The Genius of Little Things (28 page)

They began arguing while I continued watching dancing celebrities. Over the sound of the TV, I caught phrases like, “you let Scott get away with,” and “
Tyler
is not
Scott
,” and “don’t try to scapegoat,” and “we are not going over this again.”

“Can I say something?” That was my voice. Both of them glanced at each other and did that eyebrow dance before their gaze settled on me. Seconds passed before I formed the thought, and then the words. “Thanks for coming.”

Janet blinked rapidly. “Of course we came. We’re glad you’re all right.”

“I’m fine, and you’re good parents.” I blame the sedatives for my use of
parents
. They probably didn’t even hear me because the TV was loud and the medication was making me talk softer and with the hint of a slur.

They lingered a while and discussed whether one of them should stay overnight. I was sleepier than I ever thought possible. Or maybe I was more content than sleepy. All those times I had been to hospitals—with my BiMo, and once with Levi—never once was I the patient. It was a good change of pace. But I wouldn’t want to do it again.

I received no punishment for my Ritalin infraction, unless one considered doting and excessive concern to be punishment. After a few days, I started getting used to having meals cooked for me. I stopped cleaning their house. I watched TV and read. It wasn’t a bad way to spend Christmas break. Janet stayed in Las Vegas. She even slept in the same bedroom as Carl. I didn’t overhear any of their conversations. Her reason for staying, she said, was that Carl’s permissiveness wasn’t serving me well, and she needed to be there to set boundaries. But it was possible that she missed Carl, and missed me a little bit, too.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The Weather Channel promised a Christmas rainstorm. I predicted it would not come to pass. This was a classic pattern where the mountains at the California border would wring out moisture before the storm reached Las Vegas. I had covered meteorological features of southern Nevada in an extra credit science report, “Extra Dry, With a Twist.”

My prediction was correct. The day was warm and dry, and the sun occasionally peeked out from the clouds. I sat in Carl and Janet’s living room while half-reading an article about neutrinos.

I was also texting Rachel. I had begun to appreciate text messages. Rachel hated talking on phones because she had to talk on the phone all the time at work. I liked this mode of communication because the cancer risk from texting was minimal, as far as I knew. I also began to use text slang, something that I had found appalling at first. It really did save time.

Ho ho ho. (that was me)

Who are you calling ho? (that was her)

Haha. Did you get anything interesting? (me)

Yay! I got clothes. I needed them. U? (her)

iPod and books.

Want to get together next week?

If U want 2.

You don’t mind seeing a crazy person?

U R crazy like a fox.

????

It’s an expression.

Rachel visited me twice while I recovered from my breakdown. She said she came to help me with my admissions essays, but once she realized Carl and Janet were gone and we were alone, we skipped the essay and made out on the sofa. This was a welcome development. It might have been my breakdown and hospitalization, and her need to “cheer me up,” that made Rachel abandon her waiting period and agree to commence a more physical relationship sooner than she’d planned.

Fiona arrived for Christmas dinner wearing cherry-red cowboy boots, tight black jeans, a leather vest and a black shirt. She handed me an enormous bowl of something that looked like dog barf, but was, she said, traditional Indian pudding. She sang “hel-
loo
-ooo” in the direction of the kitchen and then turned to me and mouthed
patio
. I joined her, and we sat on the iron chairs that faced the Hansen’s house. She asked me if I listened to a lot of music. She told me she needed a grammatically correct song for her ESL students. They learned best when she used games or songs, she said.

I knew immediately. I told her “Raspberry Beret” by Prince. “He sings ‘when a girl as fine as
she
walks in.’ Most people say ‘as fine as
her
,’ which is not correct.”

“You’re right!” she said. “Thank you.” She thought about this for a few moments. “The rest of the song isn’t smutty, is it?” I had to consider this. I wasn’t sure. I told her it wasn’t nearly as smutty as his other songs. That seemed accurate.

I have long appreciated grammatically correct songs. My BiMo loved Alanis Morissette. She used to play the album with the song “Ironic” whenever she wanted to lift her spirits. One year, on the anniversary of my BiMo’s death, I was playing that song and realized that it had zero irony. The chorus should have been,
Isn’t it unfortunate, don’t ya think
? Or,
Isn’t it insufferably bad, don’t ya think
? And, frankly,
the don’t ya think
part was unnecessary. This was one of many reasons I would not be contributing to the human race as a songwriter.

A set of eyes appeared at the Hansen’s upstairs window. “I hear you’re getting along with them.” At first, I thought Fiona meant the Hansens. But she meant Carl and Janet. I told her they hadn’t kicked me out, so things were good.

“You think they’d kick you out? Really?”

“I guess not.” Frankly, I hadn’t worried about that for several weeks. A FoMo doesn’t fly all the way from San Francisco to see you in the hospital only to send you packing days later. And the fact that my presence was, at least temporarily, keeping Carl and Janet together suggested that they wouldn’t be handing me off to the Foster-go-Round anytime soon.

Fiona began searching through her bag. I assumed she was looking for pot.

“I thought about having kids,” she said. “You can’t take care of kids when you’re touring with a band and partying naked in a hot tub. By the time I gave that up, the biological clock was about to run out.”

She dumped out her bag on the patio table. The junk fell out with an unholy clatter.

“I don’t want to make it seem like I was one of those groupie chicks. I was promoting. It was a job. I didn’t sleep with anyone in the bands. Do not believe what Janet says. Okay, I did sleep with a drummer.
Half
-slept with him. And I didn’t enjoy it. He kissed like he was trying to clean my teeth. I’m not naming names, because he’s famous. Thanks in part to my work.”

She found what she was looking for. I was surprised that it was a pack of gum, not her pot pipe. She waved a stick at me. I declined.

“I read someplace that if you chew gum you’ll eat less because you’re already tired of chewing before you get to the meal,” she said. “But as you can see, it hasn’t worked. I’ve gained and lost the same fifty pounds for so long. And now, the holidays. Oink oink!”

I told her she didn’t look overweight.

“Aren’t you sweet.
Liar
.” She popped two sticks of gum in her mouth. “Anyway, my ESL students are my kids now.”

The Hansens’ heads appeared and disappeared, separately, in different windows. Fiona saw them.

“I don’t know what they think they’re going to find,” she said.

There was something about Fiona that made me open up, just then.

“My biological mother was a singer. Her name was Terri Superanaskaia. She went by Terri S. She performed at some clubs in Los Angeles in the 1990s. She sang in a band called the Daisy Chain. But there was a more successful band with the same name, so they broke up.”

“Why didn’t they just change the name?”

“I don’t know.”

She thought about this for about a minute. “Was your dad in a band, too?”

“I don’t know. She indicated that it was a one-night stand.”

“Right. Sounds like a musician. A
drummer
.”

Fiona asked how I became a science wiz if I had come from musical parents. I shrugged. Except for my minor-league freak out and hospital stay, I wasn’t at all like my BiMo. I didn’t have a musical atom in my body. Possibly my BiFa was a science nerd who met my BiMo at a concert. Or, I took after some heretofore-unmentioned aunt or uncle. Perhaps I would come up with a breakthrough in this area. That could be my great contribution to the world—figuring out why we are the way we are. I guess people through millennia have been working on solving the mystery of personalities. It would be kind of arrogant to think I could do it. I would most likely stick to discovering the root cause of all allergies, and take satisfaction in winning a Nobel Prize for curing autoimmune diseases.

I felt like sharing more. I liked Fiona. She let me talk without demanding anything from me.

“My biological mother was disappointed that she never had a chance to contribute something important to the world. She never had a break.”

“She had you.” At first I thought Fiona meant that I had been standing in my BiMo’s way of success. It’s what I had believed for years. But that’s not what she meant. She meant
I
was the contribution.

Fiona jumped to her feet and said she hated the gum and that she needed to nibble on something in the kitchen. When she left, she made an oinking noise.

I stayed outside for a while, enjoying the low winter sun as it warmed my back. The curtains on the Hansen’s upstairs window moved again. Mr. Hansen’s head appeared and stayed there. My hand moved up to my face. I slowly unfurled a finger, my middle finger, and pretended to remove something from my eye. Then I let the finger slowly slide over my cheekbone and down. I kept the finger extended while it rested on my chin. The curtains moved again and Mr. Hansen’s head disappeared. I don’t know if a grin crept across my face, but I suspect it may have.

Dinner had an American Indian theme. That would have made far more sense at Thanksgiving. I had no idea why they did this for Christmas. Janet had prepared squab, wild rice, and purple potatoes. At one point I dropped a bit of squab on the table. I wrapped it in a napkin and set it aside. Fiona saw this and raised an eyebrow.

I explained. “If you drop food on the floor, if it’s wet, bacteria will cling to it. Everyone talks about the five-second rule, where food is good for five seconds after you drop it. But it’s only true if the food is dry and the surface is dry.”

“Is this what your science fair project is about?” Carl said.

“Actually, it’s on honeybees.” I was perfectly happy to go on about the science fair, but Fiona wasn’t dropping the squab, so to speak. She asked how many bacteria could be on the dining table. I explained that bacteria, even dangerous ones, lurk everywhere. Janet scowled at me. Then everyone started talking at once, overlapping each other.

Janet: “The table is clean.”

Fiona: You mean I could drop a hard roll on dry ground for five seconds and it would be safe?”

Carl: “Remember when we had food poisoning from those oysters?”

Janet: “If the table isn’t clean enough for you, you’re welcome to clean it.”

Carl: “You don’t have to clean it, Tyler.”

Fiona: “What if you drop it near a swimming pool, where the ground is wet but the water is chlorinated?”

Janet: “He just suggested my dining room is crawling with germs.”

Carl: “I think he was just making a point about science.”

Fiona: “I drank champagne out of a shoe once. Probably shouldn’t have done that.”

Janet: “That’s probably not the worst thing that crossed your lips.”

They should have taken the matter more seriously. Many people die from food poisoning every year. I don’t know how many. I would have to look that up. I said it would be safe if I overturned the bowl of Indian pudding on the floor and only ate off the top of it. Fiona burst out laughing.

“I could make that my science fair project,” I said. “Drop pudding on the floor and let everyone eat it and see what happens.”

It was an amusing image, eating blue-gray glop off the floor, like a cat. It was so funny I had to laugh, too. I laughed at the pudding. I laughed at Fiona’s tales of rock stars’ tongues and at the whole blithering absurdity of everything. I laughed until I was the last one laughing. Then I felt like a
dummkopf
, so I stopped.

TWENTY-NINE

March 16. I don’t have to write journals for Creative Soul, because the class was eliminated for winter semester, as were other experimental electives, In Stitches, Gangsters, Gamblers and Growth, and Starstruck. Budget cuts. The German program will struggle on for at least the rest of the year, no thanks to me.

I’m writing this very long journal entry because, a. I feel like it, and b. I have some important things to share.

Responses from my fall back universities have begun arriving. I applied to several highly selective institutions under their regular admissions deadlines. Before my breakdown in December, I met with my guidance counselor. She insisted that a Caltech rejection was not the end of the world and some great schools had better financial aid programs. If I were to apply to a second tier school, or even UNLV, I could even win a full-ride scholarship. I choked involuntarily when she said UNLV. I was relieved that she didn’t mention it again. But she did bring up the University of California at San Diego, a school I hadn’t considered. I applied there, and to Johns Hopkins, MIT, Duke, and Rice—basically the top schools for biomedical engineering.