We stayed up too late. We basically must stay up late when Nonny’s home.
Mom used to make marmalade toast when we were sick, and it’s especially great on her fresh, homemade bread. Mom, Nonny, and I sat at the table in the kitchen eating too much toast.
Mom took a sip of her tea. Nonny took a sip. Nonny rubbed the table with the sleeve of her sweater, wiping up the wet ring from her mug. Maybe watching people drink herbal tea sounds boring but I could have stayed up watching them forever.
“You’ve got school in the morning, sweetie,” Mom said.
“And I’ll drive you,” Nonny said.
“Deal!” I said.
Mom finished the last bite of her toast. “I know you want to stay up but it’s time to start getting ready for bed.”
Right then Dad sashayed into the kitchen, blaring Beyoncé’s “Run the World” from his phone. He pulled Nonny up from her seat and twirled her, and she nearly bumped her nose into his armpit. I laughed so hard I snorted. Even though Nonny had told Dad the special news a couple of weeks ago, while the adults were coordinating her coming home and everything, having Nonny actually here meant he’d been distracted from lesson planning all night long.
“You are ridiculous,” Mom said.
“I was thinking,” Dad said, “that even though we don’t know the sex yet, and nothing changes how perfect my new grandbaby is going to be … Wouldn’t it be great to have a baby girl in the family again?”
He grabbed my hand and tried to twirl Nonny and me in some kind of knot-windmill move but we ended up crashing into each other and laughing.
“Okay, okay, you sillies,” Mom said. “A couple of you really do have school tomorrow.”
“Do I hafta?” Dad said.
I went to the pantry where we kept peanut butter (for Dad), Chips Ahoy! (for Nonny), and a box of sterilized needles (for me). Then I got the small vial of medicine from the fridge. The vials aren’t any bigger than my dad’s thumb.
“I haven’t watched you do this in a while,” Nonny said. “I’m still really impressed.”
“Impressive is in her genes,” Dad said.
Nonny flinches when she watches me do my shots. I think she’s just a tiny bit afraid of needles.
I unwrapped the needle from its paper packaging and took off the long plastic cap. There was the tiny little needle.
“Tell us your Hard Reading Words while you do it,” Mom said, “and then bed.”
Holding the needle was as normal to me now as holding a pencil. I pushed the sharp tip into the rubbery top of the bottle.
“Flabbergast,” I said. “It means to shock or amaze. Perturbed means annoyed.”
I tipped the bottle so the clear liquid inside poured down to the top, where the needle was. This watery liquid was my growth hormone, the medicine that made me grow as tall as other girls. Dad calls it my Magic Beanstalk Juice.
“Implore means to beg and beg.”
Very carefully I pulled the plunger part down and down until the growth hormone filled the syringe to the exact right line.
“Antagonize means to be mean or a bully.”
I pulled the syringe out of the bottle and held it up close to my eyes to make sure there were no bubbles. I gently flicked the syringe a couple of times, like Mom showed me, to make double sure. I lifted my shirt just a little bit until I could see my belly button and I pinched a bit of my tummy pudge.
“And persist means to keep going and going, no matter what.”
Then bam. Poke the needle fast into the pinched bit of tummy, push in the Magic Beanstalk Juice slow like testing out a peach with your thumb, then pull the needle out.
Easy peasy.
“Didn’t hurt?” Nonny asked.
“Nope,” I said.
“Man oh man,” she said. “I think when they give my baby immunizations I’m going to cry louder than the baby. And I hope … I really hope we’re out of this dumb financial black hole before—”
“Don’t worry,” Mom said. “You’ll both figure something out. And we’re here to help.”
“I remember when you guys got your first shots,” Dad said. “And I was the one who ended up needing a juice box from the nurse.”
I thought about the baby in its brand-new diaper, with the tiny black raisin belly button still stuck on its stomach from the umbilical cord. I thought about the baby getting shots. Immunizations—normal shots. For a tiny baby, new to the world and not used to pricking needles, that would be bad enough.
But what if the baby needed different kinds of shots?
I knew better than most that needing shots could mean other things. Could mean much worse, something-got-messed-up things.
What if the baby needed shots like mine?
Not very many twelve-year-old girls have to give themselves shots every day. Nonny’s baby being one of them would hurt worse than getting the shots myself.
Much worse.
Back in my room, I thought about Nonny’s face when she was talking about a financial black hole. I hadn’t really noticed that she seemed a tiny bit scared until she said it out loud.
My history book poking out of my backpack made me think of the contest Ms. Trepky had mentioned. I hadn’t gotten a chance to ask her about sending in a letter of my own, but I decided to look up the contest and see for myself.
At my computer, I fast-typed Smithsonian Women in STEM contest and clicked through to the contest page.
Exactly like Ms. Trepky had said, it was a contest based on writing letters about underrated female scientists from history. The letters were supposed to be about how that special scientist and the spectacular things they’d accomplished had impacted the world, and then how she had impacted or inspired you in your own life. That was the first part. Then in the last part of the letter, you were to tell a story about something you had done to teach people about the scientist, to raise awareness. The deadline for the contest was Valentine’s Day, so I had months to do my awareness project and write my letter.
For this contest, Cecilia would work perfectly. The contest had three divisions—eleventh/twelfth grade, ninth/tenth grade, and seventh/eighth grade—which meant that I, Libby Monroe, could enter. I just had to write the most perfect, well-crafted letter, and come up with the most spectacular project idea to teach people about Cecilia. Each contest division would have a winner who would receive a plaque and five thousand dollars for their school.
And then there was the grand prize.
What that one grand-prize winner would win almost made me spill my drink in my lap.
Ready for this?
The grand-prize winner of the Smithsonian Institution’s Women in STEM contest would win twenty-five thousand dollars.
That’s right. Twenty-five thousand dollars.
That’s twenty-five with three zeros after it, for them to use however they want. Plus another twenty-five thousand, for their school, which made it even more unbelievably spit-take, drink-spillingly mind-blowing.
But twenty-five thousand dollars. I knew exactly what I’d do with it, too. Because twenty-five thousand dollars is enough money even in adult terms for a down payment on a house your sister and her husband are trying to save up for.
I couldn’t be Mom’s left hand. I couldn’t be a mother the way Nonny would be.
But if I worked hard enough, I could calm that financial black hole in Nonny’s mind.
I could help bring Thomas home, so he wouldn’t have to take any more faraway jobs.
Kids sometimes weren’t the very nicest, and sometimes that would remind me that I had a scarred heart and missing chromosomes and didn’t play any of the games in PE very well. If I could do this one humongous thing, though, this biggest of all accomplishments, then maybe I’d have that inside me like hot herbal tea and warm marmalade toast no matter what cold words anybody else said. Even if nobody else knew what I could do, I would know.
Sometimes in my brain, an idea arrives huge and round and blocks out most everything else, like an eclipse. I could feel this idea of the contest, of helping Nonny, doing exactly that. Mom knows my mind works this way sometimes and calls it my tunnel vision. She knows I can get too focused on something when it’s so bright in my mind’s eye it’s like the sun, that one idea shining its own light over all the rest. But winning this contest and helping Nonny? Yeah, that could be my sun for a while.
I could do it. I had to.