What I Wore to Save the World

Colin, of the overwhelming Irish adorableness, the strawberry-blond hair, the cornflower blue eyes. Colin, with the soccer-star bod and just the right amount of freckles, like a big connect-the-dot puzzle you wanted to trace with your fingertips, over and over again.

But Colin was way more than the sum of his cute parts. He was funny in a way that no one else was. He got me in a way no one else ever had. When he kissed me, which he’d really only ever done twice (once in Ireland on a moonlit beach, and once on the night of the infamous junior prom, at my magic faery birthday ball with Gene Simmons looking on—trust me, you had to be there), it was beyond magic.

It was like a million leprechaun rainbows covered with little MySpace glitter hearts, and silver unicorns with flowers sprouting out of their horns dancing underneath, and a zillion helium birthday balloons floating up into a perfectly blue sky, all crammed in a blender and frappéed into a delicious milk shake of happiness. With two straws.

Sarah had no way of knowing all this, of course, because she’d never met him. But what could I say? Colin made me feel one hundred percent goddess, one hundred percent of the time. Wasn’t that worth crossing an ocean for?

Or, to be more specific—wasn’t that worth spending the summer volunteer-tutoring a bunch of hyperactive third-graders for? It wasn’t going to cure cancer or bring world peace, but it was all I could find on such short notice.

“morgan. it is the summer. i do not have to learn over the summer.” Tammy looked at me with eyes as round and cold as two Ping-Pong balls that had spent a year in the freezer. “It’s against the law, I’m almost sure.”

She stretched back on the chaise longue and let out a little ahhhhh of contentment. The regular babysitter was sick and I was on duty, which normally would have been a fairly tragic development. But today I had my own agenda, and I was acting my magical-big-sister chummiest.

I’d grabbed some chips and lemonade from the kitchen and pulled the chaise longues to the shady side of the back-yard, since I was still peeling from the commencement on Saturday. We were hanging out in style: I was wearing my favorite bikini top, the one with the polka dots, and a pair of cutoffs. I’d even streaked some lemon juice in my hair to see if I could get a few highlights going. Tammy had dressed for the occasion too, and was accessorized with scuba flippers, movie-star sunglasses and a hot-pink feather boa from her extensive Disney-inspired costume collection.

“Tammy, come on,” I pleaded. “You’re my guinea pig. Let me try to teach you something. It doesn’t matter what. I just want to practice before I have to face all those kids at camp next week.”

My first instinct was to squirt her with a hose, but I resisted. “Tammy, get this through your head: I’m volunteering for the Y day camp. It’s community service. That means I’m not getting paid.” I smiled my most reasonable smile. “Now, I shouldn’t have to pay you to practice doing work that I’m not going to get paid for, right? That wouldn’t make sense.”

“‘The East Norwich Y’s “SmartYCamp” helps kids maintain academic skills over the summer, while having fun, fun, fun!’ ” she chanted. “I’ve read the posters too. Do you know what Daddy says they charge for that camp?”

“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!”

“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.

“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—”

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,” 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.

“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.”

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 . . .”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.

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.

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?

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.

Founded nine centuries ago . . . the first University in the English-speaking world . . . graduates include twenty-five British Prime Ministers, forty-seven Nobel Prize winners, six kings, twelve saints . . .

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?

“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—”

“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.