“I walked, like, a couple of steps, then I drove,” I say. “And then we were inside at Ada’s for about an hour. I wore a bunch of layers, and I had my hat on, too. Everything UPF 50.”
“Hmm.” Dad’s leg fidgets up and down.
What now? Seriously, what now? Whatever plans my parents are conspiring, Dad just says, “Well, you should go rest now. I’ll get your car with Josh.”
To his credit, Josh looks like he wants to say a thousand things to me, but not one of them is panic to be driving alone with my dad in his pickup. Out of nowhere, Mom does her “oh!” thing and tears out of the living room for reasons unknown. Thankfully, Dad follows her, leaving the two of us alone.
“Doing okay, Ultra?” Josh asks.
“Mortified.”
“Don’t be. My parents can’t say two sentences without getting into a fight. It’s, like, tension, all the time. Yours are actually partners, like, they really work together. I mean, not just work work, but—”
“Parenting together? Nagging together? Publicly humiliating together?”
“Caring.” His hand touches my knee. Then stays on my knee. That touch, that nickname, accomplish what ten hours of sleep, followed by gallons of chai tea could never do: They vanquish all signs of weariness.
My own words, I don’t trust, not when my insides are warm and discombobulated. So I simply hope he’s engaged in the same silent planning as me. Why, yes, kiss me, Thor. To prod him to this logical conclusion, I look straight into his eyes and hold his gaze, one second, then two. My lips part. His eyes dip to my mouth. I sigh. And there it is: The Moment. Anticipation itself has weight and heft and four dimensions: here, now, you, me. In The Moment, time itself becomes part of the kiss, a prelude to our yes. Josh leans in; I do, too. I can almost feel the kiss before it happens: now, now, now.
And then, wouldn’t you know it, my parents clatter down the hall before returning to the living room, deforesting The Moment of any sign or sigh of life. In our own silent partnership, Josh and I rear from each other at the same time.
“Ta-da!” Mom says, brandishing a zippered pink pouch of an emergency kit. An emergency kit. She bestows said emergency kit on Josh. “For you.”
I.
Kid.
You.
Not.
“Talk later,” Josh says to me, gamely holding the kit bulging with I’m-afraid-to-know-what.
As soon as Dad and Josh leave, Mom plunks herself down on the sofa, unintentionally bouncing me on the seat cushion like we’ve hit a pothole. I stifle a groan because only now do I notice that my body does, in fact, hurt.
“He seems like a great boy. See, honey?” Mom smiles radiantly bright, inflicting damage without even meaning it. (An emergency kit!) She says, “See? Not everything needs to change.”
But everything has. I feel it deep in my bones, which now ache like I’ve aged eighty years.
“Honey!” Mom cries out as if we’ve been separated for seven long years instead of seven short hours with me tucked in my bedroom exactly one floor beneath theirs. Her voice lowers to a whisper and she asks, “What are you doing up?”
“Why do you think?” It’s four in the morning, and the night has been, shall we say, restless? My bedroom door has been opened and closed no fewer than three times with one or both parents checking in on me like I’m a newborn on the brink of SIDS. Multiple awakenings, though, have the productive side effect of bonus text checks from Josh. Like now. I check my phone.
Still nothing, nothing, nothing.
Whatever happened to “talk later”?
Mom squints at my face. Even though the only light comes from the tiny motion-detecting one out in the hallway, she proclaims, “You aren’t as red, I think. That’s progress.”
“I know, right?” I say, playing along, because if I’m not all hearty and hale now, she’ll shift into Crisis Overdrive: A date at a coffee shop is too dangerous! I can’t even pretend to go to sleep again. So I slide the phone back under the covers and sit up, managing to conceal my wince. My body feels tenderized like I’ve spent a few too many hours in the weight room. I tell Mom, “I’m starving!”
Instead of lecturing me on the perils of late-night snacking, Mom lights up. “Me, too! Almond butter on a rice cake?”
“Suddenly, not so hungry.”
“Kettle corn?”
I shake my head and counter, “Jalapeño cheddar?”
“That sounds surprisingly good,” she whispers, then wrinkles her nose. “But messy.”
“I’ll wash my sheets tomorrow if we goop on them.”
“Deal.” Mom grins and scoots off my bed. “Okay, baby, cue up The Great British Baking Show.”
The suggestion to watch our all-time favorite show isn’t even out of her mouth before I reach for my computer, only to have my phone ping. My body does as well. Expectant, I grasp the phone. As much as I hope it’s Josh, it’s not. Insomnia must run in the family this morning, because the text is from Auntie Ruth, who tells me that she’s called in a favor with her window tinter of choice, but it’ll be at least two weeks before that shop can fit me in.
Auntie Ruth: I’m so sorry! But Mary is worth the wait! It’s so easy to screw up tinting, kind of like eyebrows. (Never wax them. Ever.)
Auntie Ruth: Hey, I miss seeing you and your eyebrows around here.
Me: Me, too.
The truth is: As much as I do miss Auntie Ruth and I appreciate her help with the Subaru windows, her outpouring of guilt makes me feel worse about my condition. I’m not ready to face her alone quite yet. In the kitchen, the microwave alerts: The popcorn’s done. In another few minutes, Mom creeps back into my bedroom and snuggles next to me under the covers, resting the popcorn bowl on a kitchen towel between us.
“Ready?” Mom asks.
“Always.” I hit the space bar on my Mac to start the show while Mom plumps a pillow.
“Actually,” she says, placing the extra support behind me. “Now we’re ready.”
Since discovering the baking series, I’ve rationed the episodes, hoarding each one like they’re the last remaining sticks of unsalted butter on our planet. In middle school, I’d actually bake along with each episode, a virtual contestant, participating in all the challenges from making my signature dish to architecting my showstopper. I swear, watching the show is how my baking improved astronomically beyond mere chocolate chip cookies. Tonight, though, I can’t concentrate on the anatomy of a light, airy pâte à choux, my mind springing instead from thought to thought: Josh’s silence to Auntie Ruth’s disappointing text to the parts of my conversation with Dr. Anderson that I’d chosen to deny.
“Too much jalapeño?” Mom asks, worried, a few minutes into the episode when I still haven’t eaten more than two pieces of popcorn. “I always mess up the proportions.”
I finally tell her, “Dr. Anderson said that some people can’t even tolerate the light through tinted windows.”
Mom nods. Of course she’d known that already.
“What if I can’t drive anymore?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the screen between us, but all I see is another piece of my freedom vanish. It’s not like riding a bus would be any safer, surrounded as it is with four sides of light-welcoming windows.
Mom sighs. “We’ll figure something out.”
“Until then, no driving, huh?”
She shakes her head, then nestles me against her, perching her chin on the top of my head. With a sigh, Mom adds the refrain that the Sick Girl will hear for the rest of her life: “I’m sorry, honey.”
Silence is, in fact, golden.
Golden as the sun, punching through the barricade of clouds on Friday morning. Funny, my skin’s just fine, it’s my life that’s being fried alive. That’s the way I feel, sequestered all day yesterday “to recover” and now cornered in the back seat of my parents’ Volvo sedan, silent and hidden under the thickest blanket Mom could find at home. Because my parents can’t reschedule the conference call addressing global pandemics like Ebola and because there is no
safe spot for me in the boathouse, our parents made the executive decision that my sister will miss crew practice today. The wails. The wails!
“Wait,” says Roz, leaning toward the front seats, where our parents are rehearsing their call strategy. “How am I supposed to get to crew for the next two weeks? And back home? Or from now on if the tinting doesn’t work?”
Curious about how they’re going to answer that, I lower my blanket shield. Mom and Dad exchange glances at this unexpected question, not a surprise, because most of my sister’s transportation questions have been dealt with by yours truly since the fateful day I passed my driver’s test. Dad must have lost the ro-sham-bo of meaningful stares with Mom, because he is the one who answers: “Plan B. The bus.”
“The what?” Roz looks genuinely confused.
“The bus.”
On the Scoville scale of anger, Roz reaches the habanero level: blistering. She hisses at me, “You’re ruining my life.”
Do my parents say anything? Well, yes, if you count their mild, “Rosalind. Honey.”
I hadn’t known what a relief it would be to retire from being my sister’s keeper. I huddle under the blanket again.
Roz starts furiously (literally) texting, punctuated with sporadic muttering: “You know, some people want to be crew captain by their junior year.” Then, “How does anyone expect me to be crew captain if I don’t show up on time at practice every day, every season, every year?”
Meanwhile, I sink deeper in silence, shrinking from any real and imagined fractal of light. The sun grazes the tips of my fingers. I yank them back under the cloak of darkness because I don’t want a single hint of a rash, not even the subtlest reddening of my skin before school. Then, what would I do next? I wipe the sweat off my nose. Boiling, I’m boiling alive under this woolen tent for one.
Finally, after an eternity and a half, we reach Liberty. I lower the blanket and drink in fresh air as we pull in front of the Quad, the square surrounded by the main office and chapel turned performance hall. The square flanked by the redbrick library and science buildings. The square occupied by Aminta and Caresse, sitting at the bake-sale table.
The bake sale.
My stomach craters.
“Whoa!” Roz snickers at Aminta in her steampunk outfit, complete with a stovepipe hat, and Caresse in her latest creation, an eggplant-colored maxi dress with a cowboy hat. “What are they wearing?”
I have eyes only for the empty bake-sale table.
The bake sale, where I was supposed to provide the cookies. The Minecraft Creeper cookies still on our kitchen counter, individually wrapped and tied with maroon ribbons and labels that read: GEEKS FOR GIRLS AROUND THE WORLD! The bake-sale table decorated with my articles and a six-foot-long banner.
Our Volvo barely has time to stop before I bolt out of the car, tugging my messenger bag after me.
“Hey, Viola!” Aminta waves to me. “You’re here!” (Finally!)
Caresse stands up, eyebrows furrowed. “Where are the cookies? Everybody’s been waiting for them.”
“I’m sorry!” I try to explain the morning: Losing my driving privileges made me lose my memory.
“It’s okay.” Aminta nods emphatically. “You have a lot going on.”
Caresse half-shrugs and studies the tips of her boots. No one gets mad at the Sick Girl.
“I’ll ask my parents if one of them can drive the cookies over,” I say, knowing that the chances of that are nil, but I walk back to the car. Mom’s already rolled down the window, shaking the blanket like a matador as if anyone can miss seeing it. The conference call has started, but both of my parents are mouthing to me while gesturing: Go inside! Hurry!
Not until I salvage this second bake sale for Geeks for Good. I whisper to Mom, “Can you go home to get the cookies? Please?” For good measure, I take the blanket from her, as if I’m really going to drape it around myself while I’m in class.
She shakes her head regretfully, but then her mouth shapes into a victorious smile. “Auntie Ruth!”
But no, I don’t want to see Auntie Ruth. Her guilty texts alone drown me in her anxiety—I am so so so so soooooooo sorry! What would her in-person presence do to me?
“This is no big deal,” Aminta assures me as my parents drive away. “Maybe you really should get out of the light?”
I’ve become the ghost of bake sales past, haunting unwanted.
After a story breaks, reporters will race to get the story out. It’s fast and (usually) straightforward. They’ll describe just the bare bones. But be prepared for misinformation.
—Lee & Li Communications
Inside the War Room: The Crisis Management Playbook
You know that feeling when everyone is staring at you, and you tell yourself that you’re imagining things because it’s just absentee cookies from a bake sale, after all? Only you have inconvertible proof that people are, in fact, staring at you because your little sister confirms it with her text to STAY AWAY from her at school.
Seriously, they’re only cookies, people.
Somehow, some way, you—the person who has shied from being the center of attention—have become the center of your high school’s universe.
The sideways stares, the scandalized murmurings, all the signs of impending crisis.
It can’t get much worse, you tell yourself.
Only it does.
A lifetime with my parents has trained me to scan the environment for even the slightest signal of change, the smallest disturbance of the field—really no different from being on Pimple Patrol like every other teenager. Was my nose reddening? Was there an ever so subtle pain on my forehead? Did a pore on my chin look a tiny bit inflamed?
That was my face then; this is it now.
So when people’s eyes flit away guilty-fast, I know it’s only a matter of moments before I find out what the hell is going on, because, really, how many people can possibly be upset that my cookies no-showed? My skin feels clammy-damp, but I force my arms to stay at my side instead of touching my cheeks. Still, the stares. It almost makes me want to throw the blanket over myself. Almost.
There is no possible way that the (slow-moving, censorship-happy) administration could have answered the missive my parents have composed, fact-checked, and legal-approved to UV-proof the hell out of every speck of visible and invisible light at school, could they? As I hurry down the hall, heading for history, where I can hide for a few minutes, a couple of kids swivel to stare at me. There is no mistaking the ultraviolent rays of their collective curiosity. I tip the brim of my hat lower, wishing that I could do a Persephone and vanish to another planet.
“So is it contagious? What she has?” asks Brian, a guy I’ve known since fifth grade, field-tripped together countless times to the Pacific Science Center, and even ate fried silkworms with side by side at an assembly. As soon as he started high school, though, Brian jockeyed his way out of nerd-dom and into popularity with his new six-pack abs.
“Slug-brain, no,” says Aminta, my defender who’s followed me inside the main building. I think everyone in the hall is as startled as I am by Aminta’s harsh tone. This is the girl who’s been voted Most Likely to be Emma Watson in the UN and who’s slated to fast-track at MIT, where she’ll invent some groundbreaking contraption that will change the emerging world. “You can’t catch solar urticaria. It’s not like the flu.”
“What?” scoffs Brian, his lip curling. “You Doctors Without Borders or something?”
Aminta’s cheeks flush like she’s the one who’s been out in the sun for too long. Forget hiding. No one messes with my friends. I march over to them, a blaze of red. It is a tiny bit satisfying to see Brian cower, even if he’s not intimidated so much as he is revolted. There is no mistaking that people are staring.
Let them stare.
Hands on my hips, I demand, “If you have something to say, say it to my face.” (Slug-brain!)
“You’re all over YouTube,” he tells me, smirking.
Uneasines
s takes root. I ask, “What do you mean?”
“Firefly fan films.” Brian (gleefully) cues up the one episode I have never seen on his phone.
“You are such a jerk,” Aminta tells him, trying to drag me away, but I can’t take my eyes off my solo performance.
There’s so much of me and only me, front, center, full zoom. The footage turns to the moment lost from my memory when I am prone on the ground, my eyes closed, my cheeks disturbingly red. Even if I cannot bear to watch this in full view of everyone at school, I’m statue-still, riveted by what I see: I am drooling.
Drooling.
“Stop it,” Aminta orders Brian.
“Fine.” He lifts his phone to shoot new, raw footage of my face. Aminta grabs for his phone. Brian body-blocks her, indignant. “Hey! Personal property. Touch it and you’re going to be so busted by the judicial committee.”
“You are so going to be busted by the police,” Aminta shoots back.
“Yeah,” he sneers, “for what?”
Aminta is silent, at a loss for words. Brian’s smirk deepens.
“Not the police, the FBI,” I say, my voice so much stronger than my marshmallow legs feel. “Filming with the intent of doing harm.” Who knows if that is true, but the threat sounds real. More importantly, I do not quaver, and I do not lower my eyes one single degree. Instead, I go full-on Genghis Khan and stare that boy down. Journalists never cower, not in the face of an authoritarian tyrant in government, not in my school hall.
Caresse joins us on my other side. She tosses her long dreads and wriggles her own phone in the air. “I got the whole thing. I’m sure Dr. Luthra and the judicial committee are going to find this highly interesting.”
Brian vanishes, grumbling about girls on their periods and entrapment. Mr. Bluster, that’s all he is, the bully who can dish it but can’t take it. Even if I know that, I’m trembling. Ms. Bluster, the kind who can dish it but can’t stand afterward.
“You okay?” Caresse asks me, frowning with concern.
I cannot even nod to thank them for being on my side because I’m heaving, somewhere between throwing up and weeping. The bell rings. I spin around and run. The hall teems with people who turn to gawk at me. The cloud of gossip hangs low and heavy. I can’t breathe. I’ve become a mutant species, never before seen and intensely scrutinized now. I barge into the bathroom. Every single stall is occupied. There is nowhere to hide and regroup.