Martin McLean, Middle School Queen

by Alyssa Zaczek

  It was my turn to blink.

  “This wasn’t a panic attack,” I said.

  Mr. Peterson gave me a kind, gentle smile. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “these things can sneak up on us. Especially the first time. Sometimes we don’t even know what’s happening to us until it’s over. The feelings—and the physical response that comes with them—can seem to come out of nowhere. It can be overwhelming and even a little frightening.”

  A look of recognition appeared on Mr. Peterson’s face, and I realized I was nodding. “That’s okay,” he continued. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people have what are called ‘triggers.’ Triggers are experiences or topics or images that cause someone to have a fight-or-flight response, just like you did.”

  “Fight-or-flight?” I asked, wrinkling my nose. “I thought cavemen used that to figure out their chances of survival against mammoths and stuff.”

  “That’s true,” Mr. Peterson said. “But you’d be surprised what holdovers from bygone eras still hang out in our DNA and in our brains. You had an emotional response, and your body interpreted it the way a caveman’s body would have interpreted, say, an attack by a saber-toothed tiger.”

  “That’s weird,” I said.

  “That’s science.”

  “But you’re a math teacher, Mr. Peterson.”

  Mr. Peterson laughed, a full-body guffaw that sent his head backward against the lockers. I smiled to myself, just a little.

  “I’m sorry I left class,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “You don’t have to apologize, Martin,” he said. “If anything, I’m sorry if my putting you on the spot contributed to this experience at all.”

  “It wasn’t that,” I said, not meeting his gaze.

  “Do you want to—”

  But the bell rang, and Mr. Peterson didn’t have the chance to finish. Instead he clapped me on the shoulder and helped me up. Kids started pouring out of their classrooms, and I was blissfully freed from having to slink back into Math to face everyone.

  Do you want to talk about it? No, Mr. Peterson, I really don’t. Even if I could find the words, I wasn’t about to tell him that it wasn’t a teaching tactic that turned me into the Road Runner, it was the thought of Nelson spreading around the rumor that I like boys.

  Because I don’t like boys. Right?

  ReadMe App

  SEPT. 4—4:57 P.M.

  LadyOfTheStage: Soooo. . .?

  mathletesmartin: So, what?

  LadyOfTheStage: So, how are you?

  mathletesmartin: Swell

  LadyOfTheStage: Martin!

  mathletesmartin: What?!

  LadyOfTheStage: Uh, the last time we saw you, you were Usain Bolt-ing out of Peterson’s class. You totally avoided us for rest of the day!

  PicknLittle: Dude, what WAS that?

  mathletesmartin: I will pay you each $5 to stop asking me that question.

  PicknLittle: Make it $10

  PicknLittle: And then we have a deal

  LadyOfTheStage: Seriously, are you okay?

  mathletesmartin: $10 it is!

  LadyOfTheStage: Fiiiiine

  PicknLittle: Yessss

  mathletesmartin: Lovely as always, Pickle!

  LadyOfTheStage: Hey Martin, when does Mathletes practice start back up?

  mathletesmartin: Tomorrow

  LadyOfTheStage: And that’s only on weekdays, right?

  mathletesmartin: Unless we have a tournament

  LadyOfTheStage: Do you have one this weekend?

  mathletesmartin: Nope. Why?

  LadyOfTheStage: No reason

  LadyOfTheStage: Pickle, are you doing that Dungeons & Dragons club at the gaming store again this year?

  PicknLittle: I believe I’ll be gracing the realm with my gnome bard’s presence, yes.

  LadyOfTheStage: And that starts. . .?

  PicknLittle: This Sunday. What are you up to?

  mathletesmartin: I do not like the sound of this

  LadyOfTheStage: Don’t be so paranoid!

  PicknLittle: Spill it, lady

  LadyOfTheStage: I’m sure I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.

  mathletesmartin: Carmen, whatever you’re planning, we’re about 5000 times more likely to go along with it if you just tell us.

  PicknLittle: Truly. Out with it!

  LadyOfTheStage: Fiiiiiine, ruin the surprise if you must.

  LadyOfTheStage: So, I talked to Violet today. . .

  PicknLittle: DID SHE SAY ANYTHING ABOUT ME???

  mathletesmartin: Dude

  LadyOfTheStage: WAIT AND SEE, WHY DON’T YOU

  PicknLittle: FINE.

  LadyOfTheStage: FINE. ANYWAY.

  mathletesmartin: Go on. . .

  LadyOfTheStage: I talked to Violet today and I asked her what she’s doing this weekend.

  LadyOfTheStage: Turns out she’s free, so I invited her to go bowling with us!

  PicknLittle: !!!!!!

  LadyOfTheStage: What do you think?

  PicknLittle: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  mathletesmartin: I think you’ve killed Pickle.

  LadyOfTheStage: He had it comin’

  mathletesmartin: Chicago, nice!

  LadyOfTheStage: Thank you! Loooove me some Kander & Ebb.

  PicknLittle: I can’t see her!

  mathletesmartin: What are you talking about?

  PicknLittle: I’m not ready!

  mathletesmartin: You see her every day at school!

  PicknLittle: That’s different!

  LadyOfTheStage: How?!

  PicknLittle: That’s, you know, school!

  PicknLittle: I’ve never hung out with her outside of school!

  PicknLittle: I need her to think I’m cool and collected and date-worthy, not all unprepared and doofusy!

  mathletesmartin: It’s not really a date, though

  PicknLittle: But it could be the first step toward a date

  LadyOfTheStage: If she thought you were a doofus, she wouldn’t have agreed to come.

  mathletesmartin: That’s true!

  PicknLittle: You did tell her I would be there, right?

  LadyOfTheStage: Yes, obviously!

  PicknLittle: Okay

  PicknLittle: Now I need you to describe her exact facial expression upon hearing my name.

  LadyOfTheStage: Oh, she swooned. Physically swooned.

  LadyOfTheStage: Hand fluttered to her forehead, eyes rolled back in her head, knees buckling, the whole bit.

  PicknLittle: Really?!

  mathletesmartin: Oh my God

  LadyOfTheStage: No, not really!

  PicknLittle: Don’t tease me! I’m a man in love!

  LadyOfTheStage: Are you coming or not?

  PicknLittle: Martin?

  mathletesmartin: Totally up to you, dude. It’s your future marriage at stake.

  PicknLittle: Don’t say such things, you’ll give me a heart attack.

  PicknLittle: Okay. Okay!

  PicknLittle: Yeah

  PicknLittle: Yes

  PicknLittle: I’ll go

  LadyOfTheStage: Finally. Good! I’ll text her and let her know we’re all in.

  PicknLittle: I can’t believe I’m going to hang out with Violet Levi this weekend.

  PicknLittle: I’m going to need my inhaler.

  LadyOfTheStage: We’re going to meet at Bloomington Bowl at 6 on Saturday night, okay?

  PicknLittle: My palms are clammy just thinking about this.

  LadyOfTheStage: Maybe don’t say stuff like that to Violet. That’s not awesome first date talk.

  PicknLittle: YOU SAID IT WASN’T REALLY A DATE

  LadyOfTheStage: Well!

  PicknLittle: I have to go pick an outfit. What do you think she’d like me in?

  mathletesmartin: Nothing orange, you’ll clash

  LadyOfTheStage: Maybe something purple?

  PicknLittle: Very funny, you two

  ReadMe App

  SEPT.
4—5:12 P.M.

  LadyOfTheStage: Martin! It’s totally a date!

  mathletesmartin: What do you mean? We’ll both be there with them.

  LadyOfTheStage: Actually. . .

  mathletesmartin: ?!

  LadyOfTheStage: It would be oh-so-convenient if we both, say, had last-minute conflicts that night.

  mathletesmartin: Pickle is going to kill you!

  LadyOfTheStage: No, he won’t

  LadyOfTheStage: He’ll be far too busy having a romantic night under the DayGlo stars during cosmic bowling.

  mathletesmartin: Man, last year’s production of Hello, Dolly! really did a number on you.

  LadyOfTheStage: Hey, Martin?

  mathletesmartin: Hey, Carmen?

  LadyOfTheStage: Are you really okay?

  mathletesmartin: Yeah. I am.

  LadyOfTheStage: Good. Because if someone made you feel not-okay, I’d kick them in the shins.

  mathletesmartin: Yikes

  LadyOfTheStage: In my character shoes

  mathletesmartin: Double yikes

  LadyOfTheStage: Promise you’re okay?

  mathletesmartin: Super-duper, double-dog, mega-extra promise

  LadyOfTheStage: With sprinkles on top?

  mathletesmartin: With sprinkles on top

  LadyOfTheStage: Well, okay then! Shoot. Now I’m hungry. Wanna go get ice cream?

  2

  “Mijo! What happened?”

  Mom pounced on me in the living room as soon as I got home, pacing the floor in her bare feet and the denim overalls she wears to paint. I inherited her dark corkscrew curls, but her Afro-Cuban brownness mixed with my dad’s Irish blood, and I came out looking more cafe con leche than cafecito. Still, I have her warm hazel eyes, which were particularly wide as she anxiously guided me to the couch.

  “Mr. Peterson told you?” I asked. She nodded, and I watched a fuchsia paint smudge on her cheek bounce up and down. “It was really nothing, Mom.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” she wagged her finger. “I didn’t raise you to lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying!”

  “Then qué pasó, Martín?” she asked, pronouncing my name the Spanish way. She always did that when she got upset.

  “I don’t know. I was daydreaming in class and Mr. Peterson took me by surprise, that’s all,” I said. “It was totally weird, and it’ll never happen again.”

  Honestly, I hadn’t even expected her to be home—she almost never is. Teaching eats up most of her time; it doesn’t pay a ton, so she has to take on a lot of classes to pay the bills. I spend a lot of afternoons home alone, heating up Easy Mac and reading comics while she’s in class or rubbing elbows at galleries.

  “And what if it does, huh?”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t think about it happening again, because the first time was embarrassing enough. Mom ran a hand through her hair and leaned back against our couch, which is beige and lumpy and covered in ridiculous pillows. Some of these were gifts from Mom’s artist friends and have dirty sayings on them.

  “Baby, you can talk to me,” she said. She took my hands in hers, warm but rough from constant washing in the big painter’s sink in her backyard studio. “What can I do?”

  I didn’t know what to say, which is admittedly not a new phenomenon for me. But what was I supposed to tell her? Hi Mom, today I had an episode at school because the class bully implied I like boys! But don’t worry, I’m just totally freaked out and completely confused.

  No way.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just want to forget about it.” At least that part was true.

  “Espérate. Uh-uh. We have to talk this out,” she said in her Don’t Mess With Me voice. I groaned.

  “Mom—”

  “It’s important for you to communicate your feelings,” she said, wrapping her arms around a throw pillow. “Tell me, what were you doing when it happened?”

  “Just sitting in class, I don’t know!” I said, getting annoyed. Mom always does this. She tries to make up for never being around by laying the Textbook Parenting on thick when she actually is here. Sometimes I’d give just about anything for her to talk to me like I’m a person.

  “Well, you must know.”

  “I don’t!” I gestured wildly, exasperated. “It just happened to me!”

  Mom’s expression softened. She patted the spot on the couch next to her. I sighed and hesitantly scooched closer. She put an arm around me and rested her chin on the top of my head.

  “Is this my fault?” she said after a moment, so quietly I could barely hear her. I pulled back slightly to face her, and her eyes were studying me as though she had never seen me before. “Did I do something to make you—I mean, if you have anxiety, was it something I did? Is it not having your dad around?”

  “Mom, no, no way,” I said. But I wasn’t totally sure that was true. You hear all the time on the news and in movies and stuff about how not having a father can mess a person up. I didn’t know if that’s what happened to me, but I knew Dad leaving didn’t help, at least in the “expression” department.

  “I would hate to think that maybe because of the way I raised you, you’re suffering now.”

  “I’m not suffering. Honest.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with feeling your feelings, baby,” she said. “I want you to know that. I know you’re probably embarrassed by what happened today, but that’s okay. You’re okay.” Mom kissed my forehead, and then looked at me very seriously. “You have to promise me that you’ll talk to me. About anything, anything under the sun. That’s my job, baby. Can you do that for me? Can you promise?”

  You don’t know how much I can’t do that, Mom, I thought. But instead I nodded.

  It’s not that I don’t think Mom would understand. It’s more that I don’t understand. And I can’t promise to tell anyone anything, because half the time I can’t even find the words to explain the things inside my own head. If whatever happened to me in Mr. Peterson’s class was just some passing weirdness, then it’s not worth getting into with Mom. She’d have all kinds of questions—questions that I doubt I could answer—and she’d want to talk it out. I’m not so great at talking it out. I have things I want to say, of course, important things; it’s more that when I open my mouth to say them, nothing comes out.

  With Mom satisfied, I slipped upstairs to my room. It’s no Fortress of Solitude or Stark Tower, but it does the trick when I want to be alone, which is pretty often. I’ve got my gaming systems and TV set up in one corner, and my games are organized alphabetically by title on the shelves beneath my window seat.

  But I think my favorite part of my personal Inner Sanctum is my constellations. When I turn off the lights, glow-in-the-dark stars radiate a weak greenish light above me. Every night I lie in bed and stare at them, imagining all the planets and galaxies out there in the dark beyond and what might live on them, and it soothes me right to sleep.

  After talking to Mom, I didn’t feel like sleeping or gaming or even reading comics, so I queued up some music videos on YouTube. Mom raised me on all sorts of weird music, from Scottish folk to salsa to ’80s hair bands. My favorite singers are Celia Cruz and David Bowie. I love Celia’s voice most of all, but I love Bowie because of his colorful outfits and his hair, especially in that old movie Labyrinth. Mom and I sometimes quote it back and forth. She likes it because all the goblins look like cute Muppets, and I like it for all the singing and dancing.

  But Bowie and his hilariously tight pants aside, my favorite video is Celia Cruz singing “Yo Viviré” in some grainy footage ripped from an old primetime cable broadcast. The music is actually the same as “I Will Survive,” the famous Gloria Gaynor song, but Celia’s lyrics are totally different. Personally, I think the song is a thousand times better Celia’s way. In this footage, Celia is wearing this fabulous sequined, beaded jacket and a magenta bob with bangs, and during the instrumental breaks she busts out some salsa steps, despite being in her sixties or seventies at the time. She’s
so glamorous, and when she looks at the camera it’s as though she’s singing just to me. Her music makes me feel like I could do anything, be anyone—maybe even someone who can find the words to stand up to a bully or tell his mom what he’s feeling.

  Eventually I turned the music way down and set it to loop, so I could get ready for bed. I’ve always liked a little white noise when I settle in for the night. The sound of heavy rain outside sends me right to sleep. Mom says Dad liked the sound of rain too; that he splurged on an expensive machine that made all kinds of soothing noises to help him sleep. I wonder if he still has that. I wonder if he ever thinks of me before he goes to bed at night.

  It’s not as though I live every day like: I’m pouring cereal, and my dad isn’t here. I’m on the bus, and my dad isn’t here. I’m at the dentist, and my dad isn’t here. But I do think about him. I wonder what he’s doing and whether he ever wonders about me. Mom works so hard for us, but it can be lonely, and sometimes when I come home to an empty house after school, I wish he were there. I wish I had someone to help me with my homework, or to cook me dinner, or to split the chores with me. And that’s complicated, because it feels strange to miss a dad I never really knew, who never really wanted to know me. Does he ever think about me when he’s tucking his new kids into bed at night?

  I settled in and looked up at the plastic stars on my ceiling glowing away. I put them up after a field trip to the planetarium a few years ago. It was on that trip that I learned astronomers use math to chart the stars and even propel people into space. Math turns into physics, which turns into astronomy, which turns into astrophysics engineering. And although most of that is a little out of my league right now, someday I’ll understand it all. I want to be an astronomer and use what I know to make miracles happen, like putting real live people on Mars. And then I’ll come back to Bloomington and talk to seventh graders just like me, and explain to them that everything, everything in the whole universe, boils down to numbers: simple, logical, solvable.

  I wish everything were that simple. When Carmen or Mom asks me to promise that I’ll talk to them, they make it sound so easy. But a promise is complicated. A promise is something you’re not supposed to break. And promising to talk about my feelings seems risky, because I can break it without ever opening my mouth. Sure, a promise seems simple on the outside, but on the inside, I felt like a galaxy on the farthest edge of space, hurtling faster and faster as the universe grows forever outward, sending it spinning into the dark unknown.