Weird Girl, page 2
She stopped doing her school assignments altogether. Instead, she spent all day, every day, observing and making notes. She watched ants in the driveway, Vera in the kitchen, delivery men at the back door, and the workers in the greenhouse. She counted birds, and then the number of bird species, and then the number of different songs, and, finally, the number of chirps per song and the intervals between them. By this time, she had twelve full notebooks on the shelf in her room. Her father ordered her two more cases.
Sometimes, they would ask her unrelated questions. Cleo would be a quarter of the way through her observations on bread mold, and one of her parents would ask something like, “But how many houseflies were in the kitchen at the time?”
Clearly, Cleo needed to broaden her scope.
2
Of course, there was a bit of bias embedded in her parents’ constructive criticism. Helen felt that her daughter should spend more time in the greenhouses. Darwin, however, wanted Cleo to spend more time watching people. “The human species,” he said, “is the most dynamic organism on the planet, with a fine balance of predictability and nearly infinite variation.”
In late August, just after Cleo’s ninth birthday, a plain brown sedan pulled up in the driveway. It was the truancy officer from the local elementary school.
Cleo hid in the coat closet with a flashlight between her teeth. She had been practicing shorthand from a book that she found in the second library upstairs, so it was easy to record the entire conversation (although there were a few words used by her mother that hadn’t been covered by Mr. Gregg in his manual, and which seemed to mortally offend their visitor). She pushed the door open just a crack, so that she could record physical details: what everyone was wearing, what the visitor looked like, and any hand gestures that were used (again, her mother seemed to know a few that Cleo had never seen before). At one point, the argument grew so heated that nobody noticed when Cleo came out and pinched the visitor’s jacket between her forefinger and thumb in order to determine its textile composition and color. She lifted up his trouser leg to make notes about his socks and shoes. She covertly sniffed his sleeve and scribbled in the notebook while muttering to herself. By the time the man left, her mother was white-faced and silent, her father was pacing the room, and Cleo had twenty-nine pages of shorthand. She was quite pleased with herself.
At dinner that evening, however, her parents did not seem excited about her observations. They were clearly preoccupied, and as Cleo was listing the odorants she had detected when sniffing the visitor, Helen abruptly interrupted. “Cleo, you have to go to school.”
Cleo stopped. “Right now? But we’re eating dinner, and Vera’s doing the dishes!”
Darwin leaned forward. “No, Cleo. You have to go to public school. With…normal kids.” He said this with distaste.
“Why?” she asked. “I’ve got Vera, and my observation books. I don’t need to go anywhere.”
Her mother pinched the bridge of her nose and said, “We know, dear. But, our great state apparently has laws about this sort of thing, and they are forcing us to send you to school. I’ll be taking you to enroll tomorrow morning.”
Cleo had plenty of questions, but her parents were not in the mood. They told her to be quiet and eat her dinner—the first time they had ever said this to her—and conversation was nonexistent for the duration of the meal. They weren’t yelling, but Cleo knew they were very upset about the visitor, especially when they forgot to proofread their notebooks at all while they ate.
***
The next morning, Cleo was up early. She planned to make observations at this new school, but she wanted to make some notes beforehand so that she would have plenty to talk about with the other kids she would meet that day. She decided to watch the head gardener change the oil in the lawnmower, because she knew that would make for exciting conversation with her new colleagues.
Vera called her to the kitchen for breakfast, and Cleo got nervous. She had never spent time with other kids. Especially “normal” kids. In fact, she had only ever met Achillea, really. Vera gave her a hug and said, “Don’t worry, Cleo. You’re going to make plenty of friends, and learn lots of important things.”
Cleo said, “But I learn lots of things from you, Vera. And I don’t know if anyone will like me. And I’ve never been to a real school before.”
Vera stroked her hair and replied, “That’s the great thing about a clean slate. You can be anyone you want to be, and nobody can tell you different.”
Helen called from the front door, and Cleo took a deep breath. Vera handed her a bag, and Cleo was relieved to find not one, but two notebooks inside. Vera smiled, and Cleo went to the car.
Her mother didn’t speak for the entire drive, and when they pulled up in front of a large brick building, Cleo was pretty sure she heard her mother use some of those new words from the other day. They went inside and asked a little boy where the office was. He pointed to the end of the hallway, and they walked that direction.
As they opened the door and walked through, Cleo was assaulted with new sights and sounds. There were two desks, and the women behind them were answering phones, shouting instructions to each other, writing things down on little sticky pieces of paper, and barking orders at a half dozen children with dazed expressions. Cleo pulled out a notebook and started writing.
The woman on the left saw Cleo and her mother and motioned them toward her. Cleo walked slowly and kept writing. She didn’t want to miss a single detail. Her mother, on the other hand, was looking at the other desk. As soon as Cleo reached the first woman, Helen stormed across to the other and snatched a vase of flowers off of it. Cleo looked back at the first lady, whose nametag said Mrs. Harrison. Mrs. Harrison told Cleo to sit, so she did.
As Helen began barking questions at the other woman about the origin of her red and white swirl hydrangeas, Mrs. Harrison asked Cleo the purpose of her visit.
“Because I’ve never been to school before,” Cleo said, and kept writing her shorthand.
Mrs. Harrison smiled. “We get new students all the time, sweetie. What was the name of your last school?”
Cleo stopped writing. “I told you. I’ve never been to school before.”
“What—you mean NEVER?” Mrs. Harrison said, nearly shouting. “How old are you?”
“Nine, ma’am,’ said Cleo. “I did school at home sometimes.”
“This is most irregular,” the woman replied. She seemed at a loss for what to do. “Let me start your file.” She dug into a drawer to her right, and pulled out a manila folder and several sheets of paper. “Okay, what is your name, dear?”
Cleo looked at her mother, grilling the lady on the other side of the room. The lady looked terrified. The other kids were staring. Helen was gesturing wildly and demanding to know the exact pH of the soil where the hydrangeas were grown. Cleo remembered what Vera had told her that morning, about being anybody she wanted. And so she lied.
“My name is Lucy,” she said, remembering that her father used to talk about somebody with that name a lot.
“And what is your last name, dear?” asked Mrs. Harrison as she wrote on the form.
Again, Cleo looked at her mother. “Gardener. My name is Lucy Gardener.”
Pen scratched paper as Mrs. Harrison continued to fill in the form. “And what is your social security number, Lucy?”
Cleo was at a loss. She had never heard of such a thing. She called out to her mother, “Mama, what is my social security number?”
Distractedly, briefly looking in her direction, Helen called out, “519-49-2131,” and then started pulling petals off of the woman’s hydrangeas and putting them into an envelope.
Mrs. Harrison asked Cleo other questions for the forms, like her home address, and telephone number (Cleo made one up, because she had never had a reason to call her own house before, so she didn’t know it). After a few minutes, Mrs. Harrison looked up at her and frowned. “We are going to have to test you,” she said. Cleo thought this sounded pretty painful, but she decided to make notes about it anyway.
Helen finally left, promising to send Vera or one of the gardeners to collect her daughter at the end of the school day. Cleo was taken to a small, windowless room, and given a pencil and a series of tests. It turned out to be fun, because she knew most of the answers. Mrs. Harrison frowned and brought her more tests. This continued until lunchtime. Finally, Mrs. Harrison brought another woman into the room, and introduced her as Mrs. Heinz, the school principal.
“We have an unprecedented case here,” said Mrs. Harrison, and she gave Cleo’s tests to Mrs. Heinz. The two woman left the room for several minutes, and then came back to talk to Cleo.
“Lucy, are you sure you’ve never been to school before?” Mrs. Heinz asked. Cleo shook her head.
“Well, you have passed these tests with flying colors. There are some questions that you missed, but you did so well with harder questions that we’ve had to make a serious decision. At your age, you should be on a third grade level. However, your test scores indicate that you are well beyond that. Therefore, despite your age, we’ve decided to place you in a higher grade. This will be probationary, of course, until we determine if you are able to handle this emotionally and academically. But, it would be a waste of your talents to place you as we typically would.” She looked at Cleo, waiting for a response. Cleo was furiously making notes. Taking the notebook from her, Mrs. Heinz raised her eyebrows. “What is this?” she asked.
“Gregg shorthand,” said Cleo.
Mrs. Harrison and Mrs. Heinz exchanged a skeptical look. “You know Gregg shorthand?” said Mrs. Harrison.
“Of course,” said Cleo, and then she turned to page one of her notebook and recited every word that had been said to her that morning. Mrs. Heinz and Mrs. Harrison left the room.
***
It was officially decided to put Cleo into a fifth grade class for a three week period to determine her suitability to that level of education. At the end of the second week, they ended up hiring a retired high school teacher to tutor her privately. There was immediate recognition between student and teacher, as one academic to another, and they got along swimmingly.
She did not, however, fit in.
It is always a rite of passage for the new kid in school to be given a hard time. Made fun of. Shunned at lunch. And then, when a Good Samaritan offers an empty chair and a tentative introduction, the new kid is absorbed into the ecosystem, and life goes on.
This would have been the case at New Bridge Elementary School, if not for the fact that the new kid was weird. Weird in a way that nobody expected. Not only was she unaffected by taunts, nicknames, or rejections, she was constantly scribbling in her notebook like the fate of the Earth depended on it. And she stared. A lot.
Basically, the new kid was a new kind of creepy, and self-preservation won out over maintaining the dominance hierarchy. They all left her alone. What was weirdest was that she didn’t seem to notice that she was being ignored.
Eventually, students and teachers alike got used to pretending she wasn’t there. She found that, although her school cafeteria life began at the gimpy table in the corner, she was finally able to creep closer and closer to the rest of the herd. One day, she noticed an empty seat at the popular table. The kids seemed to be having an intense conversation, and she was curious. So, she walked up to the table, sat down, and alternated note-taking with bites of grilled cheese. It wasn’t until the bell rang that anybody even noticed she was there. It was such a shocking discovery that nobody knew what to do about it, so they all simply walked away, each one using the brief walk to class to rationalize the creepiness, and convince themselves that it hadn’t really happened. Cleo was thrilled with her new observations on the social hierarchy.
She also began to realize that a very important step in the scientific process was boldness. Risk. Being willing to infect yourself with an unknown bacterium, because nothing is more valuable than firsthand observation. Creeping into the cave with the sleeping bear. Putting on the face paint and dancing with the tribe. Sitting down at the chief’s table, uninvited.
So, she took the opportunities that presented themselves. Her tutor allowed her more freedom than the average student, and she quickly learned all of the secret places the school’s 1950s architecture had to offer. She spent an entire afternoon in the teacher’s lounge, eating chicken salad she found in the refrigerator and listening to conversations that no student was supposed to hear. She sat in the art room closet, inhaling the fumes of old paint, glue, and turpentine, and listened to the art teacher and the P.E. teacher alternately argue and kiss passionately. She brought binoculars and hid in the bushes to observe fights on the playground. One day, the boys’ locker room door was propped open just slightly with a little wedge of wood. So, Cleo walked in. For years afterward, when the boys had become men with jobs and families, they would share the same nightmare: laughter, cascading water, the snapping of towels, and then the moment when the steam cleared, and there was the creepy girl, biting her lip in concentration, pen moving faster than should be possible, not only writing, but sketching in her little black and white book.
3
A few weeks later, as is tradition in fifth grade classes everywhere, the boys were herded into one classroom, the girls into another. Even though Cleo had a tutor, on paper she was still a fifth grader, so her tutor sent her along with the other girls. The teacher brought out a television and VCR, and put in a scuffed black VHS tape. Everyone was distraught by the end—the teacher for what she now had to tell them, the other girls for what they had just witnessed, and Cleo because she was dying to know what the boys were doing next door. Her notes were incomplete!
As a child of scientists, with four libraries between them, Cleo had some knowledge of the birds and the bees. But, nobody had ever sat down and explained it. She was simultaneously horrified and fascinated.
Afterwards, she had so many questions for the teacher, and then her tutor, that the man finally told her to shut up. He pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath, the same way her mother did sometimes, and then told Cleo that her special assignment that weekend was to write a paper about reproduction to be turned in the following Monday.
As soon as she got home, Cleo went straight to her father’s study and asked if he had any books about sex. He had plenty. Darwin spent the next four hours leaping from shelf to shelf, pulling books about fertility rituals, courtship and marriage practices, and reproductive biology, and telling stories from his days as a graduate researcher in the field.
“Then—without painkillers, mind you—they pierce it with a sharpened stingray spine. Or, a bit of bone. And the boy can only be considered a man if he suffers the pain silently,” said Darwin. Cleo wrote it down.
She asked to be excused from dinner that evening for the purposes of continuing her research. Her scientist parents readily agreed. It took Cleo four trips to carry all of her father’s books up to one of the libraries. Vera brought her a plate of food, and everyone left her alone.
***
Cleo didn’t intend to fall asleep in the library, but certain scientific tomes will have that effect on even the most dedicated researcher. She dreamed about horses and Native Americans. The galloping hooves came closer and closer, and the shouts and war cries of their riders were louder and louder, until suddenly—Cleo started awake. Drool had stuck the page of her book to one cheek, and she groggily peeled it away from her skin before sitting up. She looked around, realized where she was, and then she heard the drums.
Curious, Cleo tried to figure out where the sound was coming from. She opened the library door and listened. Out in the hallway, she could detect additional sounds: chanting, stomping, and the occasional high-pitched yell. Strangely, the sounds seemed to be coming from her parents’ bedroom. Cleo ran back into the library, grabbed her notebook and pen, and then tiptoed down the hall. As she neared the door, someone yodeled. She could have sworn she heard her mother giggle, which couldn’t be right, because her mother never giggled. Cleo slowly twisted the doorknob and eased the door open. And her jaw dropped.
Her mother was naked, mostly. Helen’s only clothing seemed to be a loosely woven skirt of beads, and a series of heavy necklaces. Darwin was wearing what seemed to be a…gourd…with strings tied around his waist. Both wore blue painted markings on their skin. They were dancing to the beat of the drums. Cleo noticed a record player in the corner, the needle making a light scratching sound with each rotation of the vinyl. Darwin yodeled again, and Helen laughed, and they both danced faster. Cleo slipped into the corner behind the record player to observe and make notes. Her parents bodies grew sweaty, the paint started to run, and they started to dance closer and closer to each other. And then…well, Cleo instinctively averted her eyes a few times during the activities that followed, but continued to make notes as a dutiful scientist should (although she did wonder how Vera was ever going to get the body paint off of those sheets). Several hours later, as her parents were softly snoring, Cleo turned off the record player (the music had stopped long ago, but Cleo was comforted by the light scratching sound that the needle made as the turntable continued to rotate) and went back to the library.
