A Mango-Shaped Space

by Wendy Mass

  “How could you do that?” A dark cloud of dread descends upon me.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Who else knows? Wait, if Kimberly knows, then everyone must know!”

  “I’m sure not everyone …,” Jenna says, trailing off and looking everywhere but at me. I can hear the third-grade laughter ringing in my ears all over again. The passage of time doesn’t make it sound any nicer.

  “I’d take it back if I could,” Jenna insists.

  Still stinging from the betrayal, I say coldly, “What’s done is done, right? I’m sure eighth-graders aren’t as cruel as third-graders.” Yeah, right.

  “No one’s going to make fun of you,” Jenna says. “They’re just curious, that’s all.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  I hurry out of her house and walk quickly back down the road, suddenly eager to get home. I hate the idea of everybody at school talking about me behind my back. I’d tried so hard to avoid it, and then Jenna, of all people, sets it off.

  Zack is sitting at the kitchen table eating scrambled eggs when I walk in the back door. Seeing him there strikes me as strange. My life is changing by the minute, when for Zack everything is exactly the same as it was yesterday. As I pass by he tosses a handful of salt over his shoulder, spraying me with it.

  “Hey!” I say, brushing the tiny crystals off my jacket.

  “Sorry,” Zack says. “Didn’t see you there.”

  “You better clean that up before Mom sees it. And don’t leave it for Mango to lick up.”

  “Relax,” he says and grabs a sponge from the sink. “If you spill salt, you have to throw some over your left shoulder to appease the evil spirits. No big deal.”

  “The evil salt spirits?”

  “Go ahead, make fun,” Zack says. “But Beth knows it’s true.”

  “You’re brainwashing her,” I accuse him. “She never used to be this way.”

  “Hey, the Voodoo Vixen came to me, not the other way around,” he says, stuffing a whole piece of toast in his mouth.

  I head out of the kitchen, and Zack calls after me in a muffled voice. “By the way, if you can’t find Mango, he’s probably hiding in the walls.”

  Like the rest of us, Mango had found the house’s little nooks and crannies that never quite fit together. I go back in the kitchen. “Why is he hiding?”

  “I think Mom scared him. She was sweeping the hall, and she caught him peeing on the couch. So she chased him with the broom, and I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Mango peed on the couch?” I ask in disbelief.

  “Yup. Haven’t you noticed he’s been a little weird lately?”

  “Weird like how?”

  Zack shrugs. “Slinking around the house with his tail real low. Sleeping a lot.”

  “He always sleeps a lot,” I snap. “His medication makes him tired.” At that minute Mango saunters into the room and heads straight for his food bowl. Zack shrugs.

  I bend down and examine him. Poor Mango. Maybe he’s suffering from middle cat syndrome and peed to get attention. Being chased with a broom probably wasn’t the kind of attention he had been hoping for.

  “Five minutes till the bus,” Mom yells from upstairs.

  I cringe and sit down across from Zack. “Hey, can you show me how you get the thermometer to read like you’re sick? I really don’t want to go to school today.”

  “Ah, the ol’ thermometer and lightbulb trick,” he says fondly. “Never fails. But you only want to use it if you don’t mind being brought to the doctor.”

  I quickly push back the chair and stand. “Ugh, never mind.” In my haste I knock over the saltshaker. I turn it upright and pause. With a sigh of defeat, I pour a tiny bit in my hand and throw it over my left shoulder. Salt spirits or no salt spirits, I need all the luck I can get today.

  Zack smiles proudly. “Don’t worry, I’ll clean that up.”

  I give Mango an extra cat treat, grab my book bag, and head out to the bus stop. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe it won’t be that bad after all.

  Then why do I keep hearing freeeeek, freeeeek, freeeeeeeeeek over and over in my head?

  Chapter Six

  Throwing the salt must have worked, because no one asks me anything about my colors until English class. That’s when the dam breaks. Before the teacher comes in, kids rush over to my desk and begin firing questions at me.

  “What color is my name?” Ross Stoler demands. He’s never even spoken to me before. “How can you read with all those colors floating around?” asks Michelle, the girl with the dirty book. Then the questions come all at once. “Is it true that you can tell the time without looking at a clock? Is it true you can read people’s minds? What does it feel like? Does it hurt?”

  I turn from one person to the next as the questions get more and more absurd. My face is burning, and I slide down in my chair. Luckily the teacher comes in, and everyone sits down. I catch them glancing back at me when they think I’m not looking. I don’t know what they expect to see.

  At lunch I suddenly have the most popular table in the cafeteria. I tell people their names are yellow like a ripe banana, sky-after-it-rains blue, burnt-caramel brown, fire-engine red. It’s exhausting. Jenna and Kimberly try to protect me by shooing the crowd away. Sara cowers in her seat and silently chews her peanut-butter sandwich. Molly keeps bouncing up and down, clearly loving the attention. I have to admit it isn’t all bad. Kids who totally ignored me before are clamoring to talk to me now. It would be more rewarding if it didn’t have the overtones of a circus sideshow.

  “I wouldn’t talk so much if I were you,” a girl with long blond hair announces as she passes our table. “They might stick you in a class for special kids.”

  I watch her walk away, and my spirits sink with each step. She doesn’t even know me.

  “Ignore her,” Jenna says. “She’s just jealous.”

  After that I don’t feel like talking anymore and get a hall pass to go to the bathroom. I hide in a stall until lunch is over.

  Just to make the day complete, we have a pop quiz in math. I try hard to focus, but I can’t. I wind up leaving the last three answers blank. Afterward we’re supposed to start on our homework while the teacher grades the quizzes, but my notebook fills up with doodles instead. The teacher hands the quizzes back, and I leave mine facedown on the desk. I fantasize that I got an A. A nice, happy sunflower-yellow A. Slowly I turn one corner over until a letter starts appearing. It’s a big, fat purple F and a note to meet with her as soon as possible.

  By the time I board the bus to go home, I’m totally wiped out and in a really bad mood. Someone whispers, “That’s her. The girl who sees all the colors.” So that’s who I am now. The “girl who sees colors.” At least they don’t know I’m also the girl whose grand-father’s soul lives in her cat. They can’t take that away from me.

  Jenna stayed after school to work on her newspaper editorial about sexism in gym class, so she’s not here for me to hide behind. Zack keeps asking me about these rumors he heard about me, but I just stare out the window. He really won’t shut up, so when we get home I stand on the front porch and tell him the whole story. He’s actually quiet for a change.

  “How come me and Beth don’t have this?” he asks. “Maybe you’re adopted. You don’t really look like any of us now that I think about it.”

  “I’m not adopted,” I say, too worn out to argue. “I don’t know why I have it. That’s why I’m going to all these doctors.”

  “I think it’s pretty neat,” he says, following me inside.

  “You do?”

  “Sure,” he says, grinning. “Now I know you’re the strangest one in the family after all. And you had some stiff competition!”

  I open my mouth to disagree but realize I can’t. This is a very sad realization. My father walks in behind us, picking sawdust off his eyebrows. He asks to speak to me alone, but I tell him I already told Zack what’s going on.

  He seems pleased by that. Dad
likes it when we all get along. “Well then, the neurologist’s office called. Your appointment is next Friday. It would mean taking you out of school again.”

  “I think I can handle it.”

  “Maybe I should come too,” Zack suggests. “Mia needs me there.”

  “When pigs fly,” my father says.

  “Think that will be any time soon?” Zack asks hopefully.

  “Nope,” my father and I answer together.

  A strange thumping noise brings us to the living room. “That,” Zack says, “is not the way the body is supposed to work.” Beth is contorted on the floor, her legs above her head with her arms out to the sides. She slowly turns her head and looks at us.

  “It’s yoga,” she says cheerily. “You all should try it.”

  “Why?” Dad asks.

  A hidden voice responds from the other side of the couch. “It clears any blocked energy.”

  “Mom?” I ask, leaning over to get a better view. Sure enough, there she is, wearing old gardening clothes, bent in some position that looks hard to get out of.

  “The Voodoo Vixen’s got another one,” Zack whispers. “It’s only a matter of time till the rest of us are sucked in.”

  “Not me,” Dad and I say at the same time. We smile at each other, and I realize how glad I am to be home.

  Rain pelts the car as we drive through the university gates on Friday morning. Zack said that if it rains on a really important day, then good things are ahead. At least something is ahead, and that’s all I can ask. The campus is really nice, kind of medieval-looking with a lot of gray stone buildings and trees everywhere. After a few wrong turns, Dad finds the right building and the nearest visitor parking. We wander up and down the long hallways until we find the right office. My mother knocks on the door, and a tall, sandy-haired man in a white lab coat opens it right away. He barely looks old enough to be a doctor. He reminds me of a movie star, but I can’t think of which one. Right away he tells us to call him Jerry instead of Dr. Weiss. His office is small and filled with books of all sorts — fat books, skinny books, old books with pages sticking out, new books still stuffed in bags. I can’t imagine that one man could read all these books in a whole lifetime.

  “Wow,” I can’t help saying. “Our town library doesn’t even have this many books.”

  “It’s important to keep up with new discoveries in my field,” Jerry explains.

  “What exactly is your field?” my father asks, examining the many diplomas lining the walls.

  “As a neurologist, my focus is perception. I study how the brain processes information from our senses and how it relays that information back to the rest of the body.” He gestures excitedly for us to sit. “I’ve studied some unusual cases. As luck would have it, I’m one of the few researchers in the world who has experience with your condition.”

  My mother doesn’t waste any time. “Can you tell us what’s wrong with her?”

  Jerry smiles gently. “There is nothing wrong with her.”

  “But something is wrong,” I insist. “All the shapes and colors with the sounds and the letters and the numbers and —”

  “Slow down,” Jerry says, still smiling. “Mia, you don’t have a disease. You don’t even have a problem, exactly. What you have, based on what your mother told me, is a condition that is harmless. It’s called synesthesia.”

  I stare at him for a minute trying to absorb what he just said. Somewhere in my head a chorus of voices sings hallelujah. There is a name for what I have! Not that I can pronounce it. “What do I have again?”

  He says it again and I repeat it. It sounds like sin-es-thee-ja. A gold-flecked word that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. He explains, “The word synesthesia means ‘senses coming together.’ Imagine that the wires in your brain are crossed, not literally of course. In your case, your visual and hearing senses are linked. The visual cortex in your brain is activated when your auditory cortex is stimulated.”

  “In my case?” I ask. “Do a lot of people have this?” I glance at my parents, who are clearly as surprised as I am.

  Jerry shakes his head. “It’s very uncommon. We now believe that everyone is born with it, but for most people the extra neural connections are pruned away. For one person in a couple thousand, some of the connections stay. You see, the five senses can cross in many combinations. For instance, I tested one woman who tastes buttered popcorn every time she hears her husband’s voice. And there’s a well-documented case about a man who feels the sensation of objects being placed in his hands when he tastes certain foods. Seeing colored letters and numbers — lexical synesthesia — is the most common form, followed by colored hearing. Like yourself, forty percent of synesthetes — that’s the word for someone with synesthesia — have more than one type.”

  “Will those other things happen to me too?” I ask, wide-eyed.

  “No, you don’t have to worry,” Jerry assures me. “Your own synesthesia won’t vary too much.”

  “How can we make it go away?” my mother asks. “Mia can’t very well walk around seeing colors everywhere. It’s interfering with her schoolwork.”

  “I understand your concern, Mrs. Winchell. Honestly, I do. But this is Mia’s normal way of perceiving the world. She can learn to compensate for some things, but we can’t ‘cure’ her. I’ve never met anyone who wanted their synesthesia to go away.”

  “I’m still in the room,” I remind them.

  “Mia,” Jerry says, turning to me. “There are some things many synesthetes have in common, besides a slight majority of them being female. Why don’t you tell me how many of them sound familiar to you, okay?”

  I nod.

  “Are you left-handed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you artistic? Musical?”

  “I paint. I don’t play an instrument, but I listen to music a lot. I can always tell what note is being played by its color. If a piano isn’t tuned right, I can tell because the colors will be off.”

  “You’re probably a very good speller, right?”

  I nod again.

  “How do you picture the calendar year?”

  “Just like everybody else,” I assure him. “You know, like you’re sitting on top of a Ferris wheel at the amusement park. January is at the top of the wheel. If the wheel were a clock, January would be twelve. Then as the days go by, the wheel turns to the left, and February is at eleven. By the time summer comes around I’m at the bottom of the wheel, but the wheel is sort of lying flat on the ground now. Then in August it starts to rise again.” I lean back, content that at least in this regard I am normal. It takes me a second to register the fact that no one is agreeing with my description. My mother’s mouth is actually hanging open.

  “Not everyone sees the year like this?” I ask weakly.

  The three of them shake their heads. Jerry is smiling. He smiles a lot.

  “Do you mean that everyone who has this synesthesia condition has all of these traits?” my mother asks, clearly skeptical.

  “Not everyone, of course,” Jerry says. “For instance, many people I’ve tested have problems with understanding math, but on the other hand, one of my former test subjects is now a college math professor. But it’s uncanny how many characteristics they do share.”

  “It’s certainly fascinating, Dr. Weiss, er, Jerry,” my father says. “But how can we help Mia?”

  “Mia can train herself to make different mental connections by narrowing her focus and concentration. It will likely happen automatically as she gets older. Are you sure no one else in your family has this condition? It’s often hereditary.”

  My parents shake their heads. “Will you work with her and see what you can do?” my mother asks.

  “Of course,” Jerry says. He tells us he has a class to teach now but invites me back the next day to do some tests.

  “Are you going to hook me up to any wires?” I ask.

  “No wires, I promise.” The rain has stopped, and Jerry walks us all the
way out to our car. I’m about to get in when he tells me to wait.

  He digs around in his lab-coat pockets and hands me a folded piece of paper. “Here’s the address of a synesthesia Web site where you can interact with people from all over the world.”

  I stare at the paper. “Other people with synesthesia?”

  Jerry nods. “All kinds of people with all different types of synesthesia. There are discussion groups you can join and articles to read, although you may find some of them a bit dry.”

  I’m so excited that I give him a hug. He waves good-bye as we pull out of the parking lot. I settle back in my seat, clutching the piece of paper Jerry gave me. I must find Billy now. I have to let his mother know he doesn’t have a brain tumor. He’s not crazy. And neither am I.

  And the chorus belts out another round of hallelujah!

  Chapter Seven

  By eleven o’clock Saturday morning, Mom and I are sitting in Jerry’s lab surrounded by strange machines that hum and beep. I didn’t return Jenna’s three phone calls last night; I’m just not ready to share what I’ve learned about myself yet. I almost feel as if she doesn’t deserve to know, after what she did. Jerry introduces us to his assistant — a perky graduate student named Debbie, who is wearing rainbow-striped overalls the likes of which I haven’t seen since old Brady Bunch reruns. She pumps my hand hello and seems very happy to meet me. Jerry asks me about my colors, what shapes I see, what textures, etc. I explain that some letters are shiny, some are gauzy, some are grainy like wood. Some are even fuzzy. Debbie writes everything down.

  “How do I compare with other people who have this?” I ask Jerry. “Other synes … synesthetes?” It’s still a hard word to say.

  “When we first started testing people, we assumed all the synesthetes would see the same colors and shapes for the same sounds,” Jerry says. “The initial theory was that if some people, like you, can see a color when they hear a sound, that must mean that the sound actually has color but that only a rare few people can see it. But we quickly found that in reality it doesn’t happen that way. People’s colors seem to be unique to them. The geometric shapes are much more similar. Not that they appear at the same sounds, but the general shapes that synesthetes see don’t differ too much. For people who have colored alphabets, there are wide color variations, although many people seem to associate light colors with vowels.”