“She shouldn’t get to fly,” I told Delia. I wanted all astronauts to have the compact athleticism of Judith Resnik: a daredevil smile, a pilot’s comfort with switches and joysticks and headsets. Christa looked like a mom, like someone who would have to ask her kids to help her program the VCR.
Delia didn’t answer.
“I think she’s pretty,” Delia said after a while. “She seems nice.”
“I’m sure she’s very nice,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean she should get to go to space. Only astronauts should get to go.”
We both watched Christa talk. She spoke excitedly, widening her eyes and waggling her head back and forth to convey her awe and gratitude.
“She looks like Mom,” Delia observed.
“No, she doesn’t,” I said.
“She does to me,” Delia insisted quietly. She missed our mother, I knew, but she didn’t ask about her much anymore. She had decided to believe our father’s story, that our mother had gone on a trip, and had set my ugly story aside.
“We should get ready for school,” I said. I snapped the TV off.
I took a shower, washing my hair twice, then spent a long time looking at myself in the mirror. My face looked raw, pink, and frightened. Elizabeth Talbot, I thought, would never look like this, not on the worst day of her life. Her skin would always be the color it should be; her expression would always be confident and consistent. I tried to arrange my face into an expression like Elizabeth’s, like those of the teenagers at the pool—calm, bored, superior. The clothes I had picked out so carefully the night before now looked childish. I wanted clothes that would shield me from adversity, make me invisible.
I waited for the bus at a new stop, a few blocks away from where Delia and the younger kids in the neighborhood still waited for the grade-school bus. When my bus pulled up, it was mostly full, and the sight of the students on it alarmed me. I had known that I was going to high school, yet I still wasn’t entirely prepared to see actual teenagers sitting on the school bus—people so much older than me, so much more developed, possessing darker and more complicated knowledge. I tried not to stare at them as I took an empty seat toward the front. They were sitting alone, one to a seat, and glaring out the windows. Some of them, boys especially, looked vaguely monstrous—swollen and pimply and misshapen. Their bones were growing too fast and stretching their skin.
When the bus reached the school and stopped at the curb, everyone shuffled off reluctantly. The building was a series of cubes, cinderblock, with long slits for windows. The athletic field behind it was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and a few kids leaned against it, their fingers worked through the links, smoking cigarettes while they waited for the bell to ring. I walked past them, avoiding their eyes.
The main hallway on the first floor was packed with bodies. I had to force myself to join the crowd wandering toward classrooms and lockers. Here, as on the bus, everyone looked much older than me. Everything I saw the girls wearing, especially the older girls, had a similar style to it: a preppiness or little-girlishness just at the edge of going haywire: pink and white button-down shirts with the tails flying, or tied into slutty knots over their belly buttons; pleated plaid skirts that showed too much leg; sweaters in primary colors with plunging V-necks revealing tank tops underneath. They wore red and purple and lime green scarves in their hair with the corners sticking up like rabbit ears. They wore bright plastic jewelry. They wore lipstick and eyeliner. I felt conspicuously babyish, a little mouse.
I had allowed myself to imagine that Eric might be here too, that the Gifted and Talented program might have lured him away from his private school. I found myself looking for Eric everywhere. Any boy of vaguely the right build and hair color I studied and followed with my eyes, convincing myself that he might be Eric. Maybe Eric had let his hair grow out like that boy’s, I told myself nonsensically; maybe as he’s grown his shoulders have gotten broader, or his hair has gotten darker. When I finally saw these boys’ faces, they were disgusting, deformed, all wrong for not being Eric’s.
When I walked into my first class, physics, about a dozen other kids already sprinkled around the room looked up at me listlessly. No one seemed to know each other, except for two girls who were whispering together. One of them I recognized: the tall girl from the pool with the purple bathing suit. I knew her name was Chiarra, which I thought was an unspeakably cool name. She didn’t recognize me.
Waiting for class to begin, I realized that I had no idea what a high school class would be like. I thought back to the hardest things I had ever had to learn in math or science and tried to imagine ideas much harder, much more resistant to understanding. It would be like trying to make a bed with a too-small sheet, I thought; once I had tacked down one corner, the others would come flying off again, and I’d be lost.
The bell rang, and still no teacher had come in to take control. We all looked around at each other briefly. A few kids whispered quietly and looked at the door. Just then, a tall, gawky man with huge blue eyes appeared. He leaned in the doorway, bracing himself with his arms on either side. For a moment he stood there looking at us, swiveling his head back and forth unhurriedly.
We fell silent, watching him, waiting for him to do something. When he finally spoke, it was in quick little yelps of excitement.
“Good afternoon!” he cried. “My name is Dr. Schuler. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you as you came in, but I had to use the lavatory. Did you know that teachers have more kidney problems than any other occupation? It’s because we’re never given a moment in the day to use the lavatory.”
We stared at him. He jogged to the front of the room.
Dr. Schuler had a big rubbery face that looked somehow exaggerated, like a cartoon character’s. His eyes were topped with wiry and mobile eyebrows that reminded me of a dog’s. His mouth was large and loose, his purplish lips parted with happiness. He wore a tie covered with a pattern of Greek symbols.
“Good afternoon!” he said again.
“It’s morning,” said a boy in the front row.
“So it is,” said Dr. Schuler. “Good morning, then.” He stood before us, rocking on his heels and looking pleased. He seemed to be waiting for someone else to speak. When no one did, he walked up to the boy who had spoken. He stood toe to toe with him.
“What makes things go down?” Dr. Schuler asked the boy in a conspiratorial tone, but loud enough for all of us to hear. “Why don’t they go up? Why don’t they go sideways?”
The kid, a skinny boy wearing a rugby shirt, gave a couple of blinks. When it became clear that Dr. Schuler planned to wait for an answer, the boy turned slightly pink. After a long pause, the kid cleared his throat.
“Um,” he said. He looked to his left, at his buddy, and smirked quickly before turning back to Dr. Schuler. “Gravity?”
“Oh, because of gravity!” Dr. Schuler repeated, then made the exaggerated expression of enlightenment, eyebrows raised, lips curled into an O of wonder.
“And what, can you explain to us, Mr….”
“Doug,” the kid answered.
“Can you explain to us, Mr. Doug, what gravity is exactly?”
Doug shifted in his chair.
“Oh. Um. Gravity is, uh…” He dragged out his groan for effect. More laughs from around the room. “Gravity is the force that makes things go down and not up.”
“Ah, a circular answer,” said Dr. Schuler. “Scholars, remember this: a circular answer is no better than no answer at all.”
Everyone snuck looks at each other. The girl to my left, when I turned to face her, looked at me and rolled her eyes. She had short dark hair, spiky. When she smiled, a sort of wry smile ending in a sneer, I noticed that she wore thick makeup forming a crust over her acne. I smiled back.
“Can anyone tell me what gravity is?” Dr. Schuler cried.
I looked up at him, and, horribly, he was looking right at me. The adrenaline crashing through me made it hard to see his face clearly—everything went
gray and spotty, pulsing with my heartbeat.
“Can you tell us, young lady?” he asked me.
As he had with Doug, Dr. Schuler hovered over me and stared until I spoke.
“Gravity is a force that—” I stammered and had to clear my throat in the middle of my sentence. “That draws objects together.”
“Hm,” Dr. Schuler grunted, and held a finger up to his lips, contemplating the implications of what I had said.
“Any two objects?” he asked. “What about two pencils? Is there a gravitational force between these?” He clasped a pencil in one hand, and with the other he pried my rainbow pencil out of my fingers. He moved our two pencils slowly together like magnets, then pried them apart. Together, apart. Together, apart.
“Yes,” I answered. My voice was a tiny dry croak, the sound of a little cricket in the corner. “But…the gravitational force depends on the mass. So the force between two pencils is too small to have any effect.”
“Too small,” he repeated loudly, “to have any effect.” He had been bending forward in order to hear me, but now he snapped upright. “Actually, Ms.…?”
“Gray,” I squeaked.
“Actually, Ms. Gray, that isn’t quite accurate. There is a gravitational effect, however small, which can be measured using sensitive instrumentation. Even though there is no effect visible with the naked eye, it would be wrong to conclude that there is no effect at all.”
For a second I could hardly breathe. I’d been so sure I was giving him the answer he wanted, an answer he would be impressed with. The girl next to me gave me a sympathetic look, and when Dr. Schuler’s back was turned, she stuck out her tongue and flashed a middle finger in his direction. She was clearly expert at this sort of behavior—she knew just when to put the finger away as Dr. Schuler turned back toward the room without seeming to hurry, without losing her cool.
Dr. Schuler spent most of the hour outlining his policies for the class.
“Throughout your school careers, you have undoubtedly become accustomed to a certain paradigm of education. Can anyone tell me what a paradigm is?” He looked around the room hopefully while everyone stared back at him.
“Well, we’ll have to work on your vocabularies, I see. My point, scholars, is that until now your education has probably been lax. You have been given credit for trying, even when you have failed. You have been given credit for trying, even when you did not try very hard. Undoubtedly, you have come to believe the underlying assumption that effort is all that counts, effort defined very loosely as a vague willingness to receive an education.
“This class will be different. Achievement will be measured by empirical evidence of your mastery of the subject, not by my perception of your effort. Standards for achievement will be set high. I believe that students float to the mark I set for them, scholars, and I have set the mark for you very high. No more than one of you will earn an A in this class.”
He paused for a long moment to let this sink in. He seemed to relish the horrified whispers running through the room.
“If you want that A, you’ll have to compete with your peers to get it. Competition is rather out of vogue these days in educational circles, you may have noticed. But I think you’ll find that the motivation of competition will help you achieve much more than you might have otherwise, and in the end that scholar who earns the A will know that he truly deserved it.”
While we took this in, Dr. Schuler moved to his desk, which was piled high with textbooks. We approached his desk one by one while he sat inscribing our names and copying the numbers into his record book. When I got to the front of the line, Dr. Schuler said, without looking up, “And what’s your first name, Ms. Gray?”
“It’s Dolores.”
“Hmmm.” Dr. Schuler looked up at me while cupping his chin in his hand. “Sorrows.”
“Excuse me?”
“Dolores,” he pronounced slowly and carefully. “From Our Lady of Sorrows. It’s a very sad name your parents gave you, Dolores.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said stupidly.
“Well. We’ll just have to see what we can do this semester to cheer you up.” He added my name to his list. I had time to notice his handwriting was just like my father’s, all square capital letters, before he snapped the book closed. He fixed me with a large smile as he handed the book to me. I took it and tried to smile back.
When I turned around, the spiky-haired girl who had been sitting next to me was standing near the door with Chiarra. At the pool, in her bathing suit, Chiarra had been rather nondescript, but here she wore a tight black shirt, jangling bracelets, a hot pink scarf in her hair, and thick black eyeliner. I couldn’t tell whether she recognized me or not. Chiarra and the acne girl both watched me, and I became immediately self-conscious that I had been talking to a teacher, practically sucking up to him. Chiarra leveled her eyes at me. I flushed.
“What are you looking at?” she asked me.
There was no good answer to this question, so I pushed past them and headed down the hall toward the gym for PE, my next class. The two girls followed me.
“Did he pick out a nice book for ya?” one of them, probably Chiarra, called after me. They both cackled, and I felt sick with regret.
Later that night, I sat on my bed and prepared to do my physics homework: read Chapter 1 and answer the review questions. I examined the book. The title, Discovering the Physical World, was splayed across the cover in embarrassing seventies-style letters. The book’s pages were thin and glossy, the color photos giving off a foul chemical smell. The pictures were of bright young people in out-of-date clothes smiling oddly as they performed the experiments described in the book—measuring sugar into water, making pulleys out of string, blowing up balloons, balancing needles on water. Someone who had used the book before me had tried to add obscene drawings in pencil, but the marks were hopelessly pale and smudged—the glossy paper wouldn’t take the graphite.
Paging through the book, I felt a strange excitement, the consciousness that I was embarking on my career. I saw myself sitting cross-legged on my bed and diligently studying, as if from far away, a scene in a documentary about astronauts. A deep voice narrated the scene: From the beginning, even before she had shared her dreams of flying in space with anyone, Dolores Gray distinguished herself as a talented and hardworking student of physical science.
The book offered lists of questions I was supposed to try to answer before reading each chapter: Why do you think you can put your finger into a glass of water but not into a stone? If you dropped a bowling ball and a tennis ball off the roof of your school at the same time, which one do you think would hit the ground first? How do you think a compass knows which way is north? None of these questions seemed adequately explained by the CONCEPTS listed in capital letters in the book: MOLECULES, GRAVITY, MAGNETS.
The material came to her quickly, the voiceover said. She soon exceeded the abilities of her classmates, then her elders. The first to notice her exceptional talent was her physics teacher, Dr. Schuler.
Out in the living room, the TV murmured and shouted. My father would be on the couch, Delia beside him, or crouched on the floor so she could look up at the TV, letting its light bathe her. Fake TV laughter rose and fell.
I read the first paragraphs over and over until I had nearly memorized them. I felt Chiarra hovering over me, giggling, mocking me for studying, for trying to please Dr. Schuler. So instead I tried to imagine myself as Eric Biersdorfer—not embarrassed to be smart, not caring what anyone thought of me. I tried to think his thoughts, to inhabit his mannerisms. I even imagined his face as my face, breathing through his nose, seeing through his light gray eyes. As Eric Biersdorfer, I read the first chapter in the physics book slowly, taking notes as I went, and answered the review questions as thoroughly and clearly as I could. Then I did something I’d never done before: I went over my homework again, rewriting some of the sentences, looking up words to make sure I’d spelled them correctly, and checking my math on
the problems with calculations in them. Then I copied the whole thing over onto a fresh sheet of paper, free of smudges and crossings-out. I enjoyed the feel of the pencil lead scratching against the white fiber in the paper, seeing my neatest handwriting marching across the page. When I was done, I stared at it for a long time, admiring my work. There was a part of me that wanted to show it to my father; I knew he would admire it, praise me, encourage me. I knew that my good behavior would somehow make him feel better about my mother’s absence—he’d think I was telling him that he was doing a good job on his own, that we could do just fine without her. But I wasn’t doing fine without her, and I didn’t want either of us to feel that I was seeking his approval, that I had done this—or anything—to please him.
Delia and I ate cereal while my father was in the shower. I picked up the phone before I could think about what I was doing and punched the number I had memorized.
The line barely had a chance to ring once before someone picked up at the other end. I heard my mother’s voice, the high, formal tone we’d heard her bring home in the earliest days of her job. “Good morning, Dr. Chalmers’s office.”
Her voice was a shock to me; I’d been expecting the machine again.
“Hello,” I said in my best adult voice. “I’d like to make an appointment.”
There was a small pause, and I thought for a second that she had recognized my voice. But then I heard a quiet rustle of paper.
“Just a moment, let me check the book,” my mother said. At a distance, as if she were holding the phone away from her face, I heard her say, “Good morning. Please fill this out, both sides, and this one only if she hasn’t been seen here before. Here you go. And here’s a pen.”
The distance of her voice and the light clack of pen against clipboard carved out on the other end of the phone a whole scene: my mother at a metal desk, the phone turned down against her shoulder, against the warm fabric of her green dress. Her arm reaching the clipboard out toward a mom with one protective arm around her daughter, a girl of uncertain age with strep throat, or with an earache, or in need of booster shots. Plastic padded chairs around the edges of the room with more moms and children. Magazines and children’s books on the table, a box of worn toys. Behind my mother, rows of files kept in alphabetical order. Behind a swinging door, clean white examining rooms; in one of them, Dr. Chalmers bending over a child, a metal instrument in his hand.
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