by Ali Benjamin
“How was the playdate?” Mom asks on the drive home from Gabby’s.
“Mom,” I say. “It wasn’t a playdate. It’s not like we’re four, you know.”
Mom doesn’t respond, so I glance over at her. Her eyes look really tired. I remember how she looked on our first drive into Mitchell, the way she kept cranking up songs that I didn’t even know. How once we got to Vermont, she wanted to roll down the windows to breathe the fresh air, and I was so mad. Not just because the wind made my hair fly all over, either. I was mad because she was so happy.
“Mom, are you glad we moved here?” I ask.
She thinks for a minute. “Mostly,” she says. She smiles. “You seem to be settling in, so that helps. It helps a lot.”
“Is it what you expected? Living here?”
“Well, I guess nothing’s ever exactly what you expect, is it? The job’s harder than I expected, that’s for sure.”
“But you’re good at it,” I say. “You know what you’re doing.”
“Oh, honey, I don’t think anyone ever really knows what they’re doing. Everyone’s just winging it. But people are counting on me, so I do my best, and most nights when I put my head on my pillow, I feel good that I did what I could. That’s worth a lot.”
She drives for a while, then she adds, “Tell you what, though. It’d be nice to make a friend or two around here.”
I didn’t realize grown-ups even thought about that stuff. I thought it was only kids who worried about having friends.
“What if we had to move again sometime?” I ask. “Like what if the clinic closed down tomorrow and you had to go back to your old job?”
“I don’t know that I’d go back to my old job. But if I had to? Yeah, I’d still be glad I did this. Because now I know that I can. I can move, I can run an organization, I can have hard days, and then I can get up the next morning and have a better one. So yeah. Even if I did have to go back to my old job tomorrow, it actually wouldn’t be the same job. Because I wouldn’t be the same person that I was before.”
Ahead of us, there’s a line of cars, all stuck behind a slow-moving tractor. This is one of those things that happen here: You get stuck behind a tractor, or a flock of ducks cross the road from one field to another, or a deer leaps out in front of you and you have to stop short. At first these sorts of things were annoying. Now it’s just the way things are.
In the distance, I see the old Oxthorpe factory, looming and massive. As we roll toward it, I try to get a good look. There are huge silvery windows, each divided up into tiny panes. Some of the panes are broken, dark spots that look like missing teeth.
“What do you think is inside that place, anyway?” I ask.
“Memories, mostly,” she says. “Most of the town worked there once upon a time.”
I try to imagine the building filled with machines whirring and people chattering. And now it’s all rust and broken glass and crumbling bricks.
As we get closer, Mom sighs. “Just look at it, though.”
“I know, right?” I say. “The place is so creepy.”
“Hm?” For a second she looks confused. “No, I mean the flowers. Look at the way they catch the light.”
As soon as Mom says that, I see what she’s seeing: wildflowers, a riot of them, rising through the cracks in the abandoned lot, like they’re determined to reclaim the place. They’re purple and golden, almost electric in color, glowing in the late-afternoon sun.
It reminds me of a story Mom used to tell me, from a book of fables. In the story, a bunch of people who couldn’t see were asked to describe an elephant based only on touch. One felt the trunk and said that an elephant is like a snake. Another felt the leg and said that an elephant is like a great tree trunk. A third felt the tail and said an elephant is like a rope. All of them were right, and at the same time all of them were wrong. Or rather, they were all wrong, until you added all of their impressions together.
I think about asking Mom if she remembers that story, but her fingers are tap-tapping on the steering wheel, some tune that’s playing inside her head, and she looks sort of content.
Ahead of us, the tractor turns onto a dirt road, and Mom speeds up the car, and we head for home.
Among the Statues
The next morning, Mom drops me off at school extra early so she can get to some appointments. The door to the humanities room is still closed, so I go outside to visit the goats.
I’m halfway through the statue garden when I see Mags’s legs jutting out into the path. She’s sitting on the ground, wrapped in a chunky sweater, her back resting against the statue of Athena. Mags’s eyes are closed, her fingers curled around a travel mug.
“Mags? What are you doing?”
“Oh, Caitlyn!” She sits up. “You’re here early! I’m enjoying my morning coffee before heading in to start the day. I find that my friends here”—she gestures vaguely at the statues—“are pretty good company when you’ve got something on your mind.”
I do have something on my mind. Lots of somethings.
“Mags.” I hesitate. “Do you remember when we were talking about kleos?”
She nods.
“Remember when I said that when people have kleos, it’s not really them we’re remembering, not exactly?”
“As I recall, Caitlyn, you said that what we remember about others is always incomplete. I thought that was a very good way of describing it actually.”
“Well, what if everything we know about everyone is incomplete? Not just people from a long time ago, but even the people we supposedly know right now?”
In a way, I’m asking about Paulie. It’s like there are all these different versions of him, and I can’t figure out which version is right. But I’m not just asking about Paulie. I’m also thinking about my mom’s wish that she had a friend, and about Gabby missing her dad, and about her dad moving here from so far away, and about gone being gone. I’m also thinking about Henry holding on to his secret, and all the other stuff that might be happening around me—things that I don’t even know to wonder about, let alone ask about.
“Everything we know is always incomplete,” Mags says. “In the end, we get to fully know exactly one person only: ourselves. And that’s only if we work hard at it.”
After a minute, I ask, “Was Paulie Fink really as great as everyone says?”
Mags smiles. “Paulie was pretty special. But then, so are all my students.”
“But all those stories people tell about him. Did they really happen?”
“Sort of. But has anyone told you about how furious they used to get at him?”
“They did?”
“Sure. Sometimes Paulie got the whole class in trouble. I can remember more than a few missed recesses for them. That never went over well.”
That’s not something they’ve mentioned. Not once, in all these stories.
“When people tell stories,” she says, “they make choices. They emphasize some parts. Leave out others. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a story. It would just be a collection of facts. For example, do you remember when I talked about Greek democracy?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“Well, here’s a different way of telling that story: Even as the Greeks advanced the notion of democracy, they deliberately denied at least three-quarters of the population—maybe even more—the right to vote. As a woman, I wouldn’t have been able to vote. Nor would I have been able to teach, or have any sort of a public voice. Neither would most of the people you know. There are other stories we could tell about the Greeks, too: They were fiercely opposed to outsiders. They fought many, many wars—brutal ones. They enslaved fellow human beings.”
“Wait,” I say. “So why does everyone talk about them like they’re so great? They sound like a bunch of hypocrites.”
“Hypocrites.” Mags says the word like she’s turning it over, examining it closely. “Yes, you could say that. You could also say that the story many people have chosen to tell about the Greeks through th
e centuries is itself a kind of myth.”
“So why are we learning about them?”
“Well, the easy answer is this: For the rest of your life, you’ll come across things—laws, literature, art, sciences—that were born in the days of Plato. Even the word hypocrite, Caitlyn, comes from a Greek word that means actor. But like I say, that’s just one answer, and it’s the easy one.”
“What’s the harder one?”
“Caitlyn, there is not a single thing that the Greeks did wrong that humans aren’t still wrestling with today. Not one.”
Huh. So thousands of years have gone by since Plato talked about walking into the light, and people still keep getting stuff wrong.
“The thing is,” Mags adds, “we get a choice. We can choose which aspects of our world we want to keep, and which to leave in the dustbin of history.”
Mags takes another sip of her coffee. We sit like this for a few minutes—quiet and surrounded by gods who were never real in the first place. I wonder if she knows about the school closing. I want to ask her, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to tell me even if she did.
Then it’s time to go in. As we walk toward the building, Mags says, “You know, sometimes I wonder what Julius Oxthorpe would think about us being here. Sitting in his old rooms, talking about myths and legends in his sculpture garden.”
“I guess he’d think it’s kinda cool?”
“Maybe,” says Mags. “But I’m not so sure. Look around. This place is like a shrine to the ancients. But it’s so secluded, it feels like old Mr. Oxthorpe built it entirely for himself. I suspect he’d hate our being here. So being here makes me feel like a rebel. Like I’m claiming something that was never intended for me in the first place. Actually, it’s the same thing that makes me enjoy studying the classics.”
“Mags the rebel.” I laugh.
It occurs to me that she might be a Disruptor in her own way.
The Office Challenge
Later that morning, as we head toward the goats, I stop the class in the statue garden, near where Mags sat earlier. “Paulie Fink earned a reputation for bringing people and things into places you’d never expect,” I say. “He brought pizza into classrooms, placed glitter on ceiling fans, introduced fruit flies… well… everywhere. And of course, there’s the famous example of him hiding in Glebus’s office.”
I pause. I look at all those statues, then at the mansion where Mr. Oxthorpe probably never imagined us, wouldn’t want us. Yet here we are.
“So the challenge for our final three contestants”—I glance at Yumi, Diego, and Fiona—“involves going somewhere they don’t belong, and where they’re definitely not wanted.”
“Yessss…!” Fiona hisses. She turns to Diego and gives him a fist bump.
“Where?” asks Yumi. “Where do you want us to go?”
I lean in and whisper, as if those stone gods might be listening, “Glebus’s office.”
Diego and Fiona and Yumi exchange looks.
“We’re going to get caught,” whispers Fiona.
“Yeah,” Diego says. “We’ll all be eliminated by the time this is done.”
“If you get caught, that’s okay. This one is a timed competition. Only the length of time matters. Whoever gets kicked out first gets eliminated.”
“That’s it?” Yumi asks. “That’s the whole challenge? It seems sort of… straightforward.”
“That’s true,” says Gabby. “But on Megastar, the most straightforward challenges are usually the ones that get the most interesting.”
In the distance, I hear Mr. Farabi calling us. “Yoo-hoo! Originals, we’ve got some hungry goats down here waiting for you!”
“Challenge begins at recess,” I tell them.
Interview: Yumi
There’s plenty of sneaking around in Shakespeare’s plays, did you know that, Caitlyn? That’s how I felt at recess, as Diego, Fiona, and I stood outside Glebus’s office: like we were three heroic Shakespearean characters nearing the end of a great drama.
Hopefully not a tragedy, though!
We tapped lightly on Glebus’s door. When she didn’t answer, we scurried in. We knew we probably didn’t have much time—Glebus usually walks around at the start of recess, but she returns to her office pretty quickly.
Once we were inside, Fiona and Diego both moved at once toward the closet. Diego’s quick, but Fiona’s small and sneaky, like a fierce little jackrabbit. She darted in front of Diego, reached the closet first, jumped in, and slammed the door behind her.
I ran to Glebus’s desk, figuring I’d hide behind it just like Paulie had. I climbed over the top, then lowered myself into the space behind.
But I could only crouch down a few inches before my knees banged the wall. I shifted position, tried again. No go! Paulie was always smaller than I was, and, I suddenly realized, he’d been a year younger, too. So it made sense that he could fit there and I couldn’t. No matter which way I moved, I stuck out like a jack-in-the-box.
Meanwhile, Diego zipped around the room looking for a place to hide. He tried squatting behind Glebus’s rolling desk chair, but he just looked like a Mini during team tag. He slipped behind the blinds, but his jeans and sneakers were still totally visible.
The whole situation was so absurd: my top half sticking up behind the back of Glebus’s desk, and Diego’s bottom half sticking out from under her blinds. So I started cracking up.
That’s when I heard a click-click-click. Glebus’s footsteps.
As Glebus approached, Diego stepped out from behind the blinds. He wasn’t laughing, like I was. His jaw was tense, and his eyes were hard, and I could tell: He was determined not to lose.
That’s what makes Diego such a great competitor, see.
He leaped toward the closet where Fiona was already hiding, yanked the door open, and jumped in there with her.
He pulled the closet door closed just as Glebus pushed the door to her office open.
And there I was, all alone and totally exposed.
I had exactly one option left: try to will myself into invisibility. I pressed myself flat against the wall and did my best to blend in with Glebus’s floral-patterned wallpaper.
It didn’t work.
“Yumi!” Glebus sputtered. “What… what in the world do you think you’re doing?”
I guess, for me, it turned out to be a tragedy after all.
Interview: Fiona
Well. As you can imagine, when Diego jumped into the closet with me, I was all, What the—?
And then I was like, No. Not fair. This is my hiding spot. I told him that, too. I said, “This is my hiding spot, so you get your ruinous butt right out of here, Diego Silva.” At least I tried to say that, but with Glebus on the other side of the door, my only means of communication was smacking him on the arm. Through the crack in the door, I saw him point to where Yumi had been hiding. He shook his head and made a you’re out motion, like an umpire might in a baseball game.
On the other side of the door, Glebus started barking at Yumi. She was caught. Out. Eliminated. That meant Diego and I were the last two remaining. One of us was going to be the Next Great Paulie Fink.
I realized that this meant Diego, in addition to being my best friend, was now officially my mortal enemy.
My nemesis.
Inside the closet, I glared at him. It was the sort of death stare that I hoped said, I will destroy you, Diego Silva. And you know what he did in response? He glared right back.
We sat like that for a while, each of us death-staring at the other as Glebus lectured Yumi. We death-stared during Yumi’s apology, and we death-stared as Glebus barked, “I don’t even have time to figure out what made you crawl back there, young lady, because I’m now late for a very, very important phone call. Yes, shut the door behind you, I will find you later, and we will most definitely deal with this situation.”
We death-stared as Glebus shut the door and punched numbers into her phone, and we were still death-staring as we heard h
er say, “Northland Free Press? Yes, this is Alice Glebus at the Mitchell School. I’m returning a call from one of your reporters.”
And then I realized we were going to have to settle in for a bit. That’s about the point where all that death-staring started to feel awkward. I turned my face away from him dramatically.
In the name of Paulie Fink, I will fight you, Diego Silva. Only one of us will get kleos, I said to myself.
Paulie would have loved this if he could have seen it.
Something Is Very Wrong
By the time the bell rings for lunch, Fiona and Diego are nowhere to be seen. On our way to the cafeteria, we walk past Glebus’s office. “Are they still in there?” wonders Henry.
“They can’t possibly be,” says Yumi. Earlier, as she described her failed attempt at invisibility, she was laughing. Now she just looks worried.
Gabby tiptoes up, presses her ear to the door. “Glebus is talking,” she whispers. She listens for a minute. “She’s saying distressing… Like I said earlier, nothing is final… No… no…”
“Is she talking to Fiona and Diego?” asks Sam.
“I can’t tell,” Gabby whispers.
After lunch, the door’s still shut. Which means either Diego and Fiona are in huge trouble, or they’re as good at hiding as Paulie Fink ever was.
We head up to math class. Mr. Farabi asks where Fiona and Diego are. Timothy coughs, looks down at his desk. “Glebus’s office,” he says.
“Uh-oh, that doesn’t sound good,” says Mr. Farabi, and he begins the lesson without them.
We’re almost twenty minutes into class when the door finally opens. Everyone looks up eagerly. I expect Diego and Fiona to be cracking up. Or at least trying not to smile. But something’s odd. They don’t look at any of us, or at each other. They quietly slip into their seats and stare at their desks. Then they stay like that. Silent, and perfectly still.
Which means something is very, very wrong.