Lizzie visited her father first. He looked up from his computer as she came in and found a place to sit amid the books and papers scattered on his lumpy, sagging sofa.
“What can I do for you?” he asked genially.
“Nothing. I’m just visiting.”
He went on typing. Lizzie browsed through the papers in one of the piles; they were bristling with equations that had something to do with the nature of time. Lizzie got her math and science talent from her father.
Watching him as he worked, Lizzie was conscious again of how different he was from other people’s fathers. Alex’s father, for example. Always a loud presence at school events, Mr. Ryan slapped other fathers on the back and cracked as many jokes per minute as Alex—a lot of them at Alex’s expense, as Lizzie remembered. Lizzie’s father disliked small talk and kidding; he didn’t know what to say to people who didn’t read The New York Times. Lizzie loved him so much, but she couldn’t help hoping there wouldn’t be any school events involving parents for a while, at least until her new identity was more firmly in place.
“Bye,” Lizzie announced after a few more minutes of rapid-fire typing had gone by.
“You don’t have to go,” her father said. “You’re not disturbing me.”
“I know.” Nothing disturbed Lizzie’s father when he was writing. She sometimes wondered how her mother had ever caught his attention, back when they were in college together. What could she have said or done to make him look up from his books?
On her second visit, Lizzie found her mother on her couch, reading.
“Would you like some tea?” her mother asked. “My kettle’s at the boil.”
Lizzie nodded. Her mother fixed her a cup of apple cinnamon herbal tea from the kettle on the hot plate. It was a warm afternoon for tea, but Lizzie still enjoyed the first fragrant sip.
“I’m going to the football game with Alison tonight,” Lizzie told her.
“Another game? You’re becoming quite the fan.”
“Not really. I don’t watch the game, or anything. I just keep Alison company.”
“I went to a few football games when I was in high school,” her mother said. “I remember I worked out this little game I’d play with myself. I’d close my eyes and count the seconds, and then open my eyes and see how many seconds had gone by on the clock.”
“You’re kidding! That’s my game! I thought it up last week.”
“Like mother, like daughter,” Lizzie’s mother said. A little sadly? Lizzie wondered if her mother had been popular or unpopular when she was young. She had been popular enough to get married, at least. But Lizzie’s mother was almost as different from the other mothers as Lizzie’s father was different from the other fathers. For starters, the other mothers had shorter hair and didn’t carry books with them everywhere.
“Lizzie?” her mother asked hesitantly as they continued sipping their tea. “I’ve been wondering. I know you think I don’t like your new clothes, but I’ve started to get used to them. I just want to make sure that you’re dressing this way because you want to, not because the other girls are pressuring you to look like them.”
What was Lizzie supposed to say? Of course the other girls were “pressuring” her to look like them, if you called constant giggles and rolled eyes and mean comments “pressure.”
“When you were my age, didn’t you want to look like the other girls? Didn’t you want to look normal?”
“I did,” her mother admitted. “It’s only that … looking like them is one thing, Lizzie, being like them is another. I think it’s fine to be the new Lizzie on the outside; I just want you to be the same wonderful Lizzie on the inside.”
“I am,” Lizzie said shortly, though even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. She was changing on the inside, too, into somebody who didn’t write poetry, who didn’t let herself be good at math, who went to football games because everybody else did, who tried to copy Marcia Faitak in all things as closely as possible.
Lizzie couldn’t bear to continue the conversation. “Can I check if there’s e-mail from Aunt Elspeth?”
“Go ahead,” her mother said. Did she sound hurt, or was Lizzie imagining it?
Lizzie logged on to her mother’s computer. There was an e-mail from Aunt Elspeth, a long one, full of questions about school, friends, “and anything else interesting,” by which Lizzie knew Aunt Elspeth meant Ethan. But Lizzie felt funny writing back to her on e-mail. You couldn’t type private things onto a bright blue screen that anybody could walk by and see.
So, curled up at the other end of her mother’s couch, still savoring her apple cinnamon tea, Lizzie wrote Aunt Elspeth a long letter on one of her mother’s legal pads. She told her lots of things, but not everything. She told her about the football game, and acting out the scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Alex, and kidding around on the sewing machine with Alex. She hadn’t realized she had so much to write about Alex.
Lizzie didn’t write about PAL math with Ethan. She didn’t think even Aunt Elspeth would understand getting a B− on purpose just to make some boy think you weren’t a nerd. She knew from their conversation that her mother certainly wouldn’t understand; Lizzie wasn’t sure she understood, either.
* * *
The game was all right, though every bit as boring to Lizzie as the time before. Desperate for some diversion, she forced herself to follow Alison down the bleachers at halftime, though going down the bleachers was even more terrifying than going up. At the snack bar, she chose lemonade instead of hot chocolate to drink. It was the Kool-Aid kind, not the kind made with real lemons and sugar.
Alex had already gotten his burger and fries. “Don’t you ever drink soda?” he asked.
“No,” Lizzie said. Was that too strange?
“How’s everything in sewing machine land?” Alex asked. “Have you sewn your hair to anything lately?”
Lizzie knew the question, though insulting, was meant to be friendly. She managed one small giggle by way of reply, followed by a blush.
“Alex.” Marcia’s voice was impatient. She and Alison were already heading back to the stands. Ethan and Julius were still up there; Lizzie had checked. “Are you coming or not?”
New as she was to the world of popular girls, Lizzie could tell Marcia had made a mistake. She sounded like somebody’s mother. And Alex reacted as Lizzie suspected he would react to his mother: by ignoring her.
“So you don’t drink soda, and you can’t work a sewing machine, and you can’t roller-skate, and you can’t ride a bike,” Alex went on, dipping a french fry in catsup. “What do you do?”
Lizzie tried to think of an answer. Write poetry? Too nerdy. Besides, she didn’t write poetry anymore. Read? Also too nerdy. Go to classical music concerts with her parents? Off the scale for nerdiness. Stuck, she did the only thing she could think of doing: she giggled again.
“You probably can’t dance, either.” Now Alex was the one who looked uncomfortable, for some unaccountable reason.
Lizzie had to say something. She couldn’t answer every question with a giggle. “Actually, I can dance, a little bit. I had two years of ballet back in elementary school.”
“Like on your tippy-toes? Wearing a tutu?” Still holding his tray, Alex managed a little, effeminate twirl. “Like that?”
“Not really. I wasn’t on pointe yet. I had a tutu, though.”
“I bet you did. Are you going to wear it to the dance?”
The question startled Lizzie. Why would Alex be talking about the class dance, of all things, to her, of all people? “The dance?” she asked nervously.
“The seventh-grade dance? Two weeks away? Friday, September twenty-sixth? The one there’re a thousand posters for all over the halls?”
Lizzie shook her head slowly. There was something unsettling about having Alex mention the dance to her, in such a shy-sounding way. “I don’t have that tutu anymore. I outgrew it, and my mother gave it away.”
“You? Outgrew something?�
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Lizzie felt more and more awkward. The conversation had gone on too long. Everybody else had finished getting snacks and was heading back up to the stands.
“About the dance,” Alex began. “You are going, aren’t you?”
In the nick of time, Lizzie remembered: This is a bad day to make important decisions. Postpone them if you can.
“I haven’t decided yet. The game is starting. We’d better go.”
It was bad enough climbing up the bleachers. It was worse doing it while carrying a sloshing lemonade, with Alex right behind her, so she couldn’t stop every few rows to gather the courage to continue.
Finally they were back at the top bleacher. Lizzie did a quick survey of the other seventh graders. Ethan and Julius were watching the kickoff for the second half, oblivious to Lizzie and Alex. Apparently Ethan didn’t know or care that Lizzie had been deep in conversation with another boy. Marcia plainly did; she looked ready to push them both off the bleachers to their deaths below.
Lizzie squeezed herself in next to Alison, glad that there was no space for Alex, who was forced to take the only open spot, next to Marcia. It was a relief not to be able to hear their conversation.
“If I didn’t know better,” Alison murmured to Lizzie, “I’d say that somebody likes you.”
Ten
Mr. Grotient gave the problem set back to the class on Monday, when they had PAL math again. Sure enough, there was a big B− written at the top of Ethan and Lizzie’s paper. Ethan stared at it in apparent disbelief.
“So what happened, you two?” Mr. Grotient asked them in a low voice. Did he know? Did Ethan know?
“The last two problems were hard,” Lizzie said defensively. She knew she and Ethan weren’t the only ones who had gotten them wrong.
“Let me know if you need any help on the problems today” was all Mr. Grotient said.
Lizzie looked down at the paper. Was one B− enough to make her point? Or should she get a couple of problems wrong again today?
What would Marcia do? Marcia would giggle, at least; she’d act as if she thought math was stupid and her grade was funny. Lizzie had done fairly well giggling around Alex, but she still didn’t know how to giggle around Ethan. She didn’t know how to talk to Ethan, either. Should she ask him what books he had been reading? Whether he was looking forward to the field trip for English? Getting bad grades together couldn’t be enough to make a boy like a girl; you had to have more in common than shared failure.
For lack of any clearly better alternative, Lizzie reluctantly got to work. The first five problems were so easy she had no choice but to get them right. Then, when Ethan got the wrong answer to problem six, she let it stand. She couldn’t go back to being the know-it-all nerd. She just couldn’t.
Before they moved on to problem seven, she forced herself to make a real try at engaging Ethan in nonmathematical conversation. “How’s Peter doing in football?” she asked, striving for a tone of casual interest. Ethan had seemed proud the other day that his brother was on the high school team.
“Weren’t you at the games?” Ethan asked.
Well, that Lizzie had been at the games didn’t mean that Lizzie had watched the games or could tell what any particular player had or hadn’t done at the games. Should she confess her almost complete ignorance of football, accompanied by her new giggle? Maybe Ethan would feel important explaining to her all about downs and “First and ten, do it again.”
Maybe not.
Sewing machines had stood her in good stead with Julius and Alex. “How do you like the sewing machines in family living?” Lizzie tried again desperately.
Ethan looked as if no one had ever asked him anything more ridiculous, which was probably true. “They’re okay,” he said. “What do you get for problem seven?”
Lizzie gave up and focused on the math work sheet. Doggedly, she proposed a wrong answer to problem seven, since no other technique for getting Ethan’s attention seemed to work. Ethan didn’t catch the mistake. Two wrong so far.
She gave the right answer to problem eight. But the answers she wrote down were wrong again to nine (Ethan’s error) and ten (Lizzie’s error).
Four wrong total. Bad as she was pretending to be at math, Lizzie could still figure out the percentage. 60 percent: D. She handed it in.
* * *
On Thursday, the next PAL math day, the big red D on the top of their paper looked to Lizzie as if it were red neon, pulsing with light. Her first instinct was to turn the paper facedown so no one could see it, though of course Ethan had, the one person Lizzie most wanted not to have seen it.
The rest of the papers handed out, Mr. Grotient returned to Lizzie’s desk and laid his hand on her shoulder. “I’d like to talk to you after school, if you have a minute,” he said.
“Okay,” Lizzie said, half-miserably, half-defiantly. What could he say to her that was worse than what she was already saying to herself? She could hardly believe she had gotten a grade like that, in math, on purpose, and made Ethan get that grade, too. Maybe Mr. Grotient would e-mail her parents. She could just imagine what her mother would say; Lizzie could hardly claim this time that she was still “the same wonderful Lizzie on the inside.”
Lizzie opened her math book to the new problem set. “What do you get for the first one?” she asked Ethan, trying to keep her tone as light as possible. She knew better than to make any playful inquiries about football or sewing machines.
“I don’t get it,” Ethan said.
“Isn’t it 9x plus 10y?”
Ethan pulled the book away from her and slammed it shut. “What I don’t get,” he said with deliberate emphasis, “is how come you’re so bad at math all of a sudden.”
“I told you I wasn’t always right,” Lizzie said in a small voice.
“Great! I get a D, so you can prove you’re not always right? Is that it? What’s so bad about being right, anyway?”
Didn’t he know? Did he really not know? Anyway, the D wasn’t all Lizzie’s fault. It wasn’t as though Ethan got straight A’s when he worked on his own.
“If you think you can do better, go ahead.” Lizzie shoved the paper toward Ethan. Now she was angry, too.
He shoved it back to her. “You know I can’t.”
Mr. Grotient reappeared by their desks. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Ethan said sullenly.
Everything, Lizzie wanted to say.
“If I had gotten a D on my last problem set,” Mr. Grotient said mildly, “I’d spend less time arguing and more time working.”
When Mr. Grotient left to check on other students, Ethan went up to Mr. Grotient’s desk and took a second copy of the problem set. In PAL math, they were supposed to work together and turn in one shared piece of work, but Ethan evidently was done with PAL math, or at least done with PAL math with Lizzie.
For the remainder of the period, they worked alone in silence. Ethan did all his problems himself, without looking once at Lizzie’s paper. Lizzie did hers herself, too, though she couldn’t resist one glance at Ethan’s paper to see how he was doing. Probably a C. She gave one wrong answer on purpose, then erased it and put the right answer, then erased it again and put the wrong answer. Whatever she did, the whole thing was wrong, and she didn’t know how to make it right again.
* * *
All through the rest of her classes, Lizzie dreaded her after-school appointment with Mr. Grotient. Her spirits didn’t even lift when in family living the class cut out a sewing project and didn’t touch the sewing machines. She was tempted to “forget” to go see Mr. Grotient, but she knew that even if she forgot, he wouldn’t. For all she knew, he had e-mailed her parents already. So at five past three, she surrendered herself at his classroom door.
“Lizzie!” he said, his greeting as friendly as if nothing had happened. “Come on in, have a seat.”
Lizzie sat down. Here it comes, she thought.
“West Creek is forming its first math team,” Mr. Grotient s
aid, “and naturally I thought of asking you to be one of its charter members.”
Lizzie was stunned. Was this what he had summoned her to his room to talk about? Wasn’t he even going to mention the D?
“You’d train to go to a district-wide math bowl,” Mr. Grotient went on. “There are regional and state-wide competitions as well. We’ll practice twice a week after school, plus I’ll give you some more challenging assignments to work on at home, which you’re ready for anyway.”
How could Lizzie be ready for more challenging assignments when she was getting near-failing grades on her regular work? She couldn’t in all conscience let him go on without pointing this out.
“But—I’m not doing very well in math right now.”
“That’s the other thing I need to say. If you join the Mathletes, you’ll be making a commitment to work your hardest for the team and to represent our school to the best of your abilities, Lizzie. This isn’t about fooling around with the boys. It’s about trying to learn and trying to win.”
Lizzie felt herself flush, hurt at his way of putting the change in her classroom performance. Lizzie hadn’t been fooling around with the boys. She had just been trying to be a normal person for once in her life.
“So what do you say, Lizzie? Can I sign you up to be on our first team of Mathletes?”
It sounded exciting and fun—it had been a long time since Lizzie remembered how much she loved, really loved, math. Mathletes also sounded like the nerdiest team in the school, maybe even in the universe. Lizzie didn’t need to consult with Marcia to know that being the star of Mathletes wouldn’t be like being the star of the girls’ basketball team or being captain of the cheer-leading squad. If she became a Mathlete, she might as well take all the new clothes Aunt Elspeth had bought her and return them to The Gap. She might as well start writing poetry again: “Ode to an Independent Variable,” “Sonnet on Solving for x.”
Lizzie At Last Page 7
