After Dr. Gallow’s rousing speech we were divided into groups by class. Zoë and J. D. stayed in the theater with the other sixth graders (they needed the space because sixth was the entering class and there were a lot of them). I headed for Wexler Hall, next door.
A tall man with a clipboard was waiting at the entrance. He checked off my name and pointed out the table of snacks against the far wall. Juice and brownies. Ah, yes—the famous Allbright brownies. I scurried over and took two.
I didn’t recognize a soul. These kids had all tested in the fall, and though they knew one another from that weekend back in October, they were complete strangers to me. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to walk up to people I don’t know and strike up a conversation. So I was just standing there alone, feeling awkward and studying my brownies like an idiot, when I spotted Brooklyn, waving and heading in my direction. Relief washed over me.
“Franny!” he said, with a rare big smile. “Some speech, huh? We’re the future of the nation.”
“Very heavy stuff,” I agreed.
Brooklyn was craning his neck, searching the crowd. “Have you seen Cal yet?”
“No,” I said. “Do you know for sure she’s here?”
“Yeah, I saw her name on the clipboard.”
People were already moving into the meeting room. “Maybe she’s inside,” I said. “Let’s go look.”
Brooklyn suddenly grabbed my arm. “Hold on!” he said. “I see your favorite person!” I followed his gaze and saw Prescott, leaning against the wall, wearing his trademark look of sullen disdain.
I said, very softly, “Ooof! Ooof!” and Brooklyn replied, “Ooof! Ooof!”
It was our little joke from those two days of testing the previous spring. Brooklyn and Cal and I had formed this cozy little trio—which left Prescott out, of course. And we’d felt kind of guilty about that. Yeah, okay, he’d been arrogant and unpleasant at first, but maybe it was just social anxiety or something, your typical science-nerd awkwardness. So we actually tried to draw him in, to give him a chance to be part of the group. But he wasn’t interested. He kept wandering off to be by himself, and when he was forced to be in the same room with us, he would pull out Moby-Dick or simply turn his back on us. Finally we just stopped trying and left him alone.
“What’s with him, anyway?” Cal had asked at one point.
“He’s very aloof,” Brooklyn had said, drawing out the “oof” in a funny way. He liked the sound of it, apparently, because he said it again, “Ooof…ooof!”
“‘Who let the dogs out?’” I couldn’t resist. “‘Ooof…ooof!’”
It had sort of taken on a life of its own. Whenever we saw him coming, at least one of us would start oofing. I know it sounds mean, but trust me, he had definitely asked for it.
“Well, well!” Brooklyn said. “The gang’s all here.” And sure enough, there was Ms. Lollyheart.
“Ladies, gentlemen!” she hollered over the din. “Could you please take your seats now so we can get started?” Everyone put down juice glasses, finished their brownies, and made their way inside. Brooklyn and I sat near the back and continued our search for a dark, curly ponytail.
“Good morning!” The buzz quieted. “I’m Evelyn Lollyheart. You may remember me from your delightful two days of testing last year. For those who were too exhausted or too terrified to retain that information, I’m your all-purpose Allbright representative—by day, I’m assistant to the headmistress, by night I’m the girls’ Mum over at Larkspur Cottage. And this week I’ll be your orientation leader.
“I’d like to begin by inviting each of you to come up and introduce yourself to your new classmates. We need you to keep your remarks pretty short so it doesn’t take all day. Just tell us your name, where you’re from, and a little about what makes you special.
“Now, so you won’t think I’m picking on anybody, we’ll do this alphabetically. You A and B people—you’re used to this by now. You can handle it.”
As it turned out, there weren’t actually any A people, so the first to be called up was Prescott Bottomy III.
“Oooooooooooof!” whispered Brooklyn.
“Ooofity-oof,” I whispered back.
Prescott got up from his seat in slow motion and strolled up to the dais—like there was no need to hurry, his time was so much more important than ours.
“Hi,” he said, when he finally got up there, “I’m Prescott, and I grew up in Boston. But my parents are on the Hopkins Med School faculty now, so we live in Baltimore. Roland Park, actually.” (Well, of course! Important to let us know that he lives in a ritzy part of town.) “My father is a hematologist/oncologist, and my mother is a cell biologist.
“Not surprisingly, I’m strong in science and math. I came in second in the National Math Exam last year. I’m also extremely good with computers. Actually, if we’re being honest here—are we being honest here, Ms. Lollyheart?”
Ms. Lollyheart said that we were.
“Actually, I do well in the humanities and languages, too—pretty much across the board, grades-wise and testing-wise. I came in third in the National Latin Exam, for example.”
I expected Brooklyn to go “Ooof” again, but he didn’t. He was staring up at the podium with that penetrating gaze of his, clearly amazed by Prescott’s arrogance and the cluelessness he showed in expressing it so bluntly. Like Frankenstein’s monster, you really had to wonder what had made him the way he was.
“Got any plans for the future, Prescott?” Ms. Lollyheart asked. “Will you be following your parents into the medical field?”
“Something like that, though I’d rather do research than treat patients.”
“Well, I think you’ll be pleased with the level of science we teach here. You will be matched with a mentor—all of you will have mentors—someone who is doing high-caliber research, quite possibly at Hopkins. You’ll also have the opportunity to do summer internships at medical labs. Might get your name on a paper or two before you even go to college. So, welcome to Allbright, Prescott.”
He nodded and slowly returned to his seat.
“Susan Carver,” Ms. Lollyheart called next.
Susan was from Philadelphia. She had founded a literary journal at her school that won first place nationally in her grade level; she was also the teen editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her dream was to be the next Maureen Dowd, whoever that was.
Daniel Ellis followed. He was a history buff from Oakland, California, whose specialty was medieval Europe, with particular interest in the Cathars. I was amazed that somebody my age already had a specialty, and I wondered who the Cathars were.
With each progressive student, I was growing increasingly nervous. What was I supposed to say when my turn came? Exactly what special talent should I claim had brought me to Allbright—being Zoë’s sister? I wasn’t “the best” at anything. I wasn’t ranked second, or third, or even two hundred and seventy-ninth in the nation in any subject whatsoever.
“Calpurnia Fiorello,” said Ms. Lollyheart. I sat up straight and peered ahead. Brooklyn did too. How could we have missed her?
When she got up on the dais and turned around, I understood how: She’d lost maybe fifteen pounds, and her face was no longer round. Her eyebrows, noticeably heavy before, had been plucked. And the frizzy ponytail was gone; she’d had her hair straightened and cut in swingy layers. She even had on a little makeup. Cal Fiorello had had a makeover!
“Hi,” she said, “I’m Cal. And as you heard from Ms. Lollyheart, that’s actually short for ‘Calpurnia’…”
“Wow, does she look great, or what?” I whispered to Brooklyn.
“I almost didn’t recognize her.”
The transformation was truly dramatic, but it wasn’t just the weight and the hair. The change in her looks had brought about inner changes too. I could see it in the way she carried herself, the tone of her voice, the expression on her face. There was a confidence and a poise that hadn’t been there before, and I was glad to see that she no longer looked sad.
“…who was, by the way, Julius Caesar’s wife. You know, the one who told him not to go to the senate on the Ides of March? But do men ever listen to their wives? Of course not!”
She got a big, friendly laugh.
“Anyway, I’m afraid I haven’t won any national awards, as many of you have. But since my dad is in the Foreign Service, I’ve gotten to live all over the world, and that got me interested in languages. I picked up a little Hindi when I was at school in New Delhi and a fair amount of Bahasa in Jakarta. I started learning the Chinese characters when we lived in Hong Kong, but I was pretty young then, so I’m afraid I didn’t get very far with speaking it. I was pretty much limited to ‘shopping Cantonese.’
“But I’ve been here at Allbright for three months now—I was in the summer program—and I’ve had the chance to work with a tutor five days a week…”
The summer program—of course! Cal had mentioned it the day we first met. It was one of the reasons her dad wanted her to go to Allbright. Maybe the school was responsible for her new look and personality. I remembered Allison in all her perfection and wondered if there really was something about Allbright that brought out the best in people.
“So now I’ve decided to switch from Cantonese to Mandarin,” Cal was saying, “and have been brushing up on my characters and getting a head start on speaking. I’m very excited. The language program here is awesome.”
“That’s wonderful!” Ms. Lollyheart said. “Here in the U.S., I’m afraid we’ve fallen rather behind in learning languages. The fact that English is so widely spoken has made us lazy. We desperately need young people like you, Cal. I hope you will try to stretch yourself and take on at least one other language besides Mandarin.”
“Actually, I’ve been giving some thought to Arabic.”
“Excellent choice! Thank you, Cal.”
As she returned to her seat, Cal spotted Brooklyn and me, and sent us a discreet little wave.
The next kid up was a playwright. He was followed by a political activist and a math genius. Finally it was Brooklyn’s turn.
“Knock ’em dead!” I whispered.
“I’m Brooklyn Offloffalof,” he said. “And yes, I was born there.” The audience laughed, as I knew they would.
“I’m what you might call a hybrid,” he went on. “And no, I am not a car.”
Everybody giggled.
“I am the product of a Russian Jewish activist poet and an African-American Baptist police officer—and if that’s not a hybrid, I don’t know what is.
“Now naturally you’re wondering how two such people managed to get together. Well, my father was invited to New York to receive an honorary degree from Columbia. Back in those days, in the eighties, Russians weren’t free to travel unless they had special permission from the government. And if you were a public figure—a ballet dancer, like Baryshnikov, or a writer, like my dad—they never let you travel alone. They wanted to make sure you didn’t defect to the West. I mean, it was pretty grim in Russia back then. Who wouldn’t rather stay in Canada or the U.S.?
“So, Dad went to New York, accompanied by a couple of bodyguards, who never left him alone for a second. But the ceremony was in this big hall full of people, and since the commencement speaker was some famous politician, lots of reporters were there, and security too. Dad didn’t think his ‘handlers’ would make a scene in such a public place—terrible press for the Russians—so he decided to make his move. Right in the middle of the ceremony, with everybody watching, Dad got up from his seat, walked over to ‘ze most beautifool policeman in the room,’ and asked for political asylum.
“So Dad married his ‘beautifool policeman’ and became an American citizen and moved to Brooklyn, which is where I got my name. He thought it was so poetic. My mom could not convince him that a name like Brooklyn was a terrible burden to place on a young child. He promised to let her name the next one.” Pause. “My sister’s name is Junebug.”
Hilarious laughter.
“Was she born in June?” came a voice from the crowd.
“Of course.”
Brooklyn said all this in a deadpan voice that made it that much funnier. He waited for the laughing to subside, then continued in the same calm manner.
“Last year we moved to Baltimore, where my dad is poet-in-residence in the Hopkins Writing Seminars Program. My mom is with the Baltimore PD.”
“And you?” Ms. Lollyheart asked. “Besides having an obvious talent for telling stories, what would you say are your special gifts?”
“Well, first I need to say that my parents come from two of the most demonstrative cultures the world has ever produced, so nothing at our house is ever understated. We actually have exclamation points on our grocery lists: Kleenex! Potatoes! And any little disagreement can turn into this major drama. My dad will bring in the pogroms and the gulags (like they were my mom’s fault) and she’ll drag in slavery and Jim Crow (like they were his). You feel like you’re watching the semifinals of the ‘International Suffering Playoffs.’
“Well, in a household like that—and with a name like Brooklyn—I could either spend my life hiding under the bed in terror, or I could pay close attention and use it as material. I’m not really into hiding under beds, so I became a writer instead. My first book of poems is being published by Broadbrook Press in the spring. It’s called In the Shadow of the Bridge.”
No wonder they had recruited him, I thought. Cheez Louise, I was so out of my depth! Not that I really had time to brood about this, unfortunately. We had passed Offloffalof and were moving on to Petersen. Either I was going to have to call my mom to come take me home, or I’d better pull myself together and come up with something to say.
At last my name was called. I marched up to the dais with all the dignity I could muster. I had decided there was only one way out of this predicament: I would have to be funny.
“I’m Franny Sharp,” I said, “from Baltimore. And I am here to make the rest of you feel brilliant. You probably don’t need any help with that” (a tittering of laughter), “but I will give it all I’ve got. I have absolutely no talents, and will endeavor, at all times, to be ordinary. Every bell curve has its two extremes, and I promise to keep a death grip on the bottom end. I am glad to do it. Really, I am. Sydney Carton said it best, in A Tale of Two Cities, as he went to his death in another man’s place: ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.’ No need to thank me. You’re perfectly welcome.”
I bowed, and the room went wild with cheering and clapping. And then—I swear I am telling you the truth—they gave me a standing ovation!
I returned to my seat feeling wildly elated. My best hope had been to survive the ordeal without making a fool of myself. But I had surpassed that by far. In a room full of geniuses, they’d given me the standing ovation! They liked me because I was funny and unpretentious and wasn’t a threat to them.
Not the greatest foundation for friendship, you say? I disagree. At least they liked me for who I really am.