Girl Wonder (4 page)

“Really? And why is that?” I asked.

“Oh.” She waved as if this trip were the very last thing on her mind. “He got a last minute invitation to do a reading at NYU.” She stood up and thrust some pots into my arms. “Here. We can use these for the leaks.”

I swallowed. “Is this trip something Meeghan set up?”

“Meeghan's very committed to promoting
Lily
.” Mom's expression warned me not to say another word about my dad's book agent.

Lily at Dusk.
Though my parents had asked me to hold off from reading the book—in a year or so, they'd assured me, I'd be more ready for some of its more “adult” themes—I'd read the thing cover to cover right before we left Florida. It was an experience I was now trying my damndest to forget.

In the book, the headmaster of an elite boarding school is seduced by one his teenaged students—Lily Bloom.
Lily was as ripe and succulent as her namesake blossom, at once coy and open, teasing and yearning, her nectar as moist and fresh as the morning dew.

Maybe it wasn't quite that bad. But close. Really close.

What separated my father's book from all the other “middleaged white man has an affair with young girl and gets caught with his pants down” stories was that although the protagonist
does
ultimately get caught (with his pants down), he and Lily end up walking blithely hand in hand into a Mexican sunset—after shooting a whole bunch of people first.

Ew.

Lily at Dusk
hadn't gotten much of an advance, but it was now starting to gain some critical acclaim.

“Did you like it?” I asked Mom as she mopped up a big pool of water. “
Lily
, I mean.”

She glanced at me sharply. “You read it, didn't you?”

“Um—” I bit my lip.

“Well, what did
you
think of it?”

I shrugged. “It's literary porn for middle-aged white guys.”

“Charlotte!” Almost imperceptibly, I saw the corners of her mouth twitch. Then she got serious. “It does have some titillating content, and I'm sure that's the last thing you want to think about your parents thinking about. But ever since I've known your father he's dreamed of being a published author. He's definitely an inspiring example of what a person can accomplish with a lot of hard work and a little luck.”

“I work hard,” I said, glancing out the window at my brother, who was performing skateboard tricks in the rain. “Unlike some people I know around here.”

“James Henry works very hard.”

“Yeah? Well, he's also a natural at
everything
.”

“There are plenty of things you're good at. You know that, right?”

“I'm an excellent kitty massager,” I said, bending down to scratch Steerforth. He purred loudly as I stroked his chin. Then he swatted my hand.

“Cats,” Mom muttered. “I'll get you some Neosporin.”

“I'm fine,” I said, wiping the blood off on my jeans. “It's my left hand anyway.”

S
omeone was knocking at my door.

“Go away,” I mumbled.

Sleep. I needed sleep. More sleep. Couldn't get enough sleep. I dragged my pillow over my head. Now, what had I been dreaming? Something about Robert Pattinson? Ah, yes. That was it. Robert Pattinson had been asked to star in a movie but had said he'd only do it if I could be his leading lady. Somehow in my dream I was a movie star too. Somehow in my dream Robert Pattinson and I were kissing.

Oh, no! Why was Robert Pattinson fading away? And why was I suddenly so cold?

Someone had removed all my covers. This was why. I sat up and blinked. My brother was sitting on the edge of my bed. “Why are you here?” I hissed. “It's the middle of the night.”

He yawned. “It's morning. Time to get up.”

I glanced at my alarm clock. “I still have half an hour, you idiot!”

“I found something cool. You have to come see.” I lunged for my comforter. He snatched it out of my reach and grinned. “Wakey-wakey.”

“Mom!”

He clapped his hand to my mouth. “Just come, okay? I'll do your math homework tonight.”

The kid knew how to bargain.

Five minutes later, I was following him into the woods that bordered our new neighborhood. The rain had let up, but the air was foggy and moist. The temperature was lower than yesterday's. Luckily I'd thrown a sweater over my pajamas.

We headed down a narrow path in the predawn gloom. I sniffed the air. There was a bad smell. This wasn't reassuring. “You better not be taking me to see a body,” I warned.

“It's not like that. You'll see.”

This wasn't exactly reassuring either.

A few minutes later we came to the top of a steep embankment. A small creek flowed below. James Henry pointed. “Look.”

I peered into the dark water. It took my eyes a moment to adjust. Then I saw.

“Omigod!” I gasped.

“Told you,” my brother gloated.

There were dozens of fish in the pool below, their scales flashing silver in the pale light of dawn. Their bellies were pinkish-red. Most of them rested quietly in pairs. “Salmon,” I whispered.

“We read about this in biology last year. This is so cool. They must be spawning.”

Looking closer, I saw that the salmon didn't look so hot. Their breathing—or whatever it was that fish did—was fast and labored. Their mouths were bent back in snarls. Several of them were peeling flesh. It seemed too cruel that their life cycle was such an uphill battle. A lump caught in my throat as I said, “Guess the journey from the ocean isn't much fun.”

James Henry gestured at a sandbar across the creek that was littered with rotting fish. “That explains the smell.”

As I scrambled down the embankment to get a better look, I startled some of the fish. A couple of them took off upstream, their tails churning the water like torpedo propellers. For all they'd been through to get here, they still had some life left.

James Henry looked thoughtful. “It doesn't seem fair. You wait all your life to have sex, and then bam, just like that you die.”

“Must be worth it,” I sighed.

I certainly wouldn't know anything about it—sex, I mean. To date I'd only had one boyfriend—when I was eleven. His name was Aaron Brinkley. We'd gone to school together in Boston. The spring before we moved to Florida—I was in sixth grade then—we'd started hanging out. At Friday Night Skate, Aaron would glide by my side for the slow songs. When no one was watching, we'd sneak out behind the rink, skates still on, and kiss against the wall. A couple of times I let Aaron go up my shirt. One time he tried to touch my crotch, which scared me, and I'd backed away. The next week, we moved.

A branch snapped somewhere nearby. My neck hairs stood on end. There were, I remembered suddenly, all kinds of wild animals in the Pacific Northwest. Bears. Wolverines. Mountain lions. On the drive across the country, my brother had joked that we were moving to the land of Bigfoot.

Heart thumping, I grabbed a rock and peered into the trees.

“Milton!” my brother exclaimed.

I whirled around. There was a guy standing on the opposite side of the creek from us, just a short way downstream. He was holding some kind of basket. He hopped from boulder to boulder across the water, finally landing neatly in front of me. He was surprisingly graceful for someone so tall.

“You can put down your weapon,” he said in a husky voice, gesturing at my hand. “I only attack when provoked.” Unclenching my fingers, I let my rock fall to the sand. “You must be Charlotte,” he continued. “I'm Milton Zacharias. I go to school with your brother. We're neighbors. I'm in the house with the red garage.”

“Oh,” I said stupidly. “I thought you were a bear.”

Milton laughed. “Sorry to disappoint. But I played a bear once in the second grade. My school did this production of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears'? I got to be Papa Bear. I sang a song about porridge.”

“I think I know your house,” I said. “Is it the one with the gnomes?”

“Uh—yeah.” His face turned pink. He ran his fingers through his wavy hair. “My mom believes they're good luck. So you go to Shady Grove, huh?” he said quickly, giving me this look of pity.

“That place—” He shook his head.

I stiffened. “We can't all go to the Barclay School.”

“That wasn't what I meant,” he said, studying me with eyes as clear and gray as water.

Though my face was flushed with embarrassment, I held his gaze. “Explain yourself.”

“Are those mushrooms in your basket?” James Henry asked abruptly.

“They are indeed,” Milton said. “Chanterelles, if you must know. As the guidebooks like to say, they are ‘edible and choice'!” He kissed his fingers the ways chefs do. “Mushroom hunting is a personal passion of mine.”

Passion? Mushrooms? Yet he thought gnomes were embarrassing?

“Check it out,” he said, waving a mushroom under my nose. “It smells—”

I took a step back. “No, thanks.”

He cupped the mushroom in his hand, his expression indignant. “Do you have any idea how much we owe to mushrooms? Like modern medicine, for example?”

I glared at him. “Remember? I'm just a simple girl from Shady Grove.”

“I never said—!”

“I figured it out!” James Henry interrupted. “Chanterelles smell like apricots!”

Milton snapped his fingers. “That's exactly right! Thank you!”

Shaking my head, I started climbing back up the bank.

“What's your hurry?” Milton asked.

“God forbid that I should miss a precious second of my third-rate education!”

“Don't worry about it,” I heard James Henry say. “My sister's on crack.”

O
n account of James Henry having an orthodontist appointment, my mom drove me to school early. She gave me a choice: I could either practice driving or I could ride in the backseat and James Henry could have the front. I chose the backseat. “You'd make my life a whole lot easier if you'd get an automatic,” I said, fiddling with my new choker.

“I drive a manual on principle,” she said, reversing the car down the driveway. “One day you'll understand.”

“What—I'll understand why you're torturing me?”

She shook her head. “You're being melodramatic.” Once we were down the driveway, she said, “The hard part's over. You sure you don't want to drive?”

“I need to finish my reading for Political Science,” I muttered.

We were starting a unit on the executive branch of government. At the beginning of the chapter, there was a racy picture of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday” to JFK.

Read this book, kids, and you too can have your own personal blonde bombshell!

While I read in the backseat, James Henry kept going on and on about Milton and his mushrooms and the fact that Milton was really into skateboarding and that he played the guitar and they might get together sometime and jam, and that Milton was on the snowboarding team and had won all these awards and…

I snapped my book shut. “You really think that guy wants to hang out with you? He's like my age, right?”

“For your information,” James Henry began, overly enunciating each word as if I were a kindergartner, “the Barclay School has a mentoring program that pairs middle-school kids with upper-school kids. Normally you don't get to choose who you're paired with, but
because
we have similar interests, and
because
we're neighbors, and
because
his mom is a teacher there, Milton said he could pull some strings. ”

“His mother teaches at Barclay?” Mom asked. “We'll have to invite them out sometime soon.”

“Maybe they could come to my birthday,” James Henry suggested. “It's Friday, remember?”

“Like you'd let us forget,” I said.

“Have you decided what kind of food you want?” Mom asked. “Italian? Thai? Maybe Ethiopian?”

“Mexican. Duh.” James Henry swiveled around to look at me. “And since I know you're dying to know—Milton is a junior. So if you go out with him you'll be a cougar.”

I snorted. “There's no danger of that. You can have Milton all to yourself.”

“He sounds nice,” Mom said. “Maybe you should give him a chance.”

“Nice?” I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. He's a snob. And—he's weird.”

“That's crazy,” James Henry protested. “Milton is cool to everybody. You're the snob. And you totally misunderstood what he was saying to you this morning. He was just trying—”

“I understood perfectly,” I said coldly. “He thinks I'm a loser.”

My mom cut in. “Where in the world would you get an idea like that, Charlotte?”

“Never mind,” I said sullenly.

A moment later we pulled up to Shady Grove.

“Be careful,” my brother said as I climbed out of the car.

I found my locker in the labyrinth, grabbed what I needed for the morning, and headed to the library—the one place other than the gifted and talented wing where I might be able to relax. A group of students were sitting in a circle on the floor, surrounded by newspapers and magazines. They were clipping articles and sorting them into files.

Though I pretended to be absorbed in my political science reading, I couldn't help but eavesdrop. These kids were definitely not run-of-the-mill. They were talking about alternative energy, and they seemed to be experts on the subject. They sounded smart and sophisticated. They had huge vocabularies.

One guy in particular caught my eye. The other kids deferred to him a lot. He had piercing blue eyes, a movie-star jaw, and auburn hair that flopped down adorably over his brow. Even through his long-sleeved jersey you could tell he was muscular. He wasn't bulky, but strong and wiry like a soccer player. Whether he was talking or listening, he kept flipping his pen around his index finger.

I tried to concentrate on my political science chapter, but the words on the page—something about the Electoral College—began to congeal into one giant blob. Speaking of college…what was I going to do? I needed some kind of game plan. I knew my parents hoped I'd win a scholarship; though, as my dad was fond of pointing out, I was not Ivy League material. No sir. James Henry, on the other hand…My parents were the only members of their own families who'd gotten degrees, and they valued education over even health. Last year for Christmas, Dad had given me a copy of
Barron's Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges
. What I'd learned from reading it cover to cover was that I was screwed.

I wasn't a concert-level musician who'd composed her first symphony at the age of two. I didn't swallow fire or juggle knives. I'd never spent a summer vacation delivering medical supplies to Darfur. I'd never met the Dalai Lama or meditated in silence for a month. I'd never been arrested in a protest for the rights of hamsters. I certainly wasn't on the math bowl or the chess team. The most athletic thing I did each day was to make it to bed without injuring myself. There was nothing about me that would set me apart from the masses of the other applicants.

My parents insisted that an impassioned, well-written, and tightly focused personal statement could overcome a lot—even a learning disability. But how impassioned could you sound if you didn't know what you were passionate about? I didn't even know if I was good at anything, and because I was so afraid of looking stupid, it was hard for me to want to try new things.

This was not something the college books addressed.

Something landed on my foot.

A pen. A silver pen.

I bent down to pick it up. It was warm and heavy and felt good in my hand. Glancing up, I found myself looking directly at the face of Adorable Boy.

“Sorry about that,” he said.

I wanted to say something funny and intelligent, something that would keep his hypnotic eyes focused on my face forever. Unfortunately, I had forgotten how to think or speak.

So I simply held out his pen.

His fingers grazed mine gently as he reached for it. An electric shiver ran up my spine. He smiled. Had he felt it too?

“Thanks,” he said.

A moment later he went back to being engrossed in alternative energy, and I went back to covertly staring at him. He was gorgeous.

But it wasn't just his looks that struck me. Something about him reminded me of the movie
Dead Poets Society
—a flick about some guys at a New England boarding school. The boys in that movie were clean-cut without being dorky. They were eager to learn
and
eager to break the rules. You could tell my new crush had confidence in spades, not the arrogant kind, but a belief in his intelligence that he had never once doubted.

Who was he?

After that, the best I could say about my second morning at Shady Grove was that no one tried to kill me.

In Chemistry we colored in pictures of atoms. In Spanish, the substitute—our real teacher had yet to show—had us practice rolling our R's. In Language Arts, Miss Mason gave us a homework assignment: we were to write a five-paragraph essay about the scariest thing that had ever happened to us (I refrained from asking if entering Shady Grove could count).

Due to a student ambassador meeting, Mimi had missed Chemistry. We met up at lunch—the special was reconstituted mashed potatoes with meat loaf gravy—and after assuring her she hadn't missed anything important, I told her all about the
chemistry
I'd felt with Adorable Boy.

“But I'll probably never see him again,” I sighed.

“I've got just the thing.” Mimi reached into her overly large orange backpack. “Voilà!” she said, holding up a yearbook.

Flipping through the glossy pages, I noticed that even the cool kids looked stupid in the pictures. You could tell the photographers were trying to impose meaning onto moments that had only ever been trivial at best.

Amanda's picture was everywhere. Last year she'd won the Best Dressed Rebel Without a Cause award. She'd made herself up to look like a drunk Lindsay Lohan.

I found Adorable Boy on page ninety-three. He was a GATE, of course.

Mimi studied his picture. “I've seen him around.”

“Neal Fitzpatrick. What a great name.”

“Not to be a downer,” Mimi said, “but I think he might be out of our league.”

I stiffened at this. Mimi didn't know me. Who was she to assume that I was a misfit like her?

“Mind if I borrow this for the afternoon?” I asked, trying not to show my anger. When she said okay, I excused myself and headed upstairs to the restroom in the GATE wing. Hiding in a corner stall, I spent the rest of lunch hunting down every picture of Neal in the yearbook.

Here's what I learned:

Neal Fitzpatrick was editor-in-chief of the literary magazine.

Neal Fitzpatrick was a National Merit finalist.

Neal Fitzpatrick played lacrosse.

Neal Fitzpatrick was captain of the debate team.

Debate. This must have been what he was doing in the library.

I tried to guess what colleges he was going to apply to. Stanford? Yale? Columbia? He was classy. I could imagine him living in a place like New York City or Boston. I traced my fingers along the contours of his face, dreaming that I was touching his features for real. No one would ever mistake
him
for a misfit.

In Math, Mr. Johnson gave us a pop quiz on graphing parabolas. Luckily the quiz was easy (“This is a very basic curriculum”). I wasn't the last to finish either. Afterward, Mr. Johnson gave us some problems to work on so he could grade our quizzes in class.

At the end of the period he handed them back to us. So much for easy. I got a C. Well, this sucked.

On the way out of class, I stopped by Mr. Johnson's desk. “Is there anything I can do to get extra points?”

He looked confused. “But you passed.”

“How was it today?” my mom asked when she picked me up from school.

“I don't know—maybe a little better?” Because of Neal I was loath to tell her how much the day had sucked. “We could give it another week before we make any rash decisions about me transferring. At least in the regular classes I can push myself extra hard. Maybe I'll get straight A's for once.”

My brother was absorbed in doing homework—otherwise, I'm sure he would have scoffed at this.

Mom's cell phone beeped. It was Dad. He was at Smith College, where he'd just finished a reading of
Lily at Dusk
. Mom handed me the phone.

“How's it going?” he asked. “How do you like Shady Grove?”

“Okay.” To change the subject from my education, I said, “It's really pretty out here. The air feels extra fresh.”

He was not to be sidetracked. “You might want to consider adding an all-women's school to your list of prospective colleges. These girls are very articulate. Smith might be out of your league, but there are some less competitive women's colleges with similar prestige.”

“I'm sure there are,” I said. “But where are the boys?”

He laughed like he thought I was intentionally being hilarious. “You're not going to have time for boys next year.”

I gave the phone back to Mom.

“Where are you staying tonight?” she asked Dad. There was a pause. Her mouth got tight. Then, “You're going to New York?” More pause. She was gripping the steering wheel like she wanted to break it. “I see,” she finally said. “Well. We'll talk about this when you get home.” She snapped the phone shut.

“Everything okay?” I asked. We were at a stop sign now.

“It's just that—” She studied me for a moment. I had this sense that she was seeing me in a new light, as someone more adult, someone she could maybe trust. Then, with a weak smile, she said, “It's just that your father's writing career is proving to be a big adjustment.”

As I stayed up late working on my Language Arts essay—the one we were supposed to be writing about the scariest thing that had ever happened to us—my mind kept drifting off to what Mom had said about Dad. There was no denying the fact that success was changing him and also changing the dynamics of their relationship. I wondered if Mom was jealous of how well he was doing.

I also thought about my dad because the scariest thing that had ever happened to me had happened when I was with him. Back when we lived in Florida, back when Dad was simply a would-be author and had more time for us, he would occasionally take James Henry and me on these Sunday outings to give Mom a break. Though he wasn't a natural at it, he liked the idea of being an outdoorsman.

This one time he decided he wanted us to try crabbing.

I got carsick on the drive out to the Apalachicola Reserve, and when we finally got there I was too queasy to help set up the nets. “Why don't you go for a swim?” my dad suggested. “It might help.”