by Lisa Yee
“Say, Millie,” Stanford said, looking up from Holes, “do you think I should cut my hair? You know, maybe get a buzz cut?”
I could not believe he was asking me that now. We were supposed to be studying. And why would he ask me? He never asked my opinion about anything before. He was acting very odd. Nicer. When we met in front of the library yesterday he was carrying a volleyball in addition to his usual basketball. It’s ridiculous the way he is never without his basketball.
“What’s that for?” I asked as I shifted my briefcase to the other hand. It was starting to get heavy. Mom says I should take out the almanac, yet you never know when you might need one.
“It’s to play volleyball.”
“I know that,” I bristled. “But why do you have one?”
“Well, I noticed that you could use some help with your serve.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my serve,” I lied. Despite my dramatic improvements, there is still a lot wrong with my serves, and my sets and my spikes. However, this does not affect my efficiency as the team’s official scorekeeper and statistician.
“Watch,” Stanford said as he demonstrated the way I serve. I laughed because he looked like such a spaz. He retrieved the ball from the library parking lot and tossed it to me. “Here,” he said. “You have to strike off your palm and the ball will go in the direction your palm faces. Okay, that’s good. Now hit it.”
I hit the ball and it wimped out, going straight toward the ground.
Stanford frowned. “Hold it again, and watch your palm when you strike the ball. And this time also bend your wrist backward, that way it’ll go up higher,” he instructed.
I did what he told me and watched in amazement as the ball formed a perfect arc in the air. We tried it a few more times and were successful. I wanted to keep going, but Stanford stopped me. “We’d better get to the library now,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’ve got a book report due soon.”
That Stanford is doing well in English is astonishing to us both. He has actually almost finished Holes and is well on his way with Number the Stars.
I have always been a reader. Mrs. Martinez, many of my teachers and, of course, my innate curiosity have led me to wonderful books. Even as a youngster, I was drawn to literature, choosing Katherine Paterson over The Dumb Bunnies and Sid Fleischman instead of Barney and Friends. As for comics, they are a genre unto themselves, and like my grandfather before me, I only read the classics.
When I was at Emily’s a couple nights ago, Alice was puttering around in a fetching dashiki. Her feet were bare and I could see a new silver toe ring on her left foot.
“What are you working on now?” I asked her. I had noticed a pile of books about Shakespeare on the dining room table. Oh, how I longed to linger over them.
“William Shakespeare and his effect on young readers,” Alice said, looking up from her laptop. “I’m tracking a group of inner-city youngsters who were exposed to Shakespeare at an early age and seeing where they are today.”
“It sounds fascinating,” I told her. “I’d love to hear more about it.”
“Well, when I’m further along with the article, how about we discuss it?”
“I would love to!” How cool to be able to read an Alice X. Ebers article before anyone else.
“Are you interested in Shakespeare, Millie?” asked Alice.
“Oh, he’s the best!” Just as I was about to rhapsodize more about the great bard, I stopped myself, remembering who I was supposed to be. A middle-school girl getting tutored in English because she is failing. “Or so I’ve heard,” I quickly added.
“Yes,” Alice said dreamily. “Brilliant and still topical, even today.”
“Millie!” Emily yelled from her room. “Come in here, I need you now!!!”
“I’d better go,” I said to Alice. I was reluctant to leave and I think she liked talking to me too. She seems sort of lonely.
“Okay then,” Alice said, returning to her laptop. “We’ll continue this conversation later.”
“What’s it like to have a hippie for a mom?” I asked Emily.
“I don’t have a hippie for a mom. Do you think I should wear lip gloss?” Emily put some on before I could answer. “Do you think Stanford likes lip gloss?”
“You do so have a hippie for a mom,” I told Emily. “Listen to her music. Look at how she dresses.”
“Oh, that,” Emily said dismissively. She started dousing herself with White Lightning. She had just bought the perfume with her father’s charge card and spent so much that the lady gave her a free gift with purchase: a large white tote bag, a travel compact, a set of mini lipsticks, and a tiny comb. Emily wiped off her lip gloss and tried on one of the lipsticks. “That’s not my real mom,” she said, making kissy faces in the mirror.
I began to choke. I have many allergies and perfume is one of them. “Explain that,” I said, trying to wave the offending odor away.
“Alice started dressing funny after we moved here. She’s just going through another one of her phases. You should have seen her when she was in her career woman phase. She wore suits and pantyhose all the time. It was freaky.” Emily turned toward me and got serious. “Tell me the truth,” she said. “Which smile looks better? This one?” She did a big grin. “Or this one?” She smiled with her mouth closed.
I chose the toothy grin. Emily has been obsessing over her teeth. The dentist said she needs braces because her front two teeth overlap slightly. I have never given much thought to orthodontia, though I am probably destined to get braces since it is just one more thing to push me firmly into the nerd category.
I was six when I lost my first tooth. I thrilled at the notion that my primary dentation had passed and I was on to the beginnings of my permanent set of teeth. My father, on the other hand, spent the better part of a day trying to convince me to slip my tooth under my pillow. Finally, just to quiet him, I gave in. When I awoke, my tooth was gone and a shiny silver dollar was in its place.
As I approached the breakfast table, Dad was downright giddy. “Find anything special under your pillow?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant. My mother suppressed a smile, then returned to beating the lumps out of the pancake batter.
“Dad,” I replied, attempting to let him down gently, “I know it was you who took my central incisor. Now may I please have it back? I’d like to study it under my microscope.”
I tried to return the money. Of course, he refused the silver dollar and unconvincingly denied any knowledge about what I was talking about. A heated debate resulted and in the end I was once more in possession of my tooth, which I still have to this day.
My father looked dejected throughout the remainder of his breakfast and even went so far as to turn down seconds of buttermilk pancakes. The tooth fairy never visited me again after that.
Yesterday, while working on our lateral passes at volleyball practice, Emily confided, “Millie, sometimes I wish I were you. You’re so lucky, you get to spend all that time alone with Stanford. What’s it like when it’s just the two of you? He’s so incredibly gifted. I’ll bet you could just listen to him all day….”
In an effort to stop myself from yelling out the truth, I threw myself in front of the ball and, to the amazement of all, did an incredible dig.
“Keep up the good work, Millicent,” Coach Gowin yelled.
That night, as we consumed penne pesto pasta with assorted vegetables (peas, squash, zucchini, and carrots), I studied Emily’s mother. She was wearing a tie-dyed top and cutoffs. Her shirt, I noticed, still had its tag on, and she had paid full price.
Alice passed the garlic bread and asked me, “How are you doing with your schoolwork?” She had gotten her ears pierced again, making it a total of five holes. When I first met her I could have sworn she wore clip-on earrings.
“Just great!” I said. “With each class I find myself gaining a greater critical and aesthetic understanding of poetry and its importance to
our society.”
“Gee, that’s pretty impressive for a middle-school student,” Alice said, giving me an inquisitive look. I averted my eyes to my plate. “I’d love to talk to you and your father some day about homeschooling,” she said. “It’s such a big trend, maybe I can do an article about it and you two can be in it.”
Panic. Total panic. “My dad’s shy,” I said quickly.
“He is not,” Emily jumped in.
“I find it interesting that you go to summer school to supplement your homeschooling.” Alice insisted on pursuing the subject. “Is it odd being the sole student in one venue and then being in a classroom full of kids for another?”
“Uh, no,” I said, wishing she would talk about something else, anything else. “I hear melons are in season! Mom says you can get really good ones at the farmers’ market. I am especially fond of honeydew, but you can’t beat a ripe cantaloupe!”
“Emily tells me that you are also being tutored,” Alice said, pressing forward.
I could hear Emily groan in the background. “Mommmm …”
“That’s all right,” Alice said, cutting her off. “Having a tutor is nothing to be ashamed of, is it, Millicent?”
I shook my head and speared four pieces of penne pasta, one on each fork tine. But Alice would not drop the subject. “It’s great that your father recognizes he needs assistance teaching English, and to have that boy, what is his name …?”
“Stanford,” Emily and I muttered at the same time.
“Yes, for Stanford to volunteer to tutor you is so thoughtful of him. He must be a very nice and smart young man.”
“Oh! He’s supersmart,” Emily chirped. “He knows everything about books. If it weren’t for him, Millie would probably fail her summer school class.”
I wondered if retching all over the table would be considered rude.
After dinner, Alice called me into her room. There was a king-size bed with mosquito netting over it and candles all over the nightstands. None were lit, nor had their wicks ever been singed.
Alice pulled something out of a bag and handed it to me. She looked pleased with herself. I stared at the book. It was Ramona the Pest. “If it gets too hard, I’d be happy to help you with the big words,” she said, looking at me expectantly.
I started to tell her that I was actually close to finishing the biography of famed educationalist Maria Montessori. I thought it would help with my tutoring of Stanford. Then I caught myself, remembering my pledge.
“Thank you for the book,” I managed to sputter.
When I got home, my mother was lying on the couch using my dad for a pillow. They were watching The Lone Ranger. “Hi, Millie. Did you have a nice time at Emily’s?” she asked. Before I could reply, Mom noticed the book.
“Oh! I love Beverly Cleary,” she gushed, struggling to sit up. “I remember reading Ramona the Pest when I was a kid. It made me wish I had a sister.”
“Shhhh,” Dad said, “Tonto’s in trouble and Silver is the only one who can save him.”
My father loves The Lone Ranger and forces me to watch the reruns. During the commercials I have to listen to him describe the cowboy costume he used to wear when he was a boy. He always ends his monologue with “I wish I knew where it was.” As if it would still fit him.
Dad is really into telling me stuff about when he was a kid — a classic case of arrested development. Mom’s not all that much better. She’s keen on pointing out things like “When I was your age we had to bake potatoes in the oven because we didn’t have microwaves.” Or “Before remotes we had to get off the couch to change the channel.” I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel sorry for her or be grateful that I don’t have to scrub my socks on a washboard.
As for my own childhood, it pretty much disappeared when I was two years old. That’s when my parents had me tested. I had to take the IQ test twice since the first results were thought to be a computer glitch. “This little girl’s IQ is so high it’s an anomaly,” my parents were informed. “She is nothing near normal.”
Once my “genius” came to light, I was recognized as a celebrity of sorts. I was on television that same year reciting all the United States presidents. “In what order would you like to hear them?” I asked Jay Leno. “Alphabetical or by year in office?”
After a while, my parents felt the spotlight was not really a good thing for me. “Too much glare,” I overheard Mom telling Dad. So they curbed my appearances and instead focused on my education. At my insistence, toys were replaced by books, and my favorite poster was not one of Elmo but Einstein. When I was three, I’d read to my parents (a favorite book of mine being Will and Ariel Durant’s The Age of Reason Begins: A History of European Civilization in the Period of Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, Rembrandt, Galileo, and Descartes: 1558–1648) until they fell asleep. Then I’d keep on reading to myself until my eyes betrayed me and I joined them in slumber.
The other day, Professor Skylanski asked me if I felt I had missed out on anything since I’ve been in school most of my life. “Missed out?” I said, trying not to snicker. “No, not at all. I consider myself lucky to be in college. Besides, I’m totally well-rounded. I have a best friend my age, Emily, and even another sort-of friend, Stanford. He’s a boy, but not a ‘boyfriend,’ if you know what I mean. Plus, I’m on a volleyball team and no one makes fun of me anymore,” I added proudly.
“That’s really great, Millicent,” Professor Skylanski said as she erased her Top 10 All-Time Poets from the blackboard. “You’re such a wonderful student, and I’m glad you realize that there is more to life than school. In order to truly appreciate poetry, one has to have a wealth of experiences to draw from.”
I nodded. “Everything’s going great,” I assured her. And it was, other than Maddie leaving, my mother dying, and the tangle of lies I had gotten myself into with Emily.
Emily confided today that she feels rotten about her parents’ divorce. Her father is already dating some “gold digger” with a daughter our age. Recently, he took the two of them to see the Radio City Rockettes. “… and if he bought them hot fudge sundaes afterward, I’ll just die!” she howled as she punched her pillow.
I started to tell Emily that she was better off without her dad, but when I noticed that she didn’t feel the same way, I changed my tactics. He still means a lot to her, even if she claims otherwise.
What I really wanted to tell her was about me, the real me. The geek-genius me, the me who’s worried about my mom and who doesn’t want Maddie to leave. I decided to lead into my confession slowly.
“Well, there is one good thing about you coming to Rancho Rosetta,” I ventured.
“And that would be …?” she asked as she continually applied and reapplied her LipSmackers.
“Me!” I said. “We wouldn’t be best friends if you never came here.”
There, I got her to smile. It’s pretty great to be able to make someone smile.
“I like that we can tell each other everything and not have to worry about what the other person thinks,” said Emily. Good, she was going to make this easy for me. “Like that Stanford is tutoring you. You were honest enough to own up to it. I can’t tell you how much I admire you for that.
“I feel like you’re the only person I can be totally honest with. If I try to tell Alice how I feel about Dad, she gets all weirded-out and cries.” Emily looked like she was on the verge of tears. “Millie, you’re so honest it shames me.”
My stomach did the somersault that my body was incapable of doing during volleyball.
“Are you okay?” Emily looked concerned. “Are you sick? Should I get Alice?”
“It’s just that …” I tried to speak but couldn’t. “It’s just that, I’m really not …”
Emily held up her hand. “Hey, it’s okay,” she said. “Whatever you have to say can wait until you feel better, all right?”
“Okay,” I said, gasping for breath. “Yeah, it can wait. It’s no
t important.”
“She can’t find out you’re tutoring me,” Stanford wailed. “Emily’ll think I’m stupid.” I bit my tongue. “Besides, you swore on your mother’s life that you wouldn’t tell, remember?”
“Well, what about me?” I asked. “If she finds out I am a genius then she’ll know I’ve lied and think I’m a total geek.”
“That’s true,” he said, nodding solemnly.
“We have to tell her,” I insisted. “She deserves to know.”
“I don’t like all this pretending either,” Stanford said, biting into a Big Mac. We were at McDonald’s lamenting our mutual problem. “But Emily really likes me. She thinks I’m smart. No one’s ever thought that I was smart before.” I nodded and sipped my chocolate shake. “There’s just something about her,” he continued. “She’s different, but in a good way. When I’m around Emily I feel important.” I knew what he meant.
“You know,” I warned him, “when school starts you’ll be seeing Emily on campus and she’s bound to find out.” Stanford let out a massive groan and pounded the table with his fist. Just then, the toddler at the next table spit up. His mother grabbed him and scurried to the bathroom, leaving their fries scattered all over the table.
“That was disgusting,” Stanford noted as he mixed mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard together and then dipped his pickle into it.
In the end, Stanford and I agreed not to mention anything to Emily, not just yet anyway. He wanted to do the spit-in-the-hand promise, but I assured him that I was good for my word.
In a strange way our lie has bound us together. Yesterday when we were at the mall with Emily, Stanford and I were both constantly on guard, helping each other so that our secret would not be discovered. At first I was upset to have Stanford popping up all the time. But for some reason, he doesn’t seem as annoying as he used to be.
Lately, our tutoring sessions are not as excruciating as they were at the beginning of summer. Maybe I’ve grown accustomed to the pain, or maybe Stanford has actually learned a few things. He is making steps, albeit small ones, and I know he has the ability to do well if he sets his mind to it. Anyone who can analyze the performance of every player in the NBA can certainly appreciate the significance of plot, characterization, and theme.