11

Compare and contrast comparison and contrast.

The front door of Brenda’s house is ajar. I follow the sound of voices and find a group of women in the dining room serving themselves buffet-style from an impressive spread of salads. On the dining room wall, a beautiful photograph hangs: an enormous pool surrounded by snow, a single swimmer slicing through the expanse of blue, the word “Helsinki” scrawled across the bottom of the photograph in red.

“You came!” Brenda exclaims. “Everyone, this is Lina. Lina, this is everyone!” I notice there’s no uniform today. One by one they say their names, and I commit them to memory: tall Elaine in the serious pantsuit, wispy Mary in yoga pants, redheaded Tina, Amanda in hospital scrubs.

By the time I’ve poured myself a mimosa and filled my plate, the women have moved to the living room, where they’re sitting on sofas and ottomans, plates perched on their knees. I sip my mimosa, eavesdropping—kids’ sports, college applications, home remodels, spring break plans. When I overhear Elaine complaining about the school pickup policy, I slide down to the end of the sofa to join her conversation. “They’re high school students, for God’s sake,” she says.

Mary pipes up. “I’d rather pick Olivia up than leave things to chance.”

“Leave things to chance?” I ask.

The room goes silent, and the women exchange glances, as if they’re deciding how much to tell me. “You haven’t heard?” It’s the redhead, Tina. “A student went missing last year on his way home from baseball practice.”

I nod. “Gray Stafford. I did hear about him. What do you think really happened?”

“We all have our theories,” offers Amanda. “But I feel better knowing that Danny is accounted for in the afternoons.”

“What theories?”

“Well, hell, if no one wants to mention it, I will,” says Brenda. “Gray’s dad used to be in gambling before he moved here. Sports betting. He got busted and served two years in some country club up north, then returned mysteriously as a pardoned man.”

“But what about the Lamey twins?” I ask.

Elaine dabs at her lips with a napkin. “That’s different. The twins wandered off. That’s on the parents, in my opinion. Could’ve turned into a real tragedy.”

There’s so much that these theories don’t explain, but the fact that Gray’s dad did time certainly changes things. Especially if it involved organized crime, it’s not unusual for that kind of entanglement to reach the family.

I want to hear more, but Brenda taps her knife on her glass as if calling us to order. “Sorry to interrupt gossip hour, ladies, but we need to talk about Saturday morning study group. Does nine a.m. still work?”

Nods all around.

“Okay, then.” She passes around a chart she’s printed in four colors. “Matthew will take the Ethicalities discussion this week, ­Olivia has Future Functionalities, and Hannah is in charge of Theories of Global Economics. That just leaves Analogies, plus Diagrams and Analyses. Lina, do you think Rory would be interested in leading a discussion?”

“Wait, your kids voluntarily do this on Saturday mornings?”

The looks of consternation passing among the women indicate I’ve just committed some sort of blasphemy. “I think you’ll find the kids take the Wonder Test very seriously,” Tina says. “We all do.”

Early in the evening, the Lamey file appears on my doorstep, and I retreat with it to the library, my favorite room in the house. I love the comfortable leather chairs and walls of books, complete with a rolling ladder. It feels like something out of a Hollywood set.

Rory sits across from me, reading. He’s at that transitional age when he no longer wants to share every detail, yet he still likes being around me. I don’t want this phase to end.

The Lamey file is all boilerplate, random copies, travel vouchers, and other useless administrivia. The investigation is cursory, the interviews short and unrevealing. I get the feeling it was conducted by a sloppy detective on his way to lunch.

I look up from the file to watch Rory. He’s reading intently, but I can’t see the title. Each night, Rory has three types of homework—questions from the test prep book, reading, and typing. Because the test is administered entirely online, all answers have to be typed. Last week, Superintendent Kobayashi emailed a link to a report about the correlation between typing and test performance. Fast typing may not make kids smarter, Kobayashi argued, but it does allow them to “communicate their intelligence more effectively. An improvement in typing speed by ten words per minute results in a four percent increase in test scores.”

Four percent can apparently be the difference between living in Atherton and scraping by in Daly City. That may not mean anything to the general public, but it does to Greenfield parents. No one wants to live in Daly City. Atherton would be nice.

Every night, I hear Rory’s hands flying over the keyboard. After that, he spends two hours reading. Students may fulfill their reading requirement any way they choose, so long as they record it. Time + quantity = success! Of course, I’m all for reading, but the school’s approach seems to miss the point.

“They encourage us to read the same book twice or even three times,” Rory has explained. “According to Kobayashi, reading the same text repeatedly improves reading skills twenty-one percent better than reading something new. When you subtract your interest in the actual material, it helps you focus on the pure skill of reading and improves speed.”

“I call BS.”

Rory just gives me an annoyed look. He’s not buying into this Wonder Test stuff, is he?

“Hey, I had lunch with some moms from the school today. They invited you to join a Saturday study group, but it starts at nine in the morning. Prime weekend sleeping time.”

“Who are the kids?”

I tick the names off on my fingers.

“They’re cool. I guess I could do it, since Caroline already has a study group.”

“Why don’t you join hers?”

“Can’t. It’s more formal, mandatory for students who are struggling.”

“Caroline’s struggling?” I say, surprised. “She seems pretty smart to me.”

“Yeah, but she’s terrible at the test.”

“I was terrible at tests too.”

He turns the page of his book, not looking at me. “Mom, you don’t have to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Try to relate. It’s so obvious.”

“Well, at the risk of being obvious, what are you reading?”

Rory holds up his book. The cover is an illustration of space, seven planets against a black background, bright clusters of stars. The title is printed in tiny letters against a glowing blue orb. Martin in Space, by Anders Svarlbard. “I rescued it from the recycle bin at the school library.”

“What’s it about?”

“The narrator is this teenager in Stockholm who cuts school one day and wanders around the city, gets lost in a confusing section of Old Town, meets some other kids who have beer, drinks with them, and then falls asleep in a park.”

“Oh, a bit like The Catcher in the Rye.”

“Sort of, but there’s more to it. Martin has this dream that he’s in a spaceship, moving eighteen thousand miles per hour through empty, dark space, all alone. The Earth is gone, and somehow he’s on his own, with enough food and fuel to last forever, a bed, and only a small window. He thinks of his parents, who he’d been fighting with, who he didn’t like much, or so he thought before the planet was destroyed, and he thinks about his former life that he once resented . . .”

“And now he wishes he could have it all back?”

Rory nods. “There’s more. The instruments in Martin’s aircraft don’t work. Because they’re out in space, the instruments have no way to define his position. They have no anchor. You know, like a compass needs the North Pole.”

“It’s a metaphor, then?”

“Yes, a metaphor for modern life. Martin can’t know where he is without something to compare it to. So, a million miles from Earth, that’s a location. At this very moment, you and I are at latitude 37.5741 degrees north, longitude 122.3794 degrees west. All locations are defined in relation to other locations. No place is only a place, everything is relational.”

Work is an anchor, I think. Fred and Rory are anchors. Not long ago, I knew where I was in relation to my crucial points of reference. Then my dad was gone, and Fred, and soon thereafter, work. If not for Rory, I’d be like Martin in Space, free-floating, lost without an anchor. Only Rory is tethering me to Earth. It’s an enormous burden for a kid. It’s not fair to him.

Rory runs his hand through his hair, a gesture that reminds me so much of Fred I feel twin stabs of pain and joy in my heart. “I wish Dad was here. It’s totally his sort of thing.”

“How does the book end? Does Martin find his way back home? Does life return to normal?”

“I think in the end it turns out that Martin didn’t just cut school and wander around Stockholm. It turns out that Martin in Space is really about Martin in space. He actually is floating through space, unable to define where he is, and so he sleeps away his days, dreaming of when he was a child, dreaming of that day when he wandered around Stockholm, drinking a beer, trying to figure out who he was.”