by Sarah Allen
“Excellent.” She leaned back in her chair.
“It’s about what you said about that Smithsonian contest where people do a project and write a letter.”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if … well, I was thinking I really want to submit a letter, and was wondering if maybe you could look over it after I write it to help me make it better?”
Ms. Trepky smiled one of her rare smiles. It was an excited smile, not an Aren’t You Cute smile. “I would be delighted,” she said.
“It’s not due until February, but I want to get started on my project and my letter now so I can make them the best possible.”
“Would you like to start a draft over the weekend and then have me look it over?” she said.
I knew she’d ask the right questions.
“That would be great,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what,” Ms. Trepky said. “If you start working on your letter for the contest, I’ll look it over as soon as you’re ready. And at the end of the year, if you’d like to turn in your letter to me as well, I’d be more than happy to give you extra credit for class. Not that I expect you’ll need it.”
“That … that would be amazing!” I said, giving one hop instead of jumping up and down like I wanted to.
Ms. Trepky pulled up the contest instruction page on her computer, then printed it out for me so I’d have a copy of the instructions to look at. I planned to tape them on the wall above my computer. Instructions that were going to solve so much. Fix so many problems.
I put the paper carefully into my backpack and headed for the classroom door. See, Cecilia, I said in my head. I’m already on the job. You’re watching, right? You’re going to help me out?
“Libby,” Ms. Trepky said. “Speak and write as clearly as you do in my class, and they will listen.”
“Thanks,” I said.
They better, I thought.
Beach Bum
People like Dustin Pierce don’t ignore new students.
I’ve heard him and his cronies come up with nicknames starting with almost every letter of the alphabet. They work harder on those mean nicknames than on homework, it seems.
They ignore me, usually.
But he didn’t use to ignore me.
See, there’s another thing that sometimes comes with Turner syndrome, and that’s these little brown moles that I have on my arms and legs and even some on my face. Lots of people have brown moles—Marilyn Monroe had a beautiful brown mole on her lip—but sometimes when you have Turner syndrome you get a bit more spotted than other people.
I used to have one on my chin that the doctors were worried about. So I went to the doctor and he took it off. Want to know how weird and neat it is when the doctor takes a mole off? They did a tiny shot on my chin to make it numb, then he took a sharp scalpel and scraped it right off. They had to go deeper on this one to make sure they got it all because they were worried it might turn into a sun cancer mole one day when I was older, and I even had to get stitches.
Remember how I have a scar around my chest?
Well, I have another very small scar from those stitches.
Dustin had a nickname for me that started with F.
He called me FrankenChin.
Dustin and his friends don’t call me that as much as they used to, which is good. Because it’s not new anymore, and they mostly like finding new people and new nicknames to use.
Sometimes I wonder if other people call me that name, too, but because I don’t hear so perfectly I just don’t hear them. Maybe if I don’t hear them it doesn’t matter, right?
After school I went to my locker to pack up my backpack. I kept the paper from Ms. Trepky tucked neatly inside the cover of Survey of Modern America.
Talia’s locker was two down from mine. Whenever she sat next to me in class I tried to remember to smile at her, but I hadn’t talked to her since the library. She always had her earbuds in. She didn’t look like she wanted to talk.
But other people were talking to her.
Talking at her, really.
Dustin Pierce and his two buddies walked past our lockers while Talia took out her earbuds and stuffed them into her pocket.
“Hey there, beach bum,” Dustin said. His buddies snorted and they walked quicker down the hall to their lockers, giggling.
Talia froze, but only for a few seconds. The way her shoulders arched made me think they’d been calling her that name all day long. She let her backpack drop to the ground with a thump, and put her shoulders back. She opened her locker.
Dozens and dozens of paper scraps tumbled out of her locker onto the floor, some flipping around in the air before they landed. Dustin and his crew must have stuffed them in through the thin slots at the top of the locker. Talia immediately bent to the floor and started scooping them up.
I knelt next to her to help, and that’s when I saw it. They weren’t just scraps of paper.
They were pictures.
Pictures of butts.
A hundred pictures of butts. Big butts, too. Gigantic butts with stretch marks and wrinkles.
Talia’s face was red, and her mouth a knife-sharp line.
What in the world are you supposed to say to someone when you’re kneeling in the hallway, scooping up butts?
We picked up every last picture and crumpled them and threw them in the trash. Talia’s face was still stretched tight and if I were Dustin Pierce I’d have been terrified of the way Talia’s hand was clenching in a fist.
Sometimes knowing the right thing to say would be really nice. But I didn’t know.
I remembered the Silent Questions this time. I thought all the things I wanted to say and ask and put them out into the universe. I wanted to tell Talia that I was on her team. That I was her friend. Was that something people usually said silently?
The Silent Questions helped in my own head. I knew I was at least trying to say the right thing, and my stomach didn’t feel as fluttery. I didn’t know how much the Silent Questions were helping Talia. Maybe someone can be too angry to hear the Silent Questions you and the universe are asking them, at least for a while. And I didn’t blame her. Not one bit.
Finally I said, “Do you think we should tell someone?”
Talia slammed her locker shut and picked up her backpack. “Don’t you dare say one word.”
First Draft
I pulled the instruction sheet out of my backpack first thing when I got home and set it on my desk. On my computer I started a list of the things I wanted to talk about in my letter. About Cecilia growing up in England and then moving to the United States. About her kids. About her job at Harvard, and about how she figured out what stars are made of.
The Knight-Rowell Publishing website had a contact form. After working on my list, I zoomed over to their site and started filling in the form. I put in my name, my email, and then I wrote about how I wanted to talk to them about a great idea. An idea I knew they would love. An idea for a new edition of the textbook that would include Cecilia Payne.
Then I held my breath. Click. SEND.
Once I heard back from Knight-Rowell Publishing, the project could officially get started.
The instructions for the contest said that the winners would be contacted one month after the deadline. That meant that next spring, I could be the winner of twenty-five thousand dollars. Nonny could be planning for that house or rent or whatever would help the most. Cecilia would keep Nonny’s baby safe. It meant that in March, Nonny could start planning on bringing Thomas home. Instead of missing a piece in my own body, I’d fix a missing piece in the lives of the people I loved.
I could be that person.
I wanted Nonny and Mom and Dad and, well, everyone, to look at me and see what I could fix, not what I needed to have fixed in me. I wanted it so bad it was like my aorta was constricting again. But not this time. This time: fixer, not fixed.
Just this once.
After I sent Knight-Rowell that email, I tried to go back to working on my l
etter, but that’s when the words started swirling around in my brain. I couldn’t focus. I kept seeing something else in my mind that distracted me.
I kept seeing Talia’s red face, and the way her shoulders hunched when they called her that name. Hunched like she’d been hit.
The first day they come up with a nickname like that, they think they’re so clever. I remember. But they’re not. I wanted to tell Talia that.
My brain felt as swirly as the Milky Way mess on my poster. I couldn’t figure out the right thing to do in this situation. Talia’s sad and mad face wouldn’t leave my mind. I could let it go and just keep smiling at her when she sat next to me in history class, but that didn’t seem like nearly enough. Something needed to be done. Something big, so she’d know she wasn’t alone. Something so that we’d be friends.
And the more I thought about it, the more the swirling in my brain turned into the beginning of an idea. It was a big idea.
An idea like one of our Hard Reading Words: audacious: a willingness to take surprisingly bold risks.
I don’t feel audacious, usually. But this idea was audacious. And maybe audacity was what it took to make friends.
I wondered if ideas were born the same way stars are, starting off small and collecting space clouds and dust until they have enough to burst open.
Silently I thanked Ms. Trepky for making Talia and me swap phone numbers and pulled my phone out of my backpack:
Hey, it’s Libby from school. About Dustin—I have an idea. I think you’ll like it.
SEND.
I lay back on my bed while I waited for her to respond, and I couldn’t help grinning.
Being audacious was going to be fun.
The Doctor That Isn’t Mine
A couple of days later Nonny had an appointment with the baby doctor.
And she said I could come.
When Mom picked me up after school, Nonny was in the passenger seat, waving at me while I ran to the car.
“How was school?” Mom asked.
“Great!” I said.
I didn’t tell her about the plan Talia and I had made together. In the library. During lunch. Our scheme was set to take place early on Monday morning.
Talia liked my idea. I was glad she liked it. It meant that maybe, eventually, she’d like the person who’d come up with it. The person who was going to put the plan into action with her.
Me.
I slung my backpack into the seat next to me, and we drove to the doctor’s office.
Not everyone feels this way, but doctors’ offices make me feel safe. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much time in them. I have the same doctors other people do, like a pediatrician and a dentist. Then I also have special doctors. I have a doctor who knows the most about Turner syndrome and my shots, called an endocrinologist. I have a doctor for my heart, called a cardiologist. And a doctor for my ears that don’t hear so perfectly, called an ENT. That stands for ear, nose, and throat. Sometimes that makes me laugh. They didn’t try super hard to come up with a creative name for that one, huh?
I like going to doctors even when it’s someone new. Everything is clean and organized and you get to talk to someone who can fix things. Or who can make absolutely sure there’s nothing broken. (My ear doctor even has a tiny camera hooked to a screen so when she pokes the camera stick in your ear your whole waxy eardrum pops up on the TV. It’s pretty impressive!)
When we went back to the small white room, Nonny lay down on the crinkly paper. It was actually a bit strange not being the one on the exam table. Nonny lifted her shirt, exposing her milk-skin belly that was recently beginning to pudge.
Dr. Willoughby rolled over on her stool and squeezed a glob of jelly onto Nonny’s stomach, a blue, sparkly, toothpasty blob of stuff that might have been what genies are made of. Then Dr. Willoughby took what looked sort of like a white plastic showerhead and rubbed it into the blue goop and smeared it across Nonny’s stomach.
And that’s when something magic happened on the TV screen attached to the weird showerhead tool. (Doctors get the best TV!) The screen was nothing but gray fuzz, and then all of a sudden there was a black space in the fuzzy gray, and in that black space was a little bean.
A human bean.
Nonny’s baby bean.
It looked like a space ship in the middle of a swirling, faraway galaxy.
Then there was a sound. A squishy, squelchy sound almost like stepping in mud, and it came like the ticking of a clock. Squish. Squelch. Squooch.
The bean had a heartbeat.
Dr. Willoughby smiled.
Nonny looked at Mom and smiled.
Mom put her hand over her mouth and made an ohh sound.
I couldn’t stop looking at the tiny gray staticky bean. That was a baby on TV right there. Nonny’s baby.
My baby.
Well, my niece. Or nephew. I was guessing niece.
Nonny’s face made me think of one of our Hard Reading Words—radiant: glowing or emanating light.
Dr. Willoughby started talking to Nonny, explaining things, and even though I was only paying attention to the screen and the squelching noise, Dr. Willoughby’s rolling-wave voice and sunshine eyes told me everything I needed to know.
While the adults talked about how big the tiny baby was, I stared at the screen. I looked at what Dr. Willoughby said was the baby’s face. Little nose and lips. What if the baby was a little girl? What if she was born with moles on her cheeks like mine? What if she was short and had round ribs, too? And in the nanosecond space between squelches, one teeny, pinprick-size thought came poking through.
What if I wasn’t alone?
Alone with missing chromosomes and a capital-S Syndrome?
No. No, that thought could go right back out of my head. It didn’t make sense anyway. I wasn’t alone. Not even close. I had two people right in this very room who knew every bit of me and loved me and stayed by me always. They were all I needed.
No, Nonny’s baby was going to be tall and make friends the way her mom did. No needles, no surgeries. Nothing wrong, nothing missing.
See that, Cecilia? I said silently. Can you hear that tiny, squishing heart? You won’t let anything bad happen to that little protostar in Nonny’s belly, will you? Our deal will work. It has to work.
That tiny, squelching heart would keep on squelching for as long as I had anything to say about it.
Audacity
On Monday morning I woke up before my alarm.
Today was the day to be audacious.
I did my best not to fidget and rush too much. Even still, my mom said, “What’s with you today, girly, you got ants in your pants?”
“I’m just in a hurry to get to school,” I said.
I’d told Mom that I needed to get to school early that morning so I could work on a project with a friend. I think Mom was excited that I was doing something with a friend in the first place, so she didn’t ask too many questions.
Technically what I told her wasn’t a lie, but I still felt sort of guilty about it.
Before we loaded into the car, when Mom wasn’t looking, I swiped the chocolate frosting from the pantry (the store-bought kind I eat with graham crackers, not my mom’s good homemade stuff) and dropped the container into my backpack. Talia was bringing the other supplies.
When we pulled up to the school, I said a quick-as-a-rabbit goodbye to Mom and ran inside.
Talia was already there. Waiting for me by her locker.
By her left foot, she had a big green bucket full of sand and two little green shovels. And wonder of wonders, she grinned when she saw me. That made me grin, too.
“Ready?” she said.
I pulled the chocolate frosting out of my backpack. “Oh yes.”
We’d picked early morning because we knew we’d be alone. The teachers were in meetings or in their classrooms. None of the other kids had come in yet. We were alone in the hallway, which was exactly what we needed to be.
We looked both ways, lik
e we were crossing the street, and when we were absolutely positively certain nobody was there, we dashed to the smelly locker of Dustin Pierce. The big bucket of sand Talia was carrying didn’t even slow her down because she was so strong. She could have arm-wrestled anybody in our class and she would have won. Maybe even Ms. Trepky, although I had a feeling Ms. Trepky was much stronger than she looked.
We both looked around again once we were at Dustin’s locker. It really did smell like gym socks and old Doritos.
Talia looked at me for a moment, one eyebrow raised. Then she smiled again and handed me one of the green shovels. She scooped up a shovelful of sand, then slowly and carefully poured the sand through the slots in Dustin’s locker.
A tiny stream of sand trickled through the crack in the bottom, but not much. Not so much you’d notice.
There was no turning back now.
I shoveled up another batch of sand and poured it through. I wasn’t as neat about it as Talia was, and some fell out onto the floor. Talia glanced around, checking again that we were alone, and spread the fallen sand across the hall with her foot.
We scooped and scooped, looking at each other and glancing around the hall. Nobody came. I didn’t hear a sound except for the shifting sand. (Although Talia would have heard someone coming before I did anyway.) It was almost too easy.
When we’d poured as much sand as we could through the slots, Talia picked up the chocolate frosting. She popped open the lid.
“It’s almost too good to waste on a turd like him,” she said. Then she winked at me and dug out a big glob with her fingers.
PLOP! Straight onto the locker door went the frosting, leaving a mark of Talia’s chocolaty handprint. She held the frosting tub out to me and I took my own big scoop.
PLOP! There was my hand, too.
Talia took another wad of frosting with her finger and started writing on the locker with the chocolate ink. She turned our handprints into two big piles of poop. She smeared more across the bottom of the locker and it stopped some of the sand from drizzling out. Then she wrote a big BB.