Gadget Girl

by Suzanne Kamata

  Try never. I wonder if he has any idea of what a non-cook my mother is. I have to agree, however, that this meal is truly delicious. Who knew empanadas were so yummy? The pastry is so light and fluffy. It melts on my tongue. And the meat filling is spiced just right with chili pepper and cinnamon.

  “Where’d you learn to cook like this?” I ask. I’m so stuffed that I can’t eat any more.

  “Oh, cookbooks. The Food Channel. You know, here and there.” He shrugs as if it’s no big deal. “So, ladies. Any requests for next time?”

  I look over at Mom, feeling slightly alarmed. Isn’t she going to nip this romance in the bud? Wasn’t this a farewell dinner? I mean, Mom doesn’t usually have guys over for dinner more than once.

  But instead of giving Raoul the heave ho, she runs her fingers over his tattoo and says, “Why don’t you make it a surprise?”

  12

  A couple of days later, Mom comes into my room while I’m studying and drops a folder on top of my biology book. It’s long and narrow and there are clouds printed all over it. It’s an airplane ticket. My heartbeat speeds up. I’m going to Japan! I’ll finally meet my father! I wonder if he’ll be impressed by my command of Japanese greetings, and my knowledge of indigo. Wait till he sees how well I do with chopsticks and origami! In my head, I’m already dining on sushi and seaweed soup, but then I look inside and see that we’re going to… Paris.

  “Paris?” I say. “I thought you said we might be going to Japan.”

  She gets this look on her face, the one that she gets when I’m not politically correct, like when I call myself a cripple. I can’t let it go, though. “I could get in touch with my roots. I could finally meet Dad.”

  According to Mom, my father doesn’t know I exist. She says that his parents wouldn’t permit him to marry her because she was a foreigner. They broke up, and she came back to the States. And then she discovered she was pregnant.

  “You should have told them,” I always say. “They might have changed their minds if they knew a grandchild was on the way.”

  But Mom just goes all dark and gloomy and shakes her head. “You’re better off here, where people don’t carry on about bloodlines.”

  Still, I think she should have given my father a chance to decide on his own whether or not he wanted to meet me. I bet Dad—or Otosan—is really a nice guy. He’d have to be, to put up with someone like her. I’ve lived with this woman for almost fifteen years and it hasn’t been all chocolates and roses. I can see how she might drive a guy insane.

  But Raoul is pretty cool. Maybe she’s cooked up this vacation as a way to get us all together. A trial run for full-time togetherness.

  “I didn’t get an award from the Tokyo competition,” she says. She pauses for effect. “I won the Prix de Paris! I won the grand prize!”

  Mom is standing before me, waiting for me to say something. You’re welcome? After all, I’m her model. She’d be nothing without me, right? No, she wants me to offer my congratulations. I should be happy for her, I know. This is great news, after all. She’s finally getting international exposure, and she won a lot of money, but why couldn’t she use some of her stash to go to Japan? I mean, without me posing for her, she wouldn’t have won anything, right? So why can’t she think about what I want for a change?

  “Wow,” I mutter. “That’s great.”

  Mom doesn’t seem to notice my lack of enthusiasm. Or, if she does, she’s ignoring it. She spins around my room, her arms crossed over her chest. “As part of the prize, a big gallery in Paris is putting on an exhibition of my work. I want you to be a part of this. You are a part of this. I want you there with me when I open the show.”

  She’s had shows before in various parts of the country—solo exhibitions in Charlotte and Savannah, a couple of group shows in Chicago and New York—but this will be her first one abroad. This is also the first time she’s invited me to go along. In the past, Grandpa and Grandma have come to stay with me while Mom was away on art biz. The limelight’s not my thing, after all, and she doesn’t want me to miss school and physical therapy. But the Paris gig is this summer, during vacation. I have no excuse not to go.

  “Is Raoul coming, too?” I ask. I can just see him hanging out at the Cordon Bleu and guiding us through a thousand menus.

  “No,” she says, frowning. “This trip isn’t about Raoul or your dad. It’s about us. I feel like we haven’t had a chance to do much together lately. So how about it? Just you and me in France?”

  I put the folder back down. “Do I have a choice?”

  Clouds seem to form over her head. Her hand hovers over the ticket as if she’s about to take it back. “Well, yes. Of course you have a choice.”

  “Let me think about it, okay?”

  She nods and gets up to leave.

  We both know what I will decide. After all, what are my options? A summer of losing at Scrabble to my grandparents? Or a couple of months in France? At least it will be someplace different.

  The next morning I drag myself to the breakfast table to find that Mom has gone all out. Instead of the usual box of cornflakes and bunch of bananas, I find a plate of steaming scrambled eggs and whole wheat toast slathered with blueberry jam.

  “Good morning, sweetheart,” Mom says brightly. She’s flitting around with her cup of coffee, trying to get ready for work.

  “Good morning,” I mumble back. I bite into a slice of toast with jam.

  Mom and I gathered those blueberries last summer at one of those u-pick places along the highway. She hung an empty plastic peanut butter pail tied to a length of rope around my neck to make it easier for me. But even though the bucket was small, it took forever for me to fill it. I could only tug the berries from the bush with one hand, and I kept popping them into my mouth instead of the container. They were so juicy and sweet! Further down the row, Mom was all business, grabbing at berries with both hands and dropping them into her larger galvanized steel pail. We filled a few buckets and came home with purple-stained fingers and ten quarts of berries. Then we brought them to my grandmother who turned them into pies and a crisp and blueberry coffee cake. She made a batch of muffins and put up jam and compote, and even made a tasty sauce that we ladled onto salmon. Mom froze the rest so we could eat them later.

  She likes to pick fruit because it reminds her of her childhood when she’d gone apple and strawberry and peach picking with Grandpa and Grandma. It also brings back memories of Japan. “In Tokushima,” she once said, “there are lots of pear orchards, and tangerine trees. Persimmons, too. I sometimes went to a temple near the apartment where I lived and plucked a couple of persimmons to eat.”

  I gasped. “You stole from a temple?”

  She shrugged. “No one else picked them, except for the jungle crows—big black birds about the same size as cats.”

  I pictured Mom fighting her way through feathers to get to the fruit. My brave, determined mother.

  Thinking of Japan brings me back to the eggs and toast with blueberry jam, and Mom, now humming in the bathroom. She must have made this special meal by way of apology, or because she wants to soften me up. She knows that I’ve been wanting to go to Japan for what seems like forever, but we’re going to France instead.

  At lunchtime I head for the Invisible Table, but Whitney veers toward the Geeks. “Let’s sit over there for a change.”

  Changing our dining patterns will make us conspicuous, but I follow her anyway. There are a couple of empty seats next to Luke. Whitney takes one. Could she be developing a crush? On a real live boy, as opposed to the silver screen variety? On someone who is, as far as I can tell, straight? Someone who is approximately the same age as us and still alive? Am I about to lose my best friend to a boy?

  “Guess where we’re going this summer?” I ask her.

  “Uh-oh. You’re not jumping up and down, so I guess it’s not Japan.”

  I nod. “Nope. We’re going to Paris.”

  She squeals. Her reaction causes nearly everyone
at the cheerleader and jock table to look our way.

  “Paris? You’re so lucky!”

  For a moment, I wish I could send her in my place.

  “Hey,” she says. “You can go see Delight Hubbard at the Moulin Rouge!”

  Delight Hubbard is a local legend. Back in the day, she was a Drama Geek here at this very middle school. She was also a hurdler on the track team and she could sing and dance. Her future as a can-can girl was almost fated. Plus, with a name like Delight, she was a natural showgirl. She went off to Paris after high school, leaving her sisters, Joy and Hope, behind, and joined the cabaret.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I say.

  “And you’ll be able to visit the Eiffel Tower and ride a boat along the Seine. It sounds so romantic!”

  How can it be romantic if it’s just Mom and me?

  “How about you?” I ask. “Are you going to visit your dad this summer?”

  Usually, she flies out to California during long vacations to hang out with her father and stepfamily. They’ve taken her to Universal Studios and Disneyland and Hollywood, where they drove by movie stars’ homes. The rest of the time she lounges around her father’s palatial mansion. (He did well during the dot-com era.) According to Whitney, these trips are torture (except for the visit to Hollywood), but she always comes back with lots of new clothes and CDs and electronic gadgets. Last time she got a Nintendo DS. “Guilt gifts,” she calls them.

  Across the cafeteria table, she nods, but she doesn’t look happy. Her mouth twists into a grimace.

  I brace myself for bad news. Is she going to go to live with him permanently? Is her stepmother pregnant again?

  “I’ll probably be digging up grubs for my dinner,” she finally says. “My dad has decided we’re all going off the grid this summer. He’s taking us on a ‘deprivation vacation.’ We have to hike fifteen miles just to get to our little cabin in the woods. And once we get there, we have to pump our own water if we want to take a shower.” She shakes her head. “I hope we don’t run out of toilet paper.”

  I laugh, feeling relieved. And a little bit jealous. She gets to spend summer vacation with her father, while I’ve never even met mine. I’d be happy to spend the entire vacation hunkered down in the indigo fields if it meant I could be with my dad. “It might be fun,” I say. “Think about it. You’ll be singing around the campfire and roasting marshmallows for s’mores…”

  She shakes her head vigorously, her dangly earrings whipping the sides of her face. “No, no. You don’t get it. He thinks my brother and I are too soft. He wants us to endure some sort of quest.”

  “Well, it’s only for a month or two,” I say. If she’s going to be in the woods, I can hardly complain about a hotel in Paris, even though I can barely stand the thought of not being able to e-mail her. To help her feel better, I ask what she wants me to bring her back from France.

  Her eyes go all sparkly again. “Oooh, I don’t know. A snowglobe of the Eiffel Tower? Or maybe a scarf? French women are so good with scarves.”

  “Okay,” I say, “one scarf and one snow globe coming up. By the way, when you’re out there hiking around, keep your mouth open.”

  “Why?” she asks, wrinkling her nose. She’s probably imagining flies landing on her tongue. But I’m thinking of Lisa Cook in the mountains, swallowing a star and becoming a superheroine.

  13

  The next time Raoul comes over, he whips up a fabulous veal marsala. We stuff ourselves, and then he asks if he can take my mother and me out for a cup of organically brewed Guatemala Antigua at the anarchist café. Oh, and for a bit of folk music, too—a local singer/songwriter with an acoustic guitar is headlining tonight. Raoul is always on the listen for something new.

  “It’s warm tonight. We can put the top down on my convertible.” I’d love to ride in his car, but I’m not really in the mood to go out tonight.

  “You kids go ahead,” I say. “I’ve still got homework. Just don’t keep Mom out too late.”

  We all load the dishwasher together, and then I shoo them out the door. I work on a paper for English class, then watch TV for a little while and check my e-mail. There’s a message from a girl named Brandy who lives in Alaska. I sent a copy of Gadget Girl to her as a trade for her comic, Moose! I read about it in Broken Pencil, a magazine that reviews zines. There’s also some fan mail from Zack in Tallahassee, author of Gator Gothic. Happily, the Gadget Girl website has had ten more hits since I last checked two nights ago. I answer my messages and go to bed feeling all warm and happy.

  In the morning I find a copy of the latest Gadget Girl on the table, alongside the newspaper.

  “Good morning,” Mom says. She’s at the counter slicing fruit. She sees me noticing the comic. “We picked that up last night at the café. Raoul is a big fan.”

  “No kidding?”

  She’s got her eyes on her me, as if she’s waiting for more of a reaction. “In this issue, Gadget Girl uses a macchinetta. Not too many people know what that is, do they?”

  I shrug. “You always talk about it during your presentations. Maybe someone was influenced by you.”

  “Someone in your art class, do you think?”

  “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

  I open it up and pretend it’s for the first time. I’m not ready to come clean to Mom about my role in this. She’d probably make a big deal out of it and pressure me to go public.

  “It’s pretty good,” Mom says, still watching me. “Nice contrast. Great story line, too.”

  “Thanks,” I say, under my breath.

  The next day, between third and fourth periods, Whitney finds me in the hallway and grabs my arm.

  “You’ll never guess who’s become a fan of Gadget Girl!”

  I ponder. “Luke Parker?” Some kids call him Alien because a) he’s a little spacey and b) he claims to have seen a U.F.O. land in his backyard. Not only is he a walking encyclopedia when it comes to things extraterrestrial, but also he’s a huge comic-book fan.

  “No!”

  Before I can hazard another guess, Whitney blurts out, “Chad Renquist!”

  “Really?” Art class aside, I never would have pegged him for the manga-reading type. I wonder where he got it. I wonder if he liked it. I wonder if he’s figured out that I had a crush on him. How embarrassing would that be?

  “He had a copy of the latest issue in study hall today. I heard him talking with his friends. They’ve noticed a certain similarity between Chaz Whittaker and you-know-who.”

  I take a look around, make sure no one’s listening in on our conversation, then lower my voice. “Did they have any idea who the artist might be?”

  “Yeah, they did.” Whitney laughs merrily, adjusting the lace bed jacket that she’s wearing over her tank top. “They think it’s your mom.”

  “My mom?” Oh, no! I can’t decide which part of that bothers me the most—the idea that my mother is getting credit for my work, or the notion that my thirty-eight-year-old mother would have found her muse in Chad Renquist. I’m going to have to do something about this, but what? Have my mother issue a statement? Sign my name to the next edition? This is too much to think about now, with a trip to Paris coming up and all. I’ll deal with it when I get back.

  “Must have been the macchinetta,” I say. “That was a big mistake.”

  When I get home from school, I find Mom at the kitchen table with a stack of books and our portable CD player.

  A female voice says, “Voulez-vous une chambre?”

  “What’s this?” I ask, going over for a better look.

  “I was thinking you could learn a few phrases,” she says. “It’ll make you feel more independent.”

  At school, we study foreign languages. We only have three choices—French, Spanish, or German. I’m taking Spanish as an elective. Someday it’ll be spoken more widely in the States than English, so it’s best to be prepared. Plus, I can practice with Raoul. I’ve also been studying Japanese with books and tapes on my own. It’s pretty easy to
pronounce, because the same phonetic sounds appear in English. But French. It sounds like the words are scraping at the back of your throat.

  “You should at least be able to order by yourself when we go out to eat.”

  “Un Big Mac, s’il vous plait,” I say, with my best fake French accent.

  Mom frowns. “Seriously. Have a seat. I’ve made some flash cards.”

  Mom was an exchange student in Avignon in college and later studied art history at the Sorbonne. One of her big sculptural influences, Isamu Noguchi, who’s American-Japanese like me, lived in Paris for a while. I’ve heard her speak French before with her friends on the phone, and she sounds like a native to me. I figure I’ll let her do all the talking once we get over there.

  Nevertheless, I sit down at the table and have a look at the flash cards. She’s drawn pictures of food on one side, and their names in French on the other.

  “Steak and french fries,” I say, picking up the first card.

  “Steak frites,” Mom says, and I try to repeat it.

  “Yum. Ice cream.” I pretend to lick the next card.

  Mom shakes her head. “La glace.”

  14

  The night of the end-of-the-year dance, the middle school cafeteria becomes a different place. The nutritional posters on the wall are covered up with black paper and a disco ball hangs from the ceiling, scattering light. There’s a table along one wall where guys in dress pants and ties line up for punch. They fill their cups, and then heap paper plates with nuts and chips and bring them to their dates. The girls are all in dresses that show off their legs and heels. The music blaring from a stereo system set up in the corner is a mix of oldies and current hits. The girls’ cologne will fill the air, masking the lingering odor of the fish burgers that were served earlier in the day.

  At first everyone kind of hugs the wall. The dance floor is deserted. Nobody likes the songs the teachers picked. But then a really cool song will come on, and someone, Madison Fox, maybe, will squeal and drag Chad out onto the floor. Other couples will follow. There will be so many people dancing that they’ll be bumping elbows and stepping on each others’ feet. People will start kicking off their shoes, and they’ll be dancing in their socks or barefoot. And then a slow song will come on, a make-out ballad, and the floor will thin out. A few couples will hug and sway to the music, barely moving while the faculty chaperones watch.