we walked in. She switched seats with him, so that he was sitting next to me. That afternoon I read ahead a few chapters in our history book. It was interesting the way things started coming together—I could see the way that the French revolution had inevitably led to Napoleon’s rise, and how the way he organized laws spread around the world. For the first time, I found history interesting.
The next day at lunch, Brie and Chelsea attached themselves to a couple of cheerleaders and made their own new group. It was strange to see things shifting. But I had always known that we were going to split up when we went to college, make new friends and develop new interests, and while that was scary it was also something I was looking forward to. I figured it wasn’t a bad idea to get a head start.
I did worry, though, that if I broke up with Daniel (God, I was thinking about breaking up when we weren’t really even dating) that I wouldn’t have friends to go back to. I’d end up a solitary geek, sitting by myself at lunch while everyone gossiped about me.
Daniel and I walked to the library together after
history. Shyly, Daniel reached out to take my hand, and I put mine in his. I guess that meant we were really boyfriend and girlfriend.
His hand was cool in mine, and it felt nice to be that connected to him. We passed Brie, on her way to her piano lesson, and she didn’t say anything, but I saw her look at our hands.
In the library we grabbed adjacent computers. “How do we start?” I asked, as I opened up a browser.
“How much do you know about how the brain works?”
“Nothing more than we learned in biology. And I forgot most of that already.”
“So start there. If you could understand that article you read in the paper on Sunday, you can probably figure out a lot just by reading stuff about how the brain functions. I’m going to see if I can find anything about people sharing brains.”
“Yuck.”
“Not like that. Did you ever watch Star Trek?”
I groaned. “My father is a total science fiction geek. He used to make us watch those old episodes when we were kids.”
“So you know what a Vulcan mind meld is.”
“You think that’s what happened to us?” I closed my eyes and remembered kissing Daniel, the electric flashes I’d felt. I opened my eyes again and saw Daniel staring at me. I blushed. “But I don’t know all your memories. Wasn’t it some kind of telepathic link?”
“Yeah. But maybe you didn’t get my memories but instead some bit of the way my mind works.”
“Like a virus?”
He laughed. “Yeah, my brain has infected yours. Now you’re going to turn into a geek.”
I pushed his shoulder. “God forbid.”
“Go,” he said. “Start reading.”
He turned to his computer and started typing. But instead of starting with the brain, I looked up the Vulcan mind meld. Okay, so it was all in a TV show. But who knows, maybe there was a piece of truth in it? We didn’t have warp drives or teleporters or phasers, but I’ll bet there was a basis for all of it in science somewhere.
The mind meld required physical contact. Check. Daniel and I had kissed, with tongue. That was pretty physical.
You had to be a Vulcan to initial a mind meld, though. That was a problem. Daniel looked pretty human, though of course so did the Vulcans, except for those pointy ears.
I looked over at him as he stared at the computer screen. Could he be some kind of alien? I mean, if some species from another planet had already figured out how to travel across the vast distances of space, they could probably also simulate our appearance. I remembered Odo, from Deep Space Nine. He was a totally different life form, but he managed to look human, except for the nose.
Again I looked at Daniel. His long hair hung over his ears, but I was pretty sure I’d seen them before, and they weren’t pointy. I’d have noticed that. And his nose looked perfectly formed.
I went back to the details of the mind meld. The Vulcans who did it best, like Spock, had advanced mental abilities. Daniel had that covered.
I closed my eyes and concentrated. Could I sense any of Daniel’s memories floating around inside my brain? Could I feel what he was feeling?
Unless he was feeling that this was a stupid waste of time, I was only in my own head. I gave up and did what Daniel had suggested; I researched the brain. I had heard somewhere that we only used about ten percent of our brain capacity. But I discovered that didn’t mean that ninety percent was just sitting around wasting time, like the Big Mistake when he should have been doing homework. It just meant that there was a lot of power we weren’t harnessing.
Had Daniel’s brain figured out how to harness more power? And somehow have transmitted that to me?
I went back to reading. The brain was about the size of a head of cauliflower (a creepy sort of metaphor, if you ask me) and regulated about a gazillion things that we did, from seeing and hearing to walking and pooping.
“Melissa?”
I looked over and saw Daniel staring at me. “We’ve got to book if we’re going to get the last late bus.”
I looked up at the clock. It was nearly four, and we’d spent almost two hours at the computers. I hadn’t even felt the time passing.
“This whole business is freaky,” I said, as we packed up. “I didn’t even realize what time it was.”
“Welcome to my world. I have to wear this watch with an alarm so I don’t completely space out on when I have to go to work or to school.” He showed me the watch on his wrist. It was a cheap digital one with a rubber band and an alarm function on the dial.
We split up at the bus dock. As the late bus threaded its way through the farmlands and suburban developments around Stewart’s Crossing I stared out the window. I didn’t want to think any more but I couldn’t stop myself. What was happening to me? And how was Daniel involved in it?
Smart Shopping
Saturday morning I decided I was going to bake that carrot cake that Daniel wanted. I got on the Internet and surfed around a few recipes. Then I asked my mother if I could take her car down to the grocery to buy what I needed. “I can do your shopping for you, if you want,” I said.
She looked at me, then placed her hand to my forehead again. “Are you feverish? You’ve never made an offer like that before.”
“I just need this stuff, all right? Carrots and walnuts and real flour. If you don’t want me to pick anything up for you, that’s all right.”
“Oh, no, don’t let me stop you. You go get ready and I’ll put together a list for you.”
By the time I came back she had this huge list and I started to regret my impulse to ask. I was going to just dart in, buy the things I needed and then come home. Instead I was going to be trapped in the aisles of the grocery. But she gave me a pair of fifty-dollar bills and said, “If you can’t find anything, call me, and I’ll tell you where it is.”
Like I couldn’t find my way around a supermarket. I grabbed the cash and the car keys and ran.
In the past when I went to the grocery with my mom, I just mindlessly threw stuff in the cart. But that morning I found myself reading all the labels, picking the canned soup that had the fewest calories and artificial ingredients, buying the small-sized dish detergent instead of the large because there was a two-for-one sale on the small one and the per ounce cost was less that way. And even so I was home in under an hour.
“You got everything?” my mother asked, coming out to the driveway to help me unload the car.
“Yup. Everything on your list.” I handed her the change and the receipt.
“You couldn’t have gotten everything and still had this much change, Melissa.”
“It’s all about being a smart shopper,” I said airily, carrying a couple of bags inside.
We started unpacking. “This isn’t the brand of chicken broth I usually buy,” my mother said, holding up a paper carton.
“This one has almost thirty percent less sodium. And the cartons are better for the environment than cans.”
She looked doubtful, but she pulled down a can of the soup and compared ingredients. “You’re right. This brand is better. How did you figure that out?”
“I just read the labels, Mom. That’s what you’re always telling us, right?”
She just shook her head and put the soup in the cabinet.
I started peeling and shredding the carrots while the oven pre-heated. As I worked I read the section on cakes in my mother’s cookbook. All the stuff about baking powder and baking soda and how a cake should rise, and the way the egg proteins bound to the oil—it all made sense.
By the time I had the cake in the oven I was sure it was going to be perfect. How could it not be, when I understood everything about how to make it?
My father came in as I was icing the cooled cake. “That smells so good,” he said. “We haven’t had a real cake in the house in years.”
“Because of Robbie. He’s gluten-intolerant. So the rest of us have to be denied everything he can’t eat.”
“It’s not like that, Melissa.”
“Yeah, it is. But you know what? I’m going to college next year. I can eat anything I want then.”
“You haven’t tasted dining hall food.” He dipped a finger at the edge of the icing bowl. “Mmm, this is delicious.”
“It’s a mixture of powdered sugar, vanilla, and cream cheese.” I started to explain how the cheese and the sugar came together to make it so creamy, but then I stopped myself. That’s the way Daniel would talk. “I made a baby cake too, for you and Mom.” I moved the bowl aside and pointed. “I’ll frost it for you and leave it in the refrigerator.”
His eyebrows rose. “That’s my girl,” he said, kissing my cheek. “Your mother and I are so proud of you.”
“Yeah, because I don’t cause a lot of trouble like the Big Mistake.”
“You shouldn’t call your brother that. I’m sure that hurts his feelings. And your mother and I are proud of you for who you are, not in comparison with anybody else.”
He took another finger of icing, then smiled and walked back to the study. Even though I wanted to make a smart remark, I didn’t. It felt good to know that my parents were proud of me, and I was going to let myself enjoy that while it lasted.
Daniel’s mother was pretty proud of him too. You could tell it every time she looked at him.
Their apartment was small -- just a living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. We ate at their kitchen table, a spindly one with a Formica top. The chairs didn’t match each other. Mine was metal, painted a glossy maroon, while Daniel’s had a curved Windsor back with a slat missing and his mother’s was an armchair like the kind we have at each end of our dining room table.
She served us a casserole of rice and shredded chicken she called Arroz Imperial con Pollo, or Imperial Chicken and Rice. It came to the table in a big, square-topped mound. The bits of chicken had been mixed into the rice along with peas and something red that his mother said was pimento, and it tasted heavenly. There was a big bowl of soupy Cuban black beans to go along with it, and a long loaf of crusty bread.
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