Trying to Float (8 page)

THE TRAITOR REVEALED

AS I MENTIONED,
Rebecca was a stickler for the rules. Anyone who was late to class, as I was that day, risked being thrown out. I was late because my dad had decided to jump behind the counter and show the neighborhood barista how to make a proper espresso.

Hurrying up the six flights of stairs to my classroom and mulling over the excuses I might offer, I decided to play it cool. Say nothing, I thought, and take your seat. Appear detached and bored. No need to apologize. Today, I was going to stand up to her.

“It is not my fault I'm late!” I shouted out as soon as I entered the classroom.

But when I glanced at Rebecca, I was surprised at what I saw: the always taut and tidy Rebecca held her face in her hands.

I felt a bold tap on my shoulder; turning around, I came face to face with Beatrice Bendel, a Sri Lankan girl.

She plopped in the chair next to me and started to whisper.

I tried to brush her off, but Beatrice refused. And it was a good thing, for when I finally paid attention, I heard this:

“. . . and then created a
Gmail
. And you know what else, the
police
think that it's the parent of someone in our class! I think it's David's dad; he always hated Rebecca—especially when she called David a dope. What do you think?!”

I told her that I'd need a few more details.

Beatrice came through:

Just after we'd all submitted our applications for middle school, Jessie's mom, one of the parents who had been included in Rebecca's secret circle, took Rebecca aside to thank her for her help. According to my father, their conversation went something like this:

“Rebecca, I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate what you did for us.”

“You're welcome, but it's what I try to do for all the kids . . .”

“Rebecca, I am sure about that, but we would never have thought of sending our daughter to middle school in Staten Island without you.”

“Staten Island?”

Jessie's mother had been around the block, and what she saw on Rebecca's face was the look of a person who had just experienced something utterly repulsive. As if Jessie's mom had dumped red wine all over Rebecca's Chanel suit.

But as horrible as this was for Rebecca, it was worse for
Jessie's mom, since it was now obvious to her that the person with whom she had been communicating about her daughter's applications to middle school was not Rebecca. And if not, then who?

Another teacher? A parent? Someone who hated her child?

—

The principal spent days attempting to find Fake Rebecca. But no luck.

The principal appealed to Fake Rebecca to come forward through an announcement on the loudspeakers, but that didn't work either.

He called the police.

The police seized computers and interrogated teachers, parents, and administrators. The police had profilers analyze Fake Rebecca.

A couple weeks later, the police issued their report. What they discovered was that Fake Rebecca was not in touch with just a handful of parents, but with every parent in the class, proposing to each that they should send their children to generally obscure middle schools, often not in the borough of Manhattan and few being a school that anyone (especially Rebecca) would recommend.

The police also reported that Fake Rebecca was most likely the parent of a student or former student of Rebecca's—­someone who was irritated at how Rebecca had treated their child. Though it was a good theory, it didn't narrow the sus
pects, given the number of parents whom Rebecca had irritated over the years.

The e-mails from Fake Rebecca were so convincingly in the words and tone of Rebecca that it had to be an adult. Also, Fake Rebecca was having daily e-mail exchanges with large numbers of people; only an adult with time during the day could have pulled it off. Someone who was self-employed, a writer or freelance editor, for example.

It occurred to me that it might be you-know-who. But I dismissed the thought: Fake Rebecca required too much energy for my father to sustain over anything more than a couple hours on a nice afternoon with a gin and tonic.

However, the worst news for any parents that had actually taken Fake Rebecca's direction had yet to arrive. It was too late to change the selections.

While the parents were dealing with this shock, Sherry Wisenhower, a well-liked girl in my class, came forward to report that someone had created a fake e-mail address for her and was sending insulting messages to kids in the class. Those kids, assuming the e-mails were from Sherry, had turned on her.

Sherry's mom noticed what she believed to be similarities in the language used by the Sherry Impersonator and Fake Rebecca. From this, she concluded that they were one and the same.

This led Sherry's mom (Mrs. Wisenhower) to write this letter:

Dear Rebecca,

I believe Fan is the one who was pretending to be you. The reason I think it's Fan is because Fan is a mean girl. She pretends like she's not, but she is.

Yours sincerely,

Mrs. Amy Wisenhower

For the Wisenhowers, Fan, who had started out as an itch in the third grade, had become a full-blown rash by fifth, with the Wisenhowers doing whatever they could to promote their daughter at Fan's expense.

A day or two later, Amy received Rebecca's response:

Dear Ms. Wisenhower,

Though I appreciate your efforts to find the person who has been impersonating me, it troubles me that you should think it is Fan, who, as everyone knows, is extremely smart and seems to always have the best interests of her classmates in mind.

If you should have any other ideas, please let me know. We are all concerned about getting to the bottom of this.

Sincerely,

Rebecca

P.S. Please tell me why you think Fan is a “mean girl.” That is not a very nice thing to say about someone.

The response was immediate.

Dear Rebecca,

Why is Fan a mean girl?! Well, when Sherry tells other kids about her grades (which you know are always very high), Fan gets angry and says that she has higher grades than Sherry and that Sherry's parents have the money to pay for tutors. That is why I told Sherry to stop having anything to do with Fan.

Yours,

Mrs. Amy Wisenhower

If anyone was ever curious about the intelligence of the Wisenhowers, they would not need to search much beyond Mrs. Wisenhower, who was actually sending the above e-mails to the Fake Rebecca. Mrs. Wisenhower caught wind of this only when the last e-mail bounced back. The e-mail account of the Fake Rebecca had been shut down.

I could hear the sound of the paper shredder.

—

The police detective who interviewed Fan told the principal that he'd “interrogated Mafia capos who were harder to break.” But Fan eventually confessed. And with that confession came the explanation for what she'd done.

Fan, who, unknown to anyone, wanted to attend a particular and very selective middle school, determined that, given
the nature of the computer program that the city used in selecting middle schools, it would be to her advantage if the other students in our class listed middle schools outside of Manhattan as their first choice.

The rest was easy: pick the teacher whom parents were most likely to trust on the question of middle schools (Rebecca); let these parents believe that they were the only ones whom Rebecca chose to assist; and then complete the deception by including in the e-mails the sort of demands that were typical of Rebecca—bring cupcakes to the school, return library books, spring off the toilet when necessary.

When Fan was finally exposed, the reaction against her was so extreme (certain parents threatened to kill her) that Fan and her parents were placed in what was essentially an elementary school protection program. Their addresses, e-mails, and telephone numbers were changed, and Fan was relocated to a school in Chinatown, where the Caucasian parents would have trouble finding her.

If I am being entirely honest here I must confess to having half-suspected that it was Fan all along, but what was I going to do? Snitch on one of my few real friends?

Rebecca, disgusted with the whole affair and insulted that people would mistake her for anyone as devious as Fake Rebecca, left the school and quit teaching altogether.

You may be wondering what happened to me. The answer is that when Fan went to contact my mother via e-mail, Fan misspelled her name.

After Fan's e-mail to my mother bounced back, Fan tried my father's e-mail. That went through, but it made no difference, since he hadn't checked his e-mail in years. So Fan was never able to reach my parents, and I put in my choices unaffected by Fake Rebecca.

As it turned out, amidst all of this drama, I got into the middle school that was first on my list. I could only assume that my success came because it was also the middle school of Fan's dreams and she managed to divert the more deserving applicants.

In the end, Fan proved to be a very good friend.

MIDDLE SCHOOL

THE SEWER AND THE CUTTER

A GIRL (SPOILER:
me) walks into an auditorium on the first day of middle school. She finds there a large gathering of kids, parents, and teachers, and in front of them all, the principal, who will begin to tell everyone how very excited he is about the school year, how hard he and his staff worked over the summer to get things ready for the first day of class, and how he knows that everyone is going to have a great year.

This girl, tall and chubby for her age, her frizzy brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, sighs happily. She is optimistic. New friends. New crushes. A fresh start.

—

Standing next to me was a girl who, clearly upset about the new school, had begun to cry.

“Look,” I whispered idiotically, “it could be worse.”

She stared back, anxious, wanting to be convinced. I needed to say something. I settled on a story I had been told
that very morning by Jerry, the manager of the front desk at the Chelsea.

“There were two old Jewish men who worked together in a clothing factory,” I began. “It was crowded and hot, and they stood on their feet all day long.”

Ignoring her bewildered look, I continued.

“One of the men was a cutter and the other a sewer. They were both from the old country and spoke with Yiddish accents. One day the sewer went missing.”

The girl stopped crying. I had her attention.

“Exactly two weeks later, the sewer returned to the factory.”

“Where did he go?” the girl asked.

“Well, that's exactly what the cutter wanted to know. So he says to the sewer, ‘Where were you? You've been gone a long time.' ”

I waited a few seconds, pretending to decide whether I should continue.

“What was his answer?” asked the girl.

“The sewer tells the cutter, ‘I was in Africa.'

“The cutter responds, ‘What did you do in Africa?'

“The sewer, while stitching a piece of cloth, says to the cutter, ‘I traveled all over, I saw many things, and at the end of my trip, I was eaten by a lion.'

“ ‘Wait a second,' says the cutter. ‘If you were eaten by a lion, you wouldn't be living.'

“The sewer looks around the factory and says, ‘You call this living?' ”

She may not have liked the story, but she appreciated the effort. She became my friend. Janie Fields.

Quickly, almost magically, there were other friends and then still others. Mostly because of Janie. She was likable, and, for whatever reason, she liked me.

What I came to realize is that in new surroundings, girls make quick decisions about who is pretty, smart, nerdy. Girls will attempt to mark other girls as their friends as quickly as possible on the theory that some girls, seeing that another girl has been marked, will move on. This process is best described as “spraying.” An aggressive Italian girl, Maria (who would become my friend), was a first-class sprayer. Bringing a bottle of perfume to the first day of school, Maria actually doused the girls she wanted to meet.

In a new school, with new girls and boys who knew nothing about my past, I got sprayed.

THE DELICACY OF LOVE

“PLAY STREET” WAS
the time set aside after lunch for exercise. The boys would occupy most of the gym, rocketing around or hurling a basketball or showing off martial arts moves they had observed in video games.

I usually ended up sitting in the bleachers with Maria and Janie.

Maria was pretty and funny, but short—one of our teachers actually called her a “little person,” which Maria claimed was another way of saying “midget.” The three of us hated athletics, so on those afternoons when we had Play Street, we would sit together and talk. Mostly about boys.

As we entered the gym one day, we noticed something new—a group of boys playing leapfrog. Leapfrog is when boys—who, as a group, are not especially concerned with hygiene—crouch on the ground while other boys, spreading their legs, vault over them; more often than not the bottom parts of the leaping boys are wiped across the heads of those crouching.

“Animali!”
Maria snorted. “Adam would never do that.”

Adam was Maria's big crush. His blue eyes were permanently covered by his then-popular Bieber cut. His smile always seemed too big for his face, and he had a big gap between his two front teeth. He was also a good shake taller than the other boys, and a lot taller than Maria. The Munchkins in
The Wizard of Oz
were a lot taller than Maria.

Sensitive to Maria's feeling for Adam, I hastily agreed.

“Adam. Of course not. No leapfrogging for that boy.”

Janie nodded her head in mock solemnity. “Never.”

We took a lap around the gym. Various people called out to Janie in greeting as we walked. Returning to the bleachers, we saw this:

Adam, squatting on the floor, his buttocks jutting in the air, readied himself as a short and chubby boy raced at him from behind. Before we could turn away, the other boy, his hands now up against Adam's behind, widened his legs and thrust himself upward.

But the laws of physics would not have it: the boy came down on Adam's head, which crashed to the floor and then disappeared.

“Where did he go?” I asked, opening my backpack to retrieve my daily chocolate bar.

Maria, stunned, said nothing. Her mouth wagged open.

Janie watched in silence, wary of Maria's next reaction.

“Do you hear anything?” I continued, unwrapping the chocolate.

It was then that I noticed a fringe of Adam's brown hair poking out from the other boy's crevice.

“Want a piece?” I offered, extending my candy bar.

Still nothing from Maria.

Janie looked away.

Maria never again spoke of Adam, never looked at Adam. While the boys in the gym could not leapfrog over Adam's great height, Maria had no such problem: she leapfrogged over his blue eyes, his shaggy hair, his unspeakable encounter with the other boy—and every other memory she had of him, or at least every imaginary encounter.