I had been a bit offended at the word “cutesy.” “Even with Princess's tragic end?”
“Even with.” In the end, the essay “we” sent in was the one we had to model on articles you would find in a specialty magazine. Of course Jeremy chose Sports Illustrated, but I had chosen to write like a reporter from Spin magazine. I explained the contemporary music scene, and how my fellow teens in the twenty-first century wrongly worship the late 1970s British punk rockers as pioneers, when in fact punk rock was invented in America by a privileged group of private school kids like Television's Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine—and in the early 1970s. My essay suggested that because in England the musicians who took to the music actually were disadvantaged kids, the realness of their venom is why the American punk bands are side notes.
Even though the essay was entirely in my own words, I had gotten the ideas from some books on punk rock phenomena that my dad had given me. He claimed he played in a punk band while at college, as hard as that was to believe. (If you knew my dad, you would drop your jaw too.) I thought what I had written was ultimately a bit too dry to be good reading, but Mrs. Kleinman vehemently disagreed. She felt it sounded both mature and written from a teen perspective, and demonstrated an appreciation of music history. She was confident it was exactly the style the judges were looking for.
Vaughan had never been in any of my four high school English classes to date—classes where I was a teacher's pet and almost always got admiring comments on my work from my classmates. No, the only extended time he'd spent around me previous to our current precalculus class was freshman-year algebra—a class that I passed only at the mercy of my teacher, who knew I was trying hard.
“So you're one of those?” Vaughan said after Jeremy's praise of my writing ability was over. Wendy Thayer was right; Vaughan's light blue eyes did have the slightest tint of purple to them.
“One of what?” Like Wendy, I was shocked that he had addressed me directly.
“The literary bohemians.”
“If she gets an internship at the Times,” Zane managed, “I'd hardly call that being a bohemian.”
“Like I said, I was sick, so I'm probably not even going to get a chance to interview for it.”
Vaughan ran his hand through his waves and sniffed openly. “You know, I did commercials when I was kid.” (As if I didn't know. Thanks to Wendy, who did an obsessive search on the Internet for any site with Nussman “Vaughan” in it, every girl in school knows Vaughan was the little boy in the Golden Grahams cereal commercial.) “My mother,” he continued, “wanted me to stick with Professional Children's School. She thought all I'm good for is acting. I insisted I go here. There have been eighteen Nobel scientists who graduated from here.”
“I've heard.”
I'm not sure Vaughan picked up on the growing edge in my voice, because he lectured on: “Scientists can change the world and save lives. We are privileged to get the training we get here. I would never opt for the easy way out. I want my time on Earth to count.”
“I don't see working for the Times or NPR as the easy way out,” Zane said.
“That's not what I meant,” Vaughan huffed.
“What did you mean?” Zane asked quietly.
“I mean about my mom's plan for me to be an actor.”
“Some of us aren't here for the science,” I said. “Some of us are here because of our parents. And we'd like the chance to follow our own passions. The media internships are the closest thing to literature and creative writing, what I'm interested in.”
Vaughan gave me a long, condescending look before he spoke again. “You really think you could land those places, anyway?”
I took a deep breath. He really thought I was an airhead!
Well, he was sitting two rows in front of me, and I was very publicly foundering once again in a math class. But this time I had no kindly teacher willing to take mercy. My mother showed no mercy either when she “accidentally” fished an early-semester math test out of my bag. “What kind of a student gets a ninety-eight in English and a sixty-eight on her math exam?”
A student who never wanted to go to math and science school, Mom. But of course I didn't say that.
And what I really wanted to say to Vaughan—You don't know me!—I didn't say either.
If you really don't know someone well, deriding them is like making a decision from chopped-off data.
In those long seconds before the class officially started, I was torn between despising him and leaning over and forcing a kiss. Did you ever have that mixed feeling, being attracted to someone you hate? Thankfully, the new-period bell rang, and our grumpy teacher, Mr. Etchingham, asked for our homework. “Pass it up, pass it up. No scribbling in now! I'll mark anyone who scribbles now as a cheater.”
Etchingham's close-cropped hair and deep voice always made him very intimidating. But on this day, as he inched along the front-row seats in a stained red Izod shirt, he precisely reminded me of a big scary crab on the beach moving sideways down the sand. As lousy as my assignment was— I'd left two questions blank—I gratefully let him clamp his claw down on my homework.
At the end of the day when I entered Becky's office again, she had a huge mug of coffee in her hand. She looked like she'd rather be anywhere than in her office swamped with overflowing paperwork. Even though it was not a hot day, her face was covered with sweat.
“Okay, now I have time to talk this through. So why not take the slot at Out of the Box? When I said they loved you, I meant it.”
“I told you. My mom is”—I stopped to make quotation marks in the air—” 'bitterly opposed' to my working there.”
Exasperated, she put her hands in the air. “Bitterly opposed? It sounds so much more fun than anything else I'm offering. And you're the first and only one I've sent over there. You're the one I think is perfect—”
“That's so nice, but Mom thinks I should aim higher, see if there are other choices.”
“Well, I'm sorry to say you're one of the last to be placed. There isn't much else there for you. I just did my assignments, and there are only two open places—”
“What are they? I'd love to go to the Times if that one is still open.” Who was I kidding? How could that be left?
“Are you kidding?” Becky said after a big sip of her coffee. “Taken. They grabbed one of the students they liked right away. They're too busy to interview anyone else.”
“Who got it?” I said a bit shakily. “Jeremy Hart? Clara Langostini?” Even if Clara was my best friend, I knew she would be unbearable if she scored that internship. And I wasn't sure I could mask my jealousy.
“Wait for the posting.”
“Is the NBC science reporter one available?”
“Assigned.”
I could tell by her face that every “good” internship was gone.
“Medicine is an exciting field,” she tried. “We still have an opening there, maybe even two. Our local hospital contacts are eager for our student interns. They like them better than some of the college kids they get.”
“I really hate blood,” I said truthfully. “I'd faint. Isn't there anything left?”
“Let's scratch that opening at the NYU Medical Center emergency room, then. They've already filled one slot, but there are two because one of the doctors there went to Manhattan Science.”
My heart raced as Becky answered her phone.
“Yes, Zane is a very bright kid. I'm so glad you liked him, Dr. Finneran. …”
I was happy for Zane, but I was even more focused on that double emergency room slot. This was insider trading! Forget hamburger premiums! I could intern with Vaughan, one on one, with no other girls from class as distraction. I'd set his arrogant mind straight—I'd show him how smart I was as I helped the doctors in distress. In a split second my mind seesawed between the pros and cons. Could I really handle that environment? I learned how to rollerblade the previous summer. I quickly told myself, Oh, c'mon, I'd eventually get the handle on high-end stres
s. When I'm relaxed, I'm bubbly. He'd laugh a lot. I'd sashay around the hospital in my new sexy black skirt and spangly red shirt from H&M. Okay, maybe not a spangly shirt in the emergency room, but maybe my new low-cut jeans from Urban Outfitters. I'd win the hunk over, we'd hook up, and then I'd tease him that he ever thought I could be vacuous. Then I'd dump the self-righteous snob.
“Did Zane get it?” I asked when Becky hung up. She was positively beaming.
“Promise to keep it quiet?”
“I promise.”
“He did! But you can't tell him. I'm so happy for him. He's such a sweetheart, but he's so shy. I was really worried for him.”
“That's so great.” I paused, I hoped naturally, and tacked on, “I think I'd like to go on that ER interview.”
Becky took a hard look at me. “Five seconds ago you hated blood.”
“I was being dramatic. I mean, ironic.”
“You were?”
“Are you kidding? The emergency room?. Becky, what person alive wouldn't want a crack at that! It sounds really cool.”
Becky eyed me skeptically. Did she just put two and two together, and remember that Vaughan Nussman was the leading contender for the other slot? “Okay then,” she said, and wrote down the interview details. But she wasn't done with her counseling.
“Look, should I call your mom about Out of the Box?”
“How is that internship even allowed?” I said. “Does Dr. Herman really know what her brother does?”
Becky smiled a bit peculiarly and took another sip of her coffee. “Delores seemed a bit embarrassed when she came in with that opening. Something about her brother pressuring her for some cheap, smart help.” Becky suddenly realized that once again she was saying way too much for a student to know, and went silent.
I smiled my best smile and said, “Anyhow, I'm grateful for the opportunity to interview at the ER. I promise to report back what it's really like.”
“Okay,” she said after an exhausted yawn. “But I may send someone else over to Out of the Box if I need to.”
So what if Vaughan was a total jerk to me earlier? Now I had a plan to show him up. I mentally tried our coupledom out. Jordie and Vaughan.
The NYU Medical Center emergency room and corridors stank, as you might expect, from medicinal smells. My nostrils were going bonkers, but at least the interview was going perfectly. If I got the spot I would be working with Louise, the very blond chief RN on the floor, who looked to me like she was around my mother's age, forty-fiveish. She had a habit of winking at me whenever she said anything she thought was humorous. “We had a man in yesterday who thought he had ankle cancer. He was absolutely hysterical, and demanded attention. What do you think it was?”
“What?” I said politely.
“A mosquito bite.” Wink, wink.
Other than Louise's running commentary on how imperative it was to keep the emergency room sterile, it was ultraquiet in the room the first half hour, and not at all scary.
In fact, the only other sounds were sleeping patients' respirators and loud snoring by a bearded doctor who'd been there all night and fallen asleep on two pushed-together chairs.
I really thought I could handle this internship, even after I caught a strong whiff of someone's number two in a bedpan. So much for the scenes in medical TV shows when all hell breaks loose. In reality, the ER just wasn't that intimidating.
But then things changed for the worse. First a nurse rolled a little redheaded boy with big cheeks right past me. He was motionless and I was horrified. Why wasn't the nurse reacting when it was obvious that he was almost dead?
“He just had his stomach pumped,” Louise said when she saw me staring after the boy. “He swallowed some laundry detergent. I'm sure he'll be fine after an hour or so.”
I wasn't so convinced. “It's meaningful to work where you can fix things, isn't it?” I said with forced extra enthusiasm to cover my great alarm for the dying kid.
She looked delighted at that comment. “Yes, it is.”
I forced out, “I'm convinced it would be an amazing opportunity to work here.”
I could tell I was wowing her with my extreme interest in everything she did—fortunately she didn't even ask me about my medical school intent. I could just see Vaughan's jaw drop when the internships were posted on Becky's bulletin board. My whole plan was transpiring flawlessly.
Now flash forward five minutes to when I was barfing as politely as possible (try to picture that) behind an empty hospital bed. I honestly did attempt to get to the ladies' room, but tell me, how often do you see a man's arm hanging on by a thread? A nurse wheeled the incoming patient down to the operating room, and a doctor already checking her bag of scalpels ran behind them. The unexpected eye-gulp of all that arm blood and open flesh (and did I mention the gigantic fresh cut on the patient's forehead?) nauseated me instantly.
Louise was very understanding, considering what a mess I'd made. She promptly had an orderly disinfect the site. “Andre!” she called out to the very unlucky man selected for the task. “Double mop to be sure there is not one dot of the vomit left on the floor!”
Then she finished up with me in her small office. No winking came my way, as she was avoiding any form of eye contact. In fact, she was so busy addressing the elf in the March of Dimes Christmas poster over my head that I knew she would never pick me.
When I arrived home there was a burnt cheesy smell in the air. My father, eastern ad sales director for a Los Angeles film magazine, telecommutes. Dad was so engaged in his TV show that he didn't hear me key in, and I caught him chowing down microwavable enchiladas and watching a Three's Company rerun on the newly installed TiVo. Because of our mutual pop culture addiction, Sari always claims I'm Dad's pet. I've always felt that he loves Sari just as much, but her interests perplex him. Dad always tunes out when Mom and Sari talk molecules.
Elaine and Ken Popkin are an opposites-attract couple that has lasted, and Sari is, probably in Dad's mind, his wife's little carbon copy. Mom and Sari are both tall and skinny and delicately pretty even though their light arched eyebrows make them both look a little sad even when they're happy. The only thing Sari has obviously inherited from Dad is his calm nature.
No one questions where I get my looks from either. But genetics are funny: my button nose and my dark lips (not to mention my stubby toes) are just like Dad's, and my size-ten body is very much like the curvy Popkin women's figures I've seen at family bar mitzvahs and weddings. Yet I've been gifted with the Fischer side's tendency to angrily erupt like a volcano.
“What are you doing home?” Dad asked a bit sheepishly as he paused Suzanne Somers in midjiggle around the Ropers' apartment.
I told him the truth about the emergency room. After Dad stopped laughing—the thought of his daughter who wouldn't even get her ears pierced interviewing in a place that's all about blood just struck him as beyond absurd—he agreed I should just go ahead and accept the internship at Out of the Box, which he thought from the sound of it was far, far more suited to me.
He wrote me a note for school and insisted that I not even bother Mom with the fact that I came home without going back to class. Partly, I think, because he didn't want me to mention he was watching nearly pornographic seventies sitcoms while she was hard at work in an office. And especially because cutting a class is major delinquency to Elaine Popkin. She had the perfect attendance record at her high school graduation ceremony, and she doesn't even believe in taking sick days at work.
I was appreciative, but he waved his hand as if to say, That's nothing.
“Want to watch TV?” he said.
“Always,” I said.
After a commercial for a new spaghetti sauce, an anchor-woman from a daily entertainment gossip program had an exclusive interview with what would be the new mascots for the next winter Olympics in Turin.
“Okay, this is so embarrassing … but where's Turin?”
“Italy,” Dad said.
“That's where they fo
und a sheet some people think covered Jesus?”
“Yes. Bingo.”
We heard a short history of the Olympic mascot, a subject that I'd previously paid zero attention to.
“The first mascot was in 1972, when Munich trotted out Waldi, a multicolored dachshund—”
“Oh, I remember Waldi,” Dad laughed to himself. “Bizarre thing.”
“But the most famous Olympic mascot was a computer-generated creature who lived in the flame, named Izzy, short for Whatizit? Izzy could transform himself into anything desired.”
“Talk about bizarre!” Dad said with another look of glee on his face. “That mascot was unbelievable. He was a computer-generated blob. A marketing disaster.”
“In 1988 Calgary, there were Hidy and Howdy, two bears that looked like a cowboy and a cowgirl.”
“So hokey!” I said to Dad as I dipped one of Dad's potato chips into his open jar of chunky salsa.
“In 1998 the Nagano mascot was originally a weasel named Snowple, but he was later replaced by the four snow owls, or snowlets, named Sukki, Nokki, Lekki, and Tsukki, which all of Japan fell madly in love with.”
“Snowlets? They're making this up,” I said to Dad.
“The year 2000 in Sydney saw Oily the kookaburra, Millie the echidna, and Syd the platypus.”
“Wait, I actually remember that.”
“You do?” Dad said. “I don't.”
“The most recent ones from Athens were Phevos and Athena, two terra-cotta dolls. The boy doll was named after the Olympian god Apollo, god of light and music, and his sister was named after the goddess of wisdom and patron of the city of Athens.”
“I really liked the Athens ceremony,” Dad said. “They got it right. First class.” He dipped a chip.
“So what will Turin bring?” the coannouncer asked.
I dipped my own chip.
“Two cartoon characters named Neve and GHz, representing a ball of snow and block of ice, are the cutie-pie mascots for the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics. Neve is red and represents snow, and GHz is sky blue and symbolizes ice.”
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