Now That You Mention It

Worst of all, we still shared a room. Our little house only had two bedrooms. Every day, Lily would dress in front of me, totally unselfconscious about her body, her ribs striating through her skin, her vertebrae rippling as she pulled on pants. She was tiny and perfect, still so beautiful to me, as she had been when she was little. I tried not to look, but her body fascinated me. What would it be like to bend over and not have a stomach bulge? To not have to wear a bra? To have arms as long and slim as a ballerina’s, an ass that was both round and shapely but still fit into size 00 jeans?

At night, I’d cry sometimes, fully embracing my misery like any teenager worth her salty tears. I lacked my mother’s ironclad pragmatism, lacked Lily’s sense of self-preservation. Instead, I wrapped myself in melancholy, remembering when my sister and I were little, when we were close, when we were happy. I missed my father and hated him and loved him and hated him some more for ruining everything. Tears would slip into my ears as I listened to Lily breathe.

Or listened to her sneak out, slipping open the window, out onto the roof, down onto the lawn, as light and silent and beautiful as a dragonfly.

I missed her so much my bones hurt with it. The fact was, my sister had become a bitch, and it would’ve served me well to tell her that and show some gumption, as my mother would say...but that was the gift of hindsight. As it was, I yearned for her love, the friendship that I had never once questioned before our father left. “When will you be done in there?” was about the lengthiest conversation we had in years.

So Luke Fletcher was my heaven and hell. Any excitement in my life came from occasionally being paired with Luke in school. Every time was a mixed bag—we’d do a calculus problem on the board, extra credit going to the person who finished first; me acutely aware that my arms jiggled as I wrote, that the whole class was pulling for Luke.

But either way, if he won or I won, he’d smile at me, and it was everything.

Until senior year, that was.

Twenty years before I started high school, Scupper Island had produced a super genius named Pedro Perez, son of a fisherman, who was off-the-charts brilliant. He went to Tufts, then Harvard, then Oxford, then Stanford, and before he was thirty, he had three PhDs and had invented a computer algorithm that tracked consumer data and changed marketing forevermore. He had seventy-nine patents on all sorts of things, from agricultural tools to advanced rocket engines (and time-travel machines, if you listened to the rumors). Like any good billionaire hermit, he owned a ranch in Montana and moved his family out with him.

But once a year, Dr. Perez came back to Scupper to show his appreciation to his hometown by sending the kid with the highest GPA to Tufts. This Scupper Island slot at the university may or may not have had something to do with the fact that Dr. Perez had given the school tens of millions of dollars. It might simply have been a testament to our good public schools, funded by the tax dollars of our summer residents. But each year, a Scupper Island kid went off to Medford, Massachusetts and never looked back.

The scholarship covered everything. Tuition, room, board, books, a generous allowance that, rumor had it, covered everything from dorm-room furnishings to eating out. Dr. Perez’s only requirement was that the recipient finish college; dropouts would have to repay him.

No one ever dropped out.

Scupper Island was so grateful they renamed a street after him—Maple Street became Perez Avenue, and every year at the start of the second semester, Dr. Perez left Montana, returned to the island and announced the winner. He asked that grades not be posted after December midterms, so the winner could be kept a secret until the first week of January, when the entire school assembled to see who the lucky senior would be.

Most years, it was obvious who’d win, but occasionally, it would be suspenseful.

Going into our senior year, Luke and I were neck and neck. I had a 4.115 GPA, thanks to the weighted grades from my AP classes (an A in those meant a 5.0, not a 4.0).

Luke’s GPA was 4.142, because he got A-pluses in gym... And every year, for that miserable semester, as if changing in the locker room in front of my slender female classmates wasn’t punishment enough, I got an A-minus.

I tried, I was a good sport, cheering on my classmates even if they ignored me. I sweat and ran and played volleyball, diving for balls, trying my best, and I still got an A-minus. I wondered if that had been deliberate; the gym teacher was also the soccer coach. If Luke went to Tufts, he’d almost certainly play soccer, which would be a feather in Coach’s cap.

“An A-minus is a good grade,” Coach said when I meekly approached him freshman year and asked what I had to do to bump that grade up. His eyes scanned me. “For a girl with your physique, I’d say it’s a very generous grade. You work hard. You’re doing fine.” The implication was clear. Only the really fit kids got As.

Luke, of course, was a god.

In the spring of my junior year, my mother sat me down and told me if I wanted to go to college, I’d have to get there myself, a fact I already knew. She didn’t want me to get my hopes up that there was money “lying around for that.”

If I won the Perez Scholarship, I’d go for free. To Tufts! The name itself was beautiful, light and sunny, full of promise.

Only 0.027 of a grade point average stood between Luke and me.

And so, shit got serious...at least, for me. Luke and I took the same AP classes. If I could get even half a grade higher than Luke, I could erase my deficit.

He didn’t seem concerned. Luke was gifted at English and history; I had to sweat over those subjects to get my grades. But I had an edge in science, and it was a weighted class. AP bio was my chance.

I pictured going to Tufts. I sent away for information, and Luke’s mother, who ran the post office, snarled at me when I collected the fat catalog, knowing full well why I wanted it. She ignored me when I thanked her, but I barely cared, inhaling the sharp, rich scent of the catalog before going to the park bench to pore over the pictures and course descriptions.

Oh, the campus! The brick buildings and unnaturally green lawns! I could see myself in one of the dorm rooms, a puffy white comforter on my bed, throw pillows and...and whatever else people brought to college. I’d be in the beautiful city of Boston (well, Medford, but practically Boston). I could see my future self: slim and pretty with better hair, at ease, laughing with friends—friends!—treating them to pizza with Dr. Perez’s expense account.

I would get an A-plus in AP bio. I didn’t think Luke could.

But he pulled a rabbit out of a hat...or a human, more accurately. Xiaowen Liu was a Chinese girl whose family had just moved to Maine from Boston and lived in a big house on the cliff. On the first day of school, Luke asked her to be his lab partner.

“Hey, Nora,” he said with a grin. “Guess who got a perfect score on her biology SATs?” He gave Xiaowen a one-armed hug, making her blush. I didn’t blame her. I understood. She had an accent; the Cheetos had immediately pretended not to understand her and didn’t even try to pronounce her name—She-ao-wen, not terribly hard. But they insisted on calling her “Ex-Ee-Oh-whatever,” the feral, skinny bitches.

I said hi to Xiaowen on her first day, and she said hi back, but that was it for the “Outsiders Bonding” moment. I lacked the confidence to ask if she wanted to hang out sometime, and besides, her mother chauffeured her to and from school in a new Mercedes. The money thing, you see. I was an islander; she was a rich person from away. She had what I wanted to pull off and failed—quiet confidence.

All three of us got an A-plus on the first big bio test.

There went my edge in science.

Then came the English class speeches.

Luke knew he’d ace his. I was the Troll, after all; he was Apollo.

Public speaking was my greatest dread—standing in front of my peers, their judgment and disdain enveloping me like a poison gas. I’d have to suck in my stomach. I’d break out in hives on top of acne. I’d sweat. My scalp would ooze oil. Seriously, I was cursed.

But I needed every A-plus I could get. We were assigned topics; mine was the failure of the juvenile justice system in Maine. Luke’s was on genetic engineering, an unfairly interesting topic.

I worked on that speech for weeks. Researched and studied, outlined and organized. I went to the library to watch speeches by MLK and Gandhi and Maya Angelou for body language and rhythm. Practiced in front of a mirror. Filmed myself. Memorized. Tweaked. Memorized again.

Luke gave his speech, and it was an unsurprising success. He was relaxed and confident, friendly and informative. Was it one for the ages? Not really, but if I’d been his teacher, I’d have given him an A. Maybe an A-plus.

Mr. Abernathy congratulated him fondly and told the class that tomorrow, we’d be treated to mine. Sweat flooded my armpits and back at the mention of my name. There were groans and sighs from the Cheetos.

“Don’t worry, Nora,” Mr. Abernathy said absently as I left the class. “You’ll do fine.”

“That’s a tough act to follow,” I said.

“I’m sure you’ve worked hard, dear. Try not to worry.”

Ha.

I thought Mr. A liked me. Maybe he was even rooting for me. He was the classic English teacher—rumpled and kind, disorganized and eloquent. His classroom was cheerfully messy, books overflowing from the back bookcase, faded posters of great authors hanging on the walls, a few straggling plants on the windowsill. His desk was covered in papers and books, and the huge dusty blackboard (which was actually green) was crowded with homework assignments he never managed to erase, quotes from literature and abbreviations like GMC for goal, motivation, conflict, or KISS for keep it simple, stupid and doodles of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Though I was a science geek, he made me love reading.

“Don’t worry,” he repeated, sensing my insecurity. “I have every faith in you.”

At least someone did. I went home and practiced the speech again and again and again in the cellar, so Lily and Mom wouldn’t overhear me. I slept horribly, having nightmares about getting lost, missing my speech, then giving it, only to realize my legs were covered in fur. I couldn’t eat that morning (a rarity, let me tell you), and my heart thudded and twisted all morning.

I slid into English and slunk to my desk. “All right, then,” Mr. Abernathy said. “Nora, you’re up, dear.”

I went to the front of the class, and before the sweat could start oozing from every pore, I began.

The class was about to be stunned. So was I.

That saying about practice makes perfect? Being prepared? It worked.

Rather than give statistics (as Luke had), I had chosen a fellow student to use as an example.