That’s it, she said, smiling.
No medicine?
Nah, she said. You seem fine.
But what
She fixed her watch on her wrist, lifted her shoulders. I don’t know, she said. Maybe an allergy?
To food?
Or, she said, maybe an active imagination?
I picked up the hall pass. The rest of the day stretched long before me.
Just get some rest and I’ll send for you again in a couple days, said the nurse, tossing out my paper cup. Drink fluids, she said. Take it easy. Your family okay?
My family? I said. Yes, why?
Just checking, she said, settling back down in her chair. She pulled a canary-yellow knit cardigan over her shoulders. Sometimes these things go around, she said.
6
I spent the rest of the school day on the flat hard green carpet of the classroom library reading picture books about animals getting into fixes. A splinteringly dry afternoon. Eddie and Eliza came over with curious eyes to see if I wanted to play four square or dodgeball after school, but I told them I wasn’t feeling well. You don’t want to get this, I said, coughing a little in their faces. I dragged my feet to the bus. At the stop, Joseph looked wrung out from the day too and took his usual spot right up against the window, but this time he sat with a friend, a guy with high arched eyebrows and rangy arms and legs. They hunched over a textbook and talked and pointed the whole ride home.
It was Wednesday, and George always came over on Wednesdays after school. He was Joseph’s best and only friend. George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he’d been at our house and he’d pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It’s a circular current into a central station, he’d explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring. Nature is full of the same shapes, he said, taking me to the bathroom sink and spinning on the tap and pointing out the way the water swirled down the drain. Taking me to the bookshelf and flipping open a book on weather and showing me a cyclone. Then a spiral galaxy. Pulling me back to the bathroom sink, to my glass jar of collected seashells, and pointing out the same curl in a miniature conch. See? he said, holding the seashell up to his hair. Yes! I clapped. His eyes were warm with teaching pleasure. It’s galactic hair, he said, smiling.
At school, George was legendary already. He was so natural at physics that one afternoon the eighth-grade science teacher had asked him to do a preview of the basics of relativity, really fast, for the class. George had stood up and done such a fine job, using a paperweight and a yardstick and the standard-issue school clock, that the teacher had pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. I’d like to be the first person to pay you for your clarity of mind, the teacher had said. George used the cash to order pizza for the class. Double pepperoni, he told me later, when I’d asked.
That afternoon, we all got off the bus at Fairfax and Melrose and I followed the two of them home, wilted, trailed by the greasy salty smell of pastrami burritos at Oki Dog, and when George turned around to show something about the direction of an airplane, he saw me tripping along behind and waved.
Hey, Rose! he said. How’s it going?
Hi, I said. Hot, I said.
Joseph kept walking in his faded blue T-shirt, his back to me.
You’ve been walking behind us all this time? George asked.
I nodded. He kept walking backwards, as if he was waiting for something, so I raised my hand.
George laughed. Yes? he said. Miss Edelstein?
Have you ever been to the school nurse?
No, he said.
Don’t bother, I said.
Okay, he said. He looked a little bored.
He started turning back, so I waved my hand again.
Wait, I said. Sorry. I have a real question, I said. A science question.
Now my brother glanced around. Irritated.
Hey, he said. We’re busy. We don’t want to talk about fireflies.
What if, I said, food tastes funny?
Have you tried those cafeteria burritos? asked George, still walking backwards, tapping his pencil on his head like it was a drum. I had one of those today, he said. Now that was hilarious.
Don’t you have flute? Joseph asked, throwing his words back.
On Mondays, I said. Most food.
Or Eliza? said Joe.
Ballet, I said.
What do you mean? George asked.
What should I do?
I don’t get it, said George.
I think there’s something wrong with me, I said, voice cracking.
George squinted, confused. Both he and Joe were weird-looking in junior high; their features kept growing at different speeds and falling out of proportion and at that point George’s eyebrows were so high and peaked on his forehead that he always looked either skeptical or surprised.
We reached the door to the house and Joseph dug around in his backpack to find his keychain. He was in charge of Wednesday afternoons and he had a new keychain he’d bought with his allowance-a solid silver circle with a clever latch that sank into the stream of the circle invisibly. He found it, let us in, and then attached the circle to his belt loop, like a plumber.
He turned down the hall to head straight to his room, but George lingered in the entryway.
You play flute? he said.
Just a little, I said.
Hey, George, Joseph said, heaving his textbook from his backpack and flipping it open. Race you on twelve. A speedboat full of villains is leaving a twenty-foot-high pier at a steady fifteen mph. A car full of cops is about to drive off the pier to catch the villains. How fast should the car be going to land on the boat, if the car leaves the pier when the boat is thirty-five feet away?
But George crossed his arms, the way he did sometimes when he was in and out of Joseph’s room, pacing. They’d copy extra physics questions from the library and settle in for the afternoon-Joseph at his desk, George pacing. They’d prop open the side door for fresh air and flick twigs and hammer through the extra credit that the teacher put up for them, that even the teacher didn’t really know.
He fixed his eyes on me. Brown and sharp.
What’s so wrong with you? he said.
I flushed. I went through what I’d told the nurse. George stayed in the hallway to listen but Joseph ducked inside his room, tossing the textbook on his bed and sitting down at his desk, where he lifted a piece of graph paper and a compass from his folder. As I talked, he placed the steel point of the compass on the graph paper, strapped in the pencil and started to draw, with his careful hands, a beautiful arc. Every action so assured, like he knew exactly what mystery of the universe he was about to puncture.
So is it like Swiss cheese? George asked when I was done.
No, I said. It’s one big hole. The nurse said I had an active imagination.
Joseph crumpled up his perfect arc and pulled out a fresh piece of graph paper.
Don’t crumple, Joe, said George.
I fucked it up, said Joseph, tossing it into the trash.
