by Rachel Toor
I smiled because Jenni can be, let’s say, poky when it comes to getting ready to go out and she tends to show up for things anywhere from fifteen to forty minutes late. Usually it’s because she’s in the bathroom fixing her makeup.
I’ve threatened to fine her a quarter for every minute she makes me wait, but she doesn’t have that kind of money. I tell her I don’t have that kind of time.
We both know it isn’t true.
“We’ll see how it goes,” I said. “I’m not going to tell anyone except you, especially not Mom. So let’s don’t talk about it.”
Jenni zipped her lips with her finger. Walter had his hand on my glass and poked his head into the milk.
“Yes, sweet baby, you can have a sip,” I said to him. He stretched down into the glass and lapped up a drop or two.
“Alice, really. Do you think that’s a good idea, sharing your milk with him?” She sounded exactly like my mother.
“Yes, Jenni, I do. There’s a temple in India that houses twenty thousand rats and the priests feed them bread and milk and it’s considered good luck to have food sampled by a rat.”
“Do I need to remind you we’re not in India?”
“And the Hindu elephant-headed god, Lord Ganesh, rides on a rat.”
“Whatevs,” said Jenni, no longer sounding like my mother.
“Also, in the Chinese zodiac, the rat kicks off the animal calendar. Those born in the Year of the Rat possess qualities of creativity, honesty, generosity, and ambition.”
Coincidentally, I happen to have been born in the Year of the Rat. I didn’t know this until after I’d already gotten Walter and started Googling all things ratty. The Chinese New Year doesn’t start for another month, and then we’ll be in the Year of the Snake.
The Year of the Dragon, the one that’s on its way out, breathed fire on me until I nearly shriveled from rejection. I’m really hoping the Snake will be kinder, but I have my doubts; it’s hard to think about snakes—who dine on rats—being kind.
Jenni had gone back to leafing through People and had landed on a page of photos of Katie Holmes and Suri. She seemed to be trying to memorize Suri’s dress. My guess was she was going to try to copy it.
“What’s yours?” I asked.
“What’s my what?”
“Your New Year’s resolution. You said we needed to get serious. It was your idea,” I said. “Remember? Like, three minutes ago.”
“Oh,” she said, “I’m going to stop biting my nails.”
I looked at her perfect delicate hands whose too-short nails made them seem human and not doll-like. And I thought: that’s too bad.
6
Jenni is the bestest bestie, a supergood BFF. Unfortunately, she is also pretty, and petite, and she makes her own clothes and is a girly-girl who can weld, for Pete’s sake. She is one of the nicest, most patient people you could ever meet.
Nothing wrong with being pretty and petite and nice, I know. Did I mention she has a perfect, heart-shaped butt?
And straight white teeth?
And hair the color mine would be if it got to live on a tropical island all the time? Hair that’s silky, not hay-like. I swear to god I’ve had horses try to eat my hair, and who could blame them?
Jenni’s stomach is flat, her feet sample-size—the same as my mother’s—and her toes are all the right length.
She’s had maybe three zits in her entire life.
What’s the problem?
The problem is I spend a lot of time standing next to her. And standing next to Jenni makes me hideous.
I look Amazonian, and not like the Web site. Big, fat, hulking. Awkward, ungraceful, lumpish. I am average height, and like most American females, I hate my thighs.
My second toes are bigger than my thumb toes, and they’re long and bony, where Jenni’s are these perfectly formed little piggies.
My skin is oily and gets blotchy and Mom says I’ll be thankful when I’m older, which only makes me pissed off at her—I hate it when people start sentences with things like, “When I was your age” or “If I only knew then.”
Jenni will get these microscopic enlargements of her teeny tiny pores and look in the magnifying mirror and say, “Oh god, I’m disgusting.”
If she wasn’t so great, you’d want to kill her.
Or at least stab her with a mechanical pencil, or one of those cute corn-on-the-cob holders that looks like an ear of mini-corn, or something that wouldn’t do a whole lot of damage but would make the point that she’s perfect and if she thinks she’s disgusting, what are you?
But you don’t do anything because she’s your best friend and you love her and everyone knows you as Alice-andJenni, which even sounds like it’s supposed to go together, like the two of you unite to become a whole other person, maybe a girl named Alison Jenni, who is stronger and more confident than each is on her own, the result being more than summative, the new girl being somehow geometrically better than a simple joining of two addends.
Alice + Jenni = Girl Who Can Do Anything.
What Jenni doesn’t have, what I bring to the mathematical equation, is academic ambition. It’s not that Jenni isn’t smart.
She is.
She just does things at a slower, more measured pace than me and wants everything to turn out perfect. Jenni is methodical. She makes patterns for her clothes; she follows directions when she bakes; she prints out instructions and looks at maps.
Often when we’re doing homework at my house, Jenni will say, “I’m hungry. Do you want to eat something?”
And of course I always do, so we go downstairs and she looks through the fridge and takes out about eighty things, including three different kinds of mustard, mayo, a plastic container of lettuce, peanut butter, grape jelly, raspberry jam, smoked turkey, ham, tofu slices, gluten-free fake bacon slices, cheddar cheese in a block, presliced Colby, a nubbin of moldy Gouda, a cucumber, some parsley, and a sad tomato. Then she’ll pull out a loaf of whole-wheat bread, and also a big round of sourdough, and some tortillas. She’ll take two plates out of the cabinet, two knives, and when everything is spread all over the countertop she’ll say, “Now. What do we feel like having?”
If my mom or dad happen to be around, she’ll ask if she can make them a sandwich.
Mom never says yes, but she usually kisses Jenni on the head and says, “Thanks anyway, kiddo.”
Dad almost always says, “Sure. Surprise me.”
On my own, I’ll just grab the bread that is closest, slather some peanut butter on it, plop on a dollop of jelly, wrap it in a paper towel, and go back upstairs.
Plates?
Why would you need a plate?
Then you’d have to put it in the dishwasher.
Jenni likes to know all her options, weigh them, and make a careful decision. When she constructs a sandwich, she will spread the mayo in smooth swipes so every inch of the bread is covered in a perfect, even layer. She will tear the lettuce into pieces that fit like puzzle parts. She’ll fluff the ham and tofu slices so that there are air pockets and they don’t lie flat.
She’ll add salt and pepper, and, after she puts the other piece of bread on so all the dents in the crust line up, she’ll cut it diagonally, and diagonally again into four perfect triangles. If she’s making pb&j, she’ll cut off the crusts. She leaves them on when the sandwich has meat.
She may or may not have a reason.
I’ve chosen not to ask.
I throw together combinations of peanut butter, Marshmallow Fluff, bananas, and potato chips. I’m a big fan of bacon and peanut butter sandwiches; sometimes I’ll add some maple syrup and sometimes tomatoes. The craziest Jenni gets is mixing ham and tofu slices. Some of my creations get a little out of control and often I have a hard time stuffing the whole business into my mouth. Things fall out as I take a bite. Jenni, like Walter, nips politely at hers.
The funny thing is, when Jenni makes a sandwich for me, it always tastes better than anything I could have made for myself.
I’m not sure why this is, but she says the same thing about the sandwiches I make for her.
7
On the second morning of January, the tail end of the Year of the Dragon, after my first horrendous outing, I Googled “How to start running.” I figured more information might help.
There were 1,330,000,000 results, and they all said basically the same thing: you walk for a while, run for a bit, walk, run, rinse, and repeat. That’s kind of what I had ended up doing that first day, but not because I had some kind of plan.
I ran, ran out of steam, had to walk, got cold and ran to get warm, ran out of breath, and walked home.
So maybe it would be better if I tried to follow something more like a program.
I wrestled myself into the jeggings again and, when I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror, thanked every deity I could name that the style had passed quickly. Then I pulled on the T-shirt and the sweatshirt, snuck Mom’s sneaks from her shoe palace, and went out the door.
The experts and the non-expert-people-who-think-they’re-experts on the Web said to warm up by walking fast for five to ten minutes.
They also said to make sure you had the right shoes. I wasn’t about to ask Mom to buy me running shoes—it would make her too happy—so I decided to keep using hers, which she never wore anyway and so wouldn’t notice they were no longer pristine (“remaining in a pure state”).
After you warmed up, you were supposed to walk for something like six minutes, then jog for a minute, and then walk for six minutes, and then jog for a minute, and then walk for six minutes, and then jog for a minute, and then cool down.
Already I thought running was going to be really, really boring.
I was bored before I even started.
The jury seemed to be out on stretching. Some sites said to stretch, others said not to. They all seemed to agree if you were going to stretch, you should warm up for at least ten minutes before you attempt it. I’m not very stretchy—not like my mom and Jenni, who can bend over and kiss her knees while wrapping her arms around her straight legs or do a split anytime, anywhere—so I thought I’d listen to the experts and pretend-experts who said stretching was unnecessary.
I set out walking, faster than normal, and I swung my arms up and down, the way one of the Web sites had said. They would act as levers and propel me forward.
And guess what: they did.
The harder I swung my arms, the faster my legs moved.
I’m sure I looked like a windup toy soldier.
In the junk drawer in the kitchen I had found an old sports watch, an ugly digital thing with a black plastic band. I hit the stopwatch and, after eight minutes, I started running.
Not fast.
They all said not to go too fast at the beginning.
My “run” was just a tad quicker than the arm-swinging walk. I did it for one minute, and then walked. After another six minutes, I was ready to run again.
This time I wanted to go faster.
Mistake.
Someone knifed me in the ribs. At least, that’s the way it felt. Shooting pain in my right side nearly made me double over.
At forty-seven seconds I needed to stop.
But I didn’t stop. I slowed down and was grateful for the walk time when it came, and eventually whatever demon had stabbed me went away.
The last run segment I took it easy.
When I was walking for the final interval, I felt like I could do another run. I decided to go for it.
I didn’t hit the Start button on the watch this time; I just ran. I ran as hard and as fast as I could. I ran until my lungs pinched and my legs could barely leave the ground. I ran until I couldn’t run another step.
In a weird way, it felt good to hurt, to feel as bad physically as I did inside. For a few moments, I was able to forget that I was a Yale reject.
8
Last spring Mom took me with her on an overnight trip to Columbus, Ohio, where she had a Continuing Medical Education conference. She made me come along so we could attend an Exploring College Options evening at some snooty private school called Thatcher Academy (how she found out about this event I have no idea), where admissions officers from Harvard, Duke, Georgetown, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania came and did presentations.
Here’s what I learned: these colleges are exactly alike. They all had:
1. The smartest professors.
2. The prettiest campus.
3. The most spirited sports teams.
4. The most diverse student body.
5. The best food.
6. The greatest study-abroad programs.
7. The biggest libraries.
8. The richest and most successful alumni.
More than one presenter said you could take classes in fields you’ve never even heard of. When the Harvard chick mentioned “classical philology” she was right: I’d never heard of it.
So I looked it up on my iPhone while she was yammering.
Classical philology turns out to be the study of ancient Greek and Latin words.
The main differences, as far as I could tell, were among the people who gave the presentations. The lady from Duke, with shiny, precise hair, wore a trim navy-blue suit and pearls, smiled during her entire talk, and seemed genuinely thrilled to be there. I wondered if she was like Walter-the-Man’s Deborah.
The dude from Georgetown, however, thought he was a stand-up comic and cracked jokes that were not at all funny. Often they were directed at the girl from Harvard, who looked younger than me and had to keep pushing up her glasses when she spoke.
During the slide show, she talked about how the university was founded in 1636 and named after John Harvard. She showed a photo of a statue of a man sitting in a chair. People in the audience began to whisper and giggle.
The Harvard girl turned to look at the slide and said, “Jason, you asshat!” and then covered her mouth with her hand while the guy from the University of Pennsylvania stood in the back of the room cackling. He’d jacked her PowerPoint presentation so the photo we saw was of Ben Franklin, the founder of Penn, a much more recognizable figure than John Harvard, whoever he was.
These people had clearly been on the road together for too long.
Mostly parents asked the questions: “What’s the acceptance rate?”
For Harvard and Stanford, it was single digits. They didn’t need to spell out the math: only six students out of a hundred would get in. The percentages at the others were higher, but still, the odds were against you.
One girl raised her hand and wanted to know if it was better to take an honors class and get an A or take an AP and maybe get a B.
The comedian from Georgetown said, “Take the harder class and get an A!” The others nodded. People laughed not because it was funny but because everyone was so tense any opportunity to laugh was a gift.
“What’s the median SAT score?” one dad wanted to know.
“Where do students get jobs after graduation?” asked a mom with puffy hair.
“What’s the crime rate on campus?” a dad with a military bearing inquired.
“How many get into medical school?” There was no question in my mind that the dad who asked the question was a doctor.
These parents were starting to get on my nerves. It was like they were the ones going to college.
I looked at Mom in a way that said, If you ask a question I will storm out of here and never speak to you again.
According to Deborah via Walter-the-Man, the whole purpose of these nighttime programs was to generate more applications. Deborah described her job as getting the kids all excited about applying so she could deny them in the spring. The more applicants you deny, the fewer you accept, the more selective you look.
The last question of the night was about SAT prep classes. Were they worth the expense? The presenters all agreed that they could be helpful in boosting scores. When Mom heard that I could see her brain-wheels turning.
As we d
rove back to the hotel, she said she wanted to sign me up for a class. I said, “No way, José,” something she said all the time.
“Why wouldn’t you want to maximize your chances?”
I told her I’d study on my own.
“There might be tricks you could learn.”
“I’m not a dancing elephant. I don’t want to do tricks. I want to do it my way. By learning shit.”
“Alice.”
“What?”
“Can’t you ever just be easy?”
9
After my second run, I had second thoughts about the wisdom of my New Year’s resolution.
And third thoughts.
And 7,234th thoughts.
It was nearly impossible to get out of bed the next day. My legs felt like someone had put them through a meat grinder. My butt hurt, which was not surprising, but so did my arms, which was. If it wasn’t already dead, my hair would have hurt.
But still, I stuffed myself into my jeggings and went out again the next day. And the next. And the next.
Pretty quickly I gave up on the idea of following a program. My running turned out to be a lot like how I make sandwiches. I can’t ever seem to stop being me. Even though there are ways that I am superorganized, there are also ways in which I’m kind of a mess.
From all the stuff I’d read on the Web I learned the mistake most people make—the reason so many people hate running—is they start out too fast and then burn out and die. So instead of doing the whole timed walk-run thing, I forced myself to run slower than I thought I could. Each day I ran for a few minutes longer than the previous time.
I tried to go when there weren’t too many people around, but the boulevard was always swarming with runners. The worst was going past the playground, where I was afraid kids would point at me and laugh. They hadn’t yet, but you can’t trust kids not to laugh at you. Especially if you look funny, which I’m sure I did.
At one point, I tried this breathing technique I read about online where you inhale for three steps and exhale for two.
That did not go well.