Millicent Min, Girl Genius

by Lisa Yee

  At Burger King I just sat and seethed as Emily and Stanford talked nonstop. I have never known him to be so upbeat and friendly. He seemed almost human.

  “Gosh, Millie,” Emily whispered as Stanford went to get some more straws. They had been shooting straw wrappers at each other and confused this with having fun. “He’s cute and smart and athletic, what more could you ask for?”

  “Someone of our own species,” I said under my breath as I poked at the ice cubes in my Coke. Regardless of how many times I pushed them down with a coffee stirrer, they kept bobbing back up to the surface.

  Stanford came back grinning. “Hey Emmie, lookit!” He held up two fistfuls of straws.

  Emmie? Oooh, he was really pushing me over the edge. I sat up straight and informed him, “One: ‘Lookit’ is not a real word. And two: It’s stealing when you take things and don’t use them for their intended purpose. Plus, consider the unnecessary waste and its impact on the environment.”

  Emily bit her lip. “I guess we really shouldn’t waste them.” She looked disappointed as she set down her straws.

  “Fine. Great. Terrific. I’ll just put them back then,” Stanford huffed.

  “Hey,” I said sweetly, “I am only trying to help save our planet.”

  When Stanford returned he was wearing a Burger King crown, only he still looked like a jester. He handed us each one. Emily put hers on immediately. I tossed mine aside.

  “Emily, watch this,” Stanford said. He opened up the napkin and pressed it against his face. Then, and this was so gross, he stuck his tongue through it.

  Emily burst into a fit of laughter. Then she tried the disgusting napkin spectacle and Stanford started laughing like a hyena, only not as dignified. “Here, Millie,” Emily said, handing me a napkin. “Your turn.”

  They both looked at me expectantly. I held the napkin to my face and then daintily wiped my mouth. “If you two will excuse me,” I said as I pushed my chair back and stood up. “I think I hear my mother calling.”

  I grabbed my briefcase and stormed down the block. Emily was out of breath by the time she caught up with me. She looked concerned.

  “What’s the matter? Did I do something wrong?” When I didn’t answer, her face clouded over. Then all at once she lit up. “Oh, I know. I just figured it out.”

  I waited to hear what she would say, hoping that she had realized what a dolt Stanford was.

  “You’re still feeling bad because I found out that he’s tutoring you. It’s okay, really it is,” she assured me. “Millie, we’re best friends, remember.” She touched her friendship necklace. “Nothing can come between us, okay?”

  Nothing but Stanford. That dumb boy could ruin my entire relationship with Emily. Not that he’d want her to know that he was the one being tutored. Still, he couldn’t be trusted. By the way they were acting at Burger King you would have thought that they were the old friends and I was a stranger who just happened to be sitting at their table having a miserable time. I was reminded of my last party, a festive occasion for all but the birthday girl.

  I’ve asked my parents to stop giving me birthday parties because no one ever shows up and then we are forced to use the napkins that read “It’s Your Big Day, Birthday Girl!” for the rest of the week. At my eleventh birthday party, my parents somehow managed to trick some kids into coming. My father dressed as some sort of cowboy-spaceman, I couldn’t tell which. I think my mom was upset by this because the theme was Gilligan’s Island. She’s excellent at theming. People still talk about my parents’ wedding. The theme was Strawberry Fields Forever, so you can just imagine what that must have been like.

  For my party, Mom had planned lots of games with fabulous prizes. I won only one, Catch the Castaway, by default. I hid so well that everyone quit looking for me and the party went on without the birthday girl. Finally, when I emerged from my hiding place (in the closet, behind the steamer trunk, under the blanket), the only person left was Max, the annoying little neighbor kid. He admires me because he thinks I live in a tree.

  I was told that my guests had a good time. My mom saved a coconut for me. I still have it, but it dried up inside and is beginning to stink.

  “MILLICENT!”

  “Huh?”

  Emily looked worried. “I’m not sure where you go sometimes,” she said. “You just space out.”

  “Well, I’m here now!” I assured her. I was glad she had left Stanford. Maybe we’d go to my house and break in a new jumbo bag of chips. Or we could go to the park and hang upside down on the monkey bars and see who can last the longest. I’ve won three times in a row.

  “Come on back and join us,” Emily said, picking up my briefcase. “Stanford claims he can put a whole Whopper in his mouth at once!”

  I couldn’t believe she wanted to go back to that dimwit. “No, you go ahead,” I insisted as I took my briefcase from her hands. “I have a lot of stuff I need to do.”

  “Are you sure?” Emily asked.

  “Yeah, go on without me,” I said, hoping she would stay.

  “Well, okay then …” Emily said. “You sure you won’t join us?”

  “Positive,” I said. Please stay, please stay. “I’ve got a lot of things to do.”

  “All right then, see you tomorrow, I guess.” Emily looked confused. She held her crown so it wouldn’t fall off her head as she hurried back to Burger King.

  Why, I wondered, was it so hard just to tell her what I was thinking?

  With no place pressing to go, I headed to the park. It was empty, except for a boy clinging to a tire swing as his friend spun him so quickly he looked like triplets. When he finally got off, he wobbled and then fell down. His friend helped him up and then they slugged each other and ran off. Friendships are so confusing.

  I set my briefcase down and approached the monkey bars. Then I hung upside down until I couldn’t tell what was upright, me or the rest of the world. I broke my own record by three minutes, only there was no one there to confirm it.

  It’s happening faster than I had anticipated. Maddie announced her plans less than a month ago, and already it seems like she’s practically halfway to Heathrow, the quaint English hamlet that’s now the site of one of the world’s busiest airports. From there, it’s a short hop to Fenwick & Feldie’s Feng Shui Academy in the heart of London.

  Maddie was humming as we cleared out her closets today. She hums when she is happy and it had been a while since I had heard her hum. I picked up the gilded frame that held Grandpa’s mug shot and studied it. In the photos my grandfather is grinning mischievously. Though it vexes my mother to see it, I think it’s one of the best pictures of him ever taken. I like to look at it since it shows his face, front and profile.

  My grandmother is going to put her things in U-Pak-It–We-Stor-It. When she returns she plans to move into a smaller place — “like your den,” she joked to Dad the other day. He almost spit out his root beer.

  “It’s just not the same here anymore.” I could see that Maddie was trying to explain it to herself as much as to me. “There’s no laughter to bounce off the walls.”

  I am going to miss that house. It is my second home. How can I ever forget the kitchen where Maddie taught me how to make microwave brownies? And there’s the telescope that Grandpa and I gazed through on clear nights. He’d always ask, “What do you see up there, Millicent?” And I’d answer, “Everything, Grandpa. I see everything.”

  “When will you be back?” I asked Maddie as I examined an old photo of my parents waving at a marching band while I sat on the curb reading a book.

  “When the time is right.” She tried to look mysterious by arching her eyebrows. Whenever my grandmother does that it means she doesn’t have the answer.

  Maddie has agreed to stay in Rancho Rosetta until the end of the summer. Then, once school starts, she will be on her way. It was her idea to start packing now, “a little each day.” She was sitting in an empty box when she said this, and I
wondered if she planned to have herself shipped to England. Nothing she does could surprise me.

  Maddie exited the box and then struggled to open the lid of her Chinese camphor chest. I had never seen the chest open before. The lid creaked and inside it smelled sticky-sweet. “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “You know, Millicent,” she pulled out a pile of yellowing newspaper clippings and gently placed them on the floor. “Emily paid me a visit this morning.”

  “Why?” My curiosity was piqued. Emily and I often visit Maddie, but she had never gone by herself before.

  “She wanted my advice,” Maddie said nonchalantly.

  “About what?”

  “About you.

  “When Emily told me she knew all about your big secret, I was so pleased that you had finally found the courage to tell her. Emily is such a kindhearted girl. She kept saying that it didn’t matter how smart you were, that she was your best friend and that she wanted to make sure you weren’t feeling bad that she had found out.

  “But then when she asked, ‘How long has Stanford been tutoring Millie?’ I was speechless. Can you imagine? Me speechless?”

  I admitted that I could not.

  Maddie stopped digging in the chest and looked straight at me. “She doesn’t know, does she?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t planned on Emily stumbling into my tutoring session with Stanford. “I was going to tell her,” I insisted. “But then Stanford made me swear not to….”

  Maddie turned away. “Millie,” she said softly. “Emily is a friend worth keeping. I trust you will do the right thing.”

  “I’m not too happy about this either,” I said glumly. To have Emily think that Stanford is teaching me is beyond insulting.

  We continued to pack in silence. I prayed that Maddie would say something, anything, but she didn’t. Sometimes she talks so much, I can’t stand it. But it’s even worse when she doesn’t talk at all.

  Finally, Maddie reached the bottom of the chest and pulled out a beat-up old stuffed animal. “Look, it’s Chow Lee Low!” she said, holding up the dusty yellow dog for me to see. “He used to be your mother’s. She kept him around until she went off to college and met your father. I guess Jack replaced him.”

  I looked at Dad’s competition, all ragged in his moth-eaten sweater. Like my father, Chow Lee Low had a charming but crooked smile. However, the similarities ended there, since Chow Lee Low’s ears were droopy and he had one eye missing.

  It was hard to believe that my mother ever had a stuffed animal. She has aged better than Chow Lee Low. “Your mom slept with him every night,” Maddie said as she polished his remaining eye with her shirt. “He was her good-luck charm.”

  I almost started to cry. I will be so sad when Maddie embarks on her grand adventure. She is my good-luck charm, even if Dad’s convinced she’s just a crazy old woman. Just last week she tried channeling. That’s where you “go back in time” to see who you used to be. The incredible thing was, Maddie claims to have come back as herself. What are the odds of that happening?

  Mom says she’s a force of nature and what Dad says about her I’m not supposed to repeat. What will I do without Maddie?

  I think something is wrong with Mom. Okay. I’ve said it. I’ve had my suspicions for some time now. There have been clues. Like last night I caught her just sitting on the couch. My dad does that too, but when Mom does it, it scares me. Usually, she’s so full of energy she can never sit still. Even when she’s relaxing she’s always wiggling her foot or something. Then this morning I heard the unmistakable sound of someone barfing in the bathroom. When Mom opened the door, she looked flustered to find me standing there with my stethoscope.

  “Oh hello, Millie,” she said, trying to sound upbeat. “How are you?”

  That’s what I wanted to ask her. Only, if I did, it might be bad luck. You know, to bring it out in the open. Maddie says that if you don’t want to know the answer, then don’t ask the question. She was referring to how many grams of fat are in a box of See’s chocolates, but I think her advice holds true in this situation.

  I’ve often reflected on my relationship with my mother. Though she doesn’t understand me and is quite accomplished at getting on my nerves, we share a strong mother–daughter bond. However, I’ve observed that sometimes she has a hard time deciding whether to act as a peer or a parent. This is a common occurrence among working mothers, so I try to be sensitive to her needs. Therefore, I refrain from bringing up subjects like death and estate planning.

  On the few occasions when I have asked what would become of me if I were suddenly orphaned, my father has accused me of being morbid and my mother gets tight-lipped and says that in case of catastrophic illness or death I will be amply provided for. Still, I cannot stop my brain from thinking about what would happen to me if, say, my parents’ airbags failed to deploy, or they accidentally ate some poisonous mushrooms, or if my mother has a fatal illness.

  Maddie and I saw Dark Victory at one of our ditch sessions from school. In it, Bette Davis is this fun-loving society girl who discovers that she has a brain tumor. Her doctor falls hopelessly in love with her and we see Bette Davis change from a shallow, self-centered individual to someone full of love and depth. Then she goes blind and dies.

  This morning at breakfast Dad was trying to scrape the last bit of apricot jam from the jar, and Mom was studying an ad for the Macy’s Summer Sale. “I can’t read the fine print in this newspaper,” she said, squinting and moving the paper right up to her nose.

  Immediately, I flashed back to blind Bette Davis and began to gag on my Pop-Tart. When my universal signal for choking — arms crossed, hands to throat — was ignored, I was forced to administer the Heimlich maneuver on myself. Luckily, I have my Red Cross first aid certificate.

  All the while, my parents would not stop laughing. They thought I was joking. “Really, Millie,” my father said, wiping his eyes with his napkin. “You are so dramatic. You must get that from your mother’s side.”

  At that, Mom pretended to choke on her Cream of Wheat and they both burst out laughing again. I could have died, and they were laughing.

  Almost 56 million people die each year. And more than 2.4 million of them are from the United States. After we lost Grandpa, I’d lie awake at night and worry about who might be next.

  “Millicent,” my mother said during one of those nights. “There are some problems that not even you can solve.” Her hand felt cool as it stroked my hair. Some of our best moments are right before bed when we just talk or enjoy the silence.

  Dad starts his new job soon. He’s really nervous about it, and whenever we ask him questions he just yammers and changes the subject. I hope they like him there. I can tell this means a lot to him.

  The other day at tutoring, Emily “just happened” to drop by. She also “just happened” to be wearing a new sundress and “just happened” to have a suspiciously deep dark tan, except for spots on her back and near her left ear. When interrogated, she finally admitted that she had used Barbados in a Bottle, a fast-acting bronzer with shimmering flecks of light. She was totally fake. Like I also really believed she needed to check out a book on the Los Angeles Lakers.

  Stanford looked thrilled to see her. He promptly sat up straight and began grilling me on the importance of irony, saying things like, “Come on, Millicent, we’ve gone over this a thousand times before.”

  Then yesterday, Stanford showed up uninvited to volleyball, claiming he was “in the neighborhood.” He just sat in the bleachers gnawing on what looked like his shoe, though later I found out it was beef jerky. Both teams tried to show off for his benefit, and the girls kept gawking at him. You’d think they’d never seen a dolt before. The whole time Emily kept whispering to me, “I can’t believe he came to see us!” Afterward, she said to Stanford, “Millie and I were just going to get some ice cream.” To which Stan-jerk replied, “Really? So was I.” He’s as f
ake as Emily’s tan. Maybe the two of them deserve each other.

  So the three of us go get ice cream and Stanford pays for Emily’s, but not mine. The entire time the two of them were blabbing away as if I were not there. But the really amazing thing is they don’t really say anything of importance. I mean, Stanford acted as if everything Emily said about the latest fashions and her theory that man did not really land on the moon was fascinating. And Emily got all wide-eyed when Stanford re-created his winning moves from his latest basketball game. Spare me.

  When we are alone all Emily talks about is Stanford. “He’s so cute. And his eyes, those big brown eyes look like Bambi’s …”

  “His eyes only look big because his glasses magnify them,” I told her. “He’s nearsighted.”

  “… and his smile, he has the sweetest smile,” she continued. Nothing I said was sinking in.

  The only upside of this whole mess is that Stanford appears to be improving in his studies. The extra half hour of reading before basketball certainly helps, and these days he actually pays attention to me when I try to teach him something. He has to, because Emily’s always asking him how our tutoring sessions are going. She just loves listening to him prattle on and on about topics he hardly knows anything about.

  “Well, the theme of Holes is about belonging, isn’t it?” he told her the other day. I pretended to have a coughing spasm. “And, as I keep telling Millicent,” he said, raising his voice to drown me out, “Holes has a story within a story.”

  I can tell she is impressed. Emily thinks that Stanford is smart. And, ironically, around her he is.

  Today at the library, I glanced at Stanford’s notebook. There appeared to be drawings of Emily all over it. At least I think it was Emily. It was either her or an alien wearing the flowered dress Emily always wears, thinking it makes her look more alluring.

  It is abundantly clear that Emily and Stanford have a crush on each other. All Emily talks about is how cute Stanford is. How nice Stanford is. How smart Stanford is. How boring.