What I Wore to Save the World (5 page)

“A lot, but that has nothing to do with—”

“You bet a lot! It has the S word in it, that's how much. Daddy says it's an s-load of money.” She stuck her hand in my face. “If you want to maintain
my
academic skills, you have to pay, pay, pay!”

“Fine,” I said, digging in the pocket of my shorts for change. “How much?”

“Enough for a box of Tic Tacs. The orange ones. You shouldn't give me potato chips for breakfast, you know,” she added, shoving a handful into her mouth. “Pay me extra and I won't tell Mom.”

“All Tic Tacs cost the same—never mind.” I plopped a couple of quarters into her salty fist and waited while she tucked the change in her special Pocahontas purse, which already contained an empty ChapStick, some crayons, a plastic toy cell phone and her broken zipper collection.

“It's a pleasure doing business with you.” She crossed her arms. “Teach away.”

“Um.” I realized that I hadn't remembered to bring a pencil or paper outside with me. “Okay. What do you want to do first? Math, or spelling, or—”

“I want to learn about photosynthesis.” She unfolded her arms and swung her legs over the side of the chaise longue. “It's about how plants turn green and make air for us to breathe. And it's a P-H word! I already put it in my spelling book. P-H-O-T-”

“Cool,” I interrupted. The summer was too short to listen to Tammy spell every stupid word that crossed her mind. “Photosynthesis. There's this stuff in plants that's green, see, called chlorophyll—”

“I just told
you
what it was,” she said impatiently. “The plants turn green and make air. What's next?”

Already I was feeling cranky. “Let's do the times table,” I suggested.

“Bo-ring!” she sang out, but obliged. “Zero times one is zero. Zero times two is zero . . .”

Then Tammy and I recited the times table together. It went pretty well until we got to the eights. I kept getting eight times seven mixed up with six times nine, but she knew it all like the back of her grubby little hand.

“Fifty-six,”
she corrected, “fifty-six, fifty-six! Say it, Morgan!”

“Fifty-six,” I mumbled. Then, to save face, I tried to show her the cool thing about how the answers in the nine times table always added up to nine.

“See? That's like, magical, right?” I said, faking enthusiasm.

“So what? Everybody knows that. I can do
two
-digit multiplication.” She waggled her scuba flippers with pride. “I'll show you. Say two numbers.”

“Uh, seven and five.”

“I said
two-
digit numbers! Never mind, I'll do it myself. Seventy-eight times twenty-four . . .”

Then she grabbed my fashion magazine, took a crayon out of her Pocahontas purse and started to draw little lines and triangles and arrows all over the page. At the end of this exercise she came up with some random number.

“That's not two-digit multiplication, Tam.” I took the magazine back, glad that there was finally something I could teach her. “Two-digit multiplication is when you put the numbers on top of each other like this, see?” I started to write it out in crayon, all over Paris Hilton's hideous spray-on tan. “And you times the ones and carry the tens and . . . hmmm . . .”

She'd gotten the right answer.

“This is the
new
kind of multiplication,” she said smugly.

“But multiplication is just—multiplication.” I threw the magazine down. “How can there be a new kind?”

“They invent a new kind every year.” Tammy leaned forward, and her sunglasses slipped down to the tip of her nose. “It's because they don't have enough math. I think they're running out.”

“What?”

“Shhh!” She put a finger to my lips. “It's a secret. I think math is going stinked.”

I mulled that over for a minute. “You mean extinct, Tam.”

“I mean they don't have
enough
.” She pushed the glasses back up. “And that's why they keep changing multiplication. Because once you know how to do it, they have to invent a new way. Otherwise they would run out of math to teach you. And if they ran out of things to teach us at school,” she concluded with a shrug, “
then
what?”

Then what, indeed. I had no answer for that.

“Miss Wallace is a way better teacher than you,” Tammy offered.

“I'm sure she is.” This tutoring idea was starting to feel like a huge mistake. World peace would be easier.

“I hope you don't get Marcus. He goes to that SmartYCamp.” Tammy leaned back on the chaise longue and shook her head, which made the pink feathers fly everywhere. “Marcus will eat you up and spit you out.”

 

 

 

providing job security for her beloved miss wallace might have been enough to keep Tammy cheerfully relearning the same crap year after year, but my patience was already shot. My failed attempt to teach her anything had given me a massive headache, plus, some of the lemon juice had gotten in my eye and it stung like hell.

Here's a new kind of multiplication
, I thought, as I bent over the garden hose and splashed cold water in my eye: Take a dozen smart-ass kids forced by their overachieving parents to “maintain academic skills” over the summer, then multiply them by one C-average seventeen-year-old who's desperately padding her college application at the last minute, equals what?

Even I could do
that
math. It equaled disaster. It equaled a totally not-fun summer. It equaled me being eaten up and spit out by Marcus, Tammy's arch-nemesis at Idle Hour Elementary School: a snub-nosed bully who had single handedly brought many a substitute teacher to tears, according to Tammy.

What it did not equal was me getting in to Oxford. Who was I kidding?

Tammy was so entertained by stomping around the yard in her scuba flippers while I chased her with the hose that she decided she wanted to go swimming, but I didn't have the nerve to take her to the pool club. I knew as soon as we got there the manager would offer me some shifts flipping burgers in the Snack Shack, because the job was so greasy and unpleasant they were always looking for people.

And I knew I should say yes, because I was going to crash and burn as a volunteer tutor and I had no paying gig lined up for the summer, but saying yes to being Burger Girl seemed like sealing my fate in the most pathetic way possible. Of course Burger Girl didn't get in to Oxford. Burger Girl would be lucky to even end up as an X-ray technician.

And she sure didn't end up with the cute Irish boyfriend.

Forget the pool club, then. Instead I filled the bathtub, the big one in my parents' bathroom, and poured half a bottle of Mr. Bubble into the swirling water. Tammy was psyched. She kept the flippers on and put on her Little Mermaid pink plastic snorkel mask. She'd be good for at least forty-five minutes in there, until the water got cold.

My fate is
so
not ready to be sealed,
I thought, as I dragged the kid-sized pink beanbag chair from Tammy's room into the hallway, close enough to the bathroom for me to hear her splashing around. I wanted it all: Oxford and the cute Irish boyfriend (okay, one of those things I actually wanted more than the other). And I knew there must be some kind of half-goddess destiny in store for me. But was I supposed to wait for it to show up and ring the doorbell? Or was I supposed to go looking for it?

And how do you go looking for something when you don't know what it is?

“Behold, I am Tammy! Mermaid Queen of the Bubble Sea!
Blub blub blub blub blub . . .
”

I sank into the beanbag chair, took out the Oxford packet that Mr. Phineas had given me and started to read it—not just the captions this time, but the whole thing.

And, oh my God, Hugh Grant. How cute was he in
Bridget Jones's Diary
?

Clearly, Oxford rocked. Just as clearly, I was way out of my league. Two-digit multiplication had proven beyond a doubt that Morgan Rawlinson was not even close to being smarter than a third grader.

On the other hand, in all those centuries of churning out heads of state and Archbishops of Canterbury and Olympic gold medalists, nowhere in the brochure did I see any mention of a half-goddess graduate. Wasn't it about time they added one?

Major splashing sounds were emanating from the bathroom. It sounded like entirely too much fun was being had.

“Hey, take it easy in there!” I jumped up and pushed open the door. “Am I going to have to clean this whole bathroom or what—”

Tub full of bubbles. Floor full of bubbles. Bubbles stuck all over the tile walls.

No Tammy.

“Tammy!” I plunged my whole upper body into the water and batted away the suds. It was a big tub, too big, like everything else about this stupid house.
Why did I pour in so much Mr. Bubble,
I thought frantically as I pushed the foam away,
it's all suds, I can't see anything . . .

There, beneath the bubbles, with her snorkel apparatus still on but fully submerged, was Tammy. Her eyes were closed, and she lay flat against the bottom of the tub. She looked like she was sleeping, or—

I yanked her up as if she weighed nothing, water streaming everywhere. As soon as she was out of the tub she opened her eyes. No sputtering, no choking. She just looked surprised.

“Oh my God, Tammy, are you okay? Can you talk?” To think of the millions of times I'd wished this kid would just shut up for a minute, but at that moment all I wanted was audible proof that she was alive and breathing.

“I got a new P-H word,” she said. Then she started shivering. “Can you g-g-get me my sp-sp-spelling book?”

five

i wrapped tammy in the biggest bath towel i could find, brought her downstairs and sat her on the sofa, safely away from any bodies of water, active gas lines or open flames. Then I went to her room and got her favorite Disney Princesses comforter—“and m-m-my sp-sp-spelling book!” she yelled after me through chattering teeth—and wrapped her up again, even though she was already squirming and trying to get loose.

The more I asked her if she was all right the more she looked at me like I was insane.

“Do I look drownded to you?” she snapped, flipping her spelling book open to the right page. She pushed it into my hands. “You write it for me, my fingers are all wrinkly from the water.”

“It's ‘drowned,' not ‘drownded'—okay, shoot.”

“P-H-I.” She stopped and thought. “N.”

I was getting a twitchy feeling down my spine. “What word is this?”

“Just write it. N,” she repeated.

“The same N? Or another N?”

“How many did I say?”

I glanced at the book. “Two.”

“Two is enough. The rest is easy. B-A-R.”

“No offense, Tam, but I don't think that's a real word . . .” Then I saw what I'd written:

Finnbar?
My faery half brother? The magical brat whose well-intended efforts to help me out usually caused more problems than they solved? And who really sucked at spelling?

“Tammy,” I said, grabbing her a little too hard. “What does this word mean?”

“
Ow ow ow
,” she squealed. “It's not a word, it's a name,
let go let go let go
.”

The phone rang. I ignored it, but Tammy lunged at the handset on the end table.

“A name? Whose name?”

“The boy who was blowing bubbles in the bathtub while I was drownding—look, it's him on the phone!” she squealed, reading the caller ID. “P-H-I-N-”

How could Finnbar be calling my house,
I thought in a panic,
as if he were some neighborhood kid looking for a play date and not an immortal faery prince
? I grabbed the phone away from Tammy and looked for myself.

“Phek! I mean, Mr. Phineas—hello!”

“Took you long enough to answer, Morgan.” Mr. Phineas chuckled. “I was about to give up on you.”

“Sorry, I was just—in the middle of something.” Now Tammy was mouthing
I'm hungry
and rubbing her stomach.

“In the middle of something, eh?” Mr. Phineas sounded positively jolly. “I'm not surprised. After all, a person is generally located somewhere between the past and the future, which could fairly be described as the middle, don't you agree? Of course, there are exceptions.”

Only half-listening, I followed Tammy as she shuffled into the kitchen, still mummy-wrapped in her towel. The way this day was going she'd probably shut herself in the refrigerator next. Mr. Phineas kept babbling.

“I have some wonderful news for you, Morgan! My contacts have informed me that the University of Oxford is hosting an orientation session for their ‘special admissions' candidates. And you fall right in the
middle
”—he chuckled again—“of that category.”

“Sounds great,” I said wearily
.
“When is it?”

“This Friday, ten A.M. Punctuality absolutely required.”

“Hang on a sec.” I scribbled it down on the message pad on the kitchen counter. “And, where is it?”

“On campus, of course.”

“On campus, cool, okay—” Now Tammy was staring at me with big round manga-girl eyes, making begging gestures and pointing to her mouth in a truly obnoxious way. I turned my back to her and covered my free ear with my hand.