is the Pharaoh, Samuel only one of the plagues to visit her, all of which, it seems to me, she deserves.
I’m happy when school starts again, because at least it’s an escape from her. I am taking French this year, and so is Travis. We use it as a code to talk about our mothers, right in front of them.
“Bonjour, Travis, ma mère est très bête.”
“Bonjour, Evelyn, ma mère est un chien méchant.”
But my favorite class is science. Mr. Torvik has a model of the solar system hung up around the room, and when he turns a switch, the planets revolve around the sun, the baseball-sized Earth spinning on its axis. The planets glow in the dark, and if we are good, if we do our homework and do not pass notes while he is talking, Mr. Torvik shuts out the lights for the last five minutes of class and turns on the switch, so we can just look up and watch the planets move.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” he asks, the light of the planets reflecting off his glasses.
In the spring, he takes us outside and has us bring in leaves to put under the microscope. He shows us how to tell how old a tree is by counting the rings of the stump, the wider rings being moist years, when the tree grew the most. He tells us the names for the different kinds of clouds—cumulus, cirrus—and we learn about warm fronts and cold fronts and wall clouds, how tornados are formed.
We watch films about dogs and wolves, how they are different, how they are the same. They belong to the same genus, he says, but are not the same species. Snow rabbits are white because that makes them blend in with the snow and harder to see. Mr. Torvik says the reason there are white rabbits where there is snow is because all the rabbits who were different colors couldn’t hide in the snow and got killed before they could have babies.
I raise my hand. “This is before Noah’s ark, or after?”
Traci Carmichael turns around, and again there are the thin lips, the blue-gray eyes. “You’ve got to be joking,” she says. She looks at Brad Browning, who is already laughing, shaking his head. I feel my neck flush, my throat go dry. Half of me thinks, We’ll see, Traci Carmichael, we’ll see who’s laughing when the bombs go off, and only my name is in the book, but the other half of me knows I have said something stupid.
Mr. Torvik opens his mouth and closes it several times, like he is trying to yawn instead of speak. “It’s separate,” he says finally, his hands making quick, chopping motions in the air. “Two different things.”
He shows us a film of lions hunting, circling a herd of antelope. The antelope are too fast for the lions to catch, except for one with a hurt foot, and the lions all move quickly after this one, surrounding it, as if they already had a meeting and knew exactly what they were going to do. Traci puts her hands over her eyes during this part, and so of course Libby Masterson, who does not have her own brain, does too. But I watch, something in me wanting to see the look in the limping antelope’s eyes as the lion’s paw grabs it by its throat, the rest of the herd running past, only scared for themselves, no time to stop.
“It’s so sad,” Libby says, even though, really, she didn’t see it. “It’s terrible.”
But Mr. Torvik says it isn’t sad. It’s just nature. This way, he tells us, the lions get to eat and the antelope rid themselves of an imperfect specimen. Nature has to get rid of imperfections in the womb, or soon after, to make certain that imperfection isn’t allowed to mate and reproduce itself. Otherwise, there would be a bunch of antelope with bad legs limping around.
He squints at the VCR, trying to find the rewind button. “You wouldn’t want that, class, now would you?”
Mario Cuomo is on television at the Democratic National Convention, and my mother won’t let me change the channel. He looks really mad when he talks, and I like Ronald Reagan better because he’s usually smiling and making jokes. But Mario Cuomo says we cannot let Ronald Reagan be president again, because he’s already talking about spending billions of dollars putting a shield around the shining city on the hill. Mario Cuomo says this shield won’t work,