Hazel's Theory of Evolution

by Lisa Jenn Bigelow

  “You know what that means!” somebody stage-whispered. “S-E-X E-D!”

  But it didn’t—at least not today. Mrs. Paradisi walked around the room, handing out assignment packets. “Most people are under the impression that healthy relationships, whatever the nature of said relationships, are about understanding the other person,” she said. “Wrong. Well, mostly wrong. They’re about understanding yourself—your needs and wants, your vulnerabilities and strengths and limitations, your areas for growth.”

  She stopped and gave each of us a piercing bird stare before continuing. “However, I believe it’s impossible to understand ourselves without understanding where we come from. Which is why I like to start this unit by creating a family history.”

  Ignoring the groans of the class, she explained that the assignment had two parts. The first was to chart our family tree going back as many generations as we could. The second was to write a personal essay about “our family members’ roles in shaping us into unique individuals.”

  I studied the sample tree with its spots for parents’ names and dates of birth and death. Siblings’, grandparents’, aunts’ and uncles’ and cousins’. The farther up you went, the more complex it got.

  It didn’t make sense, though. The space for my name was at the bottom of the tree, where the trunk would emerge from the ground, the rest of the family arranged on branches splitting toward the sky. But I came from them, not the other way around. They ought to be roots, not branches. I turned my paper upside down and felt much better.

  Then there was the issue that my real-life tree wasn’t anywhere near this tidy. Under the surface, the roots were tangled. For starters, what was I supposed to do about Paul?

  I began to raise my hand to ask Mrs. Paradisi, but Yosh beat me with a question of his own. “What if you’re adopted and don’t know anything about your biological family?”

  I was startled. Yosh was adopted? Even though Mimi had legally adopted me, I didn’t think of myself as adopted because all my parents were alive and present in my life. Still, I hadn’t thought I had anything in common with Yosh, even a technicality.

  “You can complete the assignment using information from your adoptive family,” Mrs. Paradisi answered, “or I can provide an alternative activity, if you’d prefer.”

  “No, that’s all right,” Yosh said. “I’m not adopted. I was just curious.”

  He winked at me. I rolled my eyes, annoyed and oddly disappointed.

  Since we’d started sitting together at lunch, we’d begun talking to each other more in H&HD. Which is to say we actually said hello and goodbye. But I wouldn’t have called him a friend. Between his sarcasm and weird sense of humor, I had trouble pinpointing the times he was serious. And when I guessed wrong, he laughed at me. How could I trust someone like that?

  “Mrs. Paradisi,” I asked, “what if your family isn’t like this?”

  Her forehead creased. “Tell me what you mean.”

  “Well . . . I have two moms, but I also know my biological father. And my one mom’s parents are divorced and remarried. And my other grandmother died, and my grandfather remarried. And—”

  “Ah,” Mrs. Paradisi said. “You’re right, Hazel, families are complicated. That’s why many serious genealogists use computers to create their family trees. This is a simplified version—definitely not one size fits all. Please add or subtract branches as you see fit. The main thing is to represent everyone important in your family.”

  I nodded and picked up my pencil. I filled in my name and birthdate, and then Mom’s and Mimi’s, with a miniature dotted-line root for Paul. I added Rowan next to me and then stopped. What was I supposed to do about Lena and Miles?

  They were part of my family, obviously. And they were important, obviously. I wrote their names and paused again at date of birth and date of death.

  Miles had a stillbirth certificate, which had most of the same information as a birth certificate, plus his number of weeks’ gestation. Lena had died too early even for that. From the government’s perspective, she was a statistic without a name. Did Miles count but not Lena? I couldn’t have one without the other. I erased their names—

  —and felt sick to my stomach. Erasing them from the family tree felt like denying their existence. I couldn’t do that, especially with Mom’s words fresh in my mind from the memorial: They are part of our family, every moment of every day. They are our daughter and son, our sister and brother. Nothing changes that.

  I wrote their names back in, reluctantly adding the single dates precisely halfway between the spots marked DOB and DOD. Anyone who didn’t know better would assume they were beginnings without ends. Then I paused, yet again. Because not everyone understood.

  The day after Lena died, Mom had given me the choice of going to school or staying home. I’d gone, partly because Rowan was going and I didn’t want to seem like a baby, but also because we were having our state capitals test. The teacher would’ve given me a makeup, but I’d studied hard and wanted to get it over with.

  It was a mistake. Kirsten had noticed my red eyes immediately. “What’s the matter?” she’d taunted. “Get kicked by a goat?”

  I should’ve ignored her—I knew it as soon as I opened my mouth—but I told the truth. “My sister died.”

  “What are you talking about? I saw your family at back-to-school night. Two mothers and a brother, same as always.”

  “One of my moms was pregnant. She had a miscarriage.”

  Kirsten sighed scornfully. “That doesn’t count. People have those all the time. My mom even had one before she had me. She said it’s Nature’s way of fixing its mistakes.”

  The thought of Lena being anyone’s mistake, especially Nature’s, infuriated me. My fists curled.

  Kirsten went on. “What counts is when Andrew’s mom died in a car crash.” Andrew looked sick, and his ears turned bright pink. “What counts is when Benny Bradley died of leukemia. But you? You don’t have anything to cry about, Goat Girl. Stop faking it.”

  I was angry—but also tongue-tied. I never would’ve admitted it, but Kirsten was right: Lena dying wasn’t the same as Andrew’s mom or Benny dying. I’d been little when Gaga died, but I remembered it, and it wasn’t the same as that, either. I still thought of her pillowy hugs and the way she always slipped me a Life Saver when the grown-ups’ conversations got too boring. She made the best pies, apple and peach and sweet potato, with a crust so flaky it melted in your mouth. She called me babydoll.

  I didn’t have those kinds of memories of Lena. Until the day before, she hadn’t had a name. We hadn’t even known she was a girl. She was just the baby.

  It was sort of like Uncle Burt. He’d been killed by an IED in Afghanistan when I was two. There were photos of him holding me as a baby, but I didn’t remember him. When I looked at his freckled face grinning at me, his strong arms swinging me, I felt like I was looking at another me—a me who would grow up knowing her uncle Burt. And he was an uncle Burt who’d someday have a ten-year-old niece named Hazel. But neither of us got to be those people. If I hadn’t known better, I might’ve thought the man in the pictures was some random guy who happened to look like a more muscular version of Rowan.

  When I held Lena in Mimi’s hospital room, I’d felt the same kind of distance, the same kind of numbness. I had a baby sister, five months ahead of schedule, but she didn’t really feel like my baby sister. It wasn’t because she was dead. It was because I’d never seen her face before, never heard her cry. She was a stranger. Mostly I couldn’t believe how small and light she was. I was holding her as gently as a china cup, and I still worried I’d break her.

  I kept thinking of the stupidest stuff—how Mimi and I were supposed to have another five months of reading the pregnancy book together, as Lena grew to the size of progressively bigger fruits. How Aunt Keisha and I had been planning a baby shower, and Becca and I were going to bake the cupcakes. How I was going to be the baby’s godmother and teach her everything. None of tha
t stuff mattered now, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking it.

  Kirsten said I had nothing to cry about. And maybe I was mainly crying because Mimi and Mom were crying. Even Rowan was crying. It was catching. But even if I couldn’t explain why I was so sad, my heart was still broken.

  My eyes had darted to Becca, but she hadn’t said a word. She’d stood frozen. Maybe she was too terrified of Kirsten to speak up. Maybe she believed Kirsten was right. Maybe both.

  Then the teacher came in and made us all sit down and passed out the test. I got an A. It felt like the worst grade I’d ever gotten because I knew it didn’t matter at all.

  After Miles, I hadn’t gone back to school right away, and I hadn’t told anybody what had happened, except for Becca. Some things were too hard to explain to people who hadn’t gone through it themselves.

  I didn’t want to have to explain it to Mrs. Paradisi or anyone else in H&HD, that was for sure. Silently begging Lena’s and Miles’s forgiveness, I erased their names again.

  “What’s the problem?” Yosh said. “Not enough room to list all the goats?”

  I slid my arm over my family tree to hide it from view. At the same time, I tried to sneakily wipe my eyes. My vision had gone swimmy. “Huh?”

  “You live on a goat farm, right? I figured you’d want to include them in your siblings. Or are they your cousins?” His dark eyes glittered.

  “They’re neither,” I said before realizing how stupid I sounded. Of course Yosh didn’t think the goats were my siblings. He was making a joke—again. Everything was a joke to him.

  Had he seen Lena’s and Miles’s names, written and erased twice over? Carina had told him about my family, but she wouldn’t have mentioned them because she didn’t know herself. “Why do you have a wheelchair?” I asked, not caring if it was rude. I needed to distract him.

  Yosh didn’t seem at all bothered. “Haven’t you heard?”

  “If I had, would I be asking?”

  He studied the ceiling. “It’s one of those stories that never seems to go away. But then, you do live on a farm. I suppose your access to information may be spotty.”

  “Heard about what?” I said, growing irritated.

  “Fine, hold your horses. Goats. Whatever. The story on the streets isn’t the whole truth, anyway.” Yosh lowered his voice. “My parents are scientists in the pharmaceutical industry. And between you and me, they’re not working on your everyday over-the-counter medications. No cough syrup or allergy pills for them. I’m talking heavy-duty stuff.”

  “Narcotics?” I asked, wondering where this was going.

  “Ugh, no,” Yosh said. “You’ve got to think bigger. Have you ever heard of DARPA?”

  “Is that the association for retired people?”

  Yosh shook his head. “Nope. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s what the U.S. military uses to develop all their top-secret technology—the truly cutting-edge stuff. Stuff that sounds like science fiction.”

  “Like flying cars?” Now I was really confused.

  Yosh shook his head. “Try flying people. See, my parents had this theory that if you could flip a couple of switches in the genetic code, humans would be capable of flight. The problem is, as you can imagine, it’s highly dangerous research. Hard to get volunteers. So when my mom got pregnant, it was only natural for her to be a guinea pig.” He shrugged and gestured at himself. “Well, let’s say round one was not a complete success. Instead of a flying kid, they got one who couldn’t even walk.”

  “You’re so full of it,” I said, annoyed. “Are you capable of being serious for even thirty seconds?”

  “Swear to God, it’s the truth,” Yosh said.

  I couldn’t believe it. At least, I didn’t think I could. “You need a wheelchair because you’re the result of a failed top-secret government genetic engineering experiment.”

  “Is that so hard to swallow?”

  His face was as serious as I’d ever seen it. Maybe I shouldn’t be so skeptical. “I—I don’t know.”

  Yosh kept me hanging another long moment. Then his mouth twitched, and he let loose a bray of laughter worthy of Pax. “Hilarious! You were actually starting to buy it, weren’t you?”

  I flushed. “Excuse me for giving you the benefit of the doubt. Besides, you swore to God!”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” Yosh said. “I’m an atheist down to the bone.”

  “Why won’t you tell me the truth? You’re acting like it’s classified. For real.”

  Yosh shrugged. “Maybe it is. Maybe you don’t have the security clearance.”

  He said it like he was kidding, yet it sounded more honest than anything he’d ever said to me. I didn’t trust Yosh, and for reasons I didn’t understand, he didn’t trust me either.

  Chapter 12

  That night, I was just finishing with the dishes when the phone rang. I wiped my hands on my jeans and picked up, only to have someone squeal, “Haaazzzel!” in my ear.

  “Uh, hi . . . Becca?” I started for the stairs.

  “I feel like it’s been forever since we’ve talked,” she said, calmer and quieter. In other words, more like the Becca I knew.

  “Almost a week,” I agreed. “How did that happen?”

  “Ugh,” Becca said. “Good question. Well, there was the game on Thursday, and practice on Friday, and all weekend I had to catch up on homework, plus help my parents clean and shop and cook for Rosh Hashanah. So really, I called you as soon as I could.”

  By the time she’d finished her sentence, I’d reached the top of the stairs. I slipped into my room and shut the door. “Happy New Year,” I said. “Thanks for calling.”

  It was weird thanking her. Talking to each other never used to be a special occasion. But she was so busy now, I felt almost as if she were doing me a favor by reaching out. It wasn’t a good feeling, either.

  “Of course,” she said. “I have so much to tell you! So, we cheered our first game and—”

  “I saw the pictures.”

  Dozens of them, it felt like, of Becca and the other cheerleaders and Otto, the Osterhout otter mascot, hopping and kicking and shaking their pompoms in front of a field of green. I wondered what extraterrestrials would think of humanity if they came to Earth in the middle of a football game. Would they think, These folks know how to have a good time, let’s join ’em? Or, Whoops, never mind, no sign of intelligent life here?

  “Oh, right, I saw your comments,” Becca said. “Thanks. Well, everything went great. Not perfect, but really good considering we’ve only been a team for a couple of weeks. I was sure I’d trip over my own feet the whole game, but I only messed up twice, and I don’t think anyone could tell from the stands. Mom and Dad said everything looked perfect, but then, they would.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “I mean, that’s fantastic.”

  “Anyway, at the end of halftime, Connor Wiggins, who’s playing Otto, decided it would be a good idea to pick up Kirsten and—”

  I tried to listen to Becca’s story and laugh in the right places, but I kept thinking, What makes you think I want to hear about Kirsten? How are any of these people your friends, anyway, when they’re so different from us? Are they the reason it’s taken you so long to call me?

  Finally, I broke in. “We did the anniversary thing on Sunday.”

  There was a long pause. Becca asked, “Wait, which anniversary thing?”

  “You know. In the memory garden.”

  A briefer pause. Then, “Ohhh. I’m sorry. I remember now. How was it? Are you—is everyone okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, “everyone’s okay.”

  “Well . . . that’s good, then.”

  There was a strange note in Becca’s voice. It took me a moment to identify it as confusion. She was wondering why I’d interrupted her story—her funny story—to tell her something sad, especially since I wasn’t upset. Except, of course, I was. Some things were never okay, no matter what you said. Becca ought to have known that.
r />   “It’s been two years since Miles, hasn’t it?” she said quietly.

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “And three since Lena.”

  “It feels like such a long time ago.”

  And there it was: for Becca, this was old news. Old, and irrelevant. Because she didn’t know about the new baby. More than ever, I didn’t want to tell her. More than ever, I needed to.

  It shouldn’t have been so hard. All I had to say was, I have something to tell you. All I had to say was, Mimi’s pregnant again. And maybe she’d finally understand how I felt.

  But before I could force the words out, Becca said, “So, anyway . . . because of her sprained wrist, Kirsten can’t even shake a pompom with that hand. She’s got to wear a splint, and Connor’s benched until she gets it off, and now Coach has to find a substitute Otto—”

  I couldn’t find it in me to interrupt again. I couldn’t even enjoy Kirsten’s sprained wrist.

  When Becca got to a stopping point, I said, “Are we having a sleepover this weekend?”

  “Oh.” Becca’s energy fizzled like a candle flame I’d blown out in one big puff. “I’m sorry, but I think we might need to put sleepovers on hold until cheering’s over.”

  “Until it’s over?” I repeated, feeling sick. A whole month had passed since I’d seen Becca. I’d never gone so long without seeing her since I met her. It was all wrong.

  “I know.” Becca sounded unhappy. “We’ve got all these practices, even on weekends. I’m having trouble finishing my homework, even. My parents are complaining they barely ever see me. But there’s so much to learn. Tumbling, dance moves. We’re constantly tweaking our routine. We don’t even do any of the really difficult stunts until high school.”

  “What if we just hung out for a while, then? That would be better than nothing.”

  “Yeah!” Becca said. “Well, maybe. I’d have to check my schedule. But hey”—she brightened—“I have an idea. The Osterhout-Finley game is next Thursday. You should come! Your moms and Rowan, too. You could see what’s been sucking up all of my time, and we could hang out after the game. It would be fun.”