Teach Me Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  the physics of falling

  in the crackling forest

  eating paul

  ecstatic time machine

  swimming to mars

  cat splitter

  in the beginning

  golden ticket

  sound crazy

  aboriginal eyes

  empress of grease

  kissing africa

  deeper

  physical observations

  closer

  wonderland

  angle of his light

  my personal planet

  magnification of breath

  dawn of creation

  nova apples

  two

  the house of tomorrow

  electromagnetic love

  throbbing star

  woman exponential

  river suicide

  hydrogen snow

  heat death of the universe

  lessons learned

  yellow wedding

  moon wife

  memory scents

  naked beasts

  killer comet

  dishes make love

  big black blue

  zeb in mourning

  push

  the dripping years

  critical mass

  hearts on mars

  lizard killer

  shovel of fire

  the parent particle

  rosetta stone

  tender earthquake

  for the dead

  sexual skeletons

  mouth work

  the inertia tree

  the cold number

  bean genes

  peppercorn ice

  escape velocity

  wet

  smaller

  looking for lincoln

  chamber music

  the color of love

  and do it anyway

  sting

  mechanical death

  growing season

  neural meat

  the language of leaving

  come back for me

  remember

  mountains of time

  arm crazy

  raining words

  adoring machine

  closing doors

  water days

  x-ray heart

  Teach Me

  RAZORBILL

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada, Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright 2005 © R. A. Nelson

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  To my family: Deborah, Zachary, Alexander, Christopher, and Joseph.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  acknowledgments

  In memory of Dona Vaughn. Thanks to Sue Corbett, Diane Davis, and the generosity of the YAWRITERS list for establishing the Dona Vaughn Work in Progress Grant to honor this wonderfully giving writer. Thanks also to Stephen Mooser, Lin Oliver, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. This grant helped make this book possible.

  Thanks to my matchless editor and friend at Razorbill, Liesa Abrams, whose amazing mind and indispensable talents have made me a better writer. Thanks also for the invaluable contributions of Eloise Flood, Margaret Wright, Karen Taschek, Christopher Grassi, Polly Watson, Andy Ball, and Archie Ferguson.

  Thanks to my extraordinary agent, Rosemary Stimola. Rosemary is simply perfect. I couldn’t ask for a better champion and friend to chart my career.

  Thanks to my writerly compatriots, Kathleen O’Dell, Linda Zinnen, and Charis Kelly. Their priceless support helped my career become a reality.

  In memory of Linda Smith and thanks to Linda Sue Park and the dazzling denizens of write4kids.com. I’m grateful to Jon Bard for putting it together.

  To Brian Nelson, Craig Nelson, Randy Nelson, Ronnie Nelson, Rikki Nelson, and Doris Nelson, thanks for believing through all those years of typing and dreaming.

  Hey, Ms. Gonzalez, I did it!

  the physics of falling

  Welcome to my head.

  Let’s hit the ground running. I will get you up to speed. We need a short learning curve here. Those are things my dad likes to say. He works for NASA. He spends his days figuring out problems like this:

  If an object weighing 8.75 ounces traveling ten thousand miles per hour strikes the earth, how big a hole does it create?

  Answer: One exactly the size of my heart.

  Call me Nine.

  Everybody does. When I was three, I couldn’t pronounce Carolina; it came out Caronina. My math-crazy father thought that was cute and shortened it to Nine. I’ve been a number ever since.

  Right now I’m sitting with my parents in Mom’s Victorian room, surrounded by drapes with tassels, photographs of long-decomposed relatives, muscle-bound furniture. The sofa is covered with pictures of golden English villages I am desperate to live in that don’t exist. And on today’s menu:

  The are-you-a-lesbian conversation.

  Not that Mom would ever use that word.

  I’ve broken her heart. She’s drowning in hay fever tears. All because at this penultimate moment in my eighteen-year-old life, two weeks before the senior prom, I’m just not interested.

  Mom sobs explosively into a Kleenex. She’s allergic to her own head. She just got a new perm. If she sneezes one more time, her sixty-year-old mucous membranes will flop out on the Cavendish rug.

  That’s right. My parents are old. Older than satellites, rock ‘n’ roll, or color TV. They married late; I’m the only fruit of their looms.

  “But you’re so smart, Nine,” Mom sputters.

  Exactement, I want to say. Don’t you know that boys don’t like smart girls? But men . . .

  I look out the window so they can’t see my eyes.

  My teacher, Mr. Mann, said the same thing the day the craziness started that knocked my heart out of its orbit. He was standing under a tree with an angel halo of moonlight around his face. Then he asked me this:

  “Did you know Emily Dickinson wrote a poem with your name in it? Awake ye muses Nine, sing me a strain divine. Not one of her best, I’m afraid.”

  Two hours later, behind the Wal-Ma
rt Rule the World Super Center, he kissed me.

  “Why doesn’t Schuyler come around anymore?” Dad says, bringing me back to Earth for a fiery reentry.

  Schuyler’s my best friend. We’ve known each other since the supercontinent Pangaea split apart. Well, second grade. He and Dad have always liked each other. Schuyler is family in this house, the brother I never got to have.

  I’m hiding from him.

  I don’t want him to know what I’ve done. The trouble I’m in. How far, how fast I’m falling.

  “He’s busy,” I say.

  “But what about any of the other boys?” Mom says. “What about that one in your—”

  “I’m invisible,” I say to keep from saying anything else.

  Dad laughs. “Invisible?”

  Dad’s an engineer. He thinks in spaces, measurements, volumes.

  A six-foot chunk of girl-woman with a thirty-five-inch inseam and brown chair-stuffing hair can’t be invisible. Not the Kevin Bacon/Claude Rains movie kind, where you take off the bandages and poof, disappear.

  I’m this kind of invisible to boys: I see you, but I don’t care. I’m not going to look a second time as long as we both shall live. But to men . . .

  “It’s not just the prom, darling.” Mom goes down the list.

  I’m not sleeping. I talk too little. Lose my college paperwork. Push away my favorite Spamburger Helper. Disappear to God knows where doing God knows what. Is it dangerous? Illegal?

  What am I supposed to tell them?

  That my heat shield has failed? That I’ve fallen to Earth and disintegrated? That no one can reassemble the pieces of my life and tell the story of my death?

  “It’s nothing,” I say.

  in the crackling forest

  Sunday morning.

  I used to hate Sundays, first cousin to black-and-blue Mondays. But instead of jittery and crazed, today I wake up strangely peaceful.

  Today the birds are chirping like lunatics and pooping the patio purple and white. The sun is a gigantic nectarine. Black holes, beware. There is no suction today.

  Today my insanity has curved so far back in on itself, I’ve clambered out of my emotional gravity well.

  I have a plan.

  Today is the day of my teacher’s wedding.

  Today Mr. Mann and Alicia Sprunk, his darling little Bride to Be—the White Dwarf I saw in the wedding announcement in the newspaper—will be joined in Holy Bondage. I used to hate weddings too. Loathed, despised, abominated. Now I’m going to one and I can’t wait.

  I tell Mom I’m going to the mall. She trusts me so much; they both do. I could tell them anything—they would believe it. I have so many Good Girl Points built up. But I’m burning through them dangerously fast.

  She follows me outside, eyes desperately hopeful, hair like half-boiled spaghetti.

  “Are you going with someone, darling?”

  “Wilkie Collins,” I say.

  “Oh, good!” she says a little hysterically. “Have I met him, sweetheart? Is he in one of your classes?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t I come with you? I’ve got your prom dress all picked out at Dillard’s. Wilkie might like to see it too. Does he have a date for the dance?”

  Wilkie Collins is my car.

  He farts teal smoke. His doors stick. His heat doesn’t work unless you jiggle two wires together in a precise, calibrated, impossible-to-duplicate way. But he has never let me down.

  Swoosh.

  May used to be my favorite month.

  School is dying, flowers are blooming, windows are open. I drive very fast and safely to the Crackling Forest. It’s an L-shaped strip of woods just off the interstate. It used to be part of a forest, but now it’s a patch of surrounded, abandoned, wasted Alabama wildness behind the Firestone Holy Tire Palace.

  I grab the gym bag I’ve packed for this special occasion from Wilkie’s spongy trunk and step into the trees. This piece of woods smells of oil, not bark. Things crackle here. Leaves, gum wrappers, burger boxes. Used condominiums.

  That’s what Schuyler calls them.

  My heart bangs. I miss him so much. There are so many things I need to tell him. But what would he think of me now?

  I yank my clothes off and stuff them in the bag. The moment I’m down to my underwear, the grinding roar of a diesel truck rushes at me. It whines higher and higher as the sound waves crash against my body. Then the sound gets low and drawn out as the sound waves stretch away again. This is called the Doppler Effect. It happens with stars and galaxies too. Only then it’s called the Red Shift, meaning light waves moving away from you shift to the red end of the visible spectrum.

  It’s thrilling standing here utterly exposed in this unexposed space. My own skin turns me on. I remember Mr. Mann’s weight on my legs. I remember his warm breath on my shoulder.

  Stop it.

  I have a theory: Life is a Doppler Effect.

  In the beginning, the Life Waves rush up on you, all high-pitched and energetic, then stretch away, moaning lower and lower. You were supposed to be a hero, a movie star, Bill Gates.

  In love forever.

  But the Life Waves passed you by.

  I pull on a dead woman’s long froofy dress I bought at the Goodwill store. It’s covered with huge purple flowers. I raise my arms in the I-give-up position; the dress settles over my shoulders. The collar looks like a lace doily. No slip, and the material is so sheer, I’m sure you can see my tiny black bra in the sunlight. The one Mr. Mann bought for me when he got tired of looking at white.

  I ball up my bunchy hair with some of Dad’s mongo NASA paper clips. Next, a wide garden hat that has an industrially manufactured feather the color of lilacs attached to its brim. The shade is perfectly wrong against the flowers on my dress. I am a Woman Utterly Without Taste.

  This begins my real transformation.

  The minute the hat touches my head, it’s like that old egg-cracking gag Dad likes to pull. He knocks two fists gently against the top of my skull, then opens his fingers and draws an imaginary yolk down my hair. Just like that, I feel my new personality slipping over me, a soft, invisible, eggy rain.

  I use Mom’s compact to apply the makeup. I pause when I touch my neck just below the line of my jaw. This is exactly the place Mr. Mann kissed me the first time we knew—what did we know? This is how Emily Dickinson said it:

  THAT I did always love, I bring thee proof

  The shoes are Mom’s worst pumps from the bottom of her cedar closet. Ghastly lavender. Brutally tight on my size-ten feet. Good. They make me feel pinched and prickly, tightly wound, all a piece. Last are the gloves. They come to my elbows. It takes every ounce of upper-body strength I have to drag them on. The munchkin fingertips are pointed enough to poke out eyes.

  I come out from the Crackling Forest, ankles turning painfully. I’ve never worn heels before. I slide into Wilkie Collins and consult the handmade map on the seat beside me: Latham Methodist Church on Lilly Flagg Road.

  I pull out on the highway and turn southeast.

  eating paul

  I did it.

  It’s over. I survived.

  But I can’t stop shaking.

  Driving back from the wedding, I clench the steering wheel tightly and stare straight ahead. I might burst into flame. I might explode. I need to scream loudly. I don’t.

  What does Mr. Mann think of me now? After what I just did? How can he possibly explain it to his new wife? Is he furious? Amazed? Horrified? Ashamed?

  I wonder if he will come to me now.

  And what about me? As Dad would say, do a Systems Check:

  Am I happy? Miserable? Terrified? Triumphant? About to projectile vomit the Corn Pops I ate this morning?

  Yes.

  Cold cream is the worst.

  I feel like a baked potato. Back in the Crackling Forest, standing under the flapping leaves, I furiously scrub my face. But this is good: it not only cleans my skin, it helps reboot my emotions. My clothes are warm fr
om being in the trunk. As I change back into my real self, I watch the Firestone Holy Tire Palace through a gap in the branches. A man in a blue uniform turns a tire lovingly in his hands, brushes it over with water from a hose, impales it on a pinnacle of red steel.

  Men make the world for themselves, I think. And then they go away.

  I don’t know where these words come from.

  Back at the house, we make Paul Newman spaghetti. I tell Mom Wilkie is fine.

  It’s a beginning.

  ecstatic time machine

  Scream.

  “Look who’s here, darling!” Mom yells.

  The last bite of Paul catches in my throat. Someone is standing with her in the Victorian Room. Mr. Mann? My hands curl into fists. Kill him. Run into his arms.

  It’s only Schuyler.

  Schuyler!

  Please. Not tonight of all nights. What do I do? What do I say?

  But the pang in my chest instantly tells me how much I’ve missed him. His mind, his laugh, his eyes.

  I miss his hair.

  Tonight it’s bent all in one direction. So thick, it holds whatever shape it’s been pressed into. Our eighth-grade English teacher, Ms. Gonzalez, once said, “With hair that beautiful, you should’ve been a girl.” We were in the middle of a test on Robert Frost, the room quiet as Ganymede. Schuyler wanted to put laxative gum in her candy jar.

  Schuyler wants to do a lot of things. That’s how we’re different, I guess.

  Wanting and doing.

  He’s slouching uncertainly next to the sofa as if he doesn’t know what to say, what to ask me.

  I was a head taller than Schuyler back in seventh grade. One of our teachers called us Eek and Meek. Thanks a lot, Mr. Rombokas. But Schuyler’s finally caught up with me these last few months. It’s made him a little more fumbly-stumbly. I have a theory: Tall = shy. But I can also see the imprint of the future man.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi.”

  The moment feels like the naked part of a dream. Or the first bite of a weird new casserole. My face is still throbbing. Can he tell? Mom thankfully comes in and blows up the silence:

  “Put on some pj’s, Schuyler, we’ll have a pajama party!”