Ethan Marcus Makes His Mark

by Michele Weber Hurwitz

  4. Dad.

  5. To clarify the above, because of what Dad told me the last time we went to the nature center together.

  Bonus reason: Maybe he could come home here and, if they allow it, watch me present on the last day.

  I try to think of reasons four and five on the list for Mom, but I can’t focus. Hannah’s singing loudly—the same song over and over—and Mom’s doing this whistling-humming kind of breathing.

  I peek into her room. She’s asleep. I turn off the TV and her light, then tell Hannah to get ready for bed. She pulls off her headphones and sticks her tongue out at me.

  Without a glance outside, I pull down our shade. I used to look out every night and try to identify constellations and think about how ancient people navigated with only the stars as their guide. I wondered if I would’ve been able to do that, to find where to go without my phone or a map.

  I don’t gaze at the stars anymore, though. Did you know the name Dara means “evening star”? I looked it up after I found out Dad was staying there with her. I like to know the meanings of names. Zoe means “life” in Greek.

  Dara shouldn’t have changed my view of the awesome, luminous balls of gas that are quadrillions of miles away, but she did.

  Little things are usually what alter big things.

  BRIAN

  Mom, Dad, and John went to a cultural fair at his school—John helped with the Poland booth—and they left me in charge of Gram. She had to move in with us because she can’t remember what day it is or if she brushed her teeth. I can tell you that even if she did brush her teeth, she didn’t do a great job.

  I’m sleeping in John’s room now, but my clothes and stuff are still in my room, where Gram sleeps. It’s not easy finding my jeans and shirts in the dark while she’s snoring like a jet engine every morning.

  Gram’s sitting in the one thing Mom let her bring from her apartment—an old blue chair that leans back and has a footstool that pops out. Dad calls it a La-Z-Gram instead of a La-Z-Boy. She’s staring at my X-Men poster.

  “Hey, Gram.” I get last year’s yearbook from my bookcase and sit on the floor. Maybe if I was like Professor X, I could read the minds of the girls at McNutt and see if anyone likes me. I flip to last year’s sixth-grade pictures. I’m going through every possibility. No more strikeouts.

  I run my finger down the rows of names. “Okay, first up, Chloe Carter. She’s in my science class. She’s cute, but has a weird laugh that sounds like a freaked-out bird. So, no. Second, Kayla Guo. She’s a good athlete. She never talks, though. Not that that’s the first thing on my mind.”

  Gram makes a snorting sound.

  “What? I’m just being honest.” I go through the pages. “Gwen Larson? Carly Perez? Rafaella Simmons?”

  Gram seems to be trying to sit up. I move the lever so the back of the chair pops forward. She reaches for my hand, then covers it with both of hers. Her skin feels like tissue paper.

  “Do not push the river,” she says.

  Gram comes up with these confusing sayings out of nowhere—mostly having to do with things that could kill you—so who knows what this means. “Are you talking about a real river or an imaginary one?” I ask.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Do not push the river,” I repeat. “Okay. Sounds like a plan.” I lie on my back and put the yearbook over my face. “Let’s face it, I’m hopeless.”

  Gram makes this laugh-gurgle-type sound. “Oh, Miroslaw.”

  My dad’s name. I take the yearbook off my face. “Gram? I’m Brian.”

  “Like I always tell you, Miro, spit in the wind and your troubles are gone.”

  “What? Like really spit?”

  And, yeah, I look up and Gram’s churning the saliva around in her mouth. Before I can roll away, she hurls a spit onto the carpet. Misses me by an inch, I swear.

  Nice. My own grandma just spit at me. Or my dad.

  She looks off in the distance; then her eyes start to close, and a minute later she’s asleep. I gotta tell you, and this might be rude to say, but oldness = weirdness.

  When Mom, Dad, and John get home, along with a hundred relatives who went to see John’s Poland booth, Mom makes coffee and has babka and paczki already set out on trays. Two hours of eating and drinking and people yelling and arguing. It’s tons of fun.

  After the party’s over, I go into the dining room, where Dad’s finishing his coffee. I should tell him about the camp invitation that everyone but me thinks is a big deal, but Mom shrieks loudly from the kitchen.

  “Marta! What are you doing? Did you just spit on the floor?”

  I run in, and sure enough, there’s a pool of spit in front of Gram, who’s sitting at the table. Man, she’s got a lot of spit. Mom wipes it up with a paper towel, muttering in Polish.

  I’ll tell ya, if I ever get something going with Chloe or Kayla or Gwen or Carly or Rafaella, or anyone else, I’m never inviting them to my house. The spit house. They’d run out of here so fast, I wouldn’t even get up to bat.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Armor

  M.R.

  “Your son is exceptional. I believe he is gifted.”

  The words my preschool teacher spoke to my parents. I remember the exact day. We were in the classroom after the other children had left, and I was standing by the window. It was sunny but raining. Warm, humid, tropical-feeling. I was counting and analyzing the patterns of raindrops on the glass.

  Dad, in his dark suit and tie, sitting on a little wooden chair, his wide hands covering his knees, asked: “What does that mean, exactly?”

  As if it was a troublesome diagnosis.

  The teacher explained how I grasped concepts quickly. That I asked questions beyond what a four-year-old would ask. I knew and used words like “comparison” and “multitude.” She recommended that I be tested.

  I took it all in. The quiet drips of water streaming into a puddle on the horizontal metal frame. Dad standing, smoothing his pants. Mom fingering the edge of her white sweater. My teacher tipping her head slightly, looking at them quizzically. “This is wonderful,” she said. “This is remarkable.”

  “I suspected as much,” Dad answered, glancing in my direction. “My younger brother is like that. Maybe that’s where Marlon gets it from. I don’t know. But I have to tell you, my brother’s an odd guy. Real quirky. Always was. In school the kids excluded him. It didn’t matter how brilliant he was; he didn’t have any friends. I don’t want that to happen to my son. I don’t want him to be exceptional.”

  “But he is,” the teacher said softly. “And it’s different now. We stress kindness and acceptance. There are programs—”

  Dad shook his head, politely said, “Thank you for your time,” and motioned for me and Mom to leave. He took my hand, covered it with his, and led me to the car. He was silent on the ride home, so we were too.

  I didn’t go back to that preschool. The rest of that year, Mom bought me workbooks and puzzles and games, which I devoured at a rapid pace. Then we moved, and she got busy with her job as Dad’s social planner.

  McNutt is the fifth school I have attended. They’re all the same. The teachers tell my parents I’m highly intelligent but seem bored in class. The kids keep their distance, averting their eyes. I prefer being at home, which never feels like a home. What Dad didn’t want to happen ended up happening anyway.

  He tried to stop it, and with good intentions, I suppose. Some Sundays he took me to baseball games, the zoo, a loud, massive amusement park with rides and shows—always asking if I wanted to “invite a friend.”

  Dad’s smart—not like me, but in a different way. You’d think he’d know that you can’t alter someone’s genetic makeup with a ride on a roller coaster.

  It’s all right, though. Two schools ago, I started bringing my Shakespeare volume with me to lunch. It was easier that way. The book is heavy and large; I like to think of it as a sort of armor. I have read through it twice. I’m a fast reader, and I have a lot of time.

>   Dad was thrilled that I entered Invention Day this year and last year, because “regular” kids were participating, not geniuses.

  And that is how I will convince him to let me go to ZCIC.

  Ethan Marcus and Brian Kowalski have been invited. Dad thought their standing-desk invention was a “hoot.” And when they performed their rap song for the crowd at Invention Day, he was smiling and clapping along.

  I know exactly what I will do. I will tell Dad they are my friends.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Museum

  ETHAN

  Saturday morning, Mom announces we’re going on a Marcus family field trip. And the destination is—even hearing the word makes me tired—a museum.

  I moan, “Why?” at the same time Erin shouts, “Yay!”

  There’s me and my sister, both responding with three-letter words ending in y, and that’s where the similarities stop.

  Mom raises an eyebrow at me. “Because it’ll be fun, and informative, and interesting. No arguments, please.”

  I don’t even have time for a bowl of cereal, because we’re piled in the car minutes later. Dad tosses me a granola bar while Mom’s reading the museum website on her phone and telling us about the exhibits. Erin’s like, “Wow! Sounds amazing! Cool. I can’t wait to see that!” To be honest, for me it’s not only the tiredness factor. After an hour of looking at the millions of things in those little glass cases, I’m kinda done.

  We get there, park a mile from the building. Then Dad buys the tickets. The guy at the counter looks from me to Erin. “Are you guys twins?”

  “No!” we both answer. Why does everyone always ask that? We look nothing alike. Erin’s a little chubby and short and has crazy frizzy hair, and I’m tall and skinny like Dad, with regular hair.

  Mom smiles. “Eleven months apart.” She loves to tell people that. Sometimes she describes how Erin was a difficult birth and I was an easy one, but thankfully, she doesn’t go into that now.

  Right before we go through the turnstile, Mom says, “Hold on a sec. Dad and I wanted to bring you here today because”—she pauses to beam at us—“well, we looked into the camp, and we thought our future techpreneurs could get some inspiration.”

  Erin stares at her, then gasps. “What are you saying? I can for sure go?”

  Mom and Dad nod and Erin, like, gurgles. “This is one of the happiest moments of my life!” she cries.

  Dad pats my shoulder. “You can go too, Ethan, but we want to make sure you’re fully committed. It’s a lot more work than Invention Day.”

  “Of course we support you,” Mom says, “but I admit, we’re wondering why you’d want to do this, exactly. Before the desk invention, you never had an interest in science or making things.”

  “Really,” Erin adds. “If you weren’t so fidgety in school and hadn’t had your little outburst in LA, Invention Day would never have been on your radar.”

  I push the turnstile roughly. “Thanks, everyone.”

  Erin’s right behind me. “Ethan, the kids at these camps are so far and above. You should look at the website. What they make is incredible. And, well, I’ll be immersed in my own project, so I won’t be able to”—she makes air quotes—“save you this time.”

  That was a foul. A technical! She should be thrown out of the museum. Or the family. One thing about my sister—she never forgets anything. How many times is she going to bring up the fact that she, quote, unquote, “saved” me with the stand-in during LA and got Mr. Delman to consider the standing desk idea?

  “Don’t worry! You won’t have to save me!” I shout, making air quotes too.

  Some woman turns around, and Mom touches my arm. “Inside voice, hon.”

  “Maybe we should revisit this later,” Dad says, leading us into the first exhibit. The three of them walk through an arched doorway, and I sort of huff and stomp after them. I don’t know if I’m huffing and stomping because I’m mad about what they said or because I think what they said is true.

  The exhibit is on the Wright brothers—Orville and Wilbur, the guys who invented, built, and flew the first plane. Mom, Dad, and Erin start listening to a guy in a brown shirt and the same color brown pants. He’s standing near a full-size model of their airplane and talking about aerodynamics and gravity and velocity. It looks more like a giant kite than an airplane, if you ask me.

  I wander around the exhibit, looking at the stuff in the cases, then stop in front of a bicycle. There’s a sign that says it’s a replica of the type of bicycle the Wright brothers rode. Turns out—and I never knew this—the bros weren’t engineers or scientists or even high school graduates. They repaired and sold bicycles. The plaque says people with a lot more cred tried to fly a plane and failed. But O and W kept trying and finally figured it out. They studied birds and the wind and kites. And, weirdly, bicycles.

  Okay, here’s a secret about me: I never learned to ride a bike. Dad never did either when he was a kid, and neither of us can Rollerblade or skateboard. He says the Marcus men are missing a wheels gene.

  Mom taps my back and says we’re moving on to the next exhibit. We must go to at least ten others, but all through the day I can’t stop thinking about the bicycle.

  • • •

  When we get home, I go into the garage and pull out the bike Mom and Dad bought for my tenth birthday. (Dad was hoping the gene had skipped me.) It’s dusty, but otherwise in good shape. I think I gave up on it after a few weak, half-hearted attempts.

  I wheel it out to the sidewalk, fasten my helmet, and get on. Then this is how the next twenty minutes go: me pedaling, trying to balance, falling. Repeat, repeat, repeat. My palms get scraped, one knee is bleeding, and I rip my shirt, but like the fiftieth time I get on, I make it halfway down the block before I lose my balance.

  And it’s a crazy-good feeling.

  I jump off and grab the bike before it hits the ground. The whole time, those few seconds, all I could think about was Orville and Wilbur, and how they were smarter than the most brilliant scientists. Because they studied normal stuff. How birds use their wings and how kites stay in the air. And how bicycles work!

  I run home, wheeling the bike, and then drop it in the garage. I rush inside, realize I’m still wearing my helmet. “I rode my bike!”

  Erin, Mom, and Dad look at me like I’m nuts.

  “You rode your bike?” Mom repeats.

  “I did it! I made it half a block!” I shout. “And you know what else? I got inspiration! I’m going to the camp!”

  Erin spits out some water she’s drinking. “Wait, wait. Just because you finally rode a bike doesn’t mean you’ll survive at the camp. Ethan, I urge you to really think about this—”

  “I have! Two regular guys with no science background, just their instinct, get a plane to fly, okay? What about that!”

  They all seem too stunned (or confused) to answer.

  “You’re talking about the Wright brothers?” Dad asks as Mom gives me a paper towel to blot my knee.

  I ball it up in my hand. “Yes! Don’t you always say we can do anything we put our minds to? Gilardi has confidence in me. She said she considered lots of kids. But she picked me!”

  Brian has to be wrong! We’re not the slacker examples. They wouldn’t intentionally do that to a kid, would they? Set someone up like that? I know I’m not like Erin or Romanov or probably all the usual kids who get invited to these camps, but if two guys who fixed bikes could get a plane to fly, why can’t I invent a desk-evator that works? A new and improved version, in fact! Without duct tape this time.

  “There’s something else,” I say. “Something that might not seem big, but is. Every invention needs one basic ingredient—someone who believes in it and stands behind it. In my case, literally. I’m going. I’m finishing what I started. I want to see it through.”

  Dad nods firmly. “You have my vote.” Mom smiles and applauds. “Okay!”

  Erin stares at me. “No. This is not okay.”

  I groan. “For
once in your life, could you have some faith in me?”

  She sighs. “That’s not it. I’m . . . I just . . . don’t want you to be embarrassed again.”

  “I wasn’t embarrassed!” An 89 percent lie. Well, maybe closer to 95.

  “Ethan, listen to me. At Invention Day . . . people were laughing at you behind your back. Saying mean things. I told them to stop, but you know how people are.”

  “No, they weren’t! I didn’t see anyone laughing. I didn’t hear anything.”

  She bites her lip, shakes her head.

  I swallow. She’s serious. I unbuckle my helmet, take it off, hold it in my hands.

  “Sorry.”

  “Whatever,” I mutter.

  Erin looks down. “There’s something else I have to tell you.”

  “What? Someone made a meme of me that went viral?”

  “No . . . it’s the report for Mrs. D’Antonio. Now that all this has happened, I’ve been thinking that we—I—need to put the report on hold for the time being.”

  “What do you mean? The camp isn’t for a couple of weeks. You have time to finish it.”

  “No. I need to put all my mental energy toward my project for ZCIC. I have to prepare.”

  “You promised.”

  “Yes, I feel bad about that. I shouldn’t have.”

  “But you did.”

  Mom and Dad are letting us argue, working it out on our own like they’d usually advise. But there is no working it out. Erin promises (again) that she’ll get back to the report “sometime in January” and says that might be better anyway, to present it to Mrs. D after winter break, when she’s all fresh and rested, and besides . . .

  She keeps talking.

  I stop listening.

  After a few minutes Mom and Dad both doze off, which proves my point about museums. (Or, actually, it could be the droning of Erin’s voice.) I leave while she’s still going. In the garage, I prop my bike against the wall and hang the helmet on the handlebars.

  Now that Erin’s two bombs have been dropped, my crazy-good feeling from riding the bike just feels crazy, minus the good. Maybe Erin’s right. Maybe Gilardi’s delusional. All those lab chemicals affected her brain or something.