I’m stuffing schoolbooks into my backpack the next morning when I see that Dad’s Scrabble-tile towers have been razed.
Spelled out across the desk are three words:
For one crazy second I think of Safer, that maybe he somehow got in here again when I was asleep, and I’m still staring at the words when Dad sticks his head in.
“Message from Mom,” he says quietly. He tries to catch my eyes but I don’t let him.
Right. Safer does not love me, and he does not call me Pickle.
Mom’s job is officially the day shift, seven a.m. to three p.m. It takes her half an hour to report to the next charge nurse on duty and forty-five minutes to drive home. If a nurse on the next shift calls in sick, Mom can be “held over” to work the first half of the three-to-eleven shift, and someone else gets called in to cover the second half. That’s called a split.
But if they can’t find anyone to come in for the second half of the split, Mom has to work the whole three-to-eleven shift, which means she works from seven a.m. to eleven p.m. That’s called a double.
We all hated doubles until Dad lost his job. Then Mom started volunteering for them whenever she could. I still hate them, though.
Dad’s in the doorway again. He’s wearing a tie, and his “client meeting” glasses, with the rectangular black frames. “Almost ready?” he asks in a low voice. We’re always quiet before school, because when Mom works doubles, the number-one rule of the morning is not to wake her up.
“One sec,” I say. And, rearranging the Scrabble letters with two fingers, I quickly spell:
First period. Science. The science lab is different from the other classrooms—it has these old thick wood tables with black marks burned into them, and metal stools to sit on. It’s the only room at school that makes me think of all the kids who were here before us. I look at the scratches and the burn marks, and I think about how each one happened on a particular day, maybe twenty or forty years ago, and how each mark was made by a particular person. Those people are probably scattered all over the country now. Some of them could be dead.
Dallas Llewellyn passes me on the way to his seat, saying “You’re it, Gorgeous,” and flicking the top of my ear with his finger. I ignore him. Dallas is always on the lookout for other people’s weak spots so that he knows exactly where to poke them. And if you don’t have a weak spot, he’ll invent one and poke you anyway.
Mr. Landau writes TASTE on the whiteboard.
“Taste-test, Taste-test,” Carter Dixon chants. He’s pounding his fists on Table Two. Mandy giggles and gives him a thumbs-up. Everyone knows that she hopes the taste test will reveal that she and Gabe are destined to fall in love and be together forever.
Mr. Landau doesn’t hear Carter, or doesn’t want to. But sometime next week, he’ll hand out these little strips of paper, and when he tells us to, we’ll all put them in our mouths. The paper is coated with some kind of horrible-tasting chemical, so everyone will go running for the water fountain. Almost everyone. Some people can’t taste the chemical at all, and to them the paper will just taste like paper. Those couple of kids will be left sitting on their stools and wondering why everyone else looks like they’re going to puke.
And they’ll be looking around to see who else is sitting there with them.
Here’s the story:
A long time ago, the only two kids who didn’t run for water were a boy and a girl who started dating when they got to high school. People say they got married, but I’ve never seen any proof. Another year, there was only one kid in the whole class who didn’t taste the chemical stuff, and he got killed by a drunk driver the summer after his sophomore year. So someone decided that the taste test is the universe’s way of revealing fate: love or death. And of course everyone else fell for it right away.
Today Mr. Landau is talking about salty. He’s passed around these stale mini-pretzels, and we’re eating them. We’re supposed to chew slowly and take notes about what we taste, without using the word salty. I write down zingy. I think about writing stale or crummy, but I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
I’m not much in the mood for stale pretzels because I just had the double-stack pancake special at Everybody’s Favorite Diner. It’s not actually everybody’s favorite, but that’s what the restaurant is called: Everybody’s Favorite Diner. Dad says the owner is a genius.
Mr. Landau asks us to “share our observations.” When no one does, he starts calling on people.
“It’s salty,” Dallas Llewellyn says, shrugging.
Mr. Landau sighs. Then he takes this red and white plastic cooler out of the supply closet, puts it on his desk, and opens it. We can see a big plastic jug with ice packed around it.
He asks Gabe to hand out some tiny paper cups, and then he walks around the classroom with the plastic jug, filling each cup with a tiny amount of mystery liquid.
“Don’t drink it,” he says. “Just taste. Let it sit on your tongue.” He pours a bit into his own cup, leans back against his desk, and tips the cup into his mouth.
We do the same.
“It’s just salty water,” someone says.
Mr. Landau nods. “But salty how? How is this sensation of salt different from the pretzel?”
Gabe says, “That was dry salty. This is wet salty.”
But it’s more than that. This taste reminds me of dirt, or animals, or skin. I swish around what’s left in my cup, thinking.
“Is it—is it tears?” one of the girls says.
“Ew!”
It isn’t tears. I know what it is. I decide to drink my cupful, tipping my head back.
“Gross!” Dallas yells, “Georges drank a whole thing of tears!”
Everyone starts screeching.
“Relax!” Mr. Landau calls out. “It’s not a big deal. It’s not tears.” He looks at me: “But I did say not to drink it.”
Dallas tries for another minute to make it seem completely catastrophic that I drank an ounce of salt water. But the moment has passed.
“Georges,” Mr. Landau says as we’re filing out the door to math, “do you have a second?”
“You doing okay?” he asks me when we’re alone.
“I’m good,” I tell him.
“If you ever want to talk, I’m here.”
Sensitive-moment alert. “I knew it wasn’t tears,” I say. “That’s just—stupid.”
“Right,” he says. “Where would a person get that many tears?”
Which makes me wonder: If you took every tear cried by everyone on earth on one single day and put them in a container, how big would that container need to be? Could you fill a water tower? Three water towers? It’s one of those unknowable things. There has to be an answer, but we’ll never know what it is.
I tap the red and white cooler. “It wasn’t just salt water, though, right? It was ocean water.”
He smiles. “Correct.”
I get this picture in my head of Mr. Landau with his cooler and his plastic bottles, heading out to Coney Island on the Q train.
“I figured it wouldn’t matter if I drank it. When I swim at Cape Cod, I always drink a bunch of water by accident.”
He nods.
“And even if it was tears—who cares? I mean, why are people so afraid of everything?”
“Georges?”
“Yes?”
“Are you trying to engage me in a philosophical discussion so that you can miss part of math?”
I smile. My mouth feels stretched out, like it might be my first smile of the day. “Maybe.”
“Go to math.”
“Okay.” I walk away, quizzing myself: twenty-eight stools in the room, ten buttons on Mr. Landau’s shirt, four pencils and two pens in the cup on his desk.