EMMA ZELLAR:
BORN TO LEAD
Now she just needed to paste it all onto the trifold and arrange her binder, and go with her mom to turn it in.
Q came over and looked at all the stuff on the table. “What’s this?”
“My portfolio. It’s all about my leadership qualities.”
“Really?” Q scratched her nose. “What kinds of things?”
“Well, I was captain of our soccer team last year, remember?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I’m fifth-grade class president.”
“Well . . .”
“What?” Emma Z glared at her friend.
“Sorry but I mean—didn’t you just say you were class president when school started? There wasn’t really an election.”
“It’s in the yearbook that just came out, so.” Z picked up the Donnelly Elementary yearbook from the table and showed her the bookmarked page. Emma Zellar with her arms crossed and a stern look on her face. The caption: I’m only class president now, but when I’m older I’m going to be president of the United States! 2044 is right around the corner!!!!
“Oh,” said Q.
“Plus I have an essay in a magazine and I’m taking a college class at Darlton about leadership and it’s really interesting.”
“You’re taking a class at Darlton University?” Q gaped at her and Z felt a flash of superiority. She had saved this bit of information to share with Emma Q at just the right moment. Q read so much that sometimes Z worried there were things she didn’t know that Q did. But as her father liked to say, There’s book smart and there’s world smart, sweet pea. And I’ll take the world over a book any day.
“It’s called Leaders as Entrepreneurs. I’m sitting in on some of the sessions,” Emma Z said lightly. “It’s at the Varner School of Leadership. My dad gave them a bunch of money for, like, a lobby or something, so the associate dean said I could take the class. Do you want to see the syllabus?”
“The what?”
“That’s the class schedule. It lists the readings and assignments the students have to do.” Z dug through the papers on the desk until she found it.
Q paged through the packet. “You have to write all these papers?” Her eyes shot wide. “And you have a three-hour exam next week?”
Z smiled. “No, because I’m a junior auditor.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a special thing where you get to take the class but you don’t have to do any of the work.”
“That doesn’t sound fair.” Q looked up from the syllabus, trying to hide a pout. “Aren’t there any rules?”
“A strong leader makes her own rules,” Emma Z said, snatching away the syllabus and replacing it on the table, right next to two pink paper roses she’d found in her room yesterday.
With her back to Emma Q she said it again: “A strong leader makes her own rules.” Emma Z smiled. I like that, she thought, staring down at the roses. Her own rules. She picked one up and brought it to her nose and sniffed, smelling nothing.
FORTY-FOUR
CH’AYÑA
They brought Atik along again, spending the early hours at the Zellars’ and the afternoon at some apartments in South Crystal, four of them in a building Silea had been working for five years. Through the day, as Ch’ayña mopped, wiped, sprayed, bent her back and ordered Atik around, she stewed over the thought of him up on that stage. All pageant, all pretense. The Crystals using her Atikcha for his Quechua and his Spanish, taking his gifts so they could feel better about themselves.
“You sang for them, didn’t you,” she said to him over their lunch, a sopa de quinoa they spooned from thermoses on the Zellars’ back porch. “Sang like a bird in the mountains.”
Atik wrinkled his nose. “That’s not how it was. I wanted to go up there. I wanted to show them.”
She snorted. “To show them. So that’s what this is about, this school? Showing off?”
He shook his head and looked away. Ch’ayña shot a look at her daughter, but Silea was on her phone, probably texting with Tiago. She vowed to have it out with Silea about the school, but by the end of the day she felt too weary to bring it up again.
* * *
—
Silea set out plates for them, some flour-fried pork with stringy greens. Too much salt on everything, and the pork was dry. Silea was a horrible cook, even when she used both hands. She went to doze on the sofa, and Ch’ayña said nothing about the food. After his supper Atik went around the trailer taking pictures on the phone. He was photographing his folded animals and fruits and things but choosing bad positions and poor lighting.
“Not from that spot.” Ch’ayña pointed with her fork at the stove. “The light will be better from over there.”
He moved to where she told him, took a few shots of the paper cars and trucks on the table, then pointed the phone up to shoot the cluster of birds dangling on strings from the ceiling. Atik had made the mobile a year ago during a blizzard, using a book about South American birds he got from the school library and a whole pack of the fine folding paper you could only find at the art store in Crystal. Many of the birds had fallen since, but at least thirty still hung there, in all their colors and shapes.
“No no no,” said Ch’ayña. “You need to get lower.”
Atik huffed. “You do it then, Awicha.”
She pushed back her chair. “Give it,” she ordered.
He handed her the phone, and she pointed the lens at the thicket of his birds to find the best views. Not all the birds at once; that would dull the effect. What you wanted was a nice cluster, some sharp on the screen, others a blur in the background.
“You have the good eye, Mamay,” Silea said sleepily from her spot. “You’ve always had it.”
True. You had to get the position right. The angles and lighting. Not difficult but the details mattered.
Ch’ayña went around the trailer with the phone, getting shots of everything. The train and trees on the back of the toilet, the little village and the car park in Atik’s bedroom, the forest and orchard in theirs.
In Ch’ayña’s opinion her grandson’s greatest creation was a small paper replica of Mountain View itself. He pulled it out and she shot it: thirty-seven paper trailers, sixteen cars and trucks, two bicycles leaning against a double-wide, even the dead cat, all taped to a piece of gray cardboard in the precise arrangement of their neighborhood.
Afterward they sat three together on the couch and went through the pictures, choosing the best ones for Atik’s portfolio. “Tiago knows a place to print them out,” Silea told them.
“We don’t need his help,” Ch’ayña snapped back. Once again he was butting in where he didn’t belong.
Silea tapped her arm brace. “Right now we need all the help we can get.”
“Anyways I like him.” Atik leaned forward on the couch to look down at his grandmother. “He thinks the school is a good ticket. That’s what he said.”
“Oh, he did, did he,” Ch’ayña said. “Ticket to what?”
Atik just shrugged. “He’s smart like you, Awicha.”
Ch’ayña scowled at the flattery, though she knew what Atik said was true. Tiago had a clever way about him, and the man was good with his hands. When he came around to fix things, he worked methodically but exactingly, with an eye for detail. Atik was teaching him how to fold animals, and Tiago was pretty decent at it, despite the man’s long and thick-knuckled fingers.
Silea sent the pictures through the air to him, and this reminded Ch’ayña of the day Silea got her phone. Three days of pay. How strange it was, to lose half her daughter’s mind to that shiny little square.
FORTY-FIVE
BECK
Seen in slow motion, on a giant high-res Mac screen, Aidan’s dribbling was a thing of subtle wonder. Sometimes Beck had to watch it up cl
ose and slowed down to believe that his son’s feet could do what they did. The curve of his left boot caught the ball before flexing it to the outer side, then back again, now to his right foot, tink tink tink, then a hard pass across the midfield line. Beck adjusted the framing, cropping in to highlight Aidan’s legs and feet. He shaded away the rest and added an artful dissolve.
The highlight reel was eight minutes and thirty-two seconds long so far, with a digital mountain of clips still left to sort through. Beck’s goal: twenty minutes, enough to show the admissions folks Aidan’s dazzle. With the right production values, good editing, and a few twists here and there, the reel should make a wicked centerpiece for his son’s portfolio. Sure, it meant a few extra hours in the basement, but this was probably a good day to stay home. Leila was supposed to drop by the studio downtown to pick up her overdue paycheck, which Beck had vaguely promised her he’d leave in hard copy in an envelope on her desk by lunchtime.
Wasn’t happening. Not today anyway.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
“Hey, guys, keep it down!” Beck yelled up the stairs.
Thump.
Crack.
“Guys!”
Crack.
“Guys, quiet!”
The basement door squealed open.
“Little shithead! Liar!”
Charlie’s shout, followed by a clatter of feet down the stairs. Beck turned away from the computer as Aidan hurled himself into Beck’s lap, red-faced and sobbing.
“Charlie hit me,” he wailed. “He almost hit me with his bat too, but he hit a wall instead.”
“What?” Beck grasped his son by the shoulders and looked at his tear-drenched face. A red welt rose on his right cheek. “Where’s your m— Where’s Sonja?”
“Tay—tay—taking a nap,” he blubbered.
Beck shouted at the ceiling: “Charlie, come down here!”
No response.
“Stay put,” he said to Aidan, jogging up the stairs past three half-eaten cans of cat food sitting on the landing like mines, contents slathered across the sheet vinyl. At the top of the stairs he stopped to gape at a yawning new hole in the drywall.
“Charlie!”
Upstairs, Charlie had locked himself in his room. Music thundered from his speakers and shook the door. Beck grabbed the handle and pounded. “Charlie, open up! Open up right now!” No response.
He stomped toward the master bedroom. “Babe,” he said, bursting into one of the few orderly rooms in the house. Sonja was sprawled across the comforter dressed in yoga pants and a running bra with her head propped up on a throw pillow. A big pair of Bose headphones covered her ears. With her eyes closed she looked like a beautiful bug.
“Babe.”
Beck went over and tapped her knee. Her eyes opened and she pulled her headphones off and set them down between her legs.
“The boys were fighting downstairs. Charlie almost beat the shit out of Aidan.”
“Oh dear.”
“You didn’t hear them?” He planted his hands on his waist.
“No.” She indicated her headphones.
“Well, it was bad.”
“And did you hear them, Beck?”
“I was in the basement.”
She raised her eyebrows. “And so? I was upstairs.”
“But I was working.”
“You were playing with your soccer videos. You have been playing with them all day. You stayed home from work to play with your soccer videos.”
“I’m making a highlight reel for Aidan’s portfolio. It’s important.”
“More important than what is happening to Charlie?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Azra says he’s acting horribly, saying all these things, lashing out at Aidan. She is very worried about him, Beck.”
“She hasn’t said anything to me.”
Sonja tightened her lips.
“Okay, maybe she mentioned it. But I didn’t think he was going to act on it like this.”
She frowned. “What did he do?”
“He swung a bat at Aidan, downstairs when he—”
“A bat?” She sat up, focused now, alarmed.
“Yeah, I mean it hit the wall and didn’t hit him, and who knows if Charlie was really trying to hurt him, but still. There’s a big hole in the Sheetrock.”
“Charlie needs help, Beck. What if he hits Roy?”
“There’s no way—”
“You need to call Azra, right now, and get him an appointment with that therapist.”
Dr. Dan. Beck hated Dr. Dan, the condescending baby voice, the toys, the drawing, the big co-pay. They’d taken the twins to the shrink just after telling them about the divorce. Total waste of time—and money.
He tugged his beard. “I guess I should call her.”
“If you don’t, I will.”
“That would be awesome.”
Sonja sneered but started patting the bedspread, looking for her cell. Beck saw it by her ankle and handed it to her.
“Where’d you get those headphones?” he asked.
“What, these?” She stopped scrolling and glanced down at them, as if seeing them for the first time. “They are the noise-canceling kind. Azra gave them to me last week.” She looked up at Beck, the flecks in her irises burning an Alpine green, like an alien death ray. “They were a birthday present.”
Beck looked at the mirror behind the headboard and saw it happen, a grayness infused across the patches of skin above his unkempt beard. His legs weakened and dropped him onto the bedspread inches from Sonja’s smooth knees, which she curled away from him and pushed beneath a pillow like a turtle withdrawing its toes.
* * *
—
When Sonja came to bed in old sweatpants and a T-shirt, Beck took the nightly hint. They hadn’t screwed in seventeen days, by his count, even though over the previous months they’d just been hitting their stride again following the inevitable postpartum poontang lull. He was beginning to suspect that this abstinent turn was tactical on his wife’s part, another facet of her overall Sun Tzu household strategy. No laundry, no dishes, no sex, which especially sucked because he’d spent the last three hours doing everything he could to make up for his idiocy about her birthday. He’d made reservations at Xiomara for tomorrow, he’d bought her a full spa day at the Aspen Room, he’d even started planning a perfect getaway for them in Denver later in May, with reservations at the Brown Palace for two nights, including old-fashioned high tea in the lobby both days, something he’d heard her mention wistfully more than once. Just another set of charges on another card.
She slipped between the sheets and turned her back to him, nose in some German novel. He pushed up on his elbows. “This is getting ridiculous. What, so we’re in an Adam Sandler flick now, my wife withholding sex until I wash a goddamn dish?”
“Or remember a goddamn birthday,” Sonja said. “And the better reference is Aristophanes.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Babe, I’m really sorry, okay? I just—can I give you a shoulder rub, at least?”
She flipped a page. “I would rather have Roy vomit on my neck.”
FORTY-SIX
ROSE
They ran in tandem, Azra and Rose in the lead, Lauren and Sam behind them, street-stepping their way toward the Crystal Canyon path, a wide pedestrian throughway and bike route that started way out east at Eighty-fourth Street and followed the bubbling Crystal Creek several miles along a narrow canyon. Last summer, during a cool-down, they had tried to calculate the total miles traveled on these Friday runs since they’d met. Four miles times fifty-two weeks times eleven years: more than two thousand miles, a vast distance filled with countless conversations and endless opportunities to emote and vent.
<
br /> But only silence so far that morning, the slap of soles on asphalt and concrete. As they turned onto the creek trail Lauren broke the thin ice with a jackhammer.
“Just so you all know, our appeal was successful,” she announced.
Rose almost laughed aloud at her friend’s bluntness.
“Good for you,” said Samantha. “Xander deserves a spot if anyone does.”
“That’s for sure,” Lauren said.
Rose, looking sidelong, saw Azra shake her head, tight-lipped.
“How exactly did the process work?” Samantha asked. “Did he have to retest?”
“No. We have an old Stanford-Binet score, from back in second grade. He was in the ninety-ninth percentile. So there’s that, then the schools got their independent assessor to administer the Wechsler, because his CogPro nonverbal was so high. Ridiculously high. Plus some of his teachers at Odyssey wrote in.”
“So he’s through the first cut?” Sam asked.
“Yep.”
“And you didn’t have to retest?”
“Not the CogPro.”
Samantha asked a few more questions about the process. Her interest in the appeal sounded excessive to Rose’s ear. Usually Sam would be the last of them to indulge Lauren’s obsession with her son’s brilliance.
Azra half-turned her head. “I’m not surprised they have the appeals thing worked out. This school—I mean, I had my doubts but Aidan seems really jazzed about it. Plus I’m blown away by Bitsy Leighton, everything she said about inclusion, the multilingual stuff. Even Beck’s starting to fall in line.”
“She was great at the meeting,” Lauren admitted.
“And one-on-one she’s just as passionate. She has this edge I really like.”
“Mm-hmm,” Rose hummed. Uh-oh.
“Wait, you met her?” Lauren’s voice was a touch sharp; but Azra, amiable as ever, didn’t seem to catch on.
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