For the past month, Amber’s been staying with her older sister who has an apartment on Sutton Place, a quiet part of the city right on the East River. The apartment has a terrace overlooking the water, and she asks me to come over and hang out with her there. Even though I’m not Amber’s mentor any more since her grades are up, five o’clock on Tuesdays has become a routine for us, so now we do homework together.
“If I lived here, I’d ask my parents to move my bed outside so I could watch the boats go by when I was falling asleep.”
“It’s no big deal,” Amber says.
I don’t think she takes time to look at the view.
“My sister works full time and goes out a lot, so she’s hardly ever here,” Amber says. “And I don’t like to stay home alone.”
It’s been almost a week since she missed her speech. When I ask her what happened with Mr. Scott, she rolls her eyes. “He was sympathetic, sort of,” she says. “But I could tell by the way he was listening to me that he was judging what I was saying like I was giving a speech.”
“What did he say?”
“He understood that I was going through a lot, and he didn’t want to add to the pressure, so he said I could take more time. I thought that was it, but then he added that when I was ready and felt better, I had to give the speech.”
So now I’m feeling guilty on two counts. First because even though I’m Amber’s friend, I agree with him that she shouldn’t get a pass. And second, because I underestimated Mr. Scott. Maybe not every male is a complete pushover in the face of drop-dead beauty. “What are you going to do it on?”
I expect her to hesitate and look annoyed. She’s probably thinking of something anti-school or anti-family. How could she not?
But I’m wrong.
She pauses for a moment and then points at me. “I’m doing it on you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You. How we became friends.”
“What are you going to say?” I already had a full frontal attack from David, so I don’t need another one.
She flashes an enigmatic smile. “You’ll see.”
During the next class, those of us who’ve given our speeches get back our grades. David: A plus. He doesn’t tell me. I peer over his shoulder and see an A written in red felt-tip pen that’s about equal to the size of the E on top of an eye chart, so even someone half blind could see it. Sharon Stein: A. I don’t see her paper, but I overhear her telling someone.
And me? I stuff the paper into my notebook before anyone sees it. I was right, a crapola C plus. And he was being kind. It deserved an F. For the first time I can remember, I feel a sense of shame. I’ve never gotten less than a B plus in anything except math.
“Interesting topic and decent delivery,” Mr. Scott’s scribbled note says. “But points off because you fell far short of going beyond your comfort zone to tackle the subject more intimately.”
“Show some balls” should have been his next line. By not talking about myself and babbling on like a moron about a laughable theory of pigeonholing people favored by idiots, I made it clear I was a complete and utter loser. The saddest thing is, I’d do the same speech again.
Florence Singer, the butt of everyone’s jokes, is back in school. She’s over the flu and she’s hunched over her desk gnome-like, reviewing her note cards. She doesn’t look nervous. Florence never looks nervous. She looks prepared. I have no doubt that if someone swiped the cards off her desk, if wouldn’t matter. She’d give the same A speech.
What will her topic be? We all know she’s a genius, but we don’t know Florence the girl, the person, the human being. Everyone writes her off. The non-person with the Mensa IQ. But when you have to talk about truth, you have to open yourself up and show your heart. At least the real A students do.
Kirk Morrison plants himself in the last row of every classroom because he flatlines in school and cannot perform except on the football field. Although he was suspended from the team for half a season last year for cursing out the coach, he starts making farting noises when he sees Florence and then segues into slurping sounds, whispering, “suck me,” in a low, pervy voice that Mr. Scott can’t hear, but I imagine Florence can.
Amber turns and sneers at Kirk. “You are a totally disgusting pig.” I want to hug her for that because she’s the only one who can get away with dissing Kirk without retaliation. I dread the thought of what he’d shout from the roof if I ever confronted him. He stops momentarily and laughs. I look at his eyes and think of the vocab word “reptilian.”
Mr. Scott motions for Florence to start. She stands up and walks to the front of the room. Despite the tangled hair that falls around her shoulders and looks unwashed, and the baggy skirt, there’s a serenity around her. She may not be the person anyone wants to look like, but that’s not the issue. She knows who she is, I see for the first time, and her view of herself has nothing to do with her looks.
“I’m sixteen,” she starts. “Nobody thinks of you as an adult when you’re in high school. Nobody imagines that you have the talent to do what someone ten or even twenty years older than you can do. But I don’t believe in categorizing people,” she says, “or discounting them. I believe everybody should be judged for who they are and what they can do, no matter how old they are, so I decided that even if I was just a teenager, I was going to write a novel, get an agent, and sell my book.”
“Hey, Nora Roberts,” someone calls out from the back. Someone else laughs. Mr. Scott stands up and the room grows silent.
Florence pretends not to hear. She talks about growing up in a family of writers. “My mom’s written thirty novels,” she says, “ranging from murder mysteries to love stories. Three of her books have been optioned for movies. And my dad writes biographies. “Lincoln, FDR …” She rattles off other names, some I haven’t heard of. “So it’s no surprise that I inherited the bug.”
From the back of the room Kirk snorts. Mr. Scott gives him a threatening look that shuts him up.
“Anyway, the idea for my novel came from the world around us,” she says. “It’s a sci-fi book about good and evil, and an elite class of women who decide they want to live in a world without men, a world where there’s no need for armies because no one’s fighting, and everything’s equally distributed so there are no rich and no poor, and no hatred between different people. Everything’s tranquil with all of the men gone. The society begins to function on a higher order.” She pauses. “Then,” she says, “one of the men returns.”
I look over at Mr. Scott. He’s charmed. He’s leaning forward in his seat with a half smile on his face.
“So that’s the book I wrote,” she says. She laughs lightly. “And you’ll have to wait until it’s published to find out what happens. Anyway, I wrote it and rewrote it about twenty times until I was happy with it. I sent it to an agent who handles best-selling authors. Two weeks later, she called and said she wanted to represent me.
“Ask any writer how often that happens.” She shakes her head. “When I confessed how old I was, I immediately assumed she might rethink her offer, but just the opposite happened. She was delighted. She said I’d get more attention because I was only sixteen. She sent out my book, and a month later, a publisher offered me a contract.
“This is a speech about truth, so now I’m going to tell you how I feel.” She flashes an enormous smile and I realize I’ve never seen her do that. Before today, her face never gave away anything about how she felt. She puts her hand in the middle of her chest. “Over the moon,” she says. “Nothing in the whole world could have made me happier than getting that phone call. I was accepted. Validated.”
This gets me thinking. What would give me validation? Here’s someone who everyone in school rates a total loser, but wake-up call, she has a life. She’s only sixteen and her name will be on a book that maybe thousands and thousands of people will read. So the next thing I’m feeling is admiration. Admiration and envy of Florence Singer, which is a new one. I go back to listening to her.
“No matter what else happens to me, I’ll always have that feeling to hold on to,” Florence says. She’s quiet for a moment and then she looks out at us.
“Things in your life don’t always go the way you want them to. You don’t always end up with the people you’d like to end up with. With the friends you’d like to have—or even any friends at all … so you have to find things that make you happy and feel fulfilled. You have to search inside your heart and find work you love.
“But above all else, you have to have confidence in yourself and tell yourself you can do whatever you set out to do. That means you have to love and respect yourself for who you are and your special talents because we all have talents and we’re all special—just in different ways. Thank you.”
Mr. Scott gets to his feet and applauds, and the whole class follows him. No one is making fun of Florence Singer now. I have a feeling that even though it probably wasn’t her intention, a lot more people will want to be her friend now because of what she’s accomplished. It also hits me that her speech transformed her. She wasn’t dowdy Florence Singer anymore.
On the way out of the class, I go up to her. “Your speech was amazing. I was blown away. Do you want to have lunch together?”
Florence looks at me as if she’s never seen me before. “I usually don’t have lunch,” she says. “I go to the library to work.”
“Just this once?”
She shrugs and says, “Sure,” and I follow her out.