by Wiltz, Jenni
“I’m always ready,” her dad said.
Her mom’s eyes traveled down his arm to the shoe in his hand. “You’re not wearing those tomorrow, are you?”
“I am.”
“Roger, you’re going door-to-door. Your feet will be killing you. Just wear tennis shoes like everyone else.”
He looked at the shoe, shined to help camouflage the worn patches near the ball of the foot. “I’m wearing these.”
“You don’t work for SeedCorp anymore.”
“I know where I work, Sharon.”
Her mom tossed the dish towel over her shoulder, lips moving in silent retort.
Emma glanced at her dad to make sure he hadn’t seen her mom’s gesture. “Come on. Last one to the kitchen has to clear the table.”
Her thirteen-year-old sister, Mattie, waited for them at the small table in the breakfast nook. Thin, blonde, and blue-eyed, she already had a boyfriend. Martin Rodriguez, a basketball player who lived two blocks away, presented her with a new stuffed animal every week.
“Hey, Em,” Mattie said. “Can I borrow ten dollars?”
“I don’t have ten dollars.”
“I told you not to ask your sister,” her mom said.
“What’s it for?” Emma asked.
“The girls are going to the mall on Friday after school.”
“So go, but don’t buy anything.”
“I have to.”
“No, you don’t.”
Her mom carted four plates to the table, two in her hands and two balanced on her forearms. “Who needs milk?”
“I do,” said Mattie and her dad, at the same time.
Her mom filled each glass halfway before sitting down. When they were all seated, hands folded in their laps, her father began to say grace. “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest,” they chanted. “Let these gifts to us be blessed. Amen.”
When he finished, he looked around the table.
“What?” her mom asked.
“Soy sauce?”
“You haven’t even tried it.”
For a moment, no one moved. Then her mother sighed, got up, and grabbed the bottle from the pantry. Her dad picked it up and turned the bed of rice and broccoli into something that resembled an oil spill. He scooped up a dripping mouthful and nodded in approval as he chewed. One drop trickled out the side of his mouth and he tried to lick it up with his tongue.
“You have a napkin,” her mom said.
“Oh!” He faked surprise when he picked up the folded paper napkin beneath his knife and spoon. “That’s what these things are for.”
Mattie giggled. “Dad, you’re funny.”
“What did you do in school today, Matt?”
Her sister pushed a piece of broccoli to the side of her plate. “We had a debate in English class about John Steinbeck and whether his representation of farm workers was fair.”
Emma’s father nodded. “Which book did you read?”
“In Dubious Battle.”
He looked to Emma. “You’ve read that one, haven’t you?”
“No.”
“I thought you read it a few years ago,” her mom said. “You complained about it.”
“That was The Pearl, Mom. We read it in eighth grade.”
“What didn’t you like about it?” her father asked.
“I don’t remember. I was thirteen.”
“It must have been different for Steinbeck. Not like it is now.”
Her parents’ eyes met across the dinner table. Sometimes one or both of them would slip and say something about gang members or farm workers, both code for “Mexicans.” Before she was born, Malo Verde was a coastal farm town where they grew lettuce and broccoli and artichokes and strawberries. Now, it was a stronghold for drug smugglers, gangs, and former inmates of the nearby state prison. Locking them up had little effect since the gang leaders they wanted to impress were all in prison anyway. On the wrong day (or sometimes the wrong week), the headlines made Malo Verde sound like Iraq, but with fog.
“Dad,” Mattie said. “Are you excited about tomorrow?”
“I am.”
“What do you have to do?”
“They’ll hand out our assignments in the training session.”
“I hope you get a good one.”
“It’s going to be a big day for you, too, Em.”
“Oh?” Her mom tilted her head, one golden earring sparkling in the light.
“Chem test,” she answered.
Her dad carted another forkful of soy-soaked rice to his mouth. “Have you given any more thought to Cal Poly?”
“Dad, they require two years of a performing or visual art.”
“But everything else you have is so good. They can’t turn you down.”
“They can. Those are the rules.”
“Can you do something this summer? And then next year?”
“No, Dad, I can’t.” Her schedule for high school had been full since eighth grade. Just thinking about it liquefied the contents of her stomach. “I’ll already have AP Government, AP English, AP French, AP European History, AP Physics, and maybe calculus. Plus the SAT and finding scholarships.”
She said the last part softly, hoping he might not hear.
From the moment she’d learned the alphabet, he promised to put her through college. “Any school you want,” he’d said. “You get the grades, and I’ll handle the rest.” But that was before SeedCorp, before unemployment, before her mom started jotting down the phone numbers of bankruptcy lawyers. The one time Emma had mentioned loans, her dad shook his head. “Loans are for the kids who get Cs. You’ll do better than that.”
What if I can’t? she wanted to say.
“Can I have more milk?” Mattie asked. “This stir-fry is spicy.”
“It’s not spicy,” her mom said. “And we’re almost out.”
Mattie set down her glass, a meniscus of milk resting at the bottom. “Being poor sucks.”
“We’re not poor.” Her mom sat straighter than the rest of them, holding the knife and fork with her fingertips, the way rich people did in movies. She held a pen the same way, as if the lightest pressure was all she needed to produce elfin-perfect cursive. Emma, a lefty, clutched all pencils and utensils in a sweaty death grip.
“Then what are we?” Mattie asked.
“Lucky,” her dad replied.
Emma looked past her mom to the stack of bills sitting in the basket on the kitchen counter. There were three unopened envelopes that hadn’t been in the stack yesterday. Are we? she thought.
After dinner, Emma carted the dishes to the sink, where her mom scrubbed them and loaded them in the dishwasher. It seemed weird to Emma that her mom washed the dishes before putting them inside a machine designed to do the exact same job, but adults did things that made no sense all the time. Just yesterday, Mrs. Evans wore pantyhose with sandals. If it were up to her, Emma decided she’d never own a pair of pantyhose and she’d never wash anything twice.
She watched her mom’s quick fingers swipe food scraps from the plates to a mesh grate set over the drain. The garbage disposal had stopped working a year ago and there was no money to fix it. Every night, her mom cleaned the grate with her hands and a sponge.
“Mom,” Mattie called from the couch. “What channel’s Wheel of Fortune on?”
“You know what channel,” her mom replied.
“I’m going to check on the roses,” her dad said. A minute later, Emma saw him through the back window, carrying a spray bottle and a pair of shears. Six manicured bushes lined their backyard, all with finger-width thorns ready to inflict grievous harm on any cats that fell off the fence.
“Em,” her mom said, wrist-deep in lemon-scented suds. “Do you need the table to study tonight?”
“Chemistry test, remember, Mom?”
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“Would it help if there was pudding?”
Emma smiled. “It always helps if there’s pudding.”
“Mom, come on,” Mattie called. “Wheel of Fortune’s starting.”
Her mom pulled out a metal bowl and a hand mixer older than Emma. She poured a package of store-brand pie filling into the bowl and added the rest of the milk. Now Emma knew why her mom didn’t let Mattie have a second glass at dinner.
I’m such an asshole, she thought. All I do is complain, and all Mom does is think about how to make it better for us. “Thanks, Mom,” she said, slipping away into the dining room. Her chemistry book was right where she left it, spine flat on the linen tablecloth. “I hate you,” she said. “Everyone hates you. You know that, right?”
The chemistry book, unperturbed, flashed its cover art at her: red, yellow, and green molecules with white swoosh marks behind them, intended to make it look as if they were zooming across the cover. “You’re not even that fast,” she said.
Chapter Three
Thursday, March 27
“Isotonic means equal concentrations of solute. Hypertonic means high solute concentration. Hypotonic means low solute concentration.” Emma chanted it like a mantra as she walked into class and sank into her plastic seat. This was it—the last chemistry test before the final. Mr. Lopez erased the board, his arm swiping right to left. When he finished, the tops and bottoms of numbers floated, dismembered, on the vacant field of green.
Emma took a deep breath and pulled out her scientific calculator, her father’s old Texas Instruments from college. The buttons were as yellow as a coffee taster’s teeth and the plastic cover split like a fat man’s pants, but it still had the original user’s manual in the inside pocket. She could have cheated and written notes to herself, thumbing through the pages during the test, but she didn’t. Things, she believed, carried some essence of their owners.
On her right, Dan MacLeod twirled a dull-tipped yellow pencil in his fingers. He wore his usual black plastic flip-flops, board shorts, and black T-shirt. Today, his hair looked gelled. It created a perfect arc over his eyebrows, swooping down at the end of his brow and curving up over his ear. His long legs stretched halfway beneath the desk in front of him. They were smoother than hers. So not fair, she thought.
“You ready for this?” he asked.
“No.”
“You always say that when you’ve spent, like, a thousand hours studying.”
“Then how come you’re the one who gets the A?”
He shrugged his wide swimmer’s shoulders. “Natural talent.”
“Your talent is dull,” she said, pointing at his pencil. “It needs sharpening.”
“I like doing it in the middle of the test. Gives me an excuse to get up and stretch.”
“More like cheat off Angela Hong in the front row.”
“That hurts. You know I only cheat off you.”
Emma reached into her backpack’s front zipper pouch and pulled out her spare pencil. White with red strawberries, it was a souvenir of her father’s days at SeedCorp. “Here. It’s bad luck to start a test with a dull pencil.”
“Says who?”
“Confucius.”
He held the pencil beneath his nose. “Is it scratch and sniff?”
“It is now.”
“You’re mean today. I like nice Emma better.”
She thought of the English paper she had to write that night, the French quiz tomorrow afternoon, and the long-ass book she had to start reading for her history report. “Nice Emma’s gone away for a while.”
“Anything I can do to help bring her back?”
Emma shifted in her seat, the plastic creaking like the floor of a haunted house. If she actually asked him for something, he might say no. If that happened, she wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye until June. She knew who she was and what she looked like. “No. There’s nothing.”
“Hey, Highlander,” one of the water polo boys called. All the team members had nicknames, just like the pilots in Top Gun, her mom’s favorite movie. “Paper me.”
“Shit,” Dan said, turning to her. “Can you help me out?”
Emma passed him a piece of paper. He leaned back and passed it to his teammate, one long arm stretching across a desk and a half. I’m smaller than that desk, she thought. I’d fit inside so easily.
Mr. Lopez cleared his throat to get their attention and she banished all thought of Dan’s arms in light of the coming ordeal.
• • •
The test contained multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and free-form problems that ranged from difficult to apocalyptic. In Emma’s experience, teachers who wrote their own tests underestimated students’ ability to see through their strategies. For multiple-choice questions, the right answer was always there, as was a diametrically opposite wrong answer. There was usually a long-shot or humorous answer thrown in because the teacher was tired.
The fourth answer was the one to be careful with. It made sense, and distinguishing it from the right answer required the ability to remain confident in one’s first impulse. Confidence wasn’t Emma’s strong suit, which meant she had to rely on deduction, induction, reduction, and a plea to the non-denominational patron saint of AP Chemistry.
By the time Emma carried her test up to Mr. Lopez, there were only two minutes left in the class period. When the bell rang, she picked up her backpack and headed into the hall. “How was it?” she asked, as Rachel and Via shuffled out of the classroom behind her.
“Brutal,” Via said. She dropped her backpack and reached inside for a hair clip. With deft fingers, she wound her fluffy black strands into a bun. “My brain’s so fried my hair hurts.”
“But you were done way before both of us,” Rachel said.
“I left some stuff blank.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t feel like begging for partial credit.”
Emma shook her head. “I’m only passing this class because of partial credit.”
Via shrugged. “The real world doesn’t give partial credit.”
“This isn’t the real world,” Rachel said. “This is high school.”
“What was number nine?” Via hoisted her backpack and shrank visibly beneath its weight. “I spent ten minutes on that fucker and still don’t know if I got it right.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Emma saw Dan’s woven backpack as he left the classroom and walked down the hall in the opposite direction. He didn’t want to be seen with her—not even to return a pencil. “21.6 grams,” she answered.
Rachel bit her lip. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Goddamn it,” Rachel swore.
Via grinned. “Say it a little louder. I don’t think Tim heard.”
Rachel whirled, her red curls twirling like maypole ribbons. Tim stood behind her, one hand tucked into the front pocket of his skin-strangling Wranglers. His face was darker than his blond hair or green eyes. Emma didn’t see how you could trust anyone that tan.
Rachel’s voice flew up an octave. “Hi, Tim.”
“Hey, girl,” he said. “What are you up to?”
“Just got out of chemistry.”
“What do you have next?”
“Spanish. How about you?”
“Shop.”
“Are you going to PathFinders this week?”
That was the name of Rachel’s youth group. Emma was secretly glad Rachel never asked her to go. When she was seven, she’d gone to church with her grandma. The minister asked everyone to find a particular sentence in the Bible, which she’d tried to do and failed. There was something inherently dishonest about a book with no page numbers or table of contents.
“That depends,” Tim said. “Will I see you there?”
“You will if you give me a ride.”
Via crossed her arms over her chest. “What happened to your car?”
“It’s—”
“Missing? Vanished? Gone to join your sense of self-respect?”
“Broken.” Rachel’s glare reminded Emma of a gum commercial, the kind where invisible things like breath and wind sprouted ice crystals.
“Let’s go,” Emma said, nudging Via with her shoulder. “We have to get ready for PE.”
Over Tim’s shoulder, she saw a group of Mexican boys turn the corner into the hallway. They wore saggy black jeans and T-shirts, with stacks of gold chains twined around their necks. She wondered if they were actually in a gang, or just dressed like it. Three years ago, a gang initiation left eight innocent bystanders dead. Five of them died at Samaritan Hospital, less than a mile from her house. The mug shots they showed on the news looked like two-thirds of Emma’s freshman class. After that night, even white reporters learned to roll their r’s when they pronounced a suspect’s name.
“I should go, too,” Rachel said.
“I’ll walk you to class,” Tim replied.
He raised his arm to put it around Rachel’s shoulders. Before she could duck into his embrace, the Mexican boys passed behind him. A thin boy with sharp cheekbones and two gold chains said something in rapid Spanish. The only word Emma understood was “madre.”
As he passed, the other boy shoved Tim’s raised elbow out of the way. Tim’s elbow jerked forward, catching Rachel on the side of her head. “Ow,” Rachel said. “What was that for?”
Tim spun in a half-circle, fists balled in front of his chest.
The Mexican boy stepped back and mirrored Tim’s posture. Emma saw four tattooed dots at the base of his thumb and forefinger. She knew what it meant. Before her mom canceled cable, she used to watch Lockup on Friday nights.
“Watch where you’re going, homes,” the Mexican boy said. His friends fanned out and stood with their feet spread. One was tall with pale skin and acne scars, one had a widow’s peak, and one had a moustache.
“I’m talking to my friends,” Tim said. “You got a problem with that?”
