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She knows that her parents were just teenagers themselves when she was born, but her mother doesn't like to talk about the past, and her father, Mark, has never responded to Dylan's attempts to contact him. As far as Dylan is concerned, her family is made up of her mother, Amanda; her recently adopted younger sister, Karma; and maybe even her best friend, Toni.
And then, out of the blue, a phone call: Mark will be in town for a few days and he wants to meet her. Amanda is clearly upset, but Dylan can't help being excited at the possibility of finally getting to know her father. But when she finds out why he has come—and what he wants from her—the answers fill her with still more questions.
What makes someone family? And why has her mother been lying to her all these years? Did you whole your ultimate exercise correctly? Or did you bypass out on a few physical activities and sets due to the fact you honestly weren't "feeling it"?
Having your workout written out ahead of time for your workout log e-book gets rid of the intellectual battle we have interaction in, the again-and-forth where we strive to legitimize ducking out early. Popular Books. Fear No Evil by James Patterson. Mercy by David Baldacci. So instead I think how fitting it is that she was hit first, that she was the one to buffer us from the blow.
But am I dead? The me who is lying on the edge of the road, my leg hanging down into the gulley, is surrounded by a team of men and women who are performing frantic ablutions over me and plugging my veins with I do not know what. One of my breasts is exposed. Embarrassed, I look away. The police have lit flares along the perimeter of the scene and are instructing cars in both directions to turn back, the road is closed.
The police politely offer alternate routes, back roads that will take people where they need to be. They climb out of their cars, hugging themselves against the cold. They appraise the scene. And then they look away, some of them crying, one woman throwing up into the ferns on the side of the road. I can feel them praying. That and the fact my body seems to be completely numb, though to look at me, at the leg that the 60 mph asphalt exfoliant has pared down to the bone, I should be in agony.
I am pondering these things when the medic with the freckles and red hair who has been working on me answers my question. She and the lantern-jawed medic snake a tube down my throat, attach a bag with a bulb to it, and start pumping.
Just clenches his jaw. They load me into the ambulance; the redhead climbs into the back with me. She pumps my bag with one hand, adjusts my IV and my monitors with the other. Then she smooths a lock of hair from my forehead.
I played my first recital when I was ten. At first, just at school, as part of the music program. But some old literature professor from the university had died and bequeathed his Hamburg to our school.
It mostly sat in the corner. Most kids wanted to learn to play guitar or saxophone. When I announced to Mom and Dad that I was going to become a cellist, they both burst out laughing. They apologized about it later, claiming that the image of pint-size me with such a hulking instrument between my spindly legs had made them crack up. Dad sometimes joked that the hospital where I was born must have accidentally swapped babies because I look nothing like the rest of my family.
Sometimes I did feel like I came from a different tribe. I was not like my outgoing, ironic dad or my tough-chick mom. But in my family, playing music was still more important than the type of music you played, so when after a few months it became clear that my love for the cello was no passing crush, my parents rented me one so I could practice at home.
Over the years there was a revolving batch of students who taught me, and then, as my skills surpassed theirs, my student teachers played with me. She agreed to listen to me play, not expecting much, but as a favor to Dad, she later told me. She and Dad listened downstairs while I was up in my room practicing a Vivaldi sonata. When I came down for dinner, she offered to take over my training.
My first recital, though, was years before I met her. It was at a hall in town, a place that usually showcased local bands, so the acoustics were terrible for unamplified classical. My student teacher had flown into a minor panic and had sent out a search party. Dad found me. He was just starting his hipster-to-square transformation, so he was wearing a vintage suit, with a studded leather belt and black ankle boots.
I shook my head, too ashamed to talk. Dad cocked one of his bushy eyebrows and stared at me with his gray-blue eyes. I felt like some mysterious foreign species he was observing and trying to figure out. Obviously, he never got something as lame as stage fright. Better than flowers. And of course, he was blond and blue-eyed. Such a prodigy. Dad put a gentle arm around my shoulder. It was god-awful. And I was the drummer, way in the back.
No one even paid any attention to me. Besides, when I dropped my drumsticks and puked onstage, it was punk. If you drop your bow and smell like a brewery, it will look gauche.
You classical-music people are so snobby that way. Teddy gave a squeal of agreement. You just work through it. You just hang in there.
And after the recital, I got my present. It was mine. When my ambulance gets to the nearest hospital—not the one in my hometown but a small local place that looks more like an old-age home than a medical center—the medics rush me inside. Get a chest tube in her and move her out! Parents DOA. Boy, approximately seven years old, just behind us. After seeing myself in that ditch, I had not been able to look for Teddy.
If he were like Mom and Dad, like me, I. He is alive. They take me into a small room with bright lights. A doctor dabs some orange stuff onto the side of my chest and then rams a small plastic tube in me.
Another doctor shines a flashlight into my eye. Get her to Trauma. I have to jog to keep up. Right before the doors close, I notice that Willow is here. Which is odd. We were meant to be visiting her and Henry and the baby at home. Did she get called in because of the snow? Because of us? She rushes around the hospital hall, her face a mask of concentration.
The elevator opens right onto the roof. A helicopter, its blades swooshing the air, sits in the middle of a big red circle. My best friend, Kim, has. She went on an aerial flight over Mount St. Helens once with her uncle, a big-shot photographer for National Geographic. She still looked a little green from the experience. Kim is on yearbook and has hopes of becoming a photographer. Her uncle had taken her on this trip as a favor, to nurture her budding talent.
The hatch in the helicopter is opened, and my stretcher with all its tubes and lines is loaded in. I climb in behind it. A medic bounds in next to me, still pumping the little plastic bulb that is apparently breathing for me.
Once we lift off, I understand why Kim got so queasy. A helicopter is not like an airplane, a smooth fast bullet. A helicopter is more like a hockey puck, bounced through the sky.
Up and down, side to side. I have no idea how these people can work on me, can read the small computer printouts, can drive this thing while they communicate about me through headsets, how they can do any of it with the chopper chopping around.
The helicopter hits an air pocket and by all rights it should make me queasy. They would not have loaded me on this helicopter, would not be flying me across the lush forests if I were dead. I can see the time on the control panel. Has Willow figured out who the emergency is? Has anyone phoned my grandparents? They live one town over from us, and I was looking forward to dinner with them. He likes to cut out the cartoons and make collages.
I wonder about Kim. The helicopter pilot keeps talking to Trauma One. Outside the window, I can see the peak of Mount Hood looming. That means Portland is close. Is Adam already there? The band is normally happy to let him chauffeur while they nap. When he wakes up, will he have coffee on Hawthorne? Maybe take a book over to the Japanese Garden? Later this afternoon, I know that the band will do a sound check. And then Adam will go outside to await my arrival.
That I got to Portland this morning while the snow was still melting? It was the spring of my sophomore year, which was his junior year. By then, Adam had been watching me practice in the music wing for several months. Our school was public, but one of those progressive ones that always got written up in national magazines because of its emphasis on the arts.
We did get a lot of free periods to paint in the studio or practice music. I spent mine in the soundproof booths of the music wing. Adam was there a lot, too, playing guitar. Not the electric guitar he played in his band. Just acoustic melodies. I rolled my eyes. I noticed for the first time that his smile was lopsided, his mouth sloping up on one side. He hooked his ringed thumb out toward the quad. And by the way, what kind of name is that? Is it ghetto or something?
Yo Mama? They have names like Wei Chin. Or Lee something. Not Yo-Yo Ma. But then I laughed in spite of myself. Still, his attention baffled me. But he was cool. Cool in that he played in a band with people who went to the college in town. Cool in that he had his own rockery style, procured from thrift stores and garage sales, not from Urban Outfitters knock-offs.
He had a small group of friends and a large group of admirers. I had friends and a best friend to sit with at lunch. I had other good friends at the music conservatory camp I went to in the summer.
I was quiet in class. And I was busy, much of my time spent practicing or playing in a string quartet or taking theory classes at the community college. Kids were nice enough to me, but they tended to treat me as if I were a grown-up. Another teacher. Adam pretended to fall against the glass wall.
Then he dusted himself off. At the Schnitzle place in Portland. I got tickets. A pair. You interested? Wait, how did you get tickets? It was the uncertainty. What was this, exactly? A date? A friendly favor? An act of charity? I changed my clothes about six times.
Teddy, a kindergartner back then, sat in my bedroom, pulling the Calvin and Hobbes books down from the shelves and pretending to read them. Mom popped her head in to check on my progress.
In the pictures of her and Dad from the early days, she looked like a cross between a s siren and a biker chick, with her pixie haircut, her big blue eyes coated in kohl eyeliner, and her rail-thin body always ensconced in some sexy getup, like a lacy vintage camisole paired with skintight leather pants. I sighed. I wished I could be so ballsy. In the end, I chose a long black skirt and a maroon shortsleeved sweater. Plain and simple.
My trademark, I guess. When Adam showed up in a sharkskin suit and Creepers an ensemble that wholly impressed Dad , I realized that this really was a date.
Adam looked surprised, unused to the parent being more sarcastic than the child, I imagine. We drove to Portland, making small talk. Adam played me snippets of bands he liked, a Swedish pop trio that sounded monotonous but then some Icelandic art band that was quite beautiful. We got a little lost downtown and made it to the concert hall with only a few minutes to spare. Our seats were in the balcony. That man has a way of making the cello sound like a crying woman one minute, a laughing child the next.
When the concert started, I peered at Adam out of the corner of my eye. He seemed good-natured enough about the whole thing, but he kept looking at his program, probably counting off the movements until intermission. I worried that he was bored, but after a while I got too caught up in the music to care.
In any other context, this would have been cheesy, the old yawn-and-cop-a-feel move. His eyes were closed and he was swaying slightly in his seat. He was lost in the music, too. I squeezed his hand back and we sat there like that for the rest of the concert.
Afterward, we bought coffees and doughnuts and walked along the river. It was misting and he took off his suit jacket and draped it over my shoulders. I thought he would laugh or throw up his arm in mock surrender like he did when I beat him in an argument. But he looked straight at me, so I could see the green and browns and grays swimming around in his irises.
He shook his head. I stopped walking. I could hear the water lapping below. His voice was husky and choked. I felt the heat flood my neck and I could sense myself blushing. I stared at my shoes. I knew that Adam was looking at me now with as much certainty as I knew that if I looked up he was going to kiss me. My eyes flickered upward. Adam was there waiting for me. That was how it started.
There are a lot of things wrong with me. Apparently, I have a collapsed lung. A ruptured spleen. Internal bleeding of unknown origin. And most serious, the contusions on my brain.
Abrasions on my legs, which will require skin grafts; and on my face, which will require cosmetic surgery—but, as the doctors note, that is only if I am lucky. Right now, in surgery, the doctors have to remove my spleen, insert a new tube to drain my collapsed lung, and stanch whatever else might be causing the internal bleeding.
I need two units of O neg and keep two units ahead. My blood type. I had no idea. In the operating room, the doctors are debating what music to play, just like we were in the car this morning. One guy wants jazz.
Another wants rock. The anesthesiologist, who stands near my head, requests classical. Four Seasons, perhaps. The operating room is small and crowded, full of blindingly bright lights, which highlight how grubby this place is. The floor, though buffed shiny, is dingy with scuff marks and rust streaks, which I take to be old bloodstains.
It is everywhere. It does not faze the doctors one bit. They slice and sew and suction through a river of it, like they are washing dishes in soapy water. Meanwhile, they pump an ever-replenishing stock into my veins. The surgeon who wanted to listen to rock sweats a lot. One of the nurses has to periodically dab him with gauze that she holds in tongs. At one point, he sweats through his mask and has to replace it.
The anesthesiologist has gentle fingers. The anesthesiologist absentmindedly strokes my temples through her latex gloves. This is what Mom used to do when I came down with the flu or got one of those headaches that hurt so bad I used to imagine cutting open a vein in my temple just to relieve the pressure.
The Wagner CD has repeated twice now. Jazz wins. Dad is. He loves it, especially the wild, latter-day Coltrane stuff. He says that jazz is punk for old people. The operation goes on and on. I start to zone out. Am I a ghost? Could I transport myself to a beach in Hawaii? Can I go to Teddy? Just for the sake of experiment, I wiggle my nose like Samantha on Bewitched. Nothing happens. I snap my fingers. Click my heels. I decide to try a simpler maneuver. Except that what happens when I walk into the wall is that I hit a wall.
A nurse bustles in with a bag of blood, and before the door shuts behind her, I slip through it. There are lots of doctors and nurses in blue and green scrubs hustling around. There are rows of operating rooms, all full of sleeping people.
Is everyone else loitering about like I seem to be? How do I get back to my body? Do I have to wait for the doctors to wake me up? Maybe the rest of them figured out how to get to Hawaii. I follow a nurse through a set of automatic double doors. My grandparents are here. Gran is chattering away to Gramps, or maybe just to the air.
She is wearing her Wellies and her gardening smock, which is smudged with mud. She must have been working in her greenhouse when she heard about us. No nonsense. She keeps a collection of ceramic angels, yarn-doll angels, blown-glass angels, you-name-it angels, in a special china hutch in her sewing room. Once, a pair of loons nested in the pond in the woods behind their house. Gran was convinced that it was her long-dead parents, come to watch over her.
Another time, we were sitting outside on her porch and I saw a red bird. But they all have the same watery gray-blue eyes, the color of the ocean on a cloudy day. Maybe this is why I now find it hard to look at Gramps. Now that would be no big deal, but I guess fifty-two years ago it was kind of scandalous for a twenty-two-year-old unmarried woman to do that kind of thing. She got a job as a secretary working for the Forest Service. Gramps was working there as a biologist.
Last summer at the Massachusetts retreat, I brought my cello so I could keep up my practicing for an upcoming chamber-music concert. Teddy thought this was hilarious and kept trying to feed it pretzels. At the lodge, I gave a little concert one night, in the main room, with my relatives and the dead game animals mounted on the wall as my audience.
It was after that that someone mentioned Juilliard, and Gran became taken with the idea. At first, it seemed far-fetched. There was a perfectly good music program at the university near us. Juilliard was across the country. And expensive. Mom and Dad were intrigued with the idea of it, but I could tell neither one of them really wanted to relinquish me to New York City or go into hock so that I could maybe become a cellist for some second-rate small-town orchestra.
They had no idea whether I was good enough. In fact, neither did I. She took it upon herself to speak to Professor Christie about it, and my teacher took hold of the idea like a terrier to a bone. So, I filled out my application, collected my letters of recommendation, and sent in a recording of my playing. I had told myself that it was because there was no point advertising it when even getting an audition was such a long shot.
A small part of me felt like even applying was some kind of betrayal. Juilliard was in New York. Adam was here. But not at high school anymore. He only went to school part-time now because Shooting Star was starting to get popular. There was a record deal with a Seattle-based label, and a lot of traveling to gigs.
Then he gave a sad little smile. The auditions were held in San Francisco. Take high tea at the Fairmont. Go windowshopping in Union Square. Ride the ferry to Alcatraz. Minor panic ensued. I said I could just go by myself—drive, or take the train, and come right back.
It was Gramps who insisted on taking me. We drove down together in his pickup truck. I kept fingering the Popsicle-stick goodluck talisman Teddy had presented me with before we left. Gramps and I listened to classical music and farm reports on the radio when we could pick up a station.
Otherwise, we sat in silence. But it was such a calming silence; it made me relax and feel closer to him than any heart-to-heart would have. Gran had booked us in a really frilly inn, and it was funny to see Gramps in his work boots and plaid flannel amid all the lacy doilies and potpourri.
But he took it all in stride. The audition was grueling. I walked out with my legs wobbly and my underarms wet with sweat. But my endorphins were surging and that, combined with the huge sense of relief, left me totally giddy. When we got back home, Gramps dropped me off and enveloped me in a hug. Normally, he was a handshaker, maybe a back-patter on really special occasions.
They just moved me out of the recovery room into the trauma intensive-care unit, or ICU. In the middle of the room are more computers and a big desk, where another nurse sits. I have two nurses who check in on me, along with the endless round of doctors. There are so many tubes attached to me that I cannot count them all: one down my throat breathing for me; one down my nose, keeping my stomach empty; one in my vein, hydrating me; one in my bladder, peeing for me; several on my chest, recording my heartbeat; another on my finger, recording my pulse.
No one, aside from the doctors and nurses and a social worker, has been in to see me. On TV, patients are always critical, or stable. Grave sounds bad. She has frizzy gray hair and a coffee stain on her blouse; her face is kind. But it can be helpful even for patients in a comatose state to hear from their loved ones.
I understand this must be quite a trial for you, but the stronger you can be, the more it will help Mia. Gran tells her about the various people who are en route right now, aunts, uncles. Adam is the one I really want to see. I wish I knew where he was so I could try to go there. The people who would normally pass along pertinent information that something has happened to me are in no position to do that.
I stand over the bleeping tubed lifeless form that is me. My skin is gray. My eyes are taped shut. I wish someone would take the tape off. It looks like it itches. The nice nurse bustles over. I think I had this notion that love conquers all. And by the time he dropped me off from the Yo-Yo Ma concert, I think we were both aware that we were falling in love. I thought that getting to this part was the challenge. In books and movies, the stories always end when the two people finally have their romantic kiss.
The happily-ever-after part is just assumed. It turned out that coming from such far corners of the social universe had its downsides. We continued to see each other in the music wing, but these interactions remained platonic, as if neither one of us wanted to mess with a good thing.
But whenever we met at other places in the school—when we sat together in the cafeteria or studied side by side on the quad on a sunny day—something was off. We were uncomfortable. Conversation was stilted. One of us would say something and the other would start to say something else at the same time. The politeness was painful. I wanted to push through it, to return to the glow of the night of the concert, but I was unsure of how to get back there.
Adam invited me to see his band play. This was even worse than school. He was always surrounded by funky, lively people, by cute girls with dyed hair and piercings, by aloof guys who perked up when Adam rock-talked with them. It was like how Mandarin speakers can sort of understand Cantonese but not really, even though non-Chinese people assume all Chinese can communicate with one another, even though Mandarin and Cantonese are actually different.
I dreaded going to shows with Adam. I loved to watch him play. When he was onstage, it was like the guitar was a fifth limb, a natural extension of his body. And when he came offstage afterward, he would be sweaty but it was such a clean sweat that part of me was tempted to lick the side of his face, like it was a lollipop.
He was kidding, but I could hear the hurt behind the offhand question. At my house, with my family, we found a common ground. He sat in the kitchen with Dad, rock-talking. When it came to observing sports, Dad was a baseball fanatic, but when it came to playing, he loved to shoot hoops. Want to play a quick game? Then he turned to me. They returned forty-five minutes later. Adam was covered with a sheen of sweat and looking a little dazed. I got stung by a bee on my palm while we were playing.
Your dad grabbed my hand and sucked the venom out. You got the stinger and the venom out, so you were left with only a little itch. Adam broke into an embarrassed smile. But it was sort of true. It was more that our kissing had suffered from the same painful politeness as our conversations. Adam raised his eyebrows as if asking me a question.
I blushed in response. Dad had made his famous salt roast, which was my favorite dish, but I had no appetite. I pushed the food around my plate, hoping no one would notice. All the while, this little buzz was building inside me. I thought of the tuning fork I used to adjust my cello. Hitting it sets off vibrations in the note of A—vibrations that keep growing, and growing, until the harmonic pitch fills up the room. Kim is not allowed to be alone in her house with boys—not that the opportunity ever came up.
My parents had never mentioned any rules on this issue, but I had a feeling that they knew what was happening with Adam and me, and even though Dad liked to play it all Father Knows Best, in reality, he and Mom were suckers when it came to love. Adam lay down on my bed, stretching his arms above his head. His whole face was grinning—eyes, nose, mouth. I went to my closet and grabbed one of my spare bows. Adam did. As thin as he was, he was surprisingly built.
But he wanted me closer. I wanted me closer. I sat down next to him on the bed so his long body was stretched out in front of me. The bow trembled as I placed it on the bed. He smiled again and closed his eyes. I relaxed a little. I fiddled with his ears as though they were the string pegs and then I playfully tickled him as he laughed softly. Then, taking a deep breath for courage, I plunged into his chest.
I ran my hands up and down the length of his torso, focusing on the sinews in his muscles, assigning each one a string—A, G, C, D. I traced them down, one at a time, with the tip of my fingers.
Adam got quiet then, as if he were concentrating on something. I reached for the bow and brushed it across his hips, where I imagined the bridge of the cello would be. I played lightly at first and then with more force and speed as the song now playing in my head increased in intensity.
Adam lay perfectly still, little groans escaping from his lips. I had never known that I could make someone feel this way. When I finished, he stood up and kissed me long and deep. He pulled me to my feet and started by slipping the sweater over my head and edging down my jeans.
Then he sat down on the bed and laid me across his lap. At first Adam did nothing except hold me. I closed my eyes and tried to feel his eyes on my body, seeing me as no one else ever had. Then he began to play. He strummed chords across the top of my chest, which tickled and made me laugh.
He gently brushed his hands, moving farther down. I stopped giggling. The tuning fork intensified—its vibrations growing every time Adam touched me somewhere new.
After a while he switched to more of a Spanish-style, fingerpicking type of playing. He used the top of my body as the fret board, caressing my hair, my face, my neck. He plucked at my chest and my belly, but I could feel him in places his hands were nowhere near. As he played on, the energy magnified; the tuning fork going crazy now, firing off vibrations all over, until my entire body was humming, until I was left breathless.
And when I felt like I could not take it one more minute, the swirl of sensations hit a dizzying crescendo, sending every nerve ending in my body on high alert. I opened my eyes, savoring the warm calm that was sweeping over me. I started to laugh. Adam did, too. We kissed for a while longer until it was time for him to go home.
As I walked him out to his car, I wanted to tell him that I loved him. So I waited and told him the next day. I have quite the crowd now. Gran and Gramps. Uncle Greg. Aunt Diane. Aunt Kate. My cousins Heather and John and David. Dad is one of five kids, so there are still lots more relatives out there.
The relatives gather in the hospital waiting room. I go back into the hallway to get a break. She wears the braid every day and always, by lunchtime, the curls and ringlets of her thick mane have managed to escape in rebellious little tendrils. But she refuses to surrender to that hair of hers, and every morning, it goes back into the braid. I know this because I have seen her cry many times. There are not a lot of Jewish mothers in our town or that many Jewish kids at our school.
And the kids who are Jewish are usually only half, so all it means is that they have a menorah alongside their Christmas trees.
But Kim is really Jewish. Sometimes I have Friday-night dinner with her family when they light candles, eat braided bread, and drink wine the only time I can imagine neurotic Mrs. Schein allowing Kim to drink. She jokes that this is the reason her family moved here, when in fact it was because her father was hired to run a computer-chip plant.
When she was thirteen, she had a bat mitzvah at a temple in Portland, and during the candlelighting ceremony at the reception, I got called up to light one. Every summer, she goes to Jewish sleepaway camp in New Jersey. Right now I can see Kim is annoyed. She swerves to face her mother. So this shocks me. When they reach the waiting room and see my assembled family, Mrs.
Schein starts sniffling. I am going to leave you here. She wanders around the main lobby, loops around the gift shop, visits the cafeteria. She looks at the hospital directory. There are plush chairs like the kind you find at a movie theater, and a muted soundtrack playing some New Agey-type music.
Kim slumps back in one of the chairs. She takes off her coat, the one that is black and velvet and that I have coveted since she bought it at some mall in New Jersey on a trip to visit her grandparents. There is a crucifix mounted on the wall, a flag of a cross draped over the lectern, and a few paintings of the Madonna and Child hanging in the back. No prayer rugs or symbol to show which way is east toward Mecca? And what about the Buddhists? I mean there are probably more Buddhists than Jews in Portland anyway.
It feels so natural the way that Kim is talking to me like she always does. They talk about me. I mean, she prayed at her bat mitzvah and she does the blessings at Shabbat dinner, but that is because she has to. Mostly, she makes light of her religion. She opens her eyes and wipes her hands together as if to say enough of that. Then she reconsiders and adds a final appeal.
The thing was, neither one of us was a particularly great student straight B averages all around or, for that matter, all that serious. We were serious about certain things—music in my case, art and photography in hers—and in the simplified world of middle school, that was enough to set us apart as separated twins of some sort.
Immediately we got shoved together for everything. We sat across from each other in stony silence for about ten minutes. Finally, I said. I was caught off guard by how intensely I already hated her. Are they naturally good and turned bad by stuff like racism or are they naturally bad and need to work hard not to be?
I hated Kim even more for making me betray a book I loved. The more that happened, the more we resented it—and each other. The more the world shoved us together, the more we shoved back—and against each other. She was annoying. She was a show-off. Later, I found out that she did the same thing about me, though her major complaint was that she thought I was a bitch. And one day, she even wrote it to me.
In English class, someone flung a folded-up square of notebook paper onto the floor next to my right foot. I picked it up and opened it. It read, Bitch! Nobody had ever called me that before, and though I was automatically furious, deep down I was also flattered that I had elicited enough emotion to be worthy of the name. People called Mom that a lot, probably because she had a hard time holding her tongue and could be brutally blunt when she disagreed with you.
Even Dad called her that sometimes, but always in a jokey, complimentary way. Never during a fight. He knew better. I looked up from my grammar book.
I peered at the class. Everyone had their faces in their books. Except for Kim. Her ears were so red that it made the little sideburnlike tendrils of dark hair look like they were also blushing. She was glaring at me. I might have been eleven years old and a little socially immature, but I recognized a gauntlet being thrown down when I saw it, and I had no choice but to take it up. When we got older, we liked to joke that we were so glad we had that fistfight.
Not only did it cement our friendship but it also provided us our first and likely only opportunity for a good brawl. When else were two girls like us going to come to blows? I wrestled on the ground with Teddy, and sometimes I pinched him, but a fistfight? He was just a baby, and even if he were older, Teddy was like half kid brother and half my own kid. I could never hurt him like that. But that fall day, we fought with fists. She charged me like a bull, knocking the wind out of me.
I punched her on the side of the head, fist closed, like men do. A crowd of kids gathered around to witness the spectacle. Fighting was novelty enough at our school. Girl-fighting was extra special. And good girls going at it was like hitting the trifecta.
By the time teachers separated us, half of the sixth grade was watching us in fact, it was the ring of students loitering that alerted the playground monitors that something was up. The fight was a tie, I suppose. Kim had a swollen eye and a bad scrape on her thigh as a result of her tripping over her backpack as she attempted to kick me.
Once the teachers separated us, Kim and I looked at each other and started laughing. Kim told me that the only reason that she volunteered for team captain was that if you did that at the beginning of a school year, coaches tended to remember and that actually kept them from picking you in the future a handy trick I co-opted from then on. I explained to her that I actually agreed with her take on To Kill a Mockingbird, which was one of my favorite books.
And then that was it. We were friends, just as everyone had assumed all along that we would be. After our big brawl, though, Mrs. Schein refused to let Kim come over to my house, convinced that her daughter would return on crutches.
Mom offered to go over and smooth things out, but I think that Dad and I both realized that given her temper, her diplomatic mission might end up with a restraining order against our family. In the end, Dad invited the Scheins over for a roast-chicken dinner, and though you could see Mrs. And you do the cooking? For those few months in sixth grade, Kim and I shed our good-girl personas.
Talk about our fight circulated, the details growing more exaggerated—broken ribs, torn-off fingernails, bite marks. But when we came back to school after winter break, it was all forgotten. We were back to being the dark, quiet, good-girl twins.
In fact, over the years that reputation has served us well. When, as a prank, someone put our school up for sale, covering it with signs and posting a listing on eBay, suspicious eyes turned to Nelson Baker and Jenna McLaughlin, not to us.
This always made Kim laugh.
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