Since I’ve never lived anywhere else, whole months of days where it’s 100 degrees outside seems normal.
We call it summer.
Despite the heat, there is no escaping the fact that the bright sun and rich soil make the area ideal for growing things once you add water to the equation.
And I did.
So where once our house had a rectangle of grass, there is now a forty-foot-high stand of timber bamboo.
I have citrus trees (orange, grapefruit, and lime) next to my year-round vegetable garden.
I grow grapes, a variety of vines, annual and perennial flowers, and, in one small area, tropical plants.
To know me is to know my garden.
It is my sanctuary.
It’s sort of tragic that we can’t remember the earliest of the early years.
I feel as if these memories could be the key to the whole “Who am I?” question.
What was my first nightmare about?
How did the first step really feel?
What was the decision-making process when it came time to ditch the diapers?
I’ve got some toddler memories, but my first sequence recall is kindergarten; no matter how hard I’ve tried to forget the experience.
My parents said the place was going to be all kinds of fun.
It wasn’t.
The school was only blocks from our house, and it was here that I first committed the crime of questioning the system.
The instructor, Mrs. King, had just plowed her way through a popular picture book. It featured the hallmarks of most pre-school literature: repetition, some kind of annoying rhyming, and bold-faced scientific lies.
I remember Mrs. King asking the class:
“How does this book make you feel?”
The appropriate answer, as far as she was concerned, was “tired,” because the overly cheery instructor forced us to lie down on sticky rubber mats for twenty minutes after “lunchtime picture book.”
Half of the class usually fell deeply asleep.
I remember distinctly a boy named Miles twice peeing his pants, and, with the exception of a kid named Garrison (who I’m certain had some sort of restless leg syndrome), everyone else in the room seemed to actually enjoy the horizontal break.
What were these kids thinking?
That first week while my classmates dozed off, I obsessively worried about the hygiene of the linoleum floor.
I can still hear Mrs. King, spine straight and shrill voice booming:
“How does this book make you feel?”
She then made a few exaggerated yawns.
I recall looking around at my fellow inmates, thinking: Would someone, anyone, just shout out the word tired?
I had not uttered a single syllable in my five sessions as a student, and I had no intention of doing so.
But after days of hearing more lies from an adult than I’d been exposed to in my whole lifetime—everything from how fairies cleaned up the classroom at night to insane explanations for earthquake preparedness kits—I was at some kind of breaking point.
So when the teacher specifically said:
“Willow, how does this book make you feel?”
I had to tell the truth:
“It makes me feel really bad. The moon can’t hear someone say good night; it is two hundred thirty-five thousand miles away. And bunnies don’t live in houses. Also, I don’t think that the artwork is very interesting.”
I bit my lower lip and experienced the metallic taste of blood.
“But really, hearing you read the book makes me feel bad mostly because I know it means you are going to make us lie down on the floor—and germs there could make us sick. There’s a thing called salmonella and it is very dangerous. Especially to kids.”
That afternoon, I learned the word weirdo because that’s what I was called by the other kids.
When my mom came to pick me up, she found me crying behind the Dumpster in the play yard.
I was taken to see an educational consultant that autumn and the woman did an evaluation. She sent my parents a letter.
I read it.
It said I was “highly gifted.”
Are people “lowly gifted”?
Or “medium gifted”?
Or just “gifted”? It’s possible that all labels are curses. Unless they are on cleaning products.
Because in my opinion it’s not really a great idea to see people as one thing.
Every person has lots of ingredients to make them into what is always a one-of-a-kind creation.
We are all imperfect genetic stews.
According to the consultant, Mrs. Grace V. Mirman, the challenge for the parents of someone “highly gifted” was to find ways to keep the child engaged and stimulated.
But I think she was wrong.
Almost everything interests me.
I can be engaged by the arc of the water in a sprinkler system. I can look through a microscope for a shockingly long period of time.
The challenge for my parents was going to be to find friends who could put up with such a person.
All of this leads to our garden.
Mom and Dad said that they were looking to enrich my life. But I think one thing was obvious from the beginning:
Plants can’t talk back.
Chapter 3
As a family, we threw ourselves into growing things. I have photos from the early trips to buy seeds and pick out young plants. I look insanely excited.
Early on, I adopted my gardening outfit.
It did not change over the years.
You could say it was my uniform.
I almost always wore a khaki shirt and a red hat for sun protection. (Red is my favorite color because it is very important in the plant world.)
I had tan pants with built-in kneepads. And lace-up leather work boots.
This outfit was designed for practical reasons.
My unruly, long curly hair was pulled back and secured by some kind of clip. I had magnifying glasses (like the elderly wear) for close-up inspection.
In my garden, in this uniform, I determined (through chemical analysis at the age of 7) that the brown flecks that appeared on the backyard furniture were bee poops.
I was astonished that more people had not figured this out before.
In an ideal world, I would have spent twenty-four hours a day conducting investigations.
But rest is critically important for development in young people.
I calculated my exact biorhythms and I needed 7 hours and 47 minutes of rest every night.
Not just because I was obsessed with the number 7.
Which was the case.
But because that’s how my circadian rhythms were set. It’s chemical.
Isn’t everything?
I was told that I lived too much inside my head.
Maybe because of this, I haven’t done that well at school and I’ve never had many friends.
But my garden gave me a window into other aspects of companionship.
When I was eight years old, a flock of wild, green-rumped parrots moved into the fishtail palm tree by the back wooden fence.
A pair built a nest and I was able to witness the arrival of the parrot babies.
Each one of those little birds had their own distinctive chirp.
I’m pretty sure only the mom green-rumped parrot and I knew this.
When the littlest parrot was pushed from the nest, I rescued the tiny creature, naming him Fallen.
With careful hand-feeding that in the beginning went around the clock, I was able to parrot-parent.
When Fallen was finally strong enough to fly, I reintroduced him back to his flock.
It was incredibly rewarding.
But it was also heartbreaking.
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It has been my experience that rewarding and heartbreaking often go hand in hand.
In grade school, at Rose Elementary, I had one true companion.
Her name was Margaret Z. Buckle.
She made up the Z because she didn’t have a middle name, and she had strong feelings about being seen as an individual.
But Margaret (don’t ever call her Peggy) moved away the summer after fifth grade. Her mother is a petroleum engineer, and she got transferred to Canada.
Despite the distance, I thought that Margaret and I would stay really close.
And in the beginning it was like that.
But I guess people are a lot more open in Canada, because in Bakersfield it was just Margaret and me against the world.
Up there she has all kinds of friends.
Now, on the rare times when we correspond, she brings up things like a new sweater she got. Or a band she likes.
She doesn’t want to talk about chiropterophily, which is the pollination of plants by bats.
She’s moved on.
Who can blame her?
With Margaret in Canada, I was hoping that Sequoia Middle School would open up new avenues for friendship.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
I’m small for my age, but I had a lot of anticipation about becoming a “Sequoia Giant.”
Just the fact that the place had a tree as a mascot seemed so promising.
The school was on the other side of town and it was supposed to give me a fresh start, since the kids from my elementary all went on to Emerson.
My parents got special permission from the district to move me there.
Mom and Dad believed that I’d never found a teacher who truly understood me. I think it was more accurate to say that I’d never understood any of my teachers.
There’s a difference.
Right before school began in the fall, the anticipation I felt was like waiting for my Amorphophallus paeoniifolius to bloom.
I went through a period of obsessively cultivating rare corpse flowers.
My initial attraction was to their strange-looking blossom.
The deep purplish red petals resemble sheets of velvet fabric that could line a casket. And the long, aggressive, yellowy stigma jutting from the center is like a jaundiced old man’s finger.
But the plant’s reputation comes from its smell. Because when the bloom opens, it’s like having a dead body pop up from the soil.
The stink is simply indescribably disgusting. I mean, it really takes some adjustment.
No animal wants to get close, much less munch on the reeking, exotic, wine-colored blossom.
It’s a reverse perfume.
I believed that going to middle school would be life-changing. I saw myself as the rare plant, prepared to unfurl hidden layers.
But I truly hoped that I wouldn’t stink up the place.
I tried to fit in.
I researched teenagers, which was interesting because I was close to becoming one.
I read about teenage driving, teenage runaways, and teenage dropout rates. And it was a shocker.
But none of the research provided much enlightenment on my number one area of real interest:
Teenage friendship.
If the media is to be believed, teenagers are too busy breaking laws and trying to kill themselves and the people around them to form any bonds of attachment.
Unless, of course, those bonds produce a teenage pregnancy.
The literature had a lot of information on that.
Right before I started middle school, I had a physical.
The exam went much, much, much better than expected because for the first time I had an actual medical issue.
I had been waiting for twelve long years for this to happen.
I needed glasses.
Yes, the level of correction was slight.
And yes, it could have been brought on in part by eyestrain (apparently I focus too long on something right in front of me, like a book or a computer screen, and I don’t look away into the distance and refocus enough).
So I congratulated myself on this achievement because I had been hoping for some form of myopia, and now I had it.
After the exam we went to the ophthalmologist and I picked out my eyeglasses. I was drawn to frames that looked like what Gandhi wore.
They were round, wire-rimmed, and very “old-school,” according to the woman who deals with that part of the process.
They were perfect because I was going forward in the brave new world in peace.
A week before the first day of classes, I made another big decision.
We were having breakfast, and I swallowed a large bite of my Healthy-Start meal, which consists of beet greens topped with flax seeds (both homegrown), and then I said:
“I have figured out what I’m going to wear for my first day at Sequoia.”
My father was at the sink, sneaking a bite of a doughnut. I did my best to keep junk food away from these people, but they covered up a lot of their eating habits.
My dad quickly swallowed a piece of his fudge puppy and asked:
“And what will that be?”
I was pleased.
“I’ll be wearing my gardening outfit.”
Dad must have taken too large of a bite, because it sounded like the fudge doughnut was caught in his throat. He managed to say:
“Are you sure about that?”
Of course I was sure. But I stayed low-key.
“Yes. But I won’t put binoculars around my neck—if that’s what you’re concerned about.”
My mom, who up until this point was unloading the dishwasher, turned around. I could see her face. She looked pained. Like maybe she had just put away a whole load of dirty dishes, which is something that had happened before.
Her face smoothed out and she said:
“What an interesting idea, honey. But I’m wondering . . . will people make the connection? Maybe it’s better to wear a brighter color. Like something red. You love red.”
They didn’t get it.
The first day at middle school was a chance to make a new introduction. I needed to convey to the group a sense of my identity, while keeping a few of the basic elements of my character under wraps.
I couldn’t stop myself from explaining:
“I’m making a statement about my commitment to the natural world.”
I saw them exchange quick looks.
My dad had fudge frosting on his front teeth, but I wasn’t going to point this out, especially after he said:
“Of course. You are so right.”
I looked down into my breakfast bowl and began counting the flax seeds, multiplying them by 7s.
It’s an escape technique.
The next afternoon, a Teen Vogue magazine just appeared on my bed.
All of these publications at that time of year centered on going “Back to School.”
On the cover a teenage girl with hair the color of a banana had the widest smile that I have ever seen. The headline read:
DOES YOUR OUTFIT SAY WHAT YOU WANT IT TO?
No one took responsibility for putting it there.
Chapter 4
My parents made a few more strange suggestions before the first day of classes began.
I decided that they both must have been traumatized as teenagers.
On that first morning at an entirely new school, I packed my red, wheeled luggage (designed for the frequent business traveler but purchased to transport my books and supplies), and we headed out the door to the car.
My father and mother both insisted on dropping me off. But neither parent, per my direction, would accompany me inside.
I had reviewed the floor plan of the actual buildings, memorized everything from
the ceiling heights to emergency exits to electrical outlet locations.
I was pre-enrolled in English, math, Spanish, physical education, social studies, and science.
With the exception of P.E., I knew a lot about the subjects.
I had calculated the amount of time I needed to walk the halls, as well as the cubic feet of the storage closets.
I could recite the entire Sequoia student handbook.
As we pulled out of the driveway, I was anxious, but I knew for certain one thing:
I was ready for middle school.
I was wrong.
The place was so loud.
The girls were shrieking and the boys were physically attacking each other.
At least that’s how it appeared.
I hated to remove my red panama hat.
It was my signature color, but the hat was designed, after all, for sun protection.
I had only taken four steps into the mob when a girl approached.
She came right up to me and said:
“The toilet in the second stall is broken. It’s totally gross.”
She waved her arm in the direction of more meat-eaters and then she was gone.
I took a moment to process her statement.
Was she giving me some kind of informational heads-up?
I could see her talking to two girls next to a row of lockers and she didn’t have the same intensity.
I looked through the swarm and I saw a slight, dark- haired man pulling a wheeled cart. It was loaded with cleaning supplies. Two mops were attached to the back.
I stared at him and realized that he and I were dressed alike.
But he was pulling a cleaning trolley, not luggage with wheels that have a 360-degree rotating option.
And then I had a distressing thought: It was possible that the girl believed I was some kind of maintenance worker.
I lasted less than three hours.
The place made me severely nauseated. For health and safety reasons, I went to the office and insisted on calling home.