All Q No A Read online

  And then there was me, Mimi Schulman. I had, until recently, grown up in a boringly normal nuclear unit: scatterbrained mother, oblivious father, wannabe-anorexic big sister. Having divided my life between Texas and New York, I felt at home in both places, but I belonged to neither. I loved Dolly Parton, Bette Davis, J. D. Salinger, the Houston Astros, and cats, in no particular order. I should also add that I'd managed to turn fifteen without kissing a boy.

  But though I was awkward and inexperienced and uncosmopolitan, the girls liked me, and it worked. I took a pen from my overstuffed backpack and got started on my Goat Show book. It was New Year's Day—what better opportunity to draft a few life-altering resolutions?

  1. Be the best friend ever to Pia, Viv, Lily, and Jess. Esp. Viv. You so owe them.

  2. Be nicer to Amanda France / a better long-distance friend to Rachel / around more often for Dad's weekly pancake dinners.

  3. No more sunburns, sun blisters, or excess freckles. Wear thick muumuu and sun visor on next tropical vacation and slather on moisturizer with SPF every day, even in the dead of winter.

  4. Stop slouching. Tall is beautiful.

  5. Cultivate mysterious, woman-of-the-world aura to improve chances with mysterious man-of-the-world Max Roth.

  6. Think less about boys and more about the grave threats of globalism and other issues raised by kick-ass women at Green Amigas.

  7. Take advantage of Baldwin's course offerings and load up on electives. To quote our headmaster, Zora Blanchard: "Learning is a feast. Glutton up!"

  8. Speaking of which, try not to eat so repulsively much. In public.

  9. No more cramming sessions on subway ride to school, no matter how easy assignments. Do homework the night before to make time for unassigned (or Mom-assigned) material on commute, thereby developing intellect and, depending on the nature and strangeness of reading material, enhancing mysterious, woman-of-the-world aura (see res. numero 5).

  I shut the book. The nuzzling goats on the cover got me thinking about Max, which, I'll admit, might seem a little creepy. But that wasn't why I loved my new notebook. As a memento of our trip, the Goat Show book would bring me luck in the upcoming year, I felt sure of it. I vowed to carry it with me everywhere—use it as a repository for deep thoughts, amusing ambulatory observations, Bugle article ideas, grocery needs—anything, everything, and even a little bit of nothing.

  Doo-Dah, Doo-Dah

  THE BALDWIN STUDENT BODY came back from winter vacation unrecognizably improved. My classmates had devoted the last two weeks to fine-tuning their wardrobes and redesigning their eyebrows, submitting to scruffings and buffings and blow-dries. I, too, was unrecognizable, but not for the better. On the last day of the trip, our first with no gardening responsibilities, I'd thrown caution to the wind and hit the beach sans SPF. Big mistake, huge. But what do you expect from a girl whose mother had nagged her on this very subject two million times over the course of her life?

  When I alighted from the town car Vivian's parents had dispatched to the airport for us and entered our narrow brownstone on Barrow Street, I didn't yet feel sunburned, just woozy, too exhausted to catch up with Dad over a sit-down dinner. Oddly enough, Dad didn't seem to mind the brush-off. He was acting strange and giddy. Too sleepy to investigate his behavior, I grabbed a leftover bowl of what appeared to be homemade baked ziti from the fridge and, without bothering to heat it up, took it down to my room. Dad and I would hang out the next afternoon, after I'd slept and pieced together his gift.

  That night, the rash erupted. The next morning, I woke up fried, sunburned on body parts I hadn't known existed: armpits, the insides of my knees, the backs of my ears. My skin was as raw as ground hamburger meat. And the ache—the ache was indescribable. Motion intensified the torture, walking especially. I arrived at school on time, but it took me thirty minutes to reach my locker, by which point first period was more than halfway over. At least it was only World Civ, a gut at Baldwin. Because our snuggly teacher, Stanley, rejected the "hegemony" of taking attendance, I opted to skip the last ten minutes of what would no doubt be another one of his directionless roundtable discussions. My time would be better spent inching toward my new spring semester second-period elective, Indigenous Crafts, which met in Baldwin's "studio space," a dilapidated old brownstone across the street from the main building.

  After the pain of crossing Pierrepont Street, I panted and winced up the studio building's narrow staircase, periodically edging toward the rail to let unblistered students lope ahead of me. I'd just perfected a rhythm, hopping up the stairs without bending any joints, when something slammed into me from behind, propelling me into the wall.

  "OUCH!" I yelped as another layer of epidermis departed. A skinny girl on her cell phone shoved past me.

  "Excuse you!" she said bitchily, and flicked her ass-long, peroxided hair. The dyed blond mane struck my body like a thousand tiny whips. I winced in pain.

  Indifferent to the five-alarm damage she had inflicted, the girl immediately returned to her conversation. "Yeah, I know!" she said into her tiny cell phone. "How many times do I have to tell you? I read the script, and it sucked, all right? Screw what her agent thinks—I am not wasting my time on some straight-to-DVD disaster, do you hear me?" The girl's chicken legs vanished after the next landing, leaving me to grip the banister, weep for my lost skin, and wonder who that demon-girl was. Because I'd been at Baldwin only four discombobulating months, I was still unacquainted with most of my classmates. My friends, though, had surely met this monster diva, with her designer high heels and clingy minidress, and I made a mental note to ask about her.

  As I trudged up the final flight of stairs, I wished for the galactic-scale self-esteem of Pia, her enviable ease in the world. Pia—and Lily, too, probably—would've laughed off this creature, but not me. At nine-thirty in the morning I was already feeling completely depressed. The Indigenous Crafts studio soon boosted my spirits, however. The room had been decorated like a Hawaiian hut in an Elvis movie, with potted bamboos and leafy houseplants that cast intriguing shadows on the assembled students' faces. The studio's paint-splattered radio was broadcasting an orchestra of bongo drums at maximum volume. The classroom was surprisingly crowded for Baldwin, the school that boasted the highest teacher-to-student ratio in the city. I spotted Viv in one of her trademark black-on-black outfits right away, and this, too, was surprising. When I'd mentioned signing up for Indigenous Crafts in the D.R., Viv hadn't piped up. Then again, maybe she'd still hated me back then.

  Viv was waving me over but I saw no free stools in her vicinity—or, in fact, anywhere else. After a few seconds, I spotted a seat in the distant corner of the studio, directly across from Sam, my oldest friend in the world. Still unsure of how things stood with him, I approached him cautiously, half dreading the encounter. Had Sam received my sappy postcard yet? What had he made of my proposal for a truce? His expression revealed nothing.

  But as I drew closer to his worktable, Sam lifted his eyebrows and smirked. "Hey," I said, my voice as friendly and relaxed as I could manage.

  "Nice," he said, with a low, construction-worker whistle. "I've been looking for something to match that stoplight out front—I think you'll do just perfectly." My face flushed—even darker, that is. Before Sam's comment, pain management had eclipsed all fashion-related concerns. Now my fleece pants and hooded sweatshirt, the only garments loose enough for my raw, wrecked skin, suddenly filled me with shame. Sam, a pale, freckly redhead, never overdosed on the sun. I knew this because I had known him all my life. Even as a pre-kindergartner at City Sprouts day camp, he'd worn baseball caps and retreated to the shade while I enjoyed my bagged lunch under the scorching midday rays. "You sure you shouldn't be at the emergency room, hotcakes?"

  "Shut up." I concentrated on dragging the stool out. But as I levered myself onto the seat, I understood why it had been vacant. The stool was broken, its third leg dangling loosely like the wand of a metronome.

  "Really, Mims," Sam said. "El so
l did quite a number on you."

  "Did you not hear me?" I growled. "Shut up."

  To avoid wobbling over and further disfiguring myself, I planted my feet on the floor and pretended to lean against the stool as Sam continued teasing me, louder and louder, attracting the attention of students at neighboring tables, who started to point and snicker. Arthur Gray, Baldwin's resident wise-ass, shot me a double thumbs-up. To think that I'd poured out my heart to Sam, and on a postcard his parents were likely to intercept! When I next opened my Goat Show book, I'd be sure to strike that suicidal promise to re-befriend my remorseless tormenter.

  "Shalo-o-OM, comrades!" yodeled our teacher, Yuri Knutz. He stood at the main worktable with a frayed hardcover book in one hand and a rotten coconut in the other. "Welcome, everyone, to Russian Dissident Fiction!" he said, and banged these two objects together like castanets.

  Russian Dissident Fiction? Uh-oh. That made me 0 for 2 for the day.

  "I'd also like to welcome everyone here to my Indigenous Crafts seminar," Yuri Knutz went on, and set about theatrically emptying a brown paper bag from Wild Things health food store. "Owing to certain unavoidable last-minute circumstances, we've had to combine the classes."

  People starting shifting and murmuring, wondering what was going on.

  "Sounds odd, doesn't it?" Yuri said agreeably. "To avoid confusion, we're going to alternate the subjects every other session. Today, we'll focus on crafts, and at our next meeting, we'll read a story. A Russian one, of course. Make sense?"

  Arthur Gray spoke on behalf of everyone when he shouted, "NO!"

  Last semester, when persuading me to enroll in the Indigenous Crafts elective, Sam had described Yuri Knutz as a one-time "up-and-coming sensation" of the New York art scene. Now in his midforties, Yuri hadn't come up much further than this fourth-floor studio, but he seemed pretty upbeat as he cried, "No use dilly-dallying—let's kick-start Indigenous Crafts right away! For this curriculum, we'll be using found objects and found objects only. In indigenous cultures, remember, there are no twenty-four-hour superstores, no organic delivery services. I just returned from a trip to Peru, where I saw indigenous life in action. Natives live off the land down there, making do with whatever they scrounge up—an inspiring philosophy that we'll be applying to art supplies!"

  Yuri rubbed his palms together excitedly, then reached under the table for another Wild Things goodies bag. "Our goal," he said, "is to be resourceful with the basic materials of everyday life. Use absolutely anything you'd like."

  "What about people?" Arthur Gray asked from beneath the signature baseball cap that obscured ninety percent of his face. Ordinarily, I tuned out Arthur and his nonstop witticisms, just not when he happened to be positioned next to dreamboat extraordinaire Max Roth. Just inches away from Arthur, Max was leaning back on his stool, staring upward, his whole face on display for my marveling pleasure. While Arthur entertained, I stealthily admired the contours of Max's gorgeous profile, giving special attention to his dimpled cheeks.

  Perhaps I stared too long because Max turned to look at me—just as I was digging my hand into my sweatshirt to loosen a charbroiled swath of skin caught under my bra. I shot my eyes back to Arthur.

  "People can be part of art, right?" he was asking. "Like an arm. Or a butt?"

  Yuri mulled Arthur's suggestion with great seriousness before nodding. "Why, yes, that's an excellent suggestion, Arthur—provided, of course, you haven't purchased the people for that express purpose. Human trade is not coolness."

  "What about kitty litter?" asked Meret Altman, a short guy who played fantasy games in the library and contributed articles on science trends to the Bugle.

  "There you go!" Yuri Knutz liked this suggestion even more than Arthur's. "Kitty litter would be a real trip—way to think like an indigenous craftsman!"

  "Um, excuse me?" Sara Ramos was waving her hand in the air. "Hello?"

  Sara was a senior who wore raincoats every day, whatever the weather. Every self-respecting Baldwinite needed a shtick, and poor Sara had simply waited too long to choose hers, when only raincoats and heart-printed shoelaces remained. So it was shiny rain slickers for her, even on the sunniest days.

  "Isn't this a jewelry-making elective?" Sara asked. "Aren't we, like, learning to set pendants and shit?"

  Yuri shook his head regretfully, unbothered by her classroom cursing. "Not in this class, I'm afraid," he said. "At the department meeting, Michelle did mention a metalworking elective, but that was before the budget doo-dah."

  The words "budget doo-dah" got the restless class's attention at last. At Baldwin the word budget was used about as often as winner or percent—i.e., never. Baldwin was among the most elite private schools in the city, and therefore also among the richest. Even if we had no lacrosse field or marching band, no school could beat Baldwin for its supply of NASA-grade telescopes and authentic Broadway costumes. The words "budget doo-dah" rippled through my head. Was this why they'd combined the classes—because the school was going under?

  Giving us no chance to ask follow-up questions, Yuri hustled us to the front of the classroom. "Now, believe it or not," he said as we shuffled toward the main drafting table, "I stumbled upon every single one of these gems on my way from the Borough Hall station this morning." He fanned out his arms and let us examine his assortment of indigenous treasures: an opened airmail envelope, a wet sock, a sad-looking Dunkin' Donuts bag.

  Nonindigenous materials included glue sticks, crumbly Crayolas, and rusty scissors, but these also technically qualified as "found objects," since Yuri had found them in the classroom.

  Midway through this show-and-tell, Sara Ramos took off, her purple rain slicker squeaking as she strutted out the door.

  "Ugh, I am totally switching to African Drumming before I get scabies," Jasmine Lowenstein muttered, and followed Sara out.

  Viv left next. "I'll be back for the Russian Dissident whatever," she said, a note of apology in her voice. She lingered at the door for a few seconds, gazing at Sam and me. Did she expect me to go with her? I wondered. Unable to brave another four flights of stairs, I just smiled wanly in response.

  Yuri, meanwhile, took no notice of these defections. After peacefully distributing the materials, he put us to work on our "tribal self-portrait masks."

  Back at our worktable, Sam pushed his stool toward me. "Use it," he said. "I work better on my feet."

  Too weak to protest, I flung myself down. While eager to ask Sam about the "budget doo-dah," I was still irritated by his sunburn taunts, so I just took his stool with a soft grunt of thanks.

  A few minutes later, as Arthur Gray emitted Tarzan sounds, Sam broke our conversational stalemate. "Yuri Knutz here," he said in a funny accent, holding his mask over his face. "Over break, while researching handicapped tortoises in Papua New Guinea, I was abducted by a tribe of man-eating indigenous craftsmen. I was forced to listen to sitar music by day and sleep on a pallet of kitty litter by night. I've only just escaped and must inflict this illuminating experience on my students."

  I couldn't help it: I started laughing hysterically. So what if Sam had ruined my life last semester—he remained the only person at Baldwin with any perspective on the place. Pia, Jess, Lily, and Vivian saw nothing bizarre about a school that offered meditation meetings instead of phys. ed., and electives like Victorian Etiquette and Vegan Baking Against Globalization.

  "Class!" Yuri Knutz suddenly called us to attention. He was standing behind Max Roth and gesturing for us to join him. "I want everyone to see what a tremendous job Max has done with this project. Talk about indigenous!"

  Yuri indicated a Wild Things bag that had been cut into the shape of a potato, with asymmetrical cotton-ball blobs for eyes, a mashed orange peel for a nose, and coconut hair pasted haphazardly along the perimeter. The artwork reminded me of a project a two-year-old might bring home from daycare, but what did I know? Baldwin's faculty unanimously believed Max was fated to become a world-famous artist any day now.

&n
bsp; "Can you demystify the process of creation for us a bit?" Yuri implored Max.

  "Uh, sure," Max said. He stepped back from his table and assessed his project, while I assessed his shoulders under his thin white T-shirt. "Over break, I was reading about tribal arts in Melanesia, and there was this, um, shrunken sloth head? I wanted to play with forms that are of this world and, like, transcendental?"

  Anyone else delivering that speech would have been accused of ass-kissing or insanity, but Max was met only with oohs and aahs from his audience. He could read the instructions from a nasal-spray bottle and still sound deep and dreamy. Porter Yurnell punctured my reverie with a supersonic burp.

  "I got one, too!" he bellowed. "Yo, come check it out!" He displayed a bag with a wad of Raisinets Scotch-taped on it. "It's me if I had only one eye."

  "I see." Yuri Knutz nodded encouragingly. "Porter's got it. All it takes is a little imagination and inspiration."

  Back at our tables, I felt looser around Sam.

  "So, apart from the scorch trauma, you had fun in the sun?" he asked me.

  "Mucho."

  "That's good—really," Sam said, his voice warm and kind—the old Sam's voice. "I'm really glad you got to go, after everything. Your postcard—" He stopped. "Your postcard was really nice. It, um, made a lot of sense to me."

  "Thanks," I said quietly. "It, um, made a lot of sense to me, too."

  And then, like little children, we stayed hunched over the worktables, Crayolas and scissors in motion. In our silent cutting and drawing, Sam and I had reached our old understanding at last, and I was overjoyed.