by Maria Padian
Kit resisted the clique thing. Even when we were a clique—me, Diane, Kit, and Jeanne Anne—she’d do stuff with other people, even guys, like go to the movies or spend a day at the beach.
“Kit defies the social box,” Michael said. I remembered the admiration in his voice when he’d said that. It was the reason he’d moved her from Eat More Than Their Share in the Inferno to True Friends and People Who Are Honest in the Paradiso, Dante’s version of Heaven.
He didn’t say it, but I suspected it was the reason he’d kept me out of that ring. My inability to get beyond the “social box.”
My eyes flitted from group to group, but I couldn’t find Kit anywhere. I had just decided to make my way to Girl Jocks when someone nudged me from behind: Monique Rose.
“Hey,” she said, pointing across the room. “We’re by the windows.” The entire Special Challenges class had taken up the long, sunny table near the windows. There were plenty of empty seats. Monique Rose walked toward them, and I followed.
I put my tray down between Michael and History Dude, right across from Carla Lonsdorf, the Unit. Carla is the slowest slow grower in the school. She barely tops four feet, and she is so thin that her friends have declared her a unit of measure, like a pound. Or an ounce. For example, a car might weigh 65 Carlas. Darcy Dodson probably weighs 1.5 Carlas. Big Joan probably tipped the scale at just under three Carlas.
The Unit’s eyes, already enormous behind her thick glasses, widened to owl proportions when she saw my tray. I had two large Oakhurst Dairy milks—a strawberry and a chocolate—in addition to a very full plate of spaghetti.
“Lucky,” she said. “My mom won’t let me drink flavored milk. She says there’s too much sugar.”
“She’s right,” I said, unscrewing the top of the strawberry. “But how would she know if you drink it at school?”
“She gets a weekly printout of everything I’ve bought for lunch.” Carla shrugged. My eyes rested on the colorful salad arranged on her tray.
I chugged about half the milk and held the rest out to her.
“You didn’t buy this one.”
Before she could reply, a familiar voice cut into our conversation.
“Check it out. Look who’s sitting with the Nerd Herd.”
It had been a long time since Darcy and Co. had bothered to taunt me. I assumed I had fallen so low in the social order that it wasn’t worth their effort. Mocking McCarthy had gotten too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. But sitting with the Fifth Period gang was a not-to-be-missed opportunity. Especially for Jeanne Anne, walking by with Darcy and just within earshot of a table packed with Demigods.
“Hey, Brett, no offense, but you’re not smart enough to sit with the Herd,” Jeanne Anne said. “Although…you are desperate enough!” Darcy’s high-pitched laughter followed. I looked across the table and saw two bright patches of red appear on the Unit’s cheeks. To my right, Michael was staring at his plate as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world.
I stood up, fast. There’s something about standing up swiftly in a crowded junior high cafeteria. You get people’s attention, especially if they’ve come to expect irrational behavior from you.
Irrational: lacking usual or normal mental clarity or coherence. Acting in a way that could lead to suspension.
My hands closed. I tried to pick from one of the really choice comments forming in my mind. Violent, Practically Friendless, Juvenile Delinquent, Redefined Brett McCarthy took a deep breath and—
“Oh. My. God!” I said this loudly, with feeling. I looked, with exaggerated panic, at Jeanne Anne, then at the kids sitting at my table. I knew I had an audience. “Are you saying that these people are…are…NERDS?!?” I clapped my hand over my mouth in horror. I widened my eyes. Poor Carla looked terrified. Michael had his arms folded across his chest, a puzzled frown on his face.
“Jeanne Anne, Jeanne Anne, I had no idea!” I exclaimed. “I thought they were BRAINS! That’s what they told me! I had no idea they were…NERDS!” Someone snickered behind us. A Demigod.
“Hey,” said a kid sitting left of History Dude. “Who are you calling a Nerd? I’m a Geek, and proud of it.”
“Well, speak for yourself, Geek,” said Michael. He stood up. “I’m an Einstein.” He looked at me. I caught the trace of a grin.
A hand shot up. A friend of Michael’s from math team who looked like a walking Fifth Period cliché, with short pants, white socks, and a piece of tape holding his glasses together. “I’m an Einstein too,” he said.
“Hey, man, I’m Einstein Three!” boomed a voice from Boy Jocks, followed by deep laughs and some table pounding. Whoops of laughter now.
“Excuse me!” The Unit stood. Her cheeks were still pink, but she’d lost the panicked look. She faced Jeanne Anne. “I am not a Geek. I’m Gifted, thank you.” She sat down again. She picked up my strawberry milk and took a long gulp.
I threw my arms around Jeanne Anne’s shoulders and gave her a not-so-friendly squeeze.
“Thanks for warning me, Jeanne Anne, but it’s okay. See, they’re not Nerds after all.”
She pushed me off, glaring. She looked like a cat ready to spit.
“You are such a loser, McCarthy,” she said angrily. “Don’t touch me.”
I closed my eyes, pressed my hands against my chest, and fell back with a theatrical faint.
“A loser! She called me a loser!” I exclaimed loudly. “My heart is broken. Does that mean it’s all over between us, honey? Please, don’t be mad at me!”
Jeanne Anne walked quickly away, toward a section of table where Darcy was already seated. Low whistles and a few kissy noises from the Demigods followed her. “Hey, honey, don’t get mad!” one of them crooned. “C’mon, let’s make up!” I had a feeling Jeanne Anne would be sure to stay as far away as possible from me in the future.
Meanwhile, high fives were being exchanged down the length of the Special Challenges table. Broken Glasses Kid was arguing with Michael that actually he should be Einstein One, since he’d scored three points higher in their latest Math Olympiad. Carla was polishing off the last of my strawberry milk. Michael just had this very—I don’t know—self-satisfied look on his face. Like he had a secret.
When the bell rang and everyone drifted toward the exit doors, he and I walked out together, not talking. Just heading to the lockers like nobody’s business. Einstein and Brett McCarthy, Class Clown.
om•ni•pres•ent
The Lighthouse Project turned out to be one of the biggest genius turn-ons in Special Challenges history. Even the ever-delighted Mrs. Augmentino had no words to describe her amazement at what Fifth Period produced. The range of projects prompted her to ask No-Hare to create Lighthouse Day and invite the entire student body to see what we’d made.
All the McCarthys, plus the omnipresent Mr. Beady, planned to attend.
Omnipresent: always there.
He’d found an all-terrain wheelchair, equipped with fat snow tires, just for the occasion. At that point, the deepest, coldest part of winter, Nonna was moving slowly, and preventing her from slipping on ice had become a major family preoccupation. My mother must have purchased forty bags of rock salt from Wal-Mart and coated the Gnome Home front walk and driveway a full inch deep. Dad had bought Nonna these lightweight winter hiking shoes from L.L. Bean and was trying to convince her to wear them indoors as well as out.
“I’m just walking to the bathroom! Not climbing Everest!” she’d complained when he’d presented them to her. She seemed deaf to his explanations about the dangers of soft socks on wood floors.
“Eileen, please,” Mom had said. “If you fall and break a hip, it’s all over.”
Nonna wore the hikers. She wore my island cap, a fun fur scarf, and her Michelin Man parka. She wore her lined wool cross-country ski pants and scarlet Hot Chilis insulated socks. And when Mr. Beady wheeled her into the Fifth Period classroom dressed like that on Lighthouse Day, you’d have thought J.Lo had just stepped onto the red carpet
. We’d been milling around, admiring all the projects displayed on tables and on the walls of the classroom, when we heard an excited “She’s here!” Someone clapped, and as my family entered, the whole group applauded.
Mrs. Augmentino had set aside the first half hour as a little party just for Fifth Period and invited guests. Mrs. LaVoie was there. So was my former lunch buddy and fellow Tar Heels fan, No-Hare. The cafeteria provided a big plastic bowl of red punch, and I provided McCarthyesque Super-Sized sweets. Monique Rose and the Unit had come over the night before to bake with me.
“Why are you cutting them so big?” Carla had asked. The fact that I was slicing only six brownies to the pan really worried her.
“It’s what they do,” Monique Rose explained.
“‘They’?” I asked.
“You and your grandmother,” she said to me. “These big desserts. It’s sort of your signature characteristic. You had them at the birthday party. You always do them at your garage sale.”
“You’ve been to the garage sale?” I asked, surprised.
“Every year,” she said.
“I’ve never seen you,” I said, amazed. “Where have you been hiding?”
“Where have you been looking?” Monique Rose asked.
Standing alongside her, next to our trifold display “Maine Island Stories,” I was struck anew how strange it was that someone who’d previously existed on another planet could suddenly be my project partner, lunch companion, and describer of McCarthy family “signature characteristics.” I knew it was odd for her too. One afternoon, when we were walking to the Gnome Home together after school, she’d blurted out, “I still can’t get over that we’re friends, you know? I always thought you were some brainless jock.”
The word hung in the air, like the frost from our breath: friends. Violent, Suspended, Redefined Me had actually managed to make a friend, as opposed to losing one.
“Yeah, well, don’t kid yourself,” I’d said. “I am a brainless jock.”
Mr. Beady, Nonna, Mom, and Dad began their circuit of the room with us.
“Fairy houses!” Mom exclaimed. Monique Rose had suggested we construct a little fairy village of twigs, moss, pinecones, and stones to display before our trifold. They went with the island stories about ghosts and pixies, although Monique Rose had learned that those stories were often cooked up by islanders trying to scare or intimidate their neighbors.
Nonna leaned over, peering into the front door of a fairy house.
“It makes me wish I were thimble-sized and could lie on a little moss bed,” she said.
“Beautiful work, hon,” Mom said, looking over our trifold. “I love the way you’ve woven interviews and family anecdotes into old stories and history.”
“You weave with fibers; Brett weaves with words,” Mr. Beady said proudly. I looked at him, surprised. It had never occurred to me that Mr. Beady had any pride of ownership in me. Nonna twisted around in the wheelchair to look up at him.
“Have you noticed that ever since you blasted Philip Larkin, you’ve become wise and insightful?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, patting her shoulder and shaking his head. I could tell he was sorry he’d ever heard the name Philip Larkin.
Mom’s eyes had filled. “Remember all the fairy houses we used to make?” she said.
“We can still make them,” I said quickly. “I still love to make them.”
“You’re never too old to make fairy houses,” Nonna agreed. Mom smiled at me, and I gave her one back before they wheeled off to the final, climactic portion of the classroom. The lights.
Although most kids stuck to the assignment and tried to re-create a lighthouse from 1803, a few of them decided to simply let their genius imaginations run wild. In one corner of the room a couple of boys were torching a pile of sticks atop a little rock tower: That was the Egyptian lighthouse, modeled after one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Interesting and certainly smoky, but not relevant. Near the window a kid had put together a laser light powered by these little solar panels, which also fueled tiny lead-acid batteries. This project would probably gain him early acceptance to Harvard someday, but it wasn’t the Jeffersonian solution we wanted.
Michael had done it. He’d figured out that Spruce Island light had been commissioned just about when Lewis and Clark were exploring the Louisiana Purchase. He researched the sorts of lamps used at the time and discovered that Argand lamps—which used concave reflectors and glass cylinders around the wick—didn’t make it to the United States until 1813. So his hunch was that Spruce Island was first lit with whale-oil-burning lanterns. His “light” was nothing more than sixteen kerosene (he couldn’t get whale oil without committing a serious crime) lanterns arranged in a circle with flat tin-and-mirror reflectors behind them.
“How simple!” Nonna exclaimed. “All this time I’ve been thinking we had to construct some complicated crystal thingie…but this is all it took. Amazing.”
“The trick will be setting it up,” Dad said. “That tower needs a lot of work.”
“You know, that brings me to something I’ve been meaning to ask all of you,” said Mrs. Augmentino. The whole class quieted.
“The students have heard so much about your island from Brett, and become so very involved in this project, that we wondered…might the class take a trip out to Spruce Island once the light is installed? It would be a marvelous way to wrap up the year!”
Something clutched in my chest. My mind fast-forwarded to warm months in late June, our family boat, the Dolly Llama, laden with waterproof wet bags and food-filled coolers, plowing through blue waves that mirrored the sky. These were images I often hugged to myself, like a cozy fleece blanket, during the dark winter months. But time didn’t feel like a friend anymore. Turning calendar pages seemed dangerous these days.
“Of course!” Nonna exclaimed. “I can’t think of a better way to…christen the light. Does one christen a light, Beady? Oh, at any rate…yes. Absolutely yes.”
Cheers, claps, excited chatter. I could hear Monique Rose speaking insistently in my ear about fairy houses, see Mrs. Augmentino bend over to hug Nonna and enthuse about how incredibly marvelous this had all turned out to be. But the McCarthys just looked sort of numb. Mom held Dad’s hand as he examined one of Michael’s lanterns like it was the most fascinating thing in the world. Mr. Beady stared at the floor; then, as if he could feel my eyes on him, he looked up at me. And I realized I wasn’t the only one in the room who had fantasies about turning back the clock. Or at the very least slowing it down.
per•sist•ent
Early March, a Friday, was one of Nonna’s bad nights. By March a bad night meant she couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to be alone. Later, “bad” would take on a whole new meaning, and we would look back on those cold March nights like they were the good ol’ days.
Our definitions of even the simplest words, like “bad” and “good,” shifted week to week, changed like the weather, surprised you like a crocus poking from the snow. Hey, you’d think. Winter’s gone. That happened fast. But it didn’t. It happened slowly, while you thought of other things. And suddenly you faced a whole new season, whole new definitions of good and bad and pain.
Thursday had also been bad, and my parents were tired. So since Friday wasn’t a school night, they said I could stay with Nonna. I had my orders: Call us if you need help; don’t cook or do anything that would make Nonna get out of bed; don’t keep her awake if she can sleep.
I went armed for a slumber party. I brought my iPod because Nonna said listening to music helped her. I brought some videos—she special-requested an oldie called Casablanca. I brought Dad’s high school yearbook—I liked going through the pictures and encouraging her to tell me inappropriate stories about the kids he grew up with. I brought bananas, one of the few things she still had a taste for.
But nothing worked. Nonna kept twisting on the bed, failing to find a comfortable position. She wouldn’t eat, not even the bananas. She coul
dn’t sleep. She didn’t want to listen to music and barely paid attention to the boring black-and-white movie (although I managed to watch it all). I had run out of things to say, and we faced the prospect of a long, sleepless wait for dawn. I began to understand why my parents seemed so wrecked.
However, despite my long list of shortcomings, I am nothing if not persistent.
Persistent: continuing without change in function. Never giving up.
“Nonna!” I said. “How about a little truth or dare?”
“Hmmm,” she said. “I don’t know if I can handle any dares at the moment.”
Nonna and I played hardball truth or dare. Once she refused to tell me whether Dad had ever gotten into trouble when he was in junior high. So I made her eat an entire jar of peanut butter. Another time (it was January) I refused to reveal if there was a boy at school I had a crush on. She made me wear my bathing suit and run around the outside of the house. Twice.
“Well then, you’ll just have to tell the truth,” I said.
“You are a heartless creature,” she said. “Who goes first?”
“Me.” I pulled the armchair I was sitting in up close to her pillow.
“Is Mr. Beady your boyfriend?” I asked her.
None of us had ever spoken about Nonna’s relationship with Mr. Beady; not to her, not to each other. Well, maybe Mom and Dad did, but not with me. Mr. Beady was just one of those Facts of Life: Nonna’s buddy, always there, smack-dab in the middle of things and utterly undefined. When I was little, I hadn’t given it much thought. But these days, it filled me with questions.
Nonna shifted sideways to get a better look at me. She grimaced, and I could tell the movement hurt. But then her expression relaxed.