“But there’s more to it, isn’t there?” I ask.
“Only the entire history of our race,” she says, then rubs her forehead again.
“So what should I do?” I ask.
“Stop thinking in classes,” she says.
“Then why go to school?” I ask.
She looks at me through her fingers, and I get the sense that she meant something else, something I didn’t understand. She sighs a third time and says, “Just eat, Tiff. Okay? Just eat.”
EIGHT
SO I EAT. Then I hang out a bit and watch some TV (weird, seeing it live. I don’t like those commercial thingies) and then I go to bed. Mom doesn’t say anything more about servants. Not that night, not the next morning, not all week.
I go through my routine and I try not to say stupid stuff. I don’t call anyone a servant. I barely call people by name. I almost never get called on either—the teachers avoid me, like they expect me to be dumb or behind or both.
The only thing I seem to be good at is P.E. I can run faster than anybody, especially at short distances. I’m really good at jumping too, so Mrs. Yates wants me to go out for basketball in a few months. I’m too embarrassed to tell her I don’t know what basketball is. I actually have to Google it when I get home, and then I learn that it’s this important American game that I should be honored to be a part of, that it’s like a religion to hundreds (maybe thousands, maybe millions) of people, and if I’m really good, I can get scholarships to college when I’m older.
The girls in my P.E. class hate it that I’m good. I guess one of them—Helen?—used to be the best runner, but I can beat her with my shoes off. She says I’m good because I’m Greek, and she doesn’t make it sound nice. So finally I turn on her one morning.
She’s this flashy blonde with no fat at all. Her gym suit (we all have to wear these dorky two piece things that the school provides [for the poor kids] or that we buy and leave [again for the poor kids] so no one feels left out or dorkier than someone else) has pink embroidery around the collar and some rhinestones on the sleeves, even though we’re not supposed to “tart things up” as Mrs. Yates says.
Mrs. Yates never yells at Helen because Helen’s too good to get yelled at, I guess. Helen always stands near the bleachers when she’s not participating. Our gym is regulation-sized (whatever that means) and has a full basketball court. We’re going to have to use a community center in the winter for swimming (I don’t know how you swim in a center, but I guess I’ll learn) but everybody’s really proud of the gym floor. We’re not even allowed on it without special shoes, which my mom calls tennis shoes, but everyone here calls Nikes even if they’re not.
Anyway, during class on Monday, Mrs. Yates tells everybody that I’m the best runner she’s seen in twenty-five years of teaching, and Helen’s all smiley. (I looked; I know she hates it when I get attention.)
Then we go into the locker room to shower and change out of the stinky gym suits, and Helen says, really loud, that the only reason I’m good is because I’m Greek.
I can’t take it anymore. Helens have been trouble for my family since the dawn of time. I glare over my shoulder, wishing for some kind of magic power, any kind or maybe even just a guardian: y’know, someone from my past who’d zoom in and zip up Helen’s lips or turn her into a baton or something.
“I thought Africans were good at running,” one of the other girls says. I never learned her name. She always drops things when people throw them at her, and she complains when we have to do laps. “That’s what they say on the Olympics.”
Helen gives this evil smile and she says, “The Greeks invented the Olympics. They put in running because they’re good at it.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re confusing marathons with the Olympics. The original Olympic games didn’t have distance running. There were footraces and a pentathlon and some wrestling and stuff. And some poetry contests sponsored by my…um…by Aphrodite and the muses and stuff. But the marathon is something else.”
“Wow, girls,” Helen says. “Listen to that accent. It even makes garbage sound good.”
“Look it up,” I say, sounding just like my mom. “You’ll see how wrong you are.”
“I’m never wrong, honey,” Helen says.
“You’re never right, either,” I say and pull on my favorite white shirt. I bought it at the mall with the money Mom gave me, and it fits better than some of the stuff I magicked over the years. I slip on some jeans too. I’m just sitting down for my socks when Helen puts a manicured hand on my shoulder.
“You think you’re something, don’t you, Little Miss I’ve Lived All Over The World.”
Actually, I don’t think I’m much of anything these days, but I’m not admitting that to Helen. Instead, I say, “I’ve met people who are something. I can’t keep up with them. What does it say about you that you can’t keep up with me?”
Helen frowns at me. I can tell she knows I’ve insulted her, but she can’t tell how. Then she flushes bright red.
Mission accomplished. I take her hand off me like it’s a dead squirrel and let it drop. Then I finish getting dressed. Most of the girls need an extra five minutes for makeup, but I don’t. I decided not to wear any this year after my early attempts at putting it on manually failed.
Instead, I walk out of there like I own the world. I get some water at one of the fountains and I’m halfway to Mr. McG’s lame American History class when Jenna catches up to me.
“You shouted down Helen?” Jenna asks.
I shrug. “I wasn’t shouting.”
“Wow,” she says. “No one stands up to Helen.”
“Why not?” I ask, expecting the whole Mean Girls answer, y’know, Helen’s too mean to people who cross her and her parents are rich and the school bows down to them, and as a result bows down to Helen.
I’m so prepared for that answer, I almost don’t hear the real one.
“She’s the smartest, prettiest, most successful girl in school,” Jenna says with something like awe. “She’s good at sports, she’s in college prep, and she never misses on a test. She’s had the same friends her whole life and she’s really loyal. And she’s always going out with the best guys.”
Jenna actually admires Helen. Maybe because Helen doesn’t scowl at her from the gym floor.
“I don’t like her,” I say, which isn’t exactly true. I’m a little intimidated by her too. That scowling thing is pretty powerful. “Do you like her?”
“She doesn’t even know who I am,” Jenna says, which really isn’t an answer. I mean, you can like someone without them knowing you, can’t you? I like Brad Pitt—or I did until I learned about the whole Angelina/Jennifer thing—and I’m sure he has no clue who I am or even that there are mages in the world.
I decide to push it. “Yeah, but you know who she is. So do you like her?”
“I want to be like her,” Jenna says as the bell rings. We hurry to Mr. McG’s class and get to our desks just before he closes the door, which is to say, in the nick of time.
He’s talking about revolution today. Battles and stuff like that. I grew up hearing about battles. Epic battles still celebrated in story and song. I really don’t care about some minor revolution in some faraway land called Massachusetts.
So I sit there thinking and looking at Jenna out of the corner of my eye. She’s hunched over her book, scribbling notes. She’s not pretty like Helen. Jenna’s skinny and she doesn’t dress well at all, and she looks like she’s never stood up straight in her whole life. But she’s nicer, and that’s got to count for something, right?
That’s what all the movies teach anyway.
But I’m thinking about her last few words, and Megan’s from the day before. I mean, if dreams and goals are what you want and desire, your hopes and plans for the future, then what does it say about Jenna that she wants to be Helen?
Is that Jenna’s dream or her goal? Or is it just something she said to throw me off?
I plan to ask her after cla
ss, but just before the bell, Mr. McG tells me to talk to him after class and I miss my chance.
He wants me to do make-up work since it seems that I’m not absorbing the important stuff. I have no idea how makeup will help me with history, and I tell him.
He gives me that “how dumb is she” look, and then tells me that he means I have to catch up to everyone else. “You do understand ‘catch-up’ right? You use so much slang, dated as it is, that I thought you understood idioms.”
“I get slang,” I say (although I had no idea that what I say is dated. I guess that means old. And does that make me sound stupider than I already do? I have no idea). “I don’t know what idiotums are.”
“Idiotums.” He laughs. “Sometimes, VanDerHoven, I can’t tell if you’re Gracie Allen or Roseanne Roseannadanna.”
I frown. I’m going to have to jot those names down when I leave so that I can Google them later to understand what he means.
“I’m just me,” I say as primly as I can. “I have another class.”
He hands me a slip of paper with printing all over it. “Extra reading,” he says. “And a pop quiz once a week. You’re probably going to want some tutoring help, so if you can’t get it at home, see me and maybe we’ll assign someone. You have no real concept of America at all, VanDerHoven, and that makes this class really hard for you. Weren’t you ever in the States before this year?”
I shake my head.
“Well, here’s a tip,” he says. “Everything we’ve talked about in this class has happened in the United States.”
“Then why were you talking about French and Indians?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Roseanne Roseannadanna, you’d better go before the next bell.”
And I scurry out of there, wondering how come he suddenly cares.
NINE
BY LUNCH, IT’S all over the school that I “took on” Helen. People actually mention it to me. They’re talking to me like I’ve done something major.
It doesn’t seem major. I just corrected the airhead about her misconceptions about my people. I tell the kids that who stop to talk to me, and they want to know about “my people.” By that, I guess they mean Greeks, because they don’t know about mages. So I say a few things, and suddenly I’m totally exotic.
Finally, after lunch, I see Jenna in the hall, and I know I meant to ask her something, but I can’t remember what. So I stop her and say, “Is my slang dated?”
She grins. “You sound a little Valley Girl.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I say.
“Like you come from the Valley, y’know?”
“This is the valley,” I say.
“This is the Willamette Valley,” she says. “Valley Girls are from some valley in California. They’re very 90210 or Clueless, that movie, you know?”
“I love that movie,” I say.
“It’s ancient,” Jenna says. “If you’re trying to learn stuff to fit in, don’t get it from the movies. If it’s in a movie, it’s already too old to be cool.”
“Oh.” I nod, and worry all the way to English class. I’m not sure what I say that’s slang and what isn’t. I just learned to talk like my favorite characters. It seemed like the best way.
I’m not even paying attention as I go into class. The English classroom is my favorite room in the whole school. Mrs. Fiddler has busts of famous people on various shelves and books everywhere, and plants blooming in the windows. The room even smells good, like vanilla with a hint of lavender, which I’m guessing is her perfume. She has posters all over the wall—mostly quotes from the writers she’s having us read—and they’re pretty inspirational, even for me.
I sit in the back. In the other classes, I try to be in the back but near the door, so I can escape fast; but here I’m in the back near the window, by the violets, which are always blooming, it seems (which I guess is some kind of great feat because violets are hard to nurture—so says my friend Google. I’m beginning to think Google is magic all by itself).
Mrs. Fiddler isn’t nicer to me than anyone else or meaner, and I don’t like her class the best. Just the room, which seems more like a room in a house or a library than one of the school rooms around here.
Mrs. Fiddler is kinda flamboyant. She wears dresses when most teachers (women teachers) wear pants and she drapes scarves over everything. She used to be the drama coach, but I guess the school dropped drama a few years ago and assigned her English, and she’s making do.
At least, that’s what she said on my first day.
Then she ignored me like everybody else.
Only today, when the bell rings signaling the start of class, she lasers right in on me (is that slang? Crap. I don’t know what sounds right and what doesn’t). She closes the door and follows her bright blue gaze with, “Tiffany, I hear you are an expert on Greek myths.”
Great. That means Helen told her. Or someone. I feel that heat rising up in my cheeks.
“Not really,” I mumble.
“Now, don’t be modest,” Mrs. Fiddler says. “Most of my students don’t know the Greeks had myths, let alone the details of the first Olympic games. Is this something you studied in your European classrooms?"
Everybody is looking at me. Some of Helen’s minions (I mean friends) sit up front and they’re so intense they look like they’re trying to film everything with their eyes. A couple of the boys blink like they’ve never noticed me before. And everyone else just stares with a little relief, probably glad they’re not on the spot.
“I was homeschooled,” I mumble. By Athena half the time, I want to say, but don’t. If I can’t magick people to mess with them, I wish I could say stuff that’ll mess with their heads. But I can’t do that either.
“Well, in your homeschool then,” Mrs. Fiddler says, “did you learn about myths there?”
Mom warned me about the whole myth/truth thing—that what’s true and historical in my family is myth to everyone else, so I don’t slip this time.
“I learned it from my mom, mostly,” I say. “She’s a professor of Greek Studies, you know.”
“Hmm,” Mrs. Fiddler says, which I’m beginning to understand as mortal-adult-speak for “No, I didn’t know.”
“She would tell me the myths when she came to visit me in Greece.”
Everyone’s still staring. Imagine how they would look if I told them that Mom showed me the difference between the magical Mount Olympus (truly a place in the clouds) and the mountain the Greeks call Mount Olympus, which is spectacular, yes, but certainly not like home.
“Well, then,” Mrs. Fiddler says, “you know who Zeus is, then.”
I almost blurt, Yeah, he’s my dad, but I catch myself at the last minute. I’m getting irritated enough to drop some kind of bomb into the waters here, though. Maybe if I do mention my dad’s name, then people would leave me alone.
Although I get the sense that there’s no real respect for the Greek gods here in America.
“I know him,” I say.
“Can you tell us who he is?”
Mom prepared me for this too. I say, “It depends on who you read, Homer or the later works. He’s sort of an amalgam of all sorts of mythical figures, which is why he’s seen as promiscuous. My mom says that scholars believe that he’s like the great almighty, who, when the myths moved to a new town, took over for the local god, and as a result, in story and in song, got the local god’s wife.”
I didn’t say—and neither did Mom when she was telling me all this (she didn’t have to)—that in real life, my dad often took over for the local “god” (no magical person is supposed to set himself up as a god, according to the Powers That Be, not that it stopped anyone in my family) and really would get the local god’s wife.
“Well, yes,” Mrs. Fiddler says, looking a little uncomfortable. “Zeus is rather popular with the ladies.”
That’s rather an understatement, given how many women have flocked to him over the centuries.
“But he is married, isn’t he,
Tiffany?”
She uses my name like a club. I don’t like it, and I’m not really fond of this attention. I’m really not fond of lying about my family.
Only I don’t have to lie here.
“He’s married to Hera.”
“Who is, for all practical purposes, the queen of the Gods.”
“Not really,” I say. “There’s a lot of dispute between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena. They fight about a lot of things—not just who is the strongest or the most powerful, but also who is the fairest. That’s how the Trojan war started, not the way that it started in that dumb Brad Pitt movie.”
Mrs. Fiddler brightened. “You’re familiar with the Trojan War.”
Familiar? Beyond familiar. I had to travel back to the origins once just to see the stupid golden apple that Eris tossed out marked To the Fairest. Hera had me look to see if Aphrodite should’ve won that competition after all, not telling me, of course, that Paris, the guy who chose Aphrodite, chose her because she promised him that the most beautiful mortal on earth would be his forever. That would be the fair Helen, for whom Gym Class Helen has probably been named.
Helen’s just an unlucky name, that’s what I think. It should probably be banned.
“I know the true history of the war,” I say, “not the movie version, although I’ve seen that too.” Because I never miss a chance to see Brad Pitt without a shirt. Never.
The class is starting to stir. Like I’ve said something controversial. Hey, Jenna just told me movies can be wrong. That can’t be news to these people.
“Now, Tiffany, surely your mother has taught you there is no ‘true’ history to the war. There are the myths and there’s the Iliad, of course, but most of the scholarship that exists is divided on the actual historical facts.”
Because they aren’t privy to most of the facts. I resist the urge to sigh, and say instead, “I mean the mythical history. Y’know, the horse and everything.”
She nods as if she approves. “Have you read Homer?”
“Who hasn’t?” I ask before I can stop myself. My dad is proud of all that old blind guy wrote, even when he was wrong.
Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates Page 7
