3

A few hours later, while I’m helping Calvin prepare a dinner of Mom-can’t-stop-pumping-to-cook peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, my BFF, Tallulah, texts me: Official request for a gathering of the minds.

I smile. She’s texting in our secret code.

Me: Request granted most enthusiastically.

Me: Will we be pursuing the ordinary agenda or is there a new element for review?

Tallulah: Tengo noticias aburridas!

Me: Yay!

Me: I mean, hurrah!

Tallulah: 7:00? El Jardín Muerto?

Me: Just returned from medical professionals in major metropolis. Still in need of provisions. 8:15?

Tallulah:

Tallulah is my BFF because she’s like me: not norm . . . because we’re both officially gifted, according to school and the tests and all that stuff. Ms. Gates, who runs TGASP (which stands for Talented and Gifted After School Program), always says that Tallulah and I make the perfect pair because we’re both hyperintelligent, but we have different overexcitabilities (which is just a polite word for obsessions). When Tallulah is overexcited, it’s contagious and I start to be overexcited about the same thing. For example, Tallulah loves mystery shows and logic puzzles and true crime documentaries and secret codes.

Last summer, when we got our first cell phones, we wrote the perfect code to text in. It’s super important because our parents read all our texts, and our parents are also smart, so we had to come up with something that would stump them. Tallulah taught me that the most important part of a good secret code is that it has multiple steps, and that it’s easy for BFFs to read while being impossible for intruders to decipher. Our code has three steps.

Step one: Use English for literal meaning—but use formal vocabulary words in order to exhaust would-be code breakers.

So, when Tallulah says, Official request for a gathering of the minds, it means Let’s meet up.

Step two: Use Spanish to say the opposite of what you mean.

We chose this one because we both take Spanish in school, and we were both overexcited about communicating in a different language for a while. Since aburridas = boring, Tallulah’s news is exciting!

Step three: Use Latin when it’s a matter of life or death.

(TBH we never use step three because we aren’t ever in life or death situations, and if we were, we’d probably call our parents instead of translating the danger into Latin and then sending a message to another seventh grader. But Tallulah says every good code has an alarm signal, and I think it’s pretty fun to have a secret 911 with my bestie.)

Me: I restlessly anticipate the moment at which I can possess the information that you long to bestow upon me!

At 8:10, I grab the huge camping flashlight Mom gave me for my last birthday and wave goodbye to Calvin. He thinks I’m just going for a walk with Tallulah. I skip out the back door of our house. According to our parents’ rules, Tallulah and I are supposed to stay inside our gated community, which is stupid because it’s not technically a community, just a part of town that everyone leaves every day to go into the actual community for work or school. Mom says it is a community because you need a passcode to drive through the gates. I don’t know what passcodes have to do with communities. The only two things all the people who live here have in common are A. we live here and B. we know the passcode.

So when I shimmy through the row of hedges that lines the back of our yard and start to climb the chain-link fence behind it, I feel only a little guilty for breaking the rules. Technically, El Jardín Muerto is not inside the gates as our parents define them, even though it’s a lot closer to our houses than many things our parents do consider inside the gates. But what can we do? They never listen to us when we try to tell them that this rule makes no sense. They don’t even want to hear about how when they say gates, they actually mean fence.

I jump off the back of the fence and into another world. Instead of manicured grassy lawns, there’s rocky ground, weeds, and spindly trees that grow in the haphazard way things do after deforestation. There’s also litter everywhere, which I don’t understand. The only other person I’ve ever seen in this no-man’s-land between gated communities is Tallulah, and we never, ever litter.

Sustainability used to be one of my overexcitabilities, so I know a lot about it, even though it’s just a regular excitability now.

After a few strides, I reach a hill so steep it looks like a cliff. I step down it slowly, shining the flashlight ahead of me so I can be careful not to turn my ankle on one of the rocks. Then I pick my way through the weeds, broken glass, and cigarette butts at the bottom of the hill until I’ve wound through multiple bunches of skinny trees and jumped over the little creek that’s sometimes full of water and sometimes empty. Finally, my flashlight illuminates the raised hatchback of a red SUV: the welcome flag of El Jardín Muerto. That means “the dead garden,” but our garden is anything but dead. We named it that because El Jardín Muerto is ours, and only ours, and who would be interested in a dead garden?

Tallulah is there already, sitting on the roof of a white mini-van, a book open in her lap, and one of those headband-flashlight thingies shining from her forehead. Orchids reach out of the moonroof behind her, painting shadows across her lap. The lilies in the open hood beneath her reflect in her glasses.

El Jardín Muerto was Tallulah’s and my first project. We were new friends, barely more than neighbors, when Tallulah and I started exploring out here. We found three abandoned cars in a circle at the bottom of a hill of rocky soil. It’s not like this is some beautiful forest, but Tallulah and I were enraged to see rotting, not-at-all-biodegradable cars in the middle of one of the only greenspaces nearby. We decided to make up for the cars decomposing here by filling them with oxygen-producing, CO2-destroying plants. We read books about sustainable gardens and googled and YouTubed gardening experts, and then pooled our allowance at the plant nursery near our school. Now the cars are all filled with soil and bursting with flowers and vegetables. Tomato vines wind up the open doors of the yellow car. Sunflowers reach sky high from the middle of the circle of cars. Flowers spring up where the engines used to be, and watermelon vines tumble out of the trunks and onto the rocky ground. In the back seats we’ve planted carrots and potatoes and radishes—root vegetables that require less sunlight. In the front seats, we have seeds resting on the windshields on top of damp towels, their shoots about to sprout. El Jardín Muerto is our contribution to the lungs of the Earth.

Plus, it’s what turned us from same-age neighbors into best-best friends.

Tallulah looks up from her book when she sees me and waves frantically.

“Piper!” she calls, as if I’m in a big crowd and it’ll be difficult for us to spot each other. “Piper, I’ve been here fifteen minutes. I was so excited, I got here early, and . . . Wait.”

I stop walking. “What?” I look up at Tallulah, her headlamp a spotlight on me from the roof of the car.

“You look weird,” she says.

Tallulah is almost completely missing her Can’t Say That column.

“Huh?” I say.

“You’re rubbing your leg. It’s . . . strange. Are you OK?”

“Oh.” I glance down at my hand over my jeans. My thumb is rubbing my bruise in tiny, loving circles. “Yeah, it’s just a bruise.”

It’s not that I don’t want Tallulah to know about Dr. Grand and early puberty and everything. I trust Tallulah completely. But ever since I started precocious puberty and Mom started trying to get pregnant, I feel like bodies are all we talk about. Bodies are all almost anyone wants to talk about. I talk about bodies at all those doctor’s appointments, and in health class at school, and at HHH. I talk about bodies with Mom: her body adjusting after giving birth, Gladys’s body growing. My other friends talk about bodies that are the best at playing sports, or bodies that are the best at looking good in certain kinds of clothes. Or they talk about hydrating lotions or face creams that tingle or sting. Eloise talks about bodies, too: her boyfriend’s muscles, her own period, how important it is to wear deodorant at my age.

But Tallulah is different. With her, life is about ideas. Learning. Overexcitabilities. The Academic Decathlon. Tallulah is my ticket out of the World of Bodies and into the World of Brains. That’s my happy place.

“Oh no!” she says. “A bruise? It must hurt if you’re rubbing it like that.”

“No, it—”

“Is that why you went to see the doctor?”

“Um, no, I—”

“Are you OK to climb up?”

“Yeah, I—”

“Because I can come down if you need me to. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable when I give you the biggest, most life-changing news you’ve ever heard.”

When Tallulah is excited, she can’t stop talking. Ever. She gets in trouble for it at school almost every day. Her parents get frustrated with her. Even Calvin, who’s the most patient person on Earth, sometimes looks a little annoyed when Tallulah’s at our house and she can’t stop herself from overexplaining how to assemble a crib or that the green mush that comes with our sushi isn’t authentic wasabi, it’s actually green horseradish, because it’s almost impossible to get real wasabi outside of Japan. It sometimes exhausts me, too, how she talks and talks without stopping. But I love her anyway.

“But if you can come up, you should because it’s warm, so we can sit outside, and it’s October so who knows how much longer it’ll be warm? Warm at night is the best, especially for you because there’s no sun, so you can’t get a sunburn. I never think that much about sunburns unless I’m with you because I’ve never gotten a sunburn. Although I could, of course. Black people do get sunburns. A lot of white and other non-Black people don’t know that but—”

“Tallulah!” I yell.

She finally pauses.

“I’m fine. I’ll climb up.”

Mom always tells me that interrupting isn’t nice, so I try not to, but sometimes Tallulah gets stuck in an endless loop of words, and she looks almost relieved when I interrupt her.

“Yay!” She shoves an index card into the spine of her book and inches over on the roof of the car to make space for me. She uses her fingers to adjust the corners of her glasses, which always leaves them so smudged, I don’t know how she sees out of them.

The smell of the lilacs hanging off the car door hits me as soon as I settle in next to her. I close my eyes and breathe in deeply.

“I love it here,” I say.

I take in another big breath of lilac, and Tallulah does the same next to me. The smell is so strong, it can even pause her stream of words.

I turn and say, “OK, your noticias aburridas.” I reach up and turn down the brightness of her headlamp, which she always forgets to do when she looks directly at me.

“You’re not going to believe it,” she says. “It’s the best news of our lives.”

“Really?” The excited energy is radiating off her and into me. “Is it about the decathlon?” I whisper.

“Yes!” Tallulah says.

Ever since we met, Tallulah and I have been planning to enter the Children’s Academic Decathlon of the State of New Jersey in seventh grade. We’ve spent years and years helping the older seventh graders in TGASP prepare for it. Now it’s our turn.

Teams of two seventh graders from all over the state get to compete. The winning team gets a full scholarship to a six-week academic summer program at the University of North Bend in Indiana, as do the two smartest seventh graders from every other state in the country. Some other smart kids get to go, too, even if they didn’t win. Their parents pay the tuition. I’ve never even asked mine about tuition because I don’t need to. We’re going to win. Even Ms. Gates thinks we can win, and she’s never had any students win before.

“Tell me!”

Tallulah hops to her feet, right on the roof of the car, and holds her hands out beside her like she’s just finished some sort of dance and is waiting for applause.

“OK . . . ready?” she says.

“Wait,” I say. Because, suddenly, I’m not ready.

Tallulah freezes.

I squint, at first not believing what I’m seeing. Then I hold the flashlight closer to her legs, which are now right next to my eyes. They’re covered in tiny hot-pink Band-Aids, at least three per leg. And they’re missing something.

“Did you shave your legs?”

“Oh,” Tallulah says. She reaches down to lightly rub her thigh. “Yeah. My mom finally let me.”

“Finally?”

I use my hand to shade my eyes from the headlamp glare and lean back to look up at her. Other than her legs, she looks the same as always: feet bare except for Nike slides, silver polish chipping on her toenails, long black basketball shorts and a purple tank top, dark brown hair box-braided and then pulled into a ponytail in the middle of her head. Serious eyes staring me down from behind smudged, purple-framed glasses. All per usual, except the bare and sort-of-bleeding legs.

My face gets a little warm the same way it does when Mom decides to breastfeed Gladys in the grocery store, like I’m embarrassed to just be near her hairless legs. My hand goes back to my own leg again, right over the bruise. I’m wearing jeans so I can’t feel it, but I know my leg hair is still there and, at this moment, it feels like a security blanket.

“I’ve been asking her forever,” Tallulah is saying.

“You have?”

“Well, since, like, last week.” She laughs. “She kept saying how I wouldn’t be responsible enough to keep it up, to be diligent about exfoliating before and moisturizing after, blah blah blah. All that normal stuff she always says. But, anyway, I finally convinced her. Ugh. Leg hair is so embarrassing.”

It is?

“Daisy’s been shaving her legs for weeks now.”

She has?

It’s weird Daisy didn’t tell me that. But maybe Daisy tried to tell me and I didn’t listen, the same way she was trying to tell me about having a crush on either Jack or George earlier, and I didn’t listen to that, either.

“Don’t worry, Pipes”—Tallulah pats the top of my head like I’m a toddler or something— “I’m sure your mom will let you do it soon.”

I nod because that’s true. My mom wouldn’t even stop me if I wanted to shave my legs right now.

But Tallulah’s legs look cold and battered. Who wants that?

“And maybe I’m a little older than you,” Tallulah giggles. “Metaphorically, I mean.”

I smile up at her because, unlike anyone else, Tallulah understands metaphorical math. My life’s work.

Everywhere we go, people tell Tallulah and me that we’re so smart, but then there’s all this stuff we don’t understand about weird things that grown-ups seem to automatically assume, but that are sometimes stupid to us.

So Tallulah gets the point. She understands how I’m trying to discover the math that will explain human emotions and contradictions. You know, the way Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus to explain physics? When I’m old and dead like him, I’ll be known as Ma’am Piper Franklin, the mother of metaphorical math.

“OK, I can’t take this anymore!” Tallulah says. “Can I please tell you the news?”

“Yes!” I say.

Tallulah raises her hands toward the darkening sky and yells, “The specialties announcement is coming!”

“What? How could you know about that already?”

Tallulah sits down next to me again. “Ms. Gates called my mom about my behavior in TGASP today,” Tallulah says. She puts the word behavior in air quotes.

I recall how, this afternoon, Teddy wouldn’t stop purposely humming right in Tallulah’s ear while she was trying to map out volcanic activity in ancient Asia, so she turned and threw a pencil at him. Teddy didn’t get in trouble, but Tallulah did.

“Uh-oh. She called your mom?”

Tallulah’s parents, Joy and Edward, aren’t like mine. My mom is always concerned that my giftedness could ruin my childhood. Tallulah’s mom always worries that her childishness could ruin her gifts. Because Tallulah isn’t just smart, she’s scattered. It’s like there’s so many smart parts inside her and they’re all competing to show off, so they get in the way of each other, and they get in the way of regular parts of life, like remembering to hand in your homework.

My mom doesn’t care if I hand in my homework, like, ever. But also, I’m smart, but not so smart it scrambles me up, so I always do hand in my homework.

“Yeah. Anyway. Ms. Gates called my mom to tell her how awful I am.”

“Tallulah,” I say, softly.

“What?” Tallulah shoots back.

“You aren’t awful. And Ms. Gates knows that.”

Tallulah gives me a look like I just said the periodic table is imaginary or climate change isn’t being created by humans.

“And so does your mom,” I add.

“Well, duh,” Tallulah says. “She’s my mom. But sometimes with my ADHD . . . I mean, Ms. Gates thinks . . . And I actually am kind of awf—never mind.”

“Wait, Tallulah,” I murmur. “You’re—”

“I was saying . . . Ms. Gates told my mom that the official start of the decathlon is this Friday!”

“Really?” I squeal.

All my worries about Tallulah saying she’s awful, about her newly bare legs, about my own shots go flying out of my head. This is too exciting.

“Yeah. The committee is zooming into schools to pick the specialties on Friday.”

“One week. Seven days,” I whisper. That’s serious noticias aburridas. I have goose bumps.

Tallulah swings her legs off the roof of the car so that her slides slip in and out of the open back window. “A whole week! I’m never going to make it,” she says, dramatically.

“I hope there’s physics this year. And algebra. Or geometry,” I say.

“I hope there’s a Shakespeare specialty. Or Chinese history.”

“Chinese history?” I ask.

Tallulah loves all kinds of history, but her interests change so quickly I can’t keep up.

She nods. “Oh! Or volcanoes!”

I raise an eyebrow. “Volcanoes?”

She smiles. “It’s my new thing. I spent all Sunday afternoon watching YouTube videos of simulated eruptions. Did you know that the biggest volcano in existence actually isn’t even on Earth?”

“What?” I ask. “Where is it?”

“Mars!” Tallulah says, gleefully.

“Wow,” I say. I can already see it happening. Volcanic contagion. I’m going to be obsessed with volcanoes before you know it.

Tallulah makes everything interesting.

“We should work on the garden, huh? Because soon it’s going to be all studying, all the time, and even El Jardín Muerto will be a distraction.”

“True,” I say.

“I think some of the baby seeds are ready for soil,” Tallulah says. “And the bulbs should go in the hood of the blue car, right? Plant in fall, bloom in spring.”

“You do the bulbs; I’ll do the seeds?”

“Perfect.”

I smile at her. We’re back to being the same metaphorical age. A team. I don’t need her leg hair after all.