Most everyone ran off as soon as the fireworks started going off, but Dad sat there in his firecracker costume holding onto Mom and staring up. He said that, next to Mom, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He was so pooped from all the excitement, Mom had to help him back to their motel.
The next morning, Dad was dead.
“Weak heart,” the doctor told Mom. “Surprised he made it this long with that bum ticker.”
Mom said a heart as big and kind as Dad's couldn't have been defective. She blamed the whole thing on the baton. So she quit the twirling circuit, moved back to Carnegie, Pennsylvania, and opened up a hair salon. That's when I was born. Because they reminded her of Dad, Mom still displayed her twirling awards all over the shop. My favorite thing to do when I was little was to pretend a hairbrush was a baton and strike poses like the figurines on top of the trophies.
One day, when I was four, I was doing a dance I made up and twirling a broken curling iron when Miss Brenda, the owner of Miss Brenda's Baton Barn, walked in the salon. She took one look at me and said, “Really, Tiffany, you can deny it all you want, but you know that little one has baton in her blood.”
That creeped me out at first because I had just seen a cartoon with a vampire in it and I thought she said “bats in her blood.” Even at four, I could be stupid like that. Anyway, I kept twirling whatever I could find (a customer's umbrella, another customer's walking cane, Mom's haircutting scissors) until Mom finally gave in and let me start taking lessons at Miss Brenda's Baton Barn. I still wasn't allowed to join the Squadettes (the lame name for the Baton Barn's competitive twirling team) because those twirlers had to march in the local parades. But Mom and Miss Brenda agreed that I could get unlimited private baton lessons in exchange for Miss Brenda getting unlimited salon services.
This was actually a good deal for Miss Brenda, whose mother had passed on great skin but whose father (who had to be part werewolf) had passed on a unibrow capable of growing so thick it looked like a caterpillar napping between her eyes. Miss Brenda would go to Tiffany's House of Beauty & Nails for eyebrow waxing, and, after it was gone, I would pretend it had turned into a butterfly and flown away. The day Miss Brenda shared her awful secret, it was sort of a medium larva.
That January morning, I rode my bike to Miss Brenda's Baton Barn for my private lesson. The studio was empty, and being the only twirler in that chilly space with its twenty-foot ceiling made me feel like the last Popsicle in the box. As soon as my hands thawed and we got started, I asked Miss Brenda to help me with a new trick I had been working on. She grabbed my baton, and it seemed to spin around her neck all on its own. Miss Brenda had this flow when she touched the baton, and a far-off look, like she was the bride and it was the groom and they were in love.
“You're so smooth,” I said.
“Been doing this thirty-five years,” said Miss Brenda. “Twirl in my sleep.”
I pictured her baton whapping the ceiling with each throw as she snoozed. “Someday, I want to get as good as you,” I said. I put the baton under my chin and used my neck to twirl it around my shoulders.
“You're something special, kiddo,” said Miss Brenda. “With your natural flexibility and practice ethic, the sky's the limit.” She gestured skyward and we both looked up. The baton I had gotten stuck in the rafters last week stared back at us. “Well, maybe not the sky. But at least the ceiling,” she added. She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice sounded, I don't know, heavier. Miss Brenda said, “There's something I need to tell you.” She grabbed my baton mid-twirl. “I'm not supposed to say anything for another week, but, dang it, Mindy, I've known you since you were tiny, even taught your mom. I've got to give you a heads-up.” She looked like she would burst into tears.
“Are you okay?” I asked. She led me to her “office,” a desk in a supply closet. I followed her past the photographs on the hallway walls, including the newest one of last year's Squadettes holding up a small trophy. They were standing in front of a fence, smiling cluelessly while behind each girl's head metal things poked out like alien antennas. Looking at the team pictures made me feel left out sometimes, but there were lots of photos of me holding the trophies I'd won for my solo routines.
“I don't know how to break this to you, kiddo,” Miss Brenda said as I sat on a box in her office, “but here goes. I'm selling out. Got an offer from the Cluck and Shuck chicken corn soup franchise for the land, enough for me to buy a condo in Florida. Baton is a young gal's sport. I've got no regrets. But at fifty-eight, it's time to face facts. A girl's gotta look out for herself. I'll take you twirlers to the Twirlcrazy Grand Championship in May, but after that I'm through.”
It felt like I'd been whacked in the gut with a 7/16-inch Fluted Super Star. “But Miss Brenda, you're the only baton studio in town, and, even if you weren't, there's no way we could afford to pay someone else for my lessons.”
“Sorry, kiddo. I wish it didn't have to be this way.”
“This can't be happening to me. What will I do if you close?”
“You'll land on your feet somehow.” Then she must have said a bunch of other stuff to try to make me feel better, but I wasn't listening because I was thinking about how my life had been completely ruined. “Until I make an announcement,” said Miss Brenda, “this is just between you and me. Right?”
She winked, and I gave her one of those pretend smiles we use in competitions, but inside I was ticked. Miss Brenda was wrong about me. I wasn't one of those girls who could land on her feet. I was good at only three things: being tall, being tanned, and being a twirler. And let's face it, being tall and having free use of Mom's tanning bed weren't things I could really take credit for. Twirling wasn't just an activity I did for fun like some of the Squadettes, who also took horseback riding lessons and ballet classes. Twirling was all I had.
When I was twirling, nobody called me stupid, snickered behind my back, or told dumb-blond jokes that they changed to dumb brown-haired to fit me. When I did a perfect split-leap pullout, not a single person in the audience cared what I scored on a standardized test, or that I had failed math my first semester of eighth grade and might get held back.
If the Baton Barn closed, my competitive twirling days would be over, and I'd be just another one of the dumb kids. Life was so unfair. Why did I always get the short end of the baton?
3
Aphrodite Describes Meeting Mindy for the First Time
I
f you're skinny and flat, like me, here's a fun thing you can do. Stand in front of a full-length mirror. Turn your body sideways. Now stick out your tongue. Behold! You're a zipper. I felt chipper as a zipper the morning I got dressed for my first day of teaching at Carnegie Middle School.
I wore the gray suit I used for presentations at Harvard, but tucked a pink silk handkerchief way down low in the front pocket of the jacket where nobody but I could see it. Even though my professors at Harvard discouraged me from wearing pink because it was “too little-girly” and “suggested a failure to appreciate the importance of a professional appearance,” it was still my favorite color.
How did I make the transition from brilliant math prodigy and Harvard graduate student to thirteen-year-old middle school remedial math teacher, you might be asking? More about that later. Suffice it to say that after my new-teacher orientation, I sat at the desk in front of my eighth-grade classroom waiting for the students to trickle in. I couldn't remember if I had been in the same classroom when I had attended Carnegie Middle School as a student, since I had passed through so quickly. Boring describes that room: naked bulletin board, crooked rows of wooden student desks, and dingy white walls. My gray suit sure didn't help to pep things up, so I pulled up the pink handkerchief till it peeked out of my breast pocket.
I knew it might feel a bit awkward at first teaching students who were the same age as me. However, I was confident that my air of authority and superior mathematical skills would make it impossible for any of the thirteen-year-old students in my class to think of me in any way other than as the distinguished educator I intended to be.
A boy wandered in and came over to my desk, leaning in close. He had a chubby face, yellow teeth, and the worst breath I had ever smelled. “Why are you sitting there?” he asked. He punctuated his consonants with big bursts of air. “Park your butt in the back.”
Before I could think how to respond, Principal DeGuy came in. “That will be enough, Mr. Geruch.”
Bad-breath boy backed off. “Anything you say, Mr. DeGuy.”
Long-haired girls in wide-bottomed blue jeans and sparkly shirts wandered in, chatting and giggling. Noisy boys in straight-legged jeans and untied sneakers came in, punching one another's arms. I had memorized the seating chart, after one quick glance, so as soon as they were seated, I knew who they were. The last student to enter was the girl who had knocked me over in the stairwell earlier that morning. She gave me a suspicious look and took her seat. She was Mindy Loft. Her name suited her: she towered over me by at least a foot. She was a pretty girl, with sandy brown hair down to her waist, a slightly freckled complexion, and a strawberry scent.
Last, Miss Snipal blew in. Although she was the girls' gym teacher (and a former state Ping-Pong champion), Miss Snipal had been substituting as the math teacher. I was told the previous math teacher had quit the position in frustration because, despite her best effort, the remedial students “still couldn't tell an octagon from an octopus.” I wasn't sure why the only substitute available was an expert at pushups rather than add-ups, but I didn't want to seem nosy. I was just glad they were willing to hire me and give me a chance to teach. Principal DeGuy had asked Miss Snipal to join us as he introduced me to the class.
The bell rang, and my face heated. Since I'd turned thirteen, I had become more aware of my propensity to blush. It happened without warning, and at odd moments. I couldn't let the students see how nervous I was. Something that had always been stressed to me by my professors was that I should act my brain age, not my body age.
“Class,” said Principal DeGuy, “it is my pleasure to introduce a remarkable young lady. Aphrodite Wigglesmith was four years old when I myself recognized her mathematical intellect. She graduated from elementary school at age eight, completed middle school the following year, and graduated from high school at age eleven.”
The professors at Harvard called this the “dog and pony show.” During the show, people would stare at me with widening mouths, and I would stare at something above their heads. They would see a petite girl, not especially pretty but no worse than plain-looking, slightly red in the face at the moment, with long bangs and dark shoulder-length hair pulled back efficiently with a barrette. I would see the dirty air vent, smudge, or similarly unremarkable feature on the spot of wall I was concentrating on. Today it was a spitball that had stuck and dried near the wall clock.
Principal DeGuy pulled a paper from his pocket and read: “After a perfect mathematics score on her SAT and a demonstration of substantial progress on the Millennium Prize Problems, Aphrodite Wigglesmith was admitted under special privilege to Harvard. She is the recipient of the Strangefellow Mathematics Award and the Fellowhood of the Traveling Calculator Prize. She was awarded a bachelor of science in mathematics from Harvard, and recently completed the requirements for a master's degree.”
Principal DeGuy did not tell the class that while I was at Harvard I had to stay at the house of Harvard's dean of mathematical studies, Dr. Goode, instead of the dorm, and that my only real friend there had been a squirrel named Bernie, which I fed marshmallows and Tootsie Rolls. He also didn't tell how I came to be teaching remedial math to students in my hometown.
You see, I had a theory that nearly anyone could learn to be a math wizâwell, maybe not a total wiz, but at least wizish. Some students might take longer to understand a math concept than others, but their instruction could be tailored to suit their time:learning ratio. Had I not been on my own individualized math path, I'd have never gotten this far. Why couldn't other students benefit from the same approach? The key would be a healthy dose of confidence to deter quitting. If other students believed in their potential as much as my teachers had believed in mine, why shouldn't they succeed?
To put it simply: E + C = MW (Effort + Confidence = Math Wiz).
In order to prove my theory, I needed to find a group of students who were as math challenged as possible. I'd sent out one hundred résumés to find a teaching job and received one hundred rejections. They all said the same thing: nobody would hire a thirteen-year-old math teacher. The solution to my problem came from a most unexpected placeâa cafeteria bathroom.
“Somebody stop it!” yelled a Harvard freshman fleeing from a toilet that had begun spouting dirty water.
A pond formed around the stall and turned into a river.
“Ugh! Disgusting,” said another girl as she, too, fled.
I watched the water approach. It reminded me of Carnegie Middle School and the man with the polka-dot tie, Principal DeGuy.
Could he use a mathematics teacher?
I wondered.
It was the second time a toilet changed my life.
So there I was, about to launch my teaching career in front of a class of thirteen-year-olds who had mostly flunked their first two quarters of math and would not be able to graduate and move on to high school unless I could turn them into math wizzes this spring.