Awakening Foster Kelly

by Cara Rosalie Olsen

  A cluster of girls snuck up behind Jess and Clare. At the apex was a tall girl with an angular face and dark skin. From behind, she placed slight hands over Jess’s sunglasses. “Who's your favorite?” she sang. Laughing, the girl jerked her neck, tossing the straight, ebony hair that poured from beneath a pale pink knitted beanie over her shoulder.

  “Um . . . Matilda?” Jess answered hopefully.

  This clearly was not the answer the girl had expected. With a perplexed glance toward Clare, she snapped, “Um, no,” and pulled her hands away. “It’s Maya.”

  Jess spun around in a dance-like teeter, and smiled broadly, throwing her arms around Maya.

  “Hi-ya, Maya. Ah! That totally rhymes!" This seemed to amuse and thrill Jess all at once. “Papaya, Mariah, Flo Rida. Um . . . okay, yeah, I think that’s it. Can you think of any other ones?”

  Maya furrowed her brow.“Who’s Matilda?”

  “Oh,” Jess sighed wistfully, twirling a wisp of white-blonde hair. “No one I know . . . it’s just—I’ve always wanted to meet someone named Matilda. Ooo! Have you ever considered changing your name, Maya? I could totally see you as a Matilda!” Jess picked up a clump of Maya’s dark hair. “We might have to cut some of this off, though, and maybe dye it silver. No—blue, blue, definitely blue!”

  Maya snatched her hair back and pulled the entirety of it over the shoulder furthest from Jess. “Ah, no thank you, Crazy. Anyways.” She turned to Clare, shook her head, then grinned like a wolf. “I’m waiting,” she sang. “Tell me everything! What did you wear? Where did Cody take you? Did he pick you up? Did you guys—” Suddenly Maya stopped, took a good look where she was, and said, “Um, ew. Why are you over here? Did someone fall down the cliff or something? Did your sister get more of that stuff?” Maya fired one inquiry after the next, leaving no time between questions for answers. “Gross, whose is that?” I saw her attention rested on my backpack. Everyone laughed when Maya nudged it with the tip of her white tennis shoe. “So gross. I swear my grandma tried to give me the same one in black for my birthday this year. I burned the hideous beast.”

  More laughter, and then Clare offered a piteous look in my direction.

  “It’s, um . . . Foster’s.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t care if it’s Prada or Gucci,” Maya retorted with great disdain. “It’s frickin’ ugly.”

  “No, I mean”—Clare lifted a finger and aimed it at me—“it’s hers.”

  Maya whipped her head in every direction. “Whose?”

  And then it started all over again; only Maya and her friends were much less impressed with my chameleon-esque proclivities, finding my ability to become inconspicuous extremely weird, rather than fascinating. It was Clare’s date they wanted to discuss, and soon the group of girls left in a cloud of hair, backpacks, and giggles.

  A few moments later the first bell rang. Along with it, I took my first deep breath. It was over.

  And as I walked toward the main building, I was soon swept up in the current of my own thoughts, removing myself from the present with ease. Even when I joined my peers in the uproariously congested hallways, dozens of bodies scooting, bobbing, jumping, lingering, all making their way toward first period, I heard and saw very little of what occurred around me. I followed the pathway of my thoughts, back to the nightmare from this morning, where thick fear surrounded my waking and unconscious mind. Senior Piece partners. I felt all the air rise from my lungs and depart on that haunted realization.

  But today was ceremonious for another reason; one I hadn’t thought about until my mother had brought it to my attention, during breakfast.

  Two years ago this morning, my parents made history. Even quietly in my mind, this sentence provoked simultaneous responses—the least of which was amazement. Presidents made history. Not parents. But then, if this were true, I supposed, several people would never have been born. And these weren’t just any parents.

  Over oatmeal and a plum I had wondered how different things might have been, if at all, had we stayed where we were, in a tiny town in Connecticut.

  For some—actually for most, I would assume—coming into a large sum of money would have meant many things: luxury, abundance, recklessness, power, prestige. Endless transformations. But for the Kellys, not a great deal changed—not that monumental day, and not any since then. A new environment, yes. New walls and a wide leap of square footage, yes, that too. But aside from a few other details, mostly aesthetic, that was all.

  I claimed my assigned seat between two classmates who seamlessly continued their conversation around me. Removing a notebook from my backpack and placing it on my desk, realizing I was no more visible right here than I had been in front Jess and Clare, I smiled. I smiled because nothing had changed. And nothing would change. It didn’t have to, not ever. And nothing gave me more peace than the certainty of remaining a faint blip.

  I removed a pencil from a pouch, continuing to marvel at the resurfacing memories. Two years later and I still had trouble understanding everything.

  1.4 billion dollars could have that effect, I figured.

  Chapter Three

  Despite a creative assortment of epithets and titles, to me, my mother and father have simply remained my parents. To the rest of the world—mainly those shuffling among classified circles and holding advanced science degrees—my parents’ notorious identities vary, depending on from which side of the political latter one climbs. Either way, it was generally agreed upon that Dr. James Samuel Kelly and Dr. Marie Antoinetta Kelly were the iconoclastic physicists behind revolutionizing the oil industry.

  Growing up, my parents weren’t allowed to tell me anything—not even the name of the project that ultimately consumed their attention for almost as many years as I had been alive. All I knew was that they came home in the late afternoon, after a thirteen-hour workday hunkered inside a sunless, florescent-lit laboratory, where they tinkered with something revolving around thermodynamics and nuclear sciences. Their goal: to solve a riddle that would “Change the world.”

  Honestly I never doubted they would do it; so when it happened, I was more happy than I was surprised. And it only took fourteen years, eight months, and eleven days. This seemed like a long time, but Einstein’s theory of relativity—including the experimental stages—took over thirty-four years to develop. And these findings, while reshaping the functioning physicist’s mind and certainly instrumental in laying the groundwork for the way we now understand space and time, still could not compare to my parents’ globally relevant discovery.

  The project’s name—I learned that very triumphant day, once my parents were relieved of their sworn oath—was a mouthful; an appellation made up of fifteen letters. After unsuccessfully storing it to memory, I eventually created my own acronym, which I thought did a fairly good job of keeping the true name’s definition intact. IFSA stood for Inexpensive Safe Fuel Alternative.

  This occurrence meant many different things to many different people. To my part of the world it meant inflated gas prices would no longer be able to noose a struggling economy. As soon as the patent was in place and the formula quantified to a distributable amount, gasoline would slowly skulk into extinction. And in return for liberating the country of its leading oil distributor, my parents were rewarded, handsomely. Their once modest bank account now swollen, fertile with promise, the means to seek a dream was conceived.

  Having missed the sun’s rise and set for nearly a decade and a half, what my parents wanted—needed—most was an adventure, and I was happy to go along for the ride.

  It was a strange ambivalence that trickled through me when my mother and father sat me down to discuss an impending move westward. Spending the first fifteen years of my life in the small town of Roxbury, I would have expected a flare of anxiety to rise up in the face of abrupt change; at the very least, perhaps a sense of loss. But beyond the home itself and the surrounding land . . . I wasn’t losing anything, or anyone. Well, there was this one spot—a riverbank on the edg
e of the forest—where I liked to read, wrapped up in a quilt, with my Labrador Rhoda’s head on my lap. Rhoda, short for Rhododendron, is the genus we found her wandering among, stray and limping on a bloody, black paw. The two of us also liked to sit on the front porch and listen to the warblers sing, and on a clear night the stars looked like sparkling bracelets.

  Within three months we had packed up our home. The land and property was bequeathed to our neighbor, Jonas Bickens, who promised to see that it remained a home for its habitat and animals.

  It was a Tuesday morning that we got inside our car and waved goodbye to Roxbury’s one and only library. Soon we were merging onto the first of many routes—some more crowded than others—leading us to our destination: Southern California.

  I discovered shortly thereafter that my new school was six times the size of the one I had attended for the last two years. There I could vanish completely, a speck of sand amongst the iridescent abalone and blushing conches.

  Stiff and slightly weary after crawling through an incredible amount of traffic, we arrived in Malibu the following Thursday, just in time to catch our first California sunset. My parents . . . I could feel their elation. It made me forget all about the bit of car sickness rolling around in my abdomen. Seeing my best—my only friends—joyful to the point of utter silence and tears, made me very, very happy. Because there is one thing I know: there are all types and kinds of heroes. Mine are my parents.

  As our car rolled the last fifty feet of artfully landscaped road, neither my mother nor my father could stop grinning. We passed through the wrought iron gate in silence. It wasn’t until we were parked in our cobblestone roundabout—something I had only seen in fairytale books—that a word was spoken; not so much a word, but a high-pitched whistle from my mother’s ambidextrous lips. This valuable trick came in handy on many occasions, but especially when my father or I wandered off unknowingly and became swallowed up in a crowd.

  I laugh when I think about it: pulling up to our mansion in a 1999 Nissan Pathfinder wearing sweatshirts and jeans. Before my father could tell the man guarding the entry gate we were new residents, he was already asking if we were lost. The three of us—four, including Rhoda—looked at one another to collectively agree that, yes, we were most definitely, absolutely lost.

  Even with a large enough acquisition to live comfortably for a few dozen lifetimes, my parents’ plan wasn’t to lay poolside all day; especially because the only one possessing the complexion required for sunbathing was my mother, and truthfully none of us were very good swimmers—except Rhoda, of course; she was an excellent swimmer, and used the pool daily, clogging the drains with her fine black fur. No, retirement would have bored my parents in a matter of days. The years spent in graduate school, accumulating PhD’s in biophysics, molecular biology, and organic chemistry would never go to waste. This didn’t mean my father was exempt from slathering himself with 100 SPF every single day. Oh, no. Just because he designed and helped to build it, didn’t mean the climate-controlled greenhouse would have mercy on his delicate skin. And I knew this from several personal experiences. But for him, it was indeed a very small price to pay for a dream.

  Botany was a shared passion, which developed later in my parents’ marriage.

  Swapping the white lab coats for flannels, both my mother and father retained the majority of their former costuming: gloves, safety goggles, heavy boots. They still worked in a facility teeming with Bunsen burners, beakers, microscopes, and calorimeters. The differences: they were now a staff of two, rather than a company of hundreds; the commute no longer required a car; and where they had once solely used their education for strictly scientific purposes, now it was used to grow sunflowers the size of beach umbrellas, or turn ordinary smelling lilies into perfume that, sprayed once, lasted for three weeks.

  On occasion they would still put in thirteen-hour work days; however, my mother once told me the change resulting from working to live, to living to work, made all the difference in how she felt at the end of the day.

  I came to learn my parents were not only brilliant, but magicians in their own right. There was no limit to the incredible things that happened while I was at school.

  The day my mother discovered how to amplify the potency of a Stargazer lily to that of ten times its original strength, was a day I would never forget. I didn’t so much see this event with my eyes, but felt it with every living pore of my body.

  Two floors up, behind a thick wooden door, armed with a bottle of Febreeze, I went about my bedroom thoroughly dousing every visible object. It was cleaning day. Well, every day was cleaning day for a mysophobe, but usually only on Saturdays would I unearth my special box of cleaning supplies and utensils, most of which not available in stores—this being one of the many perks of living with people who dabbled in bioenvironmental engineering.

  On my hands and knees, engrossed in industrious labor, I paid little attention to the elbows that suddenly went itchy. I continued to scrub the bathroom sink until it shone pearly white, gleaming like dentures. It wasn’t until a little later, heading for my closet to finish Febreezing, that I caught a glimpse of my reflection, noticing I had taken on the resemblance of a flamingo. Seconds passed while I continued to gawk at myself. Then I began to burn. Horribly. I removed my rubber gloves, squealing as I found my hands, arms, shoulders, and stomach all the same salmon-y pink, covered in hundreds of pin-prick sized bumps.

  Little did my mother know, with each step she took toward my room, the burning worsened. When she came within fifty feet, the inside of my nose began to sizzle; watery fluid oozed from each nostril. Within ten feet, my vision began to fade and thick, viscous tears leaked defensively from each eye. What began as a bothersome itch manifested into dangerous asphyxia that nearly cut off my air supply.

  I didn’t start breathing again or regain control of my senses until my mother—thankfully she had been smart enough to think ahead to worst-case scenario and carried it on her—administered the antidote. She and my father were immune to the flowers’ perilous side effects, previously inoculated. When I could smell again and my tongue no longer protruded from my mouth like an engorged, pink worm, I told her she smelled exceptionally nice. The lilies were then moved and kept quarantined inside a Kelly-made Plexiglas structure.

  “Foster?”

  But even now, I could still hear my mother’s panicked cries, shouting my name from my bedroom door.

  “Foster?”

  Something was different, I noted. Her voice . . . it sounded a lot like—

  “Ms. Kelly!” shouted my Physics teacher.

  Jolted, the tip of my pencil broke over the pad where I was mindlessly solving equations. “Yes?” The face glaring at me made it quite clear she had been trying to gain my attention for some time. “I’m sorry . . . can you please repeat the question?”

  Ms. McGeether emitted an impatient sigh, shaking her head back and forth. “It was not a question, Ms. Kelly. I asked the class to pass their homework to the person sitting to their left.” Her eyebrows knit together, forming a severe black V down the middle of her face. Suddenly they lifted toward her hairline. “For grading,” she added, eyes bulging.

  “Yes, of course. I have it right here.”

  Ms. McGeether threw her hands into the air. “Hallelujah,” she declaimed, turning around in an animated waddle.

  Glowing red, I reached across the aisle to hand my paper to a pretty, very large Samoan boy, with walnut-brown skin and the kind of silky black hair worn by models on shampoo bottles.

  Perhaps not so pretty just now though, I decided, as the cambered, dark eyes fixed on me as if bananas were growing out of my ears. Still waiting for him to take my paper, I jostled it lightly. With a grunt he reached without looking, one humongous hand receiving the paper, and denting it down the middle.

  “Thank you,” I said softly. He grunted again. Removing a freshly sharpened pencil from my backpack, I prepared to grade the paper that had been placed on my desk sometime du
ring my mental exit.

  A deep, throaty snicker sounded at my left. I glanced over to find the same boy leering at my paper. He had one capaciously hairless arm flat against the desk, obstructing most of my view.

  “Something amusing, Mr. Matafeo?” Ms. McGeether asked from the front of the room; she pulled at the restrictive red turtleneck clasped like an angry hand around her throat.

  Every single person then stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at the boy grading my paper. Instinctively, I slunk down in my chair like slime.

  He shrugged and chuckled, mountainous shoulders rising and falling. “Uh, yeah, I guess,” he answered, in a deep voice belying his seventeen years. “I’m pretty sure this isn’t last night’s homework.”

  Confused, I looked down and saw he was correct. My Physics paper was indeed still on my desk. What then, I wondered with growing alarm, was he looking at with such jocular amusement?

  As if hearing my unspoken inquiry, he began to read aloud, in what I could only assume was meant to be an impersonation of me. “Softly does the heart unfold—”

  I gasped and lunged toward his desk, snatching the paper from his grasp. In my haste, I tumbled out of my chair, but managed to come away with most of the lyrics; a small portion still resided beneath my classmate’s arm where it had ripped. Rising from the floor, laughter met me in surround sound. I reclaimed my seat, crimson faced, and slightly panting from the adrenaline and exertion.

  For the next twenty minutes Mr. Matafeo paid me more attention than I was used to receiving. He leaned over every so often to regale me with my lyrics, coining me “The Singing Scientist.”

  Not very often did anyone make a remark about my intelligence. Collectively, and on a much larger scale, the students in my classes possessed an above-average GPA, which meant I wasn’t singled out as I had been at my previous school. However, Shorecliffs’ respective nuances were many—and not all of them would I consider conducive. It was after a few months attendance that, unbeknownst to me, I learned of a quarterly juncture designed to motivate students to strive for their best, reach their maximum potential, and arouse a healthy dose of competition among the Academics: the students maintaining the four highest GPAs were announced over the intercom, and awarded a Shorecliffs’ t-shirt, which we were asked to change into—immediately.