by Ariel Kaplan
“Doesn’t help a whole lot without also fixing the transcript,” I said.
“That,” she said, “is going to be a bigger challenge.”
* * *
—
Nate dropped me off in front of my house an hour later. His shirt was back on, alas. I said, “So. You and Shira.”
“Are you criticizing me for making out with Shira Gastman for fifteen seconds? I think prison would have been worse.”
“Yeah. Of course it would.”
He grinned at me in the dark. “You aren’t jealous, are you?”
“No,” I said. “Shira’s not my type.”
“Mischa,” he said.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
“Mischa.”
“I have to go to bed.” I held up the printouts of my letters. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, because I didn’t especially want my mother to find them. “Or I have to go rob a 7-Eleven. I haven’t decided.”
I hid the letters under my mattress.
When I was a little kid, my mother and I had a Sunday-morning routine. First we would make a real breakfast—eggs or waffles or blintzes or something like that—then we would clean the house for an hour, and then, when we were done, we’d walk three blocks to the local park, which had a pond behind it, and feed peas to the ducks.
We’d have the longest conversations. I’d tell her about my friends. She’d tell me about stuff at work. And in between, we’d just sit and stare at the pond. I don’t know why staring at water is so relaxing, but I guess it is for everyone, or it wouldn’t be so expensive to live by the beach or a lake or whatever. I remember one time we found a robin’s nest in the tree next to the pond, and there were eggs in it—tiny and blue and perfect. It amazed me that something so complicated as a bird could come out of something barely bigger than a jelly bean.
One of the things we used to talk about was my grandmother.
She died when I was pretty young; apparently, she had that bad gene that makes you get ovarian cancer. Mom and Grandma had kind of a weird relationship, which I didn’t witness a lot of, but I got the sense that they weren’t exactly spending much time together at the duck pond.
Grandma had been a refugee, and she and her own mother had arrived in Chicago with nothing but the goodwill of Third Cousin Moishe—who I’m named for—who put them up in his tiny apartment. Two weeks after they arrived, the cousin enrolled her in kindergarten, where on the first day the boys in her class called my tiny, malnourished grandmother a communist and stole her milk money.
They hadn’t realized, of course, that to a small child used to fearing the Soviet secret police, a few brats with fists were not particularly scary.
“I showed them who’s a communist,” she later told me. “The next day, I made a knife out of the handle of a broken teacup and took it to school in my pocket.” She always cackled when she told that story. “Boy, those little turds ran fast!”
When she wasn’t attempting to shiv her classmates on the playground, Grandma learned English, grew up, worked at a shoe store to put herself through college, and had my mother, telling her bedtime stories about princesses and clever third sons, but also about Vilnius and the Soviet deportations, because she didn’t want my mother to forget the extent of the opportunities she’d been given. She’d wanted my mother to be a doctor but had been reasonably content with her choice to go to law school, until Mom got pregnant in her last year by a man she’d met in a bar on three-dollar-mojito night.
I got up the nerve to ask my mother about that down at the duck pond when I was about twelve, because we’d just learned about abortion at school, and before that I hadn’t realized that my mom actually had a choice in whether to have me or not.
“What did Grandma say?” I asked, once I’d gotten up the guts. I’m still not exactly sure why I wanted to know so badly—I just did. I guess it was some kind of perverse curiosity.
Mom threw some peas to the ducks. She was frowning and not looking at me, like this was not a conversation she really wanted to have. “Oh, well. You know.”
“That’s what she said?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“I don’t know.” I pulled a handful of grass out of the ground and threw it a few feet. “I was just wondering.”
She exhaled. “Well, I told her I wasn’t leaving school, and I was still going to graduate and get a job, and everything would be fine. And everything was fine.” She poked me in the shoulder. “See? I’m always right.”
She still hadn’t told me what Grandma said. “But…,” I said. “But…”
“Honey,” she said. “You know, Grandma got out of Vilnius, but a lot of other people didn’t.”
Of course I knew this already; there’s a reason my mother has no cousins or aunts or uncles. If the Nazis hadn’t gotten you before 1945, there was a good chance the Soviets either killed you or deported you (which usually amounted to the same thing). “But she didn’t feel guilty about that, did she? None of that was her fault.”
“Well, I don’t think she felt guilty, exactly. It was more that she felt like since she’d made it, she needed to do something with the life she’d been given.”
“Like she wanted to show she survived for a reason?”
“No. She knew it was just luck. But she felt like she owed it to everyone else to do all the things they couldn’t. She wanted to do what they couldn’t, and then she wanted me to do what she couldn’t. She always used to say, ‘Opportunity is responsibility!’ ” My mom laughed, but only a little bit.
I hadn’t asked any more after that, because I knew beating around the bush when I heard it. And I also knew whatever disappointment Grandma had felt in finding out about my existence, she’d eventually gotten over it. But I felt kind of weird, too. Like I also owed something to all those people who hadn’t made it. I had opportunities that they didn’t.
At some point we started skipping our Sunday breakfasts. I was too tired to get up for them, and no one really wanted to clean the house first thing in the morning, either, and then I had too much homework and I was too old for the park anyway. So four times a month became two, and then, sometime in middle school, they dropped out altogether. It’s not like I miss them, exactly. It was a little-kid thing, getting up early to eat waffles and feed ducks. I honestly can’t remember the last time I did either.
I wonder what Grandma would say, if she’d lived long enough to know I wasn’t going to college.
* * *
—
The next day, I remembered as I was driving to school with my mother, it was teacher appreciation day, which meant that the SGA bought buckets of flowers at the local Safeway and handed them out to the staff. Caroline and Mark had volunteered to pick up the flowers, and then the rest of the SGA was supposed to deliver them during our respective lunch periods, along with five-dollar Starbucks cards. The juniors had the brilliant idea of making us wear silly hats while we did this; they’d also wanted us to sing, but, thankfully, Jim had killed that idea.
Caroline pulled up to Blanchard’s front entrance in her little blue Toyota at lunchtime, the backseat filled with buckets of roses, and popped her trunk open. The juniors, who were bizarrely energetic that morning, said, “Woo!” and started unloading the buckets and sticking the roses into bud vases, which were recycled from the year before. Mark got out of the passenger seat and leaned against the car.
“Are you okay?” I asked, because he was kind of listing to one side.
“He’s been like this all morning,” Caroline said. “He fell asleep when I was putting the buckets in the car.”
“I said I was sorry,” he told Caroline.
“You drooled on my upholstery!”
To me, he said, “I was up until four doing a linear algebra packet.”
“Ugh,” I said.
“Just buck up or something, okay? This is important. OKAY,” said Caroline, addressing the group. “We’ve divided the teachers by class. Come get your lists and let’s get it done.”
She passed out lists to everyone, and we picked up our shoe boxes full of bud vases from the juniors. “I thought we could double up,” she told me. “That way we can talk while we do it. I haven’t seen you in forever.”
“Sounds good,” I said, even though it kind of didn’t. I wished I was home in my bed. Or anywhere but Blanchard, really. I pulled on my sparkly purple top hat and went off with Caroline to make my rounds.
“So,” she said. “I was going to go shopping for shoes to go with my formal dress this weekend, if you want to come. We could look for dresses for you at the same time, if you want.”
“Oh,” I said, because some part of my brain was still under my mattress with those horrible letters. “Let me check my schedule, okay?”
“I was thinking maybe Saturday,” she said. “So did you decide yet?”
“Decide?”
“Which school you’re going to. I know you didn’t want to talk about it before.”
“Um, no. Still thinking. And I, uh, haven’t heard from everyone yet.”
She turned to look at me. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, you know.” I was blessedly saved because we were outside Ms. Kim’s room, and she was on our list.
Ms. Kim teaches US history, and the class was full of juniors getting ready for the AP. “Blanchard loves its teachers!” we said in unison, and then plunked her flower down on the desk with her card.
“Thank you,” she said. “Now shoo! They’re taking a quiz.”
“Oh,” Caroline said. “Sorry.”
We quickly backed out of the room. “Maybe we should try a different approach?” she said. “We sound like cheerleaders on Valium.”
“Maybe just one of us should say it?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think that would be better. So I just can’t decide what to do,” she said. “It’s such a big decision. What if I’m wrong?”
I pulled out the next flower in anticipation of Ms. Kelley’s room. “What are you talking about?”
“Hello? Dartmouth or Columbia. I just don’t know what to do, and it’s killing me.”
I blinked a few times, because I didn’t really know what to say. Legitimately, her biggest problem was choosing between Dartmouth and Columbia.
“I mean, Dartmouth was my first choice. Mindy Kaling went there. Did you know that?”
“Yeah, I heard that somewhere.”
“I love her.”
“She’s funny,” I agreed.
I opened the door to Ms. Kelley’s room. “Blanchard loves its teachers,” I said, and then sort of flung the flower onto the desk and walked back out.
“But,” she continued. “If I go to Columbia, I get to be in New York, and that’s worth something, too. There are a lot of opportunities in the city. That’s huge. Right?”
“There’s a lot of stuff in New York.”
“Yeah! There’s so many jobs, and internships, plus all the fun stuff to do like restaurants and pubs and those cool bodegas with the cats—”
“Wait. What?”
“The little grocery stores. They’re called bodegas. And they all have cats.”
“Why?”
“To keep the rats out, I guess. And they have their own social media and everything.”
“The cats do?”
“So there’s all that, and Dartmouth’s cool, but it’s kind of in…”
“New Hampshire.”
“Right.”
“Which probably also has cats.”
“Yeah, I’m sure they do, but—”
I opened the door to Mr. Robles’s room. “Blanchard looooves its teachers,” I said, and gave him his flower. He was eating a sandwich at his desk. “Uh, thanks,” he said.
“Yeah, fine,” I said.
“So what would you do?” Caroline asked as we walked out of the room.
Jeez, what a question.
“Mischa?”
“What?”
“What would you do? It’s like, this is my whole life resting on this decision. I can’t even sleep at night. I just lie there and lie there and—”
I walked into Ms. Bromley’s room. “BLANCHARD LOVES ITS TEACHERS,” I said, and then slammed the flower down on her desk.
“Are you hungry?” Caroline asked out in the hallway. “You sound hungry.”
“I’m fine. Was that the last one?”
“There’s just Ms. Ramirez, but she’s my next class anyway.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “Look, call me about Saturday, okay? I need to hear your thoughts on DOC.”
“DOC?”
“Dartmouth or Columbia.” She frowned. “I guess I could have called it COD, but I don’t think that sounds right.”
“I have a quiz next period,” I said. “I should probably study.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said. “So I’ll see you on Saturday, and we’ll talk then.”
I hadn’t actually agreed to Saturday, and I definitely did not want to talk about DOC (or COD), but I said, “Sure.”
“Do some research!” she called to me as she walked down to Ms. Ramirez’s room.
I went back toward the cafeteria to get a cookie before next period and ran into Jim in the hallway. “Success?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just hungry. I wanted a cookie.”
“A cookie sounds excellent,” he said. “Maybe even two cookies.”
Then we stopped because there was singing. In the theater room some of the juniors were singing the Blanchard alma mater to Ms. Drury and her class of sophomore drama students. At the end they did a kick line. “Woo!” they shouted.
“Were we ever that young?” Jim asked.
“No,” I said. “We weren’t.”
I got to school in time for breakfast a few days later, which meant hot chocolate and cold cereal. I was almost never there that early, but it was a nice perk for the kids who live closer, because they could come in before school for study groups and whatnot on test days. A crew of sophomores was at the table under the window, working on a problem set for precalc, and a pair of freshmen were doing a Latin translation at the table behind me.
I was there early because I’d gotten a note the night before from Emily, telling me it was time to start talking about our next move.
Jim was sitting at a table by himself, reading, and I went and sat next to him, glancing down at the magazine he had propped under his tray—the Lancet, it looked like, or some other medical journal. “What are you reading about?”
“The gut biome,” he said, showing me the article before dropping it back on the table. He marked the end of the section he’d read by scoring the end of the paragraph with his thumbnail, leaving a little dent in the paper.
“The…”
“It’s the range of bacteria that live in your digestive tract,” he explained.
“There’s an appetite killer.”
“Nah.” He showed me a table with figures that meant little to me. “See, they did these studies on mice that showed that what was living in their guts changed their brains somehow. They could make them more or less anxious depending on what was living down there.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. So, like, eating yogurt can change your behavior.”
“Yogurt.”
“Well, technically it’s the bacteria in the yogurt. There’s a theory that someday they’ll have bacteria that you can take instead of antidepressants. And others you can take instead of antibiotics and stuff. Like, you’ll have good bacteria that eat your strep or whatever.”
“Or your mono.”
“Or
your mono. Did you know,” he went on, “that most of the cells in your body are not you? You’re, like, 45% you and 55% bugs that live on you. In you.”
“Holy…seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“I’m—I’m not sure how I feel about that.” I took a bite of my cereal. “Like I need a shower, maybe.”
“Well, if you didn’t have all those bugs, you’d die.”
“Yeah, I get that, but still.” I shuddered. “I’m squicked.” I took a sip of my watery hot chocolate and got a mouthful of undissolved chocolate powder, which made me gag.
“So dramatic,” he said, thumping me on the back.
I was going to explain to him that I’d swallowed a bunch of Swiss Miss, but then I saw that Shira had come in. She was sitting at a table by the door, her eyes unfocused, staring at a spot on the wall that meant nothing to anybody. “Hey,” I said. “I’m going to go, but I’ll see you later, right?”
“You’re going to sit with Shira Gastman?” he asked, which was fair, because it was kind of an odd thing for me to do.
“Yeah,” I said. “We have…stuff.”
“Should I be worried about you? Like, we’re not going to find you high in the bathroom later, right?”
“I’ll see you in physics,” I said.
I headed over to the table where Shira was sitting.
“Hey,” I said.
I watched the glassiness drain from her eyes. It was kind of a terrifying thing to see.
“Why do you do that?” I asked. “It’s…I mean honestly, it’s kind of creepy.”
Shira’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “There’s an art to manipulating people’s perceptions of you, so that you can get them off your back,” Shira said. “It’s like those butterflies. What are they called? Viceroys. They look like monarchs, which are poisonous, so that no one will eat them. But they aren’t poisonous at all. It’s just a really clever piece of genetic engineering.”
“Isn’t it boring, though? Staring out the window all day?”
