True Rock

1991

Heather M. Fellaway developed early.

Although she knew it, she had never told anyone that before, had never actually said to another living, breathing person: "My boobs came in when I was way too young to know what to do with them." But she'd never had to tell anyone, because when you develop early, the evidence is written all over your chest. Everyone can see...especially the people you don't want to.

Heather's mother, the Crystal Meth queen of their neighborhood in El Sobrante, California, was happy for her daughter. Happy because she too had developed early, and had gotten a lot of attention from boys for it. Heather's mother had always thought that more attention from boys was the kind of thing Heather could really use to her advantage.

"Blonde hair's not gonna fly the plane from LA to Miami, Heather," she'd tell her. "It's nice, but it's not enough." Heather's mother, whose name was, ironically, Crystal Fellaway, knew this because she had blonde hair too...except sometimes it was black like a panther's. Crystal Fellaway was Latina, and her skin tone was such that she could pull that kind of drastic hair color change off.

"Sometimes you get sick of being just one kind of person," she'd explain when her hair suddenly and inexplicably changed hues.

Crystal Fellaway had somewhat of a split personality. Before Heather's chest went from concave to convex, she had worried that Heather wouldn't get any attention from boys, but as soon as her daughter developed, she started worrying that Heather was going to get the "wrong kind of attention." She wanted Heather to have them, but not at age eleven.

Heather felt kind of like a freak, but it didn't bother her too much. She was still a kid and she still played with Jerry and Mitchell Santiago every weekend. Jerry and Mitchell were the twin boys who lived across the street from Heather and her mother. She had gotten attention from them before she had developed early, but the Santiago twins weren't the kind of boys anyone would really worry about. They were wormy and their mother never made them wash so they smelled bad all the time, and on alternating weeks, one of them was always sick with yellow snot dripping from his nostrils (clear snot if it was a good week). The three of them went to school with Pauline Hooks, who was new to their class from New Orleans – this was in the early nineties, before New Orleans became a serious magnet for disaster. Pauline was thin as a reed and wore red glasses, the kind you either wear deliberately as a fashion statement when you're older and just don't care what anybody thinks anymore, or the kind your parents make you wear as a kid and you spend the rest of your adolescent and adult life trying to live down.

Pauline was the one who introduced Heather and the Santiago twins to the bottlecap game.

They were poor kids (Crystal Meth has a strange, persistent way of draining money out of the pockets of families, and it was a component of each of theirs), but the bottlecap game didn't cost a dime. They all had parents who drank massive amounts of beer, so when they got together and pooled their resources, it was safe to say that they collectively had a crap-ton of bottlecaps. The kids would turn them upside down, and on the rubbery, fleshy inside part, write different letters of the alphabet. When Pauline showed Heather and Jerry and Mitchell Santiago the game for the first time, she'd only had about thirty bottlecaps, which she kept in a plastic Ziploc bag. By the time the rest of them caught onto the game, however, they had so many bottlecaps they needed a brown paper grocery bag to hold them all.

The bottlecap game was like Scrabble for poor kids. In fact, Heather never knew what Scrabble was until years later, when some of her friends suggested they play strip Scrabble one night in high school. It worked like this: they'd shake the bag, and drop ten of the bottlecaps into a box on the ground. Shaking was the most important part. Even though only one of them could hold the bag at a time, they'd all shake and dance around during this part of the game. Sometimes they'd play the game on the swinging rope bridge over Contra Costa creek. The more they got that bridge to shake, the better.

From the ten letters, they would have to create as many words as they could, adding other letters as necessary. The one rule was that they had to use all of the ten letters that they threw down – the longer the words the better, as longer words got more points – and if they could use all ten letters to make one word, that person became the instant winner. For instance, if they threw down bottlecaps with the letters:

JDEUFNFKEH

They could say "JaDE" and "FUNK" and "HEFt" and get minimal points.

But if someone else came up with longer words using the same letters, like: "DEFUNct" that instantly won out. The more letters used, the longer the words, the more points you got.

It was a bit strange that the four of them we so obsessed with the bottlecap game. But they weren't like the other kids at school who were into playing foursquare or kickball, or truth or dare. They could easily spend an entire Saturday afternoon playing it. It was hard to explain, but it never got old. Something about starting down at those letters at their feet got their brain blood flowing. Heather lost touch with Pauline Hooks after the eighth grade ended, but she always thought Pauline should have patented that game. She swore Pauline Hooks would have been richer than Milton Bradley.

As the months passed by, Heather, Pauline and the Santiago twins got better and better at the game, and, naturally, the Santiago twins got more competitive. Heather could still remember the day they started bringing a dictionary to the bridge, just to make sure she and Pauline weren't getting away with pretend words. It got a little less fun after that, especially because they challenged the girls on pretty much everything, but Heather also noticed that they were harder on her specifically. It got to the point where it seemed like they had completely stopped trusting her. Heather was reading at a pretty advanced level for a sixth grader (Ivanhoe and The Fountainhead were her two favorites from that year), and she liked to watched PBS instead of Tom and Jerry...not that she went out of her way to share that with anyone. Anytime Heather spelled out a word that the Santiago twins didn't know, the boys would bring the entire game to a halt and scream: "I don't believe you!" It really did become a lot more like Scrabble after all.

Heather didn't let it bother her too much at first, but she was beginning to notice that every time they challenged her, she always turned out to be right. She never once rubbed it in their faces, though.

Then one day, the shit hit the fan.

Looking back, Heather would think of it all as a kind of fateful thing, and she couldn't recognize it as that when it happened, because even though she was brain smart, she still had never learned what fate was, and even if she had learned what it was, she probably wouldn't have totally understood it.

Pauline was the one to shake the bag. The four of them were jumping up and down and Heather was feeling particularly self-conscious that day. Along with their growing competitiveness, the Santiago twins were also starting to come into their own in other ways. The fact that she had developed early had never seemed to faze them before, but as the months dragged on, the more Heather began to notice them staring at her, especially when they were bouncing up and down on that bridge. Her mother had bought Heather a pair of white training bras at the Salvation Army, but Heather still absolutely hated wearing them. Ask any woman and she'll probably tell you the same thing: the first month or so of wearing a bra is just about the most uncomfortable, excruciating thing a person can live through. It's not painful or anything, but more like a persistent annoyance...like a mosquito in your ear that you hear but can't swat at in front of other people. Out of sheer discomfort, Heather had refused to wear any of the training bras. This proved to be both a good and bad thing: good because she didn't have to deal with the itchy elastic digging into her ribcage, and bad because when she played the bottlecap game, she had to hold her entire chest as stiff as possible...not that it helped. Seeing the Santiago twins with their eyes glued to her red sweater with the extra-long sleeves made Heather think about the "wrong kind of attention" that her mother had warned her about. It was in moments like these that Heather found herself extremely jealous of Pauline: she was still as flat as a board.

Heather breathed a sigh of relief when the ten seconds of jumping were up and it was time for Pauline to throw down the letters. They laid a lid of a Macy's box on the walkway of the bridge, so the bottlecaps didn't fall off the side and into the creek. The letters Pauline threw down were:

B I N D T A H M T S

And so began the routine practice (in a sense it had actually become more of an ordeal) of pouring over the letters as soon as they hit the lid of the box. The Santiago twins had also taken to bringing pads of college ruled paper to write their ideas on. Pauline and Heather hadn't graduated to doing that yet. It seemed too much of a drag for a game that was just supposed to be fun.

Heather stared at the letters for a long time, tuning out the rest of the three who were whispering their guesses and ideas to themselves under their breath. She realized for the first time ever that she had come up with a word that used all of the letters. No one had ever done that before. She wanted to scream our laugh really loudly, but it felt kind of like having a really good hand in poker: you just couldn't give it away...not just yet. She chewed the inside of her mouth.

"Okay," Mitchell said. "Are we ready?"

Heather nodded. Pauline gave an annoyed sigh. It was ironic: even though Pauline had been the one to introduce them to the game, she was consistently the worst player. It didn't keep her from trying, though. The twins announced their words, and then Pauline said hers. Heather couldn't remember what any of them said because she was so excited to upstage them all. Not in a mean way, and especially not towards Pauline...looking back, she supposed she was just madder than she realized about the Santiago twins turning so competitive...and staring at her unrestrained, size B breasts.

"Antidisestablishmentarianism," Heather proclaimed.

She could clearly remember the sound of bullfrogs croaking in the creek underneath.

"What?" Pauline asked in her soft voice.

"Antidisestablishmentarianism," Heather said again. She was so proud. It was a word she had learned while reading the Encyclopedia Britannica set her mother had somehow obtained in the early eighties and had, of course, never bothered to update, even by 1991. Reading the encyclopedia was, like the fact that she watched PBS, another little detail about Heather's life that she didn't always feel like sharing with others.

"That's not a word!" one of the twins screamed.

"I don't believe you!"

Heather nearly rolled her eyes. She'd heard this so many times before...but rolling her eyes would have been cocky, and it wasn't polite to be cocky when you knew for a clear and utter fact that you were right.

Mitchell opened the Merriam Webster and started leafing through it. Jerry stared at her defiantly.

"You can't just take a bunch of little words and glue them together to make one word," he said in that pretentious way that only an upstaged sixth grade boy can manage. "That's not in the rules."

Pauline scratched her head. "How do you even spell that word?" she asked, bewildered.

Heather then spelled it for them, taking the time to point with her index finger to the letters on the bottlecaps that corresponded to the spelling. Mitchell kept leafing through the book until he stopped. There was silence. More bullfrogs. Jerry peered over his brother's shoulder, and Heather's face broke into a proud, triumphant grin...which fell almost immediately when Mitchell Santiago slammed the dictionary shut.

"You cheated!" he screamed at her. "You cheated! You've been cheating the entire time!"

Heather didn't have time to protest, because at that point, Jerry picked up the box lid and chucked it at her and Pauline. Pauline screamed, and the two girls stepped back. The bridge suddenly seemed a lot swingier now that the twins were acting this way.

What transpired afterwards was a full-fledged chase, the boys after the girls, resulting also in the entire brown grocery bag of bottlecaps tearing and falling directly into the water beneath them. Even as an adult, Heather could still hear the sound they made as they fell...like coins falling into the tray at the slot machines in Thunder Valley. She and Pauline eventually lost them, but along the way Pauline had also fallen and skinned her knee on a rock.

"You can come home with me and I'll help you patch it up," Heather told her. Pauline nodded and limped back to her house.

"Just open the medicine cabinet, and take down the triple antibiotic," Heather told her once they were in Heather's bathroom with the door closed. Crystal Fellaway was asleep in the room down the hall. "I'll get some cotton swabs and rubbing alcohol."

"Is it going to sting?" Pauline asked. Her voice was weak and quavery.

"Yeah," Heather told her. "But you can blow on it when it does. That helps sometimes. I shouldn't blow on it, because I'll get my germs in it."

Pauline nodded and gritted her teeth. When Heather dabbed the cut with the alcohol, Pauline winced and sucked in her breath loudly through her teeth, but she didn't blow on it. Heather took a fresh cotton ball and started applying the triple antibiotic. Fortunately, this part didn't hurt much at all.

"I don't see why they had to get so mad and chase us," Pauline said. "It's just a game."

Heather shrugged her shoulders. "That's just the way they are."

Pauline cleared her throat. "I know you got the word right," she told Heather. "You're not a cheater. You never cheat. They're just mad because they can't stand to be beat by a girl. They think all girls are supposed to be one way. They can't stand it when they're not."

In the other room the telephone rang.

"Shouldn't you get that?" Pauline asked. "What about your mom?"

"She won't wake up," Heather said. "She'd sleep through a tornado." It was true. Crystal Fellaway had once slept through an actual tornado as a little girl in Billings, Montana, where she had grown up before hitchhiking her way out to California at the age of sixteen.

"Here you go," Heather said. She placed the band-aid over Pauline's knee.

"Heather! Heather!" Crystal Fellaway called from the other room. She sounded frantic. Suddenly there was rapping on the door.

"Why is this door locked!"

Heather sighed. The minute she unlocked it, the door flew open, so fast that the air seemed to almost suck her out into the hallway with it.

"Heather M. Fellaway," Crystal said, "What have I always told you about locking doors in this house?"

"It's the bathroom!" Heather protested. She knew when she said it that her mother wouldn't think it was a good enough excuse. Crystal glanced past her daughter to Pauline, who was perched on the porcelain countertop with her short, thin legs dangling down. Both her hands were clenched to the edge. Pauline was afraid of Heather's mother. Any normal kid would be, seeing her in this state, the "come down" stage of the drug she loved so much. It used to scare Heather too, but that was back when she was a really little kid. By age eleven, it was going to take a little more than seeing her mother coming down from her routine high to make her wet her pants.

"Who in the hell is that?" she asked Heather.

"Mom," Heather said annoyed, "It's Pauline. You've met her before."

"She don't look familiar to me. She don't look familiar to me at all. You bringing strangers into this house?"

"No," Heather said, casting a sympathetic glance towards Pauline. "You know her, you just don't remember her."

"I'm not a very memorable person," Pauline said. Heather was surprised that Pauline spoke at all, being the meek little girl that she was, but figured it was one of those strange reflexes people sometimes have when someone is scaring the pants off them.

"Don't tell me who I can and can't remember," said her mother. "I remember everyone. I got an eye for faces."

"Pauline is here because she fell and scraped her knee," Heather told her mother, wondering briefly if her mother could tell that she was deliberately changing the subject. "We got chased through the park by the Santiago twins."

"Twins!" Crystal bellowed. "They chased you?" There was a long silence and Heather's mother began shaking her head, then rubbing it vigorously.

"Yesyesyesyesyes," she said.

"Mama?"

"That's why I came in here. I only just remembered. Those Santiago twins. Those wormy little boys you associate with. Their mother just called me on the phone asking all sorts of questions about you."

For a second, Heather thought she was in deep shit. She wondered what sort of lie the Santiago twins had told about her to get her in trouble for one-upping them on the bridge that afternoon.

"She wanted to know if you been tested. Tested for what? I asked her. Herpes?"

"What's herpes?" asked Pauline. Again, Heather was beyond shocked to hear Pauline's voice.

"Something about you knowing big words," Crystal continued. "I told her, of course she knows big words. She ain't no sucka. She reads the encyclopedia for fun."

Heather cringed. She didn't exactly want her mother to share that with people.

"You do?" Pauline asked, mystified.

Heather tried to shrug it off. "Not on a regular basis," she told Pauline flippantly. "Just something I do to pass the time."

Crystal Fellaway seemed to sober up all of a sudden, but Heather knew it was a false alarm. She always had moments like these where she seemed to become a little more normal and would usually regress within seconds. When Heather was a really little kid, seeing her mother change like this used to make her heart stop with hope that she was becoming her real mother again, but now it didn't affect her at all.

"You're gonna stop playing that bottlecap game from now on," Crystal ordered her daughter. "Stop playing that stupid game and getting everyone upset over you. I'm sick of you showing off. And you're gonna stop hanging around those wormy Santiago brothers too. Wormy little nasty boys. They belong in a sewer, that's where they belong. And I'll bet you that's where they'll end up too. Little sewer rats. You need to start hanging around real boys. Real men. What about that Scott Milligan?"

Pauline let out a sigh, the softest of the sighs imaginable. It sounded like wind brushing up against the leaves of a small green weed. Scott Milligan was the blonde boy in their grade who most resembled Joey McIntyre from New Kids on the Block. Heather's mother had always had a queer fixation with him, and seemed to think he and her daughter belonged together, mostly due to the fact that they both had blond hair and, according to her: "twin faces of a cherub."

Heather was about to respond, when her mother's eyes fixed on the glass medicine cabinet.

"Would you look at that?" Crystal Fellaway said as if she were observing a lunar eclipse. She stepped into the bathroom, transfixed, eyes suddenly glued to the rectangular medicine cabinet-slash-bathroom mirror. Pauline jumped down from the countertop and promptly extracted herself out of Crystal Fellaway's way.

"Would you take a look at the craftsmanship of this thing?" Crystal said. "The way they got it up on the wall like this. I wonder how it's made."

Heather rolled her eyes. The worst words to ever come out of her mother's mouth were: "I wonder how it's made," because she knew it meant that her mother would soon be taking something apart...and when she finally did come out of her stupor, she would of course have no idea how to put it back together again. Crystal Fellaway once took apart their entire television set...a brand new one that Heather's uncle had given them for Christmas. Heather had cried when she came home to see that her mother had destroyed it. She loved that television set.

There are times in life when a tiny and unusual blip occurs. Most of the time, people understand these types of things as false alarms, and try as quickly as they can to forget them. That was what Heather believed Saturday was. She was still kind of sore at the Santiago twins, but even in the sixth grade, she understood that they were just being jealous boys, and couldn't help it if they were immature. She decided to pretend that the whole thing never happened, and Pauline pretty much took her lead. When they arrived at Juan Crespi Middle School on Monday at 8:15am, the Santiago twins seemed to have forgotten the whole affair as well. They greeted Heather and Pauline as usual, and they played a game of foursquare at recess, even though they never played that game. It almost felt like a relief to be playing something other than the bottlecap game, which recently seemed to be bringing out the worst in all of them. The entire morning, there was no mention of the bottlecap game at all, and especially no mention of the fact that the Santiago twins had dumped their collection of caps into the creek. Heather began to think that maybe the four of them needed a break from the game altogether, like maybe they, especially the twins, were becoming a little too obsessed with winning and needed to spend more time doing normal things on Saturday afternoons like riding bicycles or watching cartoons.

As they were returning from recess, Mrs. Raybee, their teacher, stopped Heather as she was re-entering the classroom.

"I need to speak to you for a moment, Heather," she said. Mrs. Raybee never needed to speak to Heather...in fact, she was one of the "good" kids, and as a result, Mrs. Raybee basically ignored her altogether. Heather figured she was in trouble, but for what she couldn't imagine. Then Mrs. Raybee closed the door to the classroom, leaving the rest of the kids inside, which really scared her.

"I received a phone call from Mrs. Santiago," the teacher said. Heather's body began to shake. Considering how her own mother had reacted to "a phone call from Mrs. Santiago," she was sure Mrs. Raybee was going to react worse. After all, her name was Mrs. RABIES.

"She thinks you may be quite an intelligent little girl," Mrs. Raybee continued. "Exceptionally intelligent. And I agree with her."

"I'm not that smart," Heather told her, trying to play it down, remembering how her mother had chastised her about "showing off."

"Don't be humble," Mrs. Raybee said. "Nadine, the school psychologist, wants to do some tests on you to evaluate your intelligence. Do you know what IQ stands for?"

Heather nodded. "Intelligence Quotient."

Mrs. Raybee smiled. "If you do very well, there is a special group that the school may want you to join. In fact, there may be a whole new school you can attend."

Heather frowned. "I don't want to leave Crespi," she said.

The teacher's eyes bulged. "Who," she said, "in their right mind wouldn't want to leave Juan Crespi Middle School?"

She was to meet the alleged Nadine the following Tuesday at 8:15am for testing. Mrs. Raybee said that the tests would probably take all day Tuesday and all day Wednesday, and that Heather would be excused from class and from homework assignments for both of those days. That made her happy. When she got home that afternoon, her mother was awake and watching her favorite show, Rikki Lake, on television.

"I need to talk to you, girl," Crystal said, turning around. She was sitting on the couch with a nail file in one hand. All of her nail equipment was strewn before her on the coffee table. Crystal never saw the point in going to someone and paying money to get her nails done; she figured she could do as good of a job (if not a better one) herself, and even though this wasn't true, neither Heather nor anyone else ever had the heart to tell her mother that she always did a horrible job.

Heather stopped in the doorway, noticing instantly that the entire room smelled of acrylic and acetone. That was just what her mother needed, Heather thought to herself, on top of being a meth addict, now she also had the chance to kill even more of her brain cells by locking herself in a room full of nail polish fumes. Heather left the door open behind her.

"I thought I told you to stop showing off."

"I did!" Heather protested. "It was all Mrs. Santiago. She's the one who called up the school and told them about me."

"Well I figured that out myself," Crystal said. "Doesn't take a genius to put two and two together. That woman has it out for you. Don't know why people get so fixated on certain things, but they do. She oughta just mind her own business. So you know what I did? Paid her a little visit this afternoon."

"You did what?" Heather asked.

"Paid her a visit," she repeated. "A little rendez-booze." She paused to take a drag off the cigarette she held in the hand opposite the nail file. Heather eyed her mother's clothes up and down. She was wearing black leggings, the kind that are so sheer you can practically see a woman's cellulite through them, and a faded Disneyland 1980 sweatshirt she had gotten on a trip to the park during it's 25 anniversary year, the same year Heather was born.

"Um, did you go wearing those clothes?" Heather asked.

"What's wrong with these clothes!"

Heather grimaced. Crystal exhaled a cloud of nicotine into the air.

"It was the right thing to do!" she insisted. "I went over there, and, well, in essence...I ripped her a brand new one."

"Are you serious?" Heather cried. "Why'd you do that for?"

"Listen," Crystal said. "You're my daughter, and I don't need anyone telling me how to raise my daughter. A grown woman like her ought to understand that."

"How did she react?"

"She actually had the nerve to start crying!" Crystal exclaimed. "Talking 'bout...I'm so sorry. I was only trying to help out a friend. I was only trying to do the right thing." She shook her head resolutely. "You mind your business, and I'll mind yours."

"Right..." Heather said slowly, deciding it wasn't worth it to correct her. "So you didn't consent to let me take the tests." At that point, she was more sad about the fact that she wouldn't be getting to miss two days of school than at the idea of never being able to find out how smart she was.

"No," Crystal replied, choking down a cough of smoke. "Of course I consented. I want you to find out what kinda brains you got. It's a good thing to know at your age. What I don't want is some smart-ass woman with rat twins telling me how to run my business with my child. That is one thing I will not have."

On the television, the commercial break ended, and Rikki Lake spoke to the camera. Heather watched the hue of the television alternate from pink to green to blue to yellow, to gray, and back to pink again. When her mother had taken apart the TV, Heather had somehow managed to piece it back together again on her own, but the one problem she could never solve was getting the color to stay one hue. It was something that the two of them had learned to live with it, but was still annoying. Heather always thought that if her father had had any larger presence in their lives beyond avoiding paying alimony from his new home in Savannah, Georgia, he would be the kind of person they could ask to fix the television set. But she had only met him once, when she was nine years old. He had promised to stay, that he was never going back to Georgia – that he was through with failing them and not being a part of their lives. Heather had never believed a word he said, but Crystal had believed every one. And when he did leave, after two and a half months of pretending to be something he wasn't, Crystal had been so crushed that she'd taken more meth than ever, and had had to be hospitalized. Heather had held her mother's hand in the hospital, as she drifted in and out of consciousness.

"That's okay, mom," she had said to her. "We don't need him."

Nadine was one of those women who were perpetually cross-eyed. It was the kind of thing a person could probably ignore if they were just carrying on a superficial conversation – like about the weather or who you think will make it to the Superbowl this year – but became quite distracting if, like Heather, you were spending six hours a day sitting directly across a desk from her, attempting to take tests meant to measure your intelligence. All the tests began with the name Weschler, which Heather thought was strange-sounding.

"Do you have to pay to use these tests?" she asked Nadine.

Nadine nodded. "We do have to pay, Heather," she said, "They're copyrighted."

Heather notice that Nadine was always talking in that slow, observant voice...as if whatever she was saying had to be the most important, interesting thing in the world.

"Like five dollars a test?" Heather asked, sneaking a glance at the woman's cross eyes. She instantly felt ashamed for staring and threw her eyes to her converse sneakers on the green tile floor.

"Oh no, Heather," Nadine said. That was another thing Heather didn't like: the woman using her name all the time. Using it once in a conversation was alright, and could even be a good thing, but to use it more than that struck Heather as just plain creepy. "We actually pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars to use these tests. They're quite expensive."

"And this guy Weschler owns them all?" Heather asked.

"Many of them," Nadine explained. "The main ones." She was setting up the first exercise for one of the tests...a set of red and white blocks and a stopwatch timer, as well as a few large books which Heather figured she was going to read the instructions off of.

To Heather, it didn't really seem fair. It was just a test after all. She could see paying a hundred dollars for a television set, but not for a test. Besides, that kind of thing should be free, she thought, especially for our poor-ass school.

Heather was called out of Mrs. Raybee's class two weeks later. Nadine was standing at the doorway with a stack of white papers clutched against her chest. From the way she was smiling at her, Heather couldn't read whether or not she had good news or bad news. Then again, this could have been due to Nadine's eyes being crossed, though Heather had admittedly gotten more used to them over two days of sitting alone with her in a room.

"Hello, Mrs. Raybee," Nadine said. "Can I borrow Heather for a moment?" Mrs. Raybee nodded and then turned to Heather, giving her a look that was kind of like a squeeze, a squeal of hope-filled excitement. Heather smiled back at her. She stood up and followed Nadine out into the hall and down to the Nadine's office. Heather sat down in the same chair she had sat in for the two days of testing, and for some reason, she suddenly realized that even though she had told Mrs. Raybee that she didn't want to leave Juan Crespi Middle School, she also desperately did not want this moment – and that feeling of being special and different and set apart from Jerry and Mitchell and Pauline and everyone else she knew – to disappear. She realized with panic that this was the moment that would decide whether that happened or not; if there was anything that she could have done in the past to make things turn out a certain way, she had missed that opportunity, and would now just have to live with whatever Nadine told her.

Nadine sat down across from Heather.

"The first thing I want to tell you is that you are an extremely bright young woman."

Heather waited. This was good, she thought to herself, or was it?

"Your overall performance was in the high average range..." she went on and on about all this stuff that Heather didn't really want to listen to, and didn't really care to understand. Obviously, the only thing that mattered was whether or not she was good enough to get out of Crespi and into that special school Mrs. Raybee was had talked to her about.

"...unfortunately," Nadine said at last, "the school only takes children who score in the "superior" range."

Heather looked at her, confused. She had stopped listening so long ago that she actually thought for a moment that Nadine was telling her she had made it in.

"I scored in the superior range?" Heather asked earnestly.

"Uh, no..." Nadine said. Even though her eyes were still crossed, Heather could still see the awkwardness in them, reflecting the situation that Heather had just made worse by asking a stupid question.

"You scored in the high average range, Heather. Which is still incredibly high for someone your age. In fact, in a group of 100 of your peers, you would score better than ninety of them."

It didn't console her. Nadine could see it on her face.

"You were only two points from the Superior range," she told her. She said it to make Heather feel better, but instead it only made her cringe.

"Two points?" Heather cried. "Two lousy points and they won't let me in because of that?"

Nadine frowned. "I wish I had something I could say to make you feel better," she said.

"You're a psychologist!" Heather wanted to yell at the woman. "Isn't it your job to help people deal with disappointment?"

But she didn't yell. She didn't scream. She didn't even cry. She was too numb to do any of that.

At home that afternoon, Heather found a note from her mother. She had taken on an extra shift at the bar where she worked – not as a bartender, but as a security guard – and Heather would have to make her own dinner. Even though a lot of kids in the neighborhood found it weird that Crystal Fellaway worked as a rent-a-cop, it actually made a lot of sense to Heather. She always thought her mother had more of a body figure for a cop than for a bartender, anyway. Heather preheated the oven and unwrapped a Totino's Frozen Pizza. Then she heard a knock on the door. When she looked through the peephole, she saw it was Pauline. She opened the door.

"Hey," Pauline said. "You want to play the bottlecap game?"

Heather looked at her like she was a crazy person.

"We can't play the bottlecap game," she reminded her. "We lost all of our bottlecaps in the creek."

"I know," Pauline said. "But I been starting a new collection." She reached into her backpack and pulled out a little Ziplock bag.

"I got twenty beer caps from my parents' trash this week," she said. She smiled. She was so happy about it.

"Twenty's not enough," Heather told her. "It's not even the whole alphabet."

"Yeah I know," Pauline conceded. "But we can check your mom's recycling. She probably has a lot, 'cause garbage day's tomorrow."

Heather gave a slight shrug. "Recycling bin's on the back side of the house," she told her. Pauline smiled. Heather jerked her head towards the kitchen.

"I got to put this pizza in the oven first."

"Meet you there in three minutes?" Pauline asked. She was all twitchy and excited, like the nose of a bunny.

"Okay," Heather replied listlessly. Pauline scampered down the steps, racing towards the back of the house, and it was only in that very moment, in which she wearily closed the door behind her, that all of Heather M. Fellaway's numbness suddenly fell away, and the tears finally came out.