* * *
Maggie was cozily curled up on the living room couch, reading ahead on the very uncozy subject of segmented worms, when she heard her mother’s voice at the front door.
“Maggles! I’m home!”
Maggie’s mother had an unlimited collection of pet names for Maggie, all variations on Maggie’s name.
Her mother gave Maggie a quick kiss on the forehead and then flung herself down on the other end of the living room couch without even bothering to take off her coat. “This job,” she said, “is turning out to be Mistake Number Three.”
Mistake Number One, as Maggie knew all too well, had been marrying Maggie’s father, who had walked out on them eight years ago, when Maggie was four. Mistake Number Two had been dropping out of college after marrying him, so that her mom was still struggling to finish her B.A. while some of the other parents—Alycia’s father, for one—had Ph.D.s. But Maggie’s mother changed her mind with some frequency about which catastrophe in her life constituted Mistake Number Three. It could be anything from failing to drain the spinach well enough for spinach lasagna to locking her car keys in the car on a hot day while three sacks of frozen goods melted all over the upholstery.
“What happened today?” Maggie asked, closing her biology book. Her mother usually had a story to tell from work. Sometimes Maggie felt more as if she and her mother were roommates, commiserating over their lives together, than mother and daughter.
“We have twenty-two faculty members in the history department and two secretaries. But each of the twenty-two thinks Barb and I can spend a hundred percent of our time working for them. And you know who the worst is, don’t you? The absolute worst? Bob Eagen. I’m supposed to drop everything else and work full-time on his conference. Because you and Alycia are friends, I suppose. He always asks about you right before he gives me some ridiculous, nitpicky assignment. Like, ‘How’s Maggie? Oh, and while we’re chatting, could you call university catering and tell them that two of our speakers are vegans, not just vegetarians, and another one is allergic to shellfish, and the head table needs to have eight chairs, not seven.’”
“What’s a vegan?” Maggie asked.
“Someone who doesn’t eat any animal products at all. Not only meat and fish but milk, butter, eggs, cheese—even honey. Bob says this one guy won’t even eat honey, because it’s exploiting the bees.”
Maggie’s mom gave a little snort of laughter. “Try coming up with a menu for someone like that.” She took off her coat, but, instead of hanging it in the closet, draped it over a chair. “How was your day, Mags?”
“We have to dissect a worm. On Friday. In biology.”
“Oh, no!” Maggie’s mother groaned sympathetically. “Yuckeroo.”
Maggie could tell that her mother was waiting for the rest of the story. She wasn’t sure that she could stand sharing the part about the rubber band in her hair, but when she started in on it, she found herself talking faster and faster until the whole humiliating episode had spilled out.
“That little twit,” Maggie’s mother said when Maggie had finished.
“I guess he thought he was being funny.”
“Hardy har har,” Maggie’s mother said with exaggerated disdain. “See how hard I’m laughing?”
“Anyway, I’m not going to be able to do it,” Maggie said. “I can’t cut up a worm.”
“Sure you can.”
“No, I can’t. Really, I can’t.” Although it wasn’t a question of whether she could do it but of whether she would. And Maggie knew she wouldn’t. It was wrong to kill something on purpose, just to cut it up to see what its insides looked like.
“Oh, Mags, you close your eyes and hold your nose and do it. Like changing a poopy diaper. Or cleaning up throw-up when it’s all over the bed. It’s not your favorite thing, but you do it, and you get through it, and then it’s done. Unless it’s throw-up, and then as soon as you put on the clean sheets and the clean pillowcases and the clean pajamas, the kid throws up all over again.” Maggie’s mother laughed.
“I was thinking…” Maggie began slowly. “If you wrote me a note? Saying you didn’t want me to do it? Like that it was against our religion or something…”
Maggie’s voice trailed off. She and her mother didn’t really have a religion, not the formal kind where you went to church on Sundays. But Maggie believed in God, a God who had made every creature in every phylum they had studied so far. And Maggie knew that if she did have a religion, her own Maggie McIntosh religion, her religion would say that you weren’t supposed to kill anything at all.
“Mags, listen. One thing I’ve learned over the last eight years is that you don’t get anywhere by running away from your problems, contrary to what some people may think. You’re getting A’s in biology, you want to keep on getting A’s in biology. So you do what you have to do. I have a job, I want to keep on having a job, I do what I have to do.” She gave Maggie a small smile. “What do you want for dinner?”
Maggie shrugged. She wasn’t hungry. Thinking about the worm dissection had taken away her appetite.
“Let’s stick a frozen pizza in the oven. Do you have any homework?”
“Not too much. About an hour in math. And I’m trying to do a little biology every day so the exam won’t sneak up on me. And I still need to practice that new Bach piece for piano, and I have to get started on an opinion essay for English.”
“An opinion essay! I wish somebody at my office would ask me to write an opinion essay. I have some opinions that would surprise a few of them. What are you going to write it on?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll write it on—”
Maggie and her mother both said at the same time, “Dissections!”
“I know some vegans you can call if you want fuel for your fire,” Maggie’s mother said, reaching over to give her a hug. “I happen to know exactly where they’re going to be sitting at a certain conference and exactly what their menu is going to be.”
Maggie hugged her mom back. Some of her friends didn’t want to hug their moms anymore, but Maggie did. Besides, she had no one else to hug. For the first three years after he’d left, Maggie’s father had sent her presents on her birthday and at Christmas, but then he had married somebody else, and Maggie hadn’t heard from him since, except for the child-support check that came to her mother every month, the check that he was required by law to send. Maggie’s heart had raced as she looked through the mail every day before last Christmas, but there had been no card from her father, no present, no phone call: nothing.
“So is it pizza time?” her mother asked.
“Yup,” Maggie said. Hungry or not, she had to keep up her strength for what was to come.
“All right,” her mom said. “And then I can study for my chemistry exam, and you can spout off some opinions for English, and we can both astonish the world. If the world isn’t too dumb to notice. Which it probably is. But let’s astonish it anyway.”
3
When Maggie made herself walk into biology class on Tuesday, at least she knew exactly what to expect: a classroom crawling with worms. And one of them—no doubt an especially agile and active one—would be hers.
Today Mr. O. had on one of his Mickey Mouse ties—not the one with lots of little Mickeys printed all over it, but the one with the huge Mickey grinning out from the widest part of the tie, giving a jaunty wave that would have made Maggie want to wave back under less wormy circumstances.
“Campers!” As usual, Mr. O. jumped right in. “How many bureaucrats does it take to change a light bulb?”
Kip knew the answer this time: “One to do it, forty-four to do the paperwork.”
Mr. O. added Kip’s name to the Light Bulb Hall of Fame list that he kept in one corner of the chalkboard. Maggie’s name wasn’t there. She had thought about checking to see if there were any light bulb joke books in the library, but had decided against it. If she knew the answers to Mr. O.’s jokes ahead of time, it would spoil the fun of hearing
them in class.
Too soon, joke time was over and worm time had begun.
“All right, campers! Your worms await you!” Mr. O. announced. “Come and get ’em!”
Maggie sat completely still, wearing what she hoped was a blank stare of incomprehension: come and get what? So Matt was the one to retrieve their worm jar and paper plate from the low shelf under the classroom window. Maggie noticed that Kip was the one collecting the worm he shared with Alycia.
Despite his remarks on Monday, Jake was getting the worm for his table, his face showing no expression. As he turned back toward his seat, his eyes met Maggie’s and held them for a long moment, as if to say that he understood why she wasn’t collecting her table’s worm. He really was good-looking. Maggie wondered if he ever smiled. Not that the prospect of a worm dissection was anything to smile about.
Mr. O. explained that they would be testing their worm’s sensitivity to light and touch and recording their observations in their lab notebooks. Light didn’t sound too terrible. Touch Maggie didn’t even want to think about.
“Let’s start with light,” Matt said. He handed Maggie the flashlight Mr. O. had given them and crouched beside the table, at eye level with the worm.
Maggie couldn’t very well refuse to shine a flashlight on the worm. That would be carrying squeamishness too far, even for her. She clicked on the flashlight and aimed the beam in the general direction of the paper plate, trying not to think about what it was shining on.
“Shine it on the anterior end,” Matt ordered, sounding like a surgeon giving instructions to his operating-room nurse. Maggie shifted the flashlight awkwardly. She clearly wasn’t cut out for O.R. duty. “No, the other end. Bring it in closer.”
Reluctantly, Maggie moved the flashlight a couple of inches closer, careful to keep her hand still a good foot away from the worm.
With a gesture of impatience, Matt snatched the flashlight from Maggie and positioned it to suit himself. Fine! This was one job Maggie didn’t mind being fired from.
But Maggie had to look at the worm at least enough to have something to write in her notebook about its reaction to light. She made herself glance down at the paper plate.
Wait. Their worm was moving toward the rim of their paper plate—the wrong rim. Under the focused beam of Matt’s flashlight, it was propelling itself grotesquely off the edge of the plate, onto the table, heading unmistakably toward Maggie.
“Matt!” Maggie tried to keep her voice to an anguished mouse-squeak. “It’s getting away!”
Matt didn’t do anything. The worm kept advancing.
“Matt! Get it!”
Without taking his eyes off the worm, Matt replied coldly, “This is a scientific experiment. Our job is to observe worm behavior, not to interfere with it.”
Maggie didn’t scream this time, but she did scoot her chair away, until she almost bumped into the next lab table. Finally Mr. O. called out, “Okay, campers, move on to your next experiment.” Matt made a careful measurement of the distance the worm had traveled toward Maggie, in centimeters. Then he deftly retrieved their worm and deposited it back on the paper plate.
Somehow Maggie survived the rest of the class. Matt did the other worm experiments unassisted. For “sensitivity to touch,” he methodically poked at the writhing worm with the eraser end of his pencil, as Maggie took care to keep her own eraser worm-free. After a while, she hardly even pretended to watch. Maybe she could get through the dissection the same way as Alycia, after all.
“Maggie, I need to see you after class for a minute,” Mr. O. called out above the scramble of people returning their worm motels to the worm shelf.
Maybe not.
“Do you have lunch now?” Mr. O. asked Maggie when the bell had rung and the others had begun streaming out of the room.
Maggie nodded.
“So do I. Why don’t you grab your lunch, come get me in the teachers’ room, and we’ll eat back here. There’re some things we need to talk about.”
On her way to her locker to collect her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Maggie didn’t know if she felt more scared or excited at the thought of eating lunch with Mr. O. She had never had lunch with a teacher before; she had never been inside the teachers’ room. As far as she knew, Mr. O. had never had lunch with anyone else in their class, certainly not with Alycia. But Maggie knew what Mr. O. wanted to talk about. He wanted to talk about worms.
Clutching her lunch bag tight in one hand, Maggie knocked timidly at the door of the teachers’ room with the other. No one answered, so she knocked again, louder.
Ms. Bealer, Maggie’s English teacher, opened the door and looked down at her suspiciously, making Maggie feel even shorter.
“Is Mr. O. here?” Maggie asked.
“Maggie! Come on in!” she heard him call.
Maggie’s first glimpse of the teachers’ room was a huge disappointment. It was just a regular, not very nice room, with a few ugly tables scattered about on an ugly linoleum floor. Its only special feature was that it had a mini-kitchen on one wall, with a microwave, refrigerator, and sink. But otherwise it looked like a smaller version of the school cafeteria. Maggie had always imagined the teachers’ room as a posh, private club, sort of like the elegant tearoom at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver.
Mr. O. was retrieving his lunch from the refrigerator.
“All set?” he said.
Maggie nodded. Then Mr. O. led the way back to their classroom. It was strange to think of eating lunch in a room so filled with worms, on a table where worms had been slithering a few minutes earlier. But Maggie tried not to think about it.
“Ah, peanut butter and jelly,” Mr. O. said when Maggie unwrapped her soggy little sandwich. With a conspiratorial grin, he pulled out his own sandwich. “Peanut butter and jelly. Grape jelly?”
“Strawberry jam.”
“But creamy peanut butter?”
Maggie smiled back at him. “Definitely.”
For a moment they both munched their sandwiches in companionable silence. Maggie would never again envy Alycia’s pita-pocket sandwiches. She would be content with peanut butter and jelly for the rest of her life, savoring the knowledge that it was Mr. O.’s favorite sandwich, too.
When they had both finished their sandwiches, Mr. O. took a big swig of milk. Maggie hadn’t known that teachers drank milk with lunch; she had assumed they all drank coffee. Then he said, “So, Maggie. We have to do something about you and worms.”
Maggie didn’t know what to say. “I just … hate them.”
“They don’t bite, you know. We’re not talking about rattlesnakes here.”
“I know. But they … slither.”
“Maggie.” Mr. O. looked at her reproachfully, his tone saying, Come on, Maggie, I expect more from you than that. “You are one of the two best biology students in our class.”
Even as Maggie flushed with pleasure at the praise, she wondered who the other one was. It had to be Matt.
“I don’t want to see you throw away your chance to get a real education in biology. I hate to say this, Maggie, but it’s important, so I will. Squeamishness about worms—it fits the cliché, the stereotype, of what our society expects of girls. A boy sees a worm, he wants to find out what makes it act the way it does. A girl sees a worm, she squeals, ‘Ooh, a worm!’ The result is that the boy learns something about biology, and the girl doesn’t.”
Maggie felt ashamed. She didn’t want to be a stereotype.
“Have you ever wondered why I assigned all boy-girl lab partners last September? I’ve read a number of studies that report that middle-school girls who are every bit as smart as middle-school boys tend to do worse than the boys in science. I assigned boy-girl partners to try to keep that from happening, to keep the boys and girls working together. But my plan is going to backfire if the girls let the boys do the experiments for them.”
Maggie had to admit that the plan certainly was backfiring this week.
“So, Maggie, what do you
say? Will you try to get to know your worm? He’s really not such a bad little guy.”
Maggie nodded. She would have agreed to anything in the world, if Mr. O. had asked her for it in that low, earnest, caring voice.
But she couldn’t help thinking: If you really got to know a worm, if you established a personal relationship with it, how could you turn around then and kill it? Wasn’t there something hypocritical about getting involved with a creature that you were going to murder and cut into pieces three days later?
* * *
“Where were you?” Alycia demanded as she sat down next to Maggie in sixth-period English.
Maggie felt shy about saying it, but she didn’t want to lie to Alycia. “I—well, I had lunch with Mr. O.”
Alycia’s eyes widened. “No kidding!”
“It wasn’t any big deal,” Maggie said quickly. “He just wanted to give me a pep talk about worms. You know: ‘Love your worm, worms are your friends.’”
“Ugh,” Alycia said. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather not talk about while I’m eating.” But Maggie still thought that Alycia looked jealous.
Ms. Bealer called the class to attention. She was a tall woman, even taller than Mr. O., and she never told jokes in class, light bulb or otherwise.
“Boys and girls,” Ms. Bealer said. She was the only teacher who called the class “boys and girls.” Mr. O. always said “campers.” Other teachers said “Hey, gang,” or “you guys.” Ms. Kocik, Maggie’s social studies teacher, her favorite teacher after Mr. O., called them “intrepid seekers after truth.”
“I hope you are all beginning to work on your opinion essays. Remember, they are due in class two weeks from tomorrow. Let me review the format that I want you to use in writing your essays. The first paragraph states the issue you will be considering. The particular thesis that you are defending should be stated in the last sentence of the first paragraph…”
Standing Up to Mr. O. Page 2