Ten Miles Past Normal - By Frances O'Roark Dowell Page 0,7
wrapped around an authentic, very scary-looking biker named Todd, who works at the Harley shop in Rocky Mount and attends Renaissance fairs in his spare time, which is where Emma met him last fall.
It’s the Renaissance fair detail that kills me. Emma is Harvard smart, cute, and has a sarcastic remark for every occasion. Girls like her don’t do Renaissance fairs. But then Emma doesn’t do anything girls like her are supposed to do. In fact, aside from making stellar grades, she mostly does the exact opposite.
Joking about choosing Emma as our project topic led us to come up with a list of bad girls of American history: Lizzie Borden, Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ma Barker, Madonna—
“And Emma Goldman,” Sarah added, as though it were obvious. She likes to do that, throw out names of people or places that no one else has ever heard of and make it sound like common knowledge.
“Who’s Emma Goldman?” I asked. I was years past pretending like I knew all of Sarah’s little-known facts and figures when I actually didn’t. I’d been burned too many times acting like I was as well informed as Sarah-pedia.
Sarah leaned back in her seat, an old-fashioned heavy desk chair on wheels. “Emma Goldman was your basic proto-feminist, radical socialist freethinker. She’s who Emma was named after.”
“Your parents named Emma after a radical socialist freethinker?”
“Well, actually, my parents named Emma after my grandmother,” Sarah admitted. “My grandmother was the one who was named after Emma Goldman.”
“So how’d your dad end up such a total Republican?”
Sarah grimaced. “Bad seed. Every family’s got one.”
We discussed the possibility of doing our project on Emma Goldman, but Sarah was afraid it might get her grounded. Her parents were well aware of Emma Goldman’s thoughts on free love, and it could be safely assumed the Lymans didn’t share them. So that left us . . . nowhere.
“But all kidding aside,” I said after a few minutes of both of us looking glumly around the room as if our project topic would suddenly pop out of Sarah’s overstuffed closet along with her tennis racket and the purple platform sandals she’d found last summer at One More Time, our favorite thrift shop. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we actually could do Emma? I mean Emma, your sister.”
Sarah nodded. “Or at least someone who’s interesting, but not everybody knows about. Somebody who has a story that needs to be told, somebody whose story has been kept a secret for a long time—”
Sarah was starting to ramp up the rhetoric, which had been happening with alarming frequency since her decision to enter international politics. I quickly cut her off. “Yeah, maybe someone local. Like that woman who started the community garden over near the homeless shelter.”
“Yeah, okay, maybe,” Sarah said in a super-supportive tone that meant no way was she doing the community gardening lady, but she was willing to humor me until she figured something else out. “Well, this is a good start. Why don’t we each come up with a list and go over it on Monday in class, discuss the pros and cons of our ideas, and see what’s going to work best in the long run?”
Sarah lives and dies by the pro/con list. Every major decision she’s made in her life—whether to play flute or trumpet in band, whether to accept Clark Merritt’s invitation to the eighth-grade dance, whether to buy a bikini or a one-piece—has been made by considering the pros (flutes are lighter and involve less spit) and the cons (going to the dance with Clark Merritt could quite possibly mark her as a dweeb forever) of a situation. Once the pros and cons are added and subtracted and a decision is reached, Sarah never looks back.
The bus passes what I’ve come to think of as the “one mile away from school, and it’s time to panic” mark—an oak tree split in half by lightning that I swear looks like an old man standing with his arms wide open like he’s asking, “What? What did I do that was so wrong?” I open my notebook and look over my uninspired list. Community garden lady. Jennifer Phillips, a reporter my mom used to work with, who uncovered a major nursing-home scandal three years ago and won a ton of journalism prizes for it. Marie Murray, a professor in my dad’s department who teaches blind kids to play violin.
I lean my head back and close my eyes, which is what I