MAX
Oh . . . . How do you know that the Milla with you is the real Milla, and not the Milla with Modessa and Quin?
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
Because when she’s with Medusa and her evil harpy, Quin, she turns into a shrunken, wimpy version of herself, which is not the real her.
MAX
But even if she is the “real” her with you, what good does that do? Doesn’t she always go running back to Modessa and Quin?
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
Do you have to be so negative? You can only say she always goes running back as long as the “always” is true. But once the “always” goes away, then it’s not true anymore.
Max scratches his ear.
MAX
So . . . what’s up with the camera?
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
(proudly)
Ms. Perez said I could be the official documentariast of Greek Week. Documentarian?
(short pause)
Anyway, I get to documentize—aaaargh! I’m going to film everyone’s presentations. Isn’t that awesome?
Max draws out a huge glob of earwax.
MAX
Check it out. Sweet.
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
Ewww! Not sweet! Disgusting!
Max extends his finger so that Katie-Rose can admire it.
MAX
On MythBusters once, they made a candle out of earwax.
CLOSE-UP ON GLOB OF EARWAX.
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
What’s MythBusters?
MAX
It’s this show on the Discovery Channel. They do stuff like re-create the Hindenburg to see what went wrong, or they see if roach poison can set a house on fire. Stuff like that.
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
And they made a candle out of some guy’s earwax?
MAX
They wanted to see which burned better: earwax or normal wax.
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
And?
MAX
The earwax. It burned forever. But apparently it was really stinky, so the MythBusters concluded that earwax candles wouldn’t be a good product.
PULL BACK TO SHOW MAX’S FACE, RIGHT AS HE’S SNIFFING HIS GLOB OF EARWAX.
MAX
You know, if I accumulated enough . . .
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
No. Un-awesometatiousful, Max.
MAX
I could collect donations. I could start with all the earwax in our neighborhood, and then ask around at school—
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
Stop right there or I am going to throw up IN YOUR HAIR. Which needs brushing, by the way.
Max absent-mindedly rakes his fingers through his bottle-brush hair.
MAX
Maybe I’ll get one of those plastic gelato spoons—know the ones I’m talking about? Like miniature shovels?
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
NOOOOOO.
Max tries to look innocent, as if he has no clue why Katie-Rose is yelling at him. He can’t quite hide his grin, though.
MAX
Hey, want to come see what I’ve got of my domino course so far? I mastered the elusive reverse domino, but now another problem’s developed. Maybe you could take a look?
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
What good would I do? You’re the domino genius.
From off-screen comes the sound of a door opening.
PAN TO FRONT DOOR.
Katie-Rose’s mom pokes her head out of the house.
KATIE-ROSE’S MOM
Aren’t you supposed to be in your Greek costume, bun-bun?
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
Wanna see Max’s earwax?
From the far edge of the camera angle, Max can be seen offering it up obligingly. Katie-Rose’s mother wrinkles her nose.
KATIE-ROSE’S MOM
Ew. Max.
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
He wants to make a candle out of it.
KATIE-ROSE’S MOM
Pretty small candle . . .
PAN TO MAX.
Max blushes. He leans over and wipes the glob of earwax on the leaves of a bush.
KATIE-ROSE’S MOM (off-screen)
Not on my lilacs!
Off-screen, Katie-Rose laughs.
KATIE-ROSE’S MOM (CONT’D)
And Katie-Rose, turn off your camera and come put on your servant girl outfit.
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
Fine, fine.
MAX
But what about my domino course? Because mentally, I’m dealing with some fatigue issues, and it worries me.
The image on the camera jiggles as Katie-Rose stands.
KATIE-ROSE (off-screen)
I’m worried, too, Max. Believe me.
CAMERA SHUTS OFF.
FADE TO BLACK.
Milla is heartbroken. She knows it’s just a turtle . . . except at the same time, it’s not. It’s Tally. It’s her good-luck charm. And if Milla’s luck is so bad that she loses her good-luck charm, well, what’s to stop the roof from flying off her house the next time a storm hits? Or both moms being in a car accident? Or everyone in her whole family dying, including her grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins, even the ones from Texas she never sees? What if everyone in her family dies, plus every single friend, plus everyone she just plain knows?
If every single person she knew died, Milla would want to die, too. Not that she would commit suicide, because Mom Abigail had a college friend who committed suicide, and Mom Abigail said it was awful. She said her friend took a whole container of Advil and waited, alone, in her dorm room. Then—and this is the worst part—her stomach started cramping, and she got scared and called 911. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, but it was too late.
That’s the part that kills Milla. That Mom Abigail’s friend changed her mind. That she got scared and changed her mind . . . but too bad, there was no going back.
At her desk in Mr. Emerson’s classroom, Milla gives herself a shake. Along with her pristine noblewoman’s chitōn, which Mom Abby spent half of yesterday making from a pattern, she’s wearing her lime green sparkly scarf for the second day in a row. She knows ancient Greek noblewomen didn’t wear sparkly green scarves, but without Tally, she needs something to hold on to.
“Pssst,” someone says. It’s Katie-Rose, out in the hall. Beckoning. “Psssst.”
I have never actually heard someone say “pssst,” Milla thinks. Leave it to Katie-Rose.
Milla feels bad about how she treated Katie-Rose yesterday on the playground, so she raises her hand and asks Mr. Emerson if she can go to the bathroom. As always, when Milla raises her hand in Mr. Emerson’s class, she feels guilty, as if she’s drawing attention to the fact that Mr. Emerson only has one hand to raise, should he want to. Milla knows she’s being dumb—how many hands would he need to raise? nobody raises both their hands to ask to go to the bathroom—but that’s how she feels.
“Yes, Camilla,” Mr. Emerson says. “Come get the pass.”
Milla scrambles out of her desk and goes up front, where Mr. Emerson keeps a kayak oar with the word GIRLS carved into the handle. He has another oar carved with the word BOYS. They’re the biggest bathroom passes Milla has ever seen. She wonders where Mr. Emerson got them, and if he kayaks. Is it possible to kayak with only one arm?
Stop thinking about his arm, Milla tells herself. She prays that losing Tally the Turtle isn’t a sign she’s going to lose one of her arms.
Although I’d rather lose an arm than my entire family plus everyone I know . . .
“Milla!” Katie-Rose says as soon as Milla steps out of the room. “Come on—there’s something I have to show you.”
“Um, okay.” She angles the kayak oar so that it doesn’t bang against the walls.
Katie-Rose leads Milla to the computer lab and tells her to leave the oar outside. Milla obeys, which is kind of her way of saying “sorry” to Katie-Rose about yesterday.
“So . . . what do you want to show me?” she asks.
Katie-Rose glances at the back of the room, where the lab monitor is plugging numbers into a graph. She grabs Milla, guides her into a chair, and nudges the chair closer to a computer. Katie-Rose pulls up a second chair.
“Now,” Katie-Rose says officiously. “We all know you like IMing, right?”
“Uh . . .” Milla glances at the lab monitor, wondering who “we” is.
“Just say yes,” Katie-Rose commands. Her fingers fly over the keys. Katie-Rose is like the best typist in the whole fifth grade.
“Yes?” Milla says.
“Well, look!” Katie-Rose says proudly. On the screen appears a website called BlahBlahSomethingSomething. com. The words are bubble-shaped and orange. Glitter sparkles around each letter so they appear to be shimmering.
“BlahBlahSomethingSomething.com?” Milla says.
“And look here.” Katie-Rose hits Return, and a members list pops up:
Yasaman
The*rose*knows
Milla’s intrigued, but wary. If Modessa came in and saw her geeking out with Katie-Rose . . .
“Did you make this website?” she says.
Katie-Rose’s fingers are at it again. “Are you kidding? I wish. No, Yasaman did—and she’s really sweet and funny, and here’s her blog, see?”
Milla peers at Yasaman’s one entry:
Things about me:
I like frogs
I love books
I love movies, too, but I’m not allowed to see very many
Oh, and I LOVE orange and I LOVE school and I just know this is going to be the best year ever!!!
“She likes . . . frogs?” Milla says dubiously.
Katie-Rose shoots Milla a sharp look, and Milla shrinks. There’s nothing wrong with frogs, she supposes. Just as there’s nothing wrong with turtles.
“I like frogs, too,” she amends.
“Well, excellent, because you can become a member!” Katie-Rose says. “And you can help us come up with a better name, because BlahBlahSomethingSomething.com is pretty lame, I admit. But isn’t the site totally awesometatiousful?”
“What can you do besides IM and have a blog?” Milla says.
Katie-Rose pulls up a new page. “Tons of things. You can make your own profile. See? I haven’t gotten to work on mine much, ‘cause of all our Greek stuff—groan—but I picked out my wallpaper. The old-timey film projectors are ‘cause I want to be a cinematographer one day. Yasaman’s is polka-dotted.”
Katie-Rose clicks, and Milla catches a glimpse of tangerine polka dots.
“Who knew, right?” Katie-Rose says. She clicks again, and a new screen appears. This page is called the Chatterbox! and on the right hand of the page is a rectangle full of emoticons, winking and waving and doing their things.
“Ooo, yay, Yasaman added smileys!” Katie-Rose says. “Let’s try them out. We have to try them out.”
Katie-Rose does some fancy tap-tap-tapping, and the page fills up with pigs:
“They are so cute!” Katie-Rose squeals. “Do you love them so much? Ooo, cupcakes, too! Yasaman said she wanted cupcakes!!!”
“This is making me hungry,” Katie-Rose says when her finger stops punching keys. She regards Milla hopefully. “Do you think they’ll have cupcakes in the commons, when we do our presentations?”
“Um, no,” Milla says. “I think there’ll be . . . figs. Or . . . Greek food.”
“They could have cupcakes,” Katie-Rose says.
“Truuue,” Milla says carefully. They could also have MoonPies and giant pink bunnies and free iPods for every kid in the school, but Milla knows they won’t.
Katie-Rose snaps back into brisk, efficient Katie-Rose mode.
“So, yeah, this is the chat room, that’s why it’s called the Chatterbox. If there’s more than two of us online, we can go there to talk instead of straight-up IMing. And we can share music, and make avatars, and eventually add applications like Make Your Own Button and stuff like that. It’s going to be like Facebook, basically. Only better.”
“And Yasaman made all this?” Milla asks. “How?”
“’Cause she’s brilliant, that’s how,” Katie-Rose says. “Under that hajib of hers is one smart brain, and I should know.” She waggles her eyebrows. “It takes one to know one.”
Milla can’t help but giggle. Katie-Rose is so full of herself—and yet, Milla suspects she doesn’t mean to be obnoxious. And to her credit, Katie-Rose is equally generous in her assessment of others. Well, certain others. Like Yasaman, and how easily Katie-Rose said, “’Cause she’s brilliant, that’s how.”
Milla cannot for the life of her imagine Modessa saying something like that. Modessa’s compliments fall more along the lines of, “Seriously, Milla, be happy you’ve got big feet. I would die to be able to borrow my mom’s shoes.”
This thought sobers her, and she says, “Actually, I think it’s called a hijab.”
“Huh?”
“Hijab, not hajib. The scarf Yasaman wears.”
“I’d say it’s more of a head covering,” Katie-Rose says. “A ‘scarf’ is what you’re wearing. It’s totally different.”
“Katie-Rose . . . do you realize you just corrected my correction?”
Katie-Rose wrinkles her brow. Then she laughs. “Oh my gosh, I did.” She whacks her forehead. “I am such a dingleberry.”
“Katie-Rose!” Milla exclaims.
“I am! I don’t mean to be, but I am.” She crosses her eyes. “Such. A. Dingleberry.”
Milla’s giggles are back, to the power of ten squillion. “Do you even know what a dingleberry is?!”
“Yeah! A stupid person.”
“No. A dingleberry . . .”
She can’t say it.
“What?” Katie-Rose demands. “A dingleberry is what?!”
Milla’s laughing so hard she might pee. She’s vaguely aware of the lab monitor’s head jerking up, just as she’s vaguely aware of someone—a girl, white-blonde hair—hovering outside the computer lab.
Milla tries to pull herself together, but oh, it feels good. All that laughter makes it easier to breathe.
She puts her mouth to Katie-Rose’s ear and whispers, “A dingleberry is a teeny bit of poop that, um, stays stuck even after you wipe.”
Katie-Rose’s eyes bug out. She claps her hands over her mouth and leaps up out of her chair as if she can run away from the dreadful dingleberry.
“Ew! No! I take it back!” she squeals. “I am not a dingleberry!”
“Girls!” the lab monitor says in a shocked tone.
Red-faced and giggle-snorting, Milla says, “I’ve got to go, or Mr. Emerson’s going to think I fell into the toilet.”
“With the dingleberries,” Katie-Rose manages. “Of which I am not one!”
Milla stands. She flips her scarf over her shoulder.
“Wait!” Katie-Rose says. “So will you join?”
“Huh?”
“You know. BlahBlahSomethingSomething.com.”
“You guys have got to change the name.”
“I know, I know. So will you?”
Milla hesitates. She should just say sorry, I just can’t, because c’mon. Club Panda? Modessa’s standards?
“I asked Yasaman to make you a button with Tally the Turtle on it,” Katie-Rose says. “It’s a virtual button, not a real button, but still.” She navigates to a screen called Katie-Rose’s Bling and pulls up a button icon that looks like this:
“Isn’t it cute?” Katie-Rose says. “We want to make it say ‘hi,’ but we haven’t figured out how.”
Milla looks at the button icon and feels a swelling of . . . love? No, not love. That’s too strong. But something like love, because Katie-Rose doesn’t think Tally the Turtle is dumb. She doesn’t think Milla should be “over it already.” And Yasaman, based on her blog, seems nice, too.
“Okay, I’ll join,” Milla says, surprising herself.
Katie-Rose beams. Milla feels slight
ly sick at what she’s just promised . . . but (maybe) slightly happy, too.
As she leaves the lab and grabs the kayak-oar bathroom pass, something catches her eye. She looks toward the movement just in time to see Modessa, garbed in a black tunic over black leggings, disappear around the corner.
girls’ bathroom. She’s about to flush when she hears the bathroom door swing open. She hears two girls enter, and she freezes, because she recognizes one of their voices. Modessa, who’s not on Yasaman’s top five list of People She’d Like to End Up on a Deserted Island With. She’s not even on her top five million, and not just because she was mean to Katie-Rose yesterday.
Last year, Yasaman and Modessa were in the same class, and during their unit on the Middle East, Modessa said, “That’s where the ragheads live.” Then she looked straight at Yasaman and said, “Oops. Sorry, Spazaman.”
Their teacher, Ms. Avery, forced both Modessa and Yasaman to stay in during afternoon break.
“We don’t discriminate, and we don’t use ethnic slurs,” Ms. Avery told Modessa, who widened her eyes and said, “Oh my God, you are so right. I didn’t even think!”
“Well, I want you two to engage in a dialogue about your differences,” Ms. Avery said, closing the door behind her as she followed the rest of the class out to the playground.
“Thanks a lot,” Modessa said to Yasaman.
“Excuse me? You’re the hater who got us into this,” Yasaman said. Only, she didn’t say it out loud, because Modessa was a hater. A very powerful hater.
Modessa folded her arms over her chest. She stared at Yasaman, while Yasaman found her gaze shifting every which way.
Make recess end, she prayed. Make recess end.
“I heard about that Muslim dad, you know,” Modessa said.