“Moooo!” It is still dark when I reach to shut off the Holstein-shaped alarm clock that my best friend, Jessie, gave me for my sixteenth birthday. To shut it off, you have to pull down on the cow’s enormous plastic udder. Mom wanted to throw it out. I told her it was just humor, Jessie-style.
I step into the steamy shower and let the warmth coax me awake. I shampoo, shave my legs, and let the conditioner sit in my hair for exactly five minutes, just as it says on the bottle. After toweling off, I put on deodorant, foot powder, perfume, and then begin applying wine-colored eyeliner under my lashes.
Do boys have to go through all this trouble day in and day out? How about Tomper Sandel, the football player who appears to be naturally cute with his shaggy blond hair and cleft chin—does he worry about how he smells?
I put on extra eye shadow in a semicircle around my top eyelid. According to Glamour magazine, this will give Oriental eyes a look of depth. I’ve always known that I don’t have the neat crease at the top of my lid—like my friends do—that tells you exactly where the eye shadow should stop. So every day I have to paint in that crease, but I don’t think I’m fooling anybody.
“Hurry up, Ellen,” Mom calls from downstairs. I throw on my new Ocean Pacific T-shirt and jeans and run down.
Mom is standing in the kitchen, quietly spreading peanut butter on whole wheat bread. She turns to look at me, and her eyebrows dip into a slight frown.
“Is that what you’re wearing to school?”
“Yes, Mom,” I say. We go through this scene every year.
“What about all those good clothes we bought in Minneapolis?”
“Those dresses are great,” I say. “But no one wears a dress on the first day of school.”
“Oh,” Mom says, as if she’s not convinced. She turns to finish packing my lunch. As usual, Father has already left for the hospital so he can get an early start on patients with morning-empty, surgery-ready stomachs.
I grab the Cheerios and milk, and eat while looking over my schedule one more time. This year, I won’t have Jessie in a single class. She took typing and creative foods so that she can have more free time. In the meantime, I’ll be sweating out calculus and trying to tack gymnastics onto my already-stuffed schedule. My parents say I have to take all the hard classes so I can get into Harvard like my sister, Michelle.
“Here’s your lunch,” Mom says, handing me a brown paper bag. I open it and find a small container filled with soft white ovals in sugary liquid.
“What is this?” I grimace, holding the tiny container aloft. “Litchi nuts,” Mom answers. “Remember? You love them.”
“Not for lunch,” I say, a little too vehemently. The truth is, I don’t want people seeing those foreign-looking nuts and asking what they are.
Then I remember that every day Mom packs Father’s lunch, then my lunch, while I’m up in the bathroom doing my deodorant-perfume-powder dance.
“Well, thanks, though, Mom,” I say. “Could I please have a Hershey’s bar from now on?”
Mom smiles. She is so thin and small in her gown and robe. I throw my lunch in my knapsack and kiss her quickly.
“Goodbye, Myong-Ok. It’s your last year here,” she says. I look up at her upon hearing my Korean name. To me, it doesn’t sound like my name, but to Mom, I think it means something special. Sometimes I think she has so much more to say to me, but it gets lost, partly because of the gap separating Korean and English, and partly because of some other kind of gap that has always existed between me and my parents.
On the way to the bus stop, I slip the container of litchi nuts into a garbage can alongside the road. Wasteful, I know, but I’m always so nervous on the first day of school. All those kids. Especially the popular ones.
Everyone is at the bus stop—the same faces from last year, and the year before, and the year before that, but my throat still constricts. I wish Jessie lived nearby so she could take the bus with me. Two of the hockey players, Brad Whitlock and Mike Anderson, are loudly hooting and swaggering as if they own the place. I slip back and try to become invisible.
When the bus comes, student bodies swarm around the door like eager bees waiting to get into the hive. I let most of the kids go ahead of me, but as I board, someone shoves me from behind.
“Hey, chink, move over.”
In back of me is Brad Whitlock, a darkly adult look clouding his face. The sound of his words hangs for a moment in the cramped air of the school bus. Numbly, I look around. Everyone seems to be looking somewhere else: out the window, at their books, just away. Brad pushes past me to the back of the bus, where he resumes guffawing with his friends.
I sit gingerly in the nearest seat, like an old lady afraid of breaking something. I feel so ashamed, and I don’t know why. And why Brad Whitlock, the popular guy who had never before even bothered to acknowledge my existence all these years at Arkin High? I keep my eyes fixed on the landscape and concentrate on keeping them dry.
As soon as the bus doors open at school, I rush out without looking back. Once I join the tide of people flowing into the brick building, my heartbeat finally starts to settle. Now I feel protected, anonymous. Inside, excited voices unite in a single deafening roar, punctuated by the staccato of slamming locker doors.
“Hey, Ellen!” Jessie’s voice rises above the din. She will never know how glad I am to see her familiar face.
“Hi, Jess!” I say, keeping a falsetto of cheerfulness in my voice.
“Are you okay?” Jessie’s big brown eyes study me closely. Then the prefinal bell rings.
“I’m fine, thanks, Jess.” I slam our locker door, imagining that Brad Whitlock’s fingers are caught in it. Maybe someday I’ll stop to really think about it, about what it means to be different.
The prefinal bell means that I have one minute to get to room 2D, the chemistry classroom. I see my friend Beth sitting in the corner by the window. I also see Tomper Sandel—all muscles under his Arkin High Football T-shirt—sitting in the same row.
Crossing the room to join Beth, I pass Tomper’s desk.
“Hi, Ellen,” he says, and smiles.
“Uh, hi, Tomper,” I say, trying not to stare. Tomper Sandel—saying hi to me?
“Ahem,” says Mr. Borglund, our teacher, as he stands in front of the class. He looks like a cartoon character: his skin is as dark and wrinkled as a dried apple, and his hair—which I’m sure was blond in his younger years—stands straight and stiff, the color of a Brillo pad, on top of his head.
When he tells us to pick lab partners, Beth and I quickly choose each other. Mr. Borglund ushers us all across the hall to the lab room, which has rows of black counters with sinks and weird spigots crusted with powdery precipitates of experiments past.
“Chemistry is based on the metric system,” Mr. Borglund says to us. “For instance, instead of pounds, we have grams. There are 454 grams to a pound. Familiarize yourselves with the meter sticks, scales, and graduates in your lab kits. Then do the problems I’m handing out.”
Beth and I dig out the tangled mess of beakers, scales, and rulers from our lab cubby. Beth starts balancing her plastic bracelet against the tiny gram weights, which look like metal Monopoly pieces.
“How was your summer?” she asks.
“Pretty good,” I say. “Are you going out for gymnastics again?”
“For sure,” she says. “You are, aren’t you?”
“I’m planning on it,” I say, thinking how Mom and Father had cautioned me that if any of my grades fell lower than an A, there would be no more gymnastics.
Mr. Borglund has given us three problems on converting from the US to the metric system. It’s almost too easy: once you know the formula, it’s the same for all three. Beth works it out on her calculator, and I double-check the numbers to make sure they are absolutely right. Then I hand in the paper, after writing ellen sung and beth zeigler neatly at the top. We are the first group to finish. The two guys sharing our counter are fencing with their meter sticks.
We are putting the equipment away when Tomper pokes his head into our lab space.
“How’s it going over here?” he asks. I look at him warily, but thrill at his faint smell of smoke; it reminds me of log cabins and chopping wood.
“We’re just finishing up,” Beth chirps. I give Beth a look to let her know that we’d better not give him any answers, since that’s what he’s probably here for.
“How’s gymnastics going, Ellen?” He turns to me and grins, his chin folding into a perfect dimple—adorable.
“Our first meet is in a few weeks,” I say, then add, “Beth is going out for it again, too.”
“I’ll be there,” he says, giving the thumbs-up sign and smiling right into my face.
He walks away, hands casually thrust into the pockets of his faded Levi’s. From the back, his gold hair curls down his tanned neck. What luck to finally have him in a class.
“He’s gorgeous.” Beth sighs.
“Too flirtatious,” I say as coolly as I can.
English composition is the last class of the day. My interest perks up when I see Tomper Sandel walk in the door ahead of me.
I take a seat next to Beth, and we look up expectantly at our new teacher, Mrs. Klatsen. This class is one of those silly ones that they make all the seniors take to make sure everyone can read and write when they leave Arkin High. At least I’ve heard that Mrs. K. is supposed to be a good teacher.
Neatly stacked in front of her are The Red Pony, The Good Earth, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and The Complete Shakespeare.
“Good books like these can open up worlds,” she says, standing up regally. She must be at least six feet tall.
“Why not wait until the movie comes out?” calls Mike Anderson from the back of the room.
I look up at Mrs. K. She is smiling.
“Movies and TV are definitely entertaining,” she says, not missing a beat. “But did you ever stop to think about how one-track they are? Movies and TV give you an entire picture and tell you exactly how to feel—they have the scary music and the canned laughter to make sure you get it right. But books, on the other hand, give you only the words; you have to use your imagination for the rest. It’s more than entertainment: your imagination will help you get things from books that you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life.”
I look at Mike; his mouth is closed.
“For today, I’d like to see how well your vocabularies have held up over the summer. Pick your partner by writing down your first and second choice on a piece of paper.”
How democratic, I think as I join the scribbling and scrabbling of pens. I write down beth zeigler, and then, as an afterthought, I put tom sandel under her name. I tear the page out of my spiral-bound notebook and make sure it is folded up before I send it forward.
Mrs. K. sorts through the ragged papers and comes up with a list. Then she calls me to her desk.
“Ellen.” Her eyes smile through her huge plastic glasses that make her look appealingly bookish. “Your teacher last year, Mrs. Jaynes, told me about what a wonderful English student you are.”
I try to smile modestly. It’s true that English has always been one of my favorite classes.
“And a lot of people put you down for first choice.”
Everyone knows I’m good with vocab words. I sigh to myself. It’s not like I’m popular or anything.
“Whom did Beth put down?” I ask.
“Well, I thought that instead of Beth, I’d like to pair you with someone who needs a little help, and I wanted to make sure it was okay with you.”
“Sure,” I say hopefully. Maybe it’ll be Tomper.
“I think,” she says, “that Mike Anderson could benefit greatly from working with you.”
I immediately think of Mike guffawing with Brad Whitlock at the bus stop this morning. Then Mrs. K. smiles such a straightforward, honest smile that I can’t say anything. I like her too much.
So, Mike Anderson, the star hockey player with less-than-stellar brains, slides his desk along the floor like a scooter—until it bumps into mine.
“Hey, Ellen, how’s life?” He grins suavely.
I pull out the vocab list, and his grin dissolves. “Ready?” I ask.
He rests his head on the desk and mumbles into his elbow, “Yeah.”
The first word is omniscient.
“How about if we say ‘God is considered to be omniscient’?”
“Yeah, sure,” comes the muffled reply.
“Omniscient means ‘all-knowing,’” I tell him for his benefit.
I do the next few words without seeing any signs of life from Mike.
“Here, you do the next one.” I poke the pen into his hand, and he clambers out of his stupor with gruff surprise. The word is sentimental.
He scratches his head for a moment, looks at the word, then looks at me. He seems so uncertain that I feel sorry for him. Don’t they ever use sentimental in Sports Illustrated?
“Uh, how about ‘They took a sentimental journey to the center of the earth’?” He beams. “Howzat?”
He might be popular, I think, but he’s sure not much to look at in the IQ department.
Of course, when it is time to read the results out loud, we are called on for sentimental.
“It’s your word,” I murmur, giving him a nudge.
“Uh, sentimental. ‘They took a sentimental journey to the center of the earth.’”
A pause. Then the class hoots with laughter. Even Mrs. Klatsen chuckles. Mike looks around and grins as if he planned to be funny.
That’s what being popular is like—everyone thinks you’re great no matter what you do.
“That’s not quite it, Mike,” she says. “Beth, you try.”
“We became very sentimental when we heard our class song,” she dutifully replies.
“Perfect,” says Mrs. K.
I can’t help wondering if Jessie’s day is going any better. This is supposed to be our best year ever, she told me over the summer. A best year for best friends.