Talk Nerdy to Me

by Tiffany Schmidt

  “Hey.” She paused, and I realized she wasn’t greeting someone else; she was getting my attention. Merri waited for me to meet her eyes and unclench my jaw. “You’d be fine.”

  There was a slap-bang-laugh behind us, and we turned toward the commotion: Curtis. Greeting someone on his lacrosse team with a leaping chest bump that resulted in dropped books and guffaws like it was comedic genius. How could anyone make that much noise just entering a building? At least I’d been wrong about one thing—it hadn’t been a ball he’d caught and gnawed on the quad. An apple hung loose in his large hand. When he caught me staring, he held it up with a smile. “Bite?”

  I turned away in disgust. It wasn’t possible—it was the sort of detail Merri would include in one of her stories that I’d make her edit out for realism—but even from half a hallway away, I could smell that apple and feel his eyes on the back of my neck.

  I rubbed at the spot and filed into the classroom, where he’d sit two seats behind me. It was only second period; there was so much school left. But all I wanted was to get home and trade my uniform for workout clothes and run until this restlessness stopped chasing me.

  2

  I’ve never gotten nervous before oral presentations. Never sweated through a shirt or held note cards in shaky hands. I didn’t do stomach butterflies or sleepless nights before exams.

  I prepared. I learned the material. I did well. It was simple cause and effect. A pattern positively reinforced by years of As.

  Around me I could hear the complaints of my math classmates. “My parents are going to kill me,” intermixed with “What’d you get?” and “There goes my weekend.”

  I stared at the paper Mr. Neumoyer had placed facedown on my desk. I hadn’t finished the test—no one had—so I hadn’t thought it would be a problem. But even through the back of the page I could see the red pen circle and the number inside. Eighty-nine.

  I was an A student.

  That number was incontrovertibly a B. Only one standard deviation above average. There was a pulse of pain between my eyebrows as I tried to focus on Mr. Neumoyer’s speech about failing tests needing signatures. I should feel pity for those classmates, but I couldn’t spare any from myself.

  Merri’s eighty-five was faceup. She frowned but shrugged it off. I couldn’t shrug. Not then. Definitely not after school when the email I’d been expecting hit my inbox.

  Eliza—

  Your latest math test was posted. We’re concerned and will be calling tonight. Make yourself available. Be prepared to communicate a reason for this grade as well as steps you’ll take to prevent similar scores in the future.

  It was from Dad’s email. Not that he’d signed it. No time for closings or sentiment when their offspring had performed in a substandard manner. Actually, no time for sentiment ever.

  They hadn’t given a time for their call, which meant it hovered over my plans for the night. I could do today’s prescribed workout: thirty minutes of yoga and twenty minutes of weight training, paired with an audio file of a research article they’d chosen. But there was no way I could sneak in my run. The one I’d been looking forward to since I got off the treadmill last night, dripping and wobbly legged but mentally lighter, capable of completing the rest of the tasks on my to-do list and sleeping.

  My parents weren’t delaying the call to make me anxious. Telephone communication at South Pole Station was dependent on the positioning of satellites. Other Antarctic bases had more consistent access, but Amundsen-Scott was remote—at the pole—and if there wasn’t a satellite in range, they’d have to wait. Sometimes the access window narrowed to a few hours a day, unless they used the station’s iridium phones.

  I never wanted to get one of those calls, because they were only for emergencies. I couldn’t think about that—about the times when a medical emergency did occur at their base and how transportation from the South Pole wasn’t always possible. When those fears hit, when I had flashbacks to Brazil that left me quaking, I reminded myself I was safe in Pennsylvania and that, of the places they’d traveled, Antarctica seemed to be among the safest.

  No snakes, I reminded myself. No poisonous spiders. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms. No street gangs.

  I was making dinner when my phone rang. I alternated cooking nights with Nancy, the latest in my string of doctoral-student guardians, but she wouldn’t care if dinner was late. She was so deep in dissertation mode, I doubted she’d notice. I pulled the pot of bulgur off the stove and rested my knife against the piles of onions and tomatoes I’d been dicing. The salmon could stay in the oven, but I turned it off, then snatched up my phone, treading the fine line between delaying and missing their call. “Hello.”

  “We’re both here.” Mom’s crisp voice emanated from the receiver. Dr. Violet Gordon was the parent who was sterner, more pragmatic. My dad, Dr. Warner Fergus, had two modes: chummy, or distracted. I preferred them two on one; individually they were too intense.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “We’re well,” Dad answered. “I wish I could say the same about your math grade.”

  “Present the facts, Eliza.” It was what Mom always said, a throwback to when I’d tried emotional arguments for why I should have a later bedtime or be allowed to attend a slumber party, or eat ice cream, or join the soccer team. But I was no longer a second grader clutching a soccer permission slip and whimpering, “Everyone else is doing it,” only to be faced with “I guess ‘everyone else’s’ parents don’t care about the brain health of their children.” Because facts like “girls’ soccer has the highest concussion rate of youth sports” always trumped “but I like it.”

  I sat up straight on my kitchen stool. “It wasn’t a qualitative problem; it was a quantitative one. I understand the material perfectly. There were more problems on the test than could be solved within the class period. I didn’t get any wrong; I simply left some incomplete.”

  “You mismanaged your time, that’s what I’m hearing,” said Mom.

  “There wasn’t enough time. No one finished. But Mr. Neumoyer grades on a curve; my class average is a ninety-seven.”

  Dad hmm’d, and I imagined him nodding, his shaved head reflecting any overhead lights. I closed my eyes. I didn’t know what their current lab looked like, but I could picture other ones, where mini-me had had her own stool.

  They’d let me help as much as I could. Had asked for my observations and written them down like my findings had as much merit as their own. And when I hadn’t been able to be a hands-on participant, I’d had my own assignments—sometimes just coloring on copies of the periodic table. There’d been a place for me with them . . . until there wasn’t.

  Dad asked, “Was yours the top score?”

  “I was in the top.”

  “Your voice has gone up, which means you’re being evasive,” Mom said. “It’s times like these I wish we had video capabilities so I could analyze your body language.”

  If I didn’t satisfy them, they’d email my teacher. Merri called them “‘Space-station parents’—because they’re too far away to be helicopter, but they’re still right on top of you.”

  Ironically, I had fewer rules and more freedoms during their rare visits home. “Mr. Neumoyer mentioned one person scored above ninety.”

  “Which student? Merrilee? She’s quite competent at math.” I was waiting for the day they revolted against my best friend. Her rampant imagination and spontaneity were the antithesis of their priorities, but whenever they spoke about her, Mom would slip in something closer to a compliment than I ever got. “Quite competent at math” was high praise. On their last call Dad had dubbed her “formidable.”

  Blast! I was gritting my teeth, a habit I needed to break. “Merri got an eighty-five.”

  “I can email Dr. Walton at Princeton and ask if she has a doctoral student who’s available to tutor you,” Dad said, but Mom disagreed. “She’s more than capable.”

  I gripped the counter with white knuckles. In our family
, needing help was akin to failure—academic achievement should be independent and appear effortless. I’d grown up overhearing stories of their colleagues’ disappointing offspring: Dr. Feinstein’s son didn’t get into MIT. Have you met Dr. Ramos’s daughter? She’s an “artist”—I wonder what they even talk about? Dr. McNamara’s twins are taking an SAT prep course—a prep course!

  “I don’t need a tutor.”

  “Good.” I was relieved for a half second before Dad continued. “Then is it how you’re allocating your time? Perhaps we should do a, let’s call it an ‘energy audit,’ where you record your day in fifteen-minute intervals and we evaluate how you’re—”

  “That won’t be necessary.” I had only the illusion of privacy as it was—if they added this new demand, I’d lose even that. My jawline tightened in the distorted reflection on the window across from me. I forced the muscles to relax. Everyone who said I had a great poker face didn’t factor in how much time I’d had to perfect it while staring at my miniature on a computer screen. Antarctica might not have video-call capabilities, but most of their previous locations had. “This was one assessment. It’s an anomaly, not a pattern.”

  “Patterns start with one anomaly,” Mom said.

  “But in this case . . . ,” Dad began, and in the pause that followed, I imagined them exchanging looks, maybe even passing each other notes, “we’re going to accept your assertions—”

  “—with the caveat that your next score is back where it belongs.”

  Dad continued over Mom’s interruption. “Mr. Neumoyer also confirmed that this was a more difficult assessment and there was only one A.”

  I ground my teeth again. So it had been a trap to see if I’d tell the truth. Though they’d call it “verification by additional sources.”

  “Eliza.” There was a change in Mom’s voice—it went from inquisitive to informative. “We’ve never expected a school to be in charge of your education. That’s our responsibility.”

  “I realize that.” It was the explanation they gave for the work that filled my weekends and school breaks. They’d been home for only three days over Christmas, but in the rare moments they weren’t meeting with colleagues, they’d piled on assignments.

  Merri kept waiting for some clichéd teenage rebellion where I trashed our home lab, but I liked science. I found the processes and exactitude of experiments calming. Sure, my parents and I might not always overlap in the scientific topics we preferred, but it gave us something to talk about.

  Dad cleared his throat. “We had, however, expected your preparatory school to do a better job of rounding you.”

  “We’re not unaware that our educational efforts tend to be one-sided.” Mom’s laugh was a dry titter. Dad’s was closer to a cough. When I truly laughed, it was a wild honking sound that made them both freeze and blink. Luckily we weren’t a family that joked. In most instances, I could get away with a flat “Ha.”

  “If we were ignorant of cognitive neuroscience, we might make a humorous comment about your ‘creative left brain’ needing work.”

  Mom groaned. “How can people still believe that myth?”

  “Can you give me the bottom line?” I asked, because satellite phones weren’t always reliable, and if I was going to be reprimanded, I’d rather it happen before the signal dropped.

  “You need to do more,” Dad said.

  “You’ve accomplished nothing extraordinary since beginning at Hero High. Now that cross-country is over, do you have a single obligation outside of class?”

  That was the crux of it. Merri’s parents told her “Do your best.” I’d seen them praise Rory for a seventy because they’d known she’d tried. Mine expected “extraordinary.”

  And I’d done “nothing.” Besides homework, their assignments, their workouts, their logs. Cooking, shopping, cleaning. Driver’s ed and getting my license. Following their rules and directives and fitting in my secret workouts.

  Bracing for their reply, I asked, “Do you have a club you’d like me to join?”

  “Oh, that’s your decision,” Mom insisted. I waited a beat, swallowing a sigh they might hear through the speaker. “But we’ve narrowed it down to three you may choose between.”

  They’d used the word “choose,” but they’d have an obvious preference.

  “There’s robotics club, chess club, or academic bowl team,” Dad said.

  “The other option we discussed was if you should form your own group.”

  “It would be a good way for you to hone your leadership and interpersonal skills.”

  I closed my eyes and counted by fives, then by sevens. I’d trained myself not to react during these calls. Not to show emotion when their criticisms dug deep, or flinch when some data I’d reported didn’t measure up to their standards. When I didn’t measure up to their standards. But “leadership”? “Interpersonal skills”? They must be talking about their other, fictitious daughter, because those weren’t traits I possessed.

  84, 91, 98, 105 . . . “Academic bowl sounds promising.”

  “Good,” Mom said. “Well chosen.”

  The signal was holding, and I wanted to keep them on the line. I wanted them to ask me questions—real questions, not the data-entry ones from my log. Who cared about my blood pH or REM cycles or the protein-to-carbohydrate ratio in my diet? How about my day? How about the project my English teacher, Ms. Gregoire, had said she’d announce in class tomorrow? When she’d teased it today she’d added, “Some of you in here are skating . . . but not for long,” while looking in my direction. If I told them this, would they hear me, or would they jump to asking, “Are you skating?”

  I wanted to snicker over burnt suppers when Dad attempted to cook local cuisines. I wanted to fall asleep listening to them debate the merits of Darwin versus Wallace, Edison versus Tesla. But I wasn’t eight anymore. And they were nine thousand miles away.

  “Nancy can sign any permission forms,” Dad said. “Put her on the line, would you?”

  16, 32, 48, 64, 80, 96, 112. “Sure.” I knocked on the door of her office and held up my phone. “My parents.” Into the receiver I said, “Here’s Nancy.”

  She straightened from where she’d been bent over a laptop, her short black hair in disarray from absentminded finger furrows while she edited her dissertation. Taking my phone, she said, “Hello?” then nodded that I should leave. So I shut the door on a conversation that was likely about me, because what choice did I have?

  That’s what passed for goodbye with my parents. There was no “Miss you,” “Love you,” or “Talk soon.”

  They cared. They did. They wouldn’t spend their precious time analyzing every facet of my life if they weren’t invested in my well-being. They just communicated their affection in a different language than the Campbells’ good-night hugs and the notes they snuck in Rory’s and Merri’s lunches. Small talk wasn’t in my parents’ skill set, and I didn’t need them to hand me the perfect-temperature cup of chamomile tea, look me in the eye like they had all the time in the world, and say, “Catch me up on you.”

  I never knew how to answer when Mrs. Campbell did that. Or how to process my disloyal yearning when Mr. Campbell called me his “fourth daughter.”

  After Nancy returned my phone, I’d call Merri and tell her we’d be joining the academic bowl team. But first I unplugged my headphones from their charger and filled a water bottle. Dinner could wait. Four miles. That was my estimate for how long it would take to chase away these feelings. So that when I spoke to Merri, I could present this like it was something I wanted to do. If I didn’t sell it, she’d be in their inboxes with a passionate defense. But Merri never realized that for every battle she won with them—permission to have a doughnut on the first day of school, assent for the occasional sleepover, the privilege of no longer turning in my cell phone to my guardian before my designated bedtime—they added additional restrictions to some other aspect of my life. If she protested this, I’d be forced to start my own club.

&
nbsp; I practiced the words in my empty kitchen. “Academic bowl sounds fun. Doesn’t it?”

  Better make it five miles.

  3

  My English teacher’s black wrap dress was covered in pairs of antique keys that crossed in Xs all over the fabric. Her red lipstick outlined a half-moon smile as she waited in the classroom’s doorway. “Come in and get settled. I need every second of class time to go over this assignment.”

  Merri was captivated by Ms. Gregoire’s personal style. A staple of our drives home was my best friend deconstructing her outfits: the printed dresses (“They’re so glamorous, not cute like you’d think. I mean, bicycles on clothing sounds like it’d be cute, but it’s glam!”), her shoes (“Did you see her heels? How does she glide around the room on such high heels?”), and her hair (“I’ve always wanted to be a redhead; Ms. Gregoire’s hair makes me explode with follicular envy”).

  Personally, I thought the heels were a poor choice that would lead to joint and back pain as well as shortened Achilles tendons. But I’d admit to being intrigued by her dresses and elaborate hairstyles.

  That day was no exception. Her hair was in a loose side braid that looked purposefully messy. I didn’t know how to do that. I could do a braid or a bun, or any other style that required precision. But anything that was beachy, or casual, or involved random pieces hanging or wafting was beyond me.

  “Get seated,” Ms. Gregoire announced, and Merri practically squealed as she settled into her desk between Toby and me. This was the only class our whole lunch table had together. Hannah Kim and her girlfriend, Sera Williams, sat on my other side. Curtis—the only person who could make shy Sera laugh out loud—was next. To his left was Lance Volgate. They’d been Toby’s friends, and since Merri was friends with him and I was friends with her, it was where we’d melded when she and I transferred. If Merri and I had started at Hero High as freshmen, it’s probable we’d eat lunch at a different table and my group texts would come from different numbers.