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  But I did not celebrate when I heard I got in. Hard to believe.

  Back in eighth grade, I'd worked up the courage to admit to my parents that I didn't particularly want to apply to a renowned math and science school. I'd even asked if they possibly had enough money to keep me in Clarkson, my cozy little private school, which ran all the way up to twelfth grade.

  “Your tuition is killing our finances,” Mom had said after a long sigh.

  “How about if I apply to Art and Design?”

  “I'm not sending you to school to cut and paste. And why would you be any happier there? You've never expressed any real interest in art.”

  She had a point. If there had been a magnet school for writing and journalism, maybe she would have let me apply. But there wasn't an exclusive (and free) school like that in New York City. I mulled for hours over the status of the family bank account and what Mom had meant about “killing our finances.” Although my mother likes to say, “Jordie never misses anything!” I didn't know one thing about how bad our family money situation was back then. We had family vacations. Bills got paid. Food was on the table.

  “Are we actually broke?” I'd whispered to Dad as Mom took one of her usual forty-five-minute showers.

  “It's been a hard year for sales,” Dad had said with an embarrassed nod. “The economy's gone kaplunk.”

  “I heard that some public schools have over fifty kids in a room. What kind of attention can a teacher give a kid with numbers like that?” I asked Mom another time.

  “It doesn't matter, if every one of those kids can challenge you at lunch,” Mom had said. “Your sister went to Manhattan Science without complaint.”

  “Sari was dying to go. She wants to be a scientist.”

  “And look how she excelled. The school makes special effort to lead girls into jobs that women have always been cut off from.”

  Even today my mother snaps out of any conversation that mentions the word fun.

  Not me. I've loved fun for as long as I can remember. I desperately wanted to have unicorns for my eighth birthday party theme and was obsessed with a goofy and huge unicorn pinata in our local party store. Mom's big happy idea for the birthday party, however, was that I should insist my little girlfriends dress as lab scientists and she would decorate my birthday cake with test tubes and plastic white mice. No kidding—and she did it.

  Most kitchens have sweet breakfast place mats with garden vegetables or a motif of oil and vinegar cruets, right?

  My mother hand-made our place mats, laminating the periodic table of elements. The maddening thing is, it worked. It's ingrained. I can still tell you, after hundreds of bowls of Cheerios and Raisin Bran, that number 26, Fe, is iron; 33, As, is Arsenic; and 95, Am, is americium.

  Believe me, that was the tip of the iceberg. Mom took many extra steps to introduce science to her girls because it was her agenda. According to my father, Mom's mother (Grandma Barbara) thwarted Mom's dreams of becoming a famous scientist like Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie. The children of the Jersey City branch of the Fischers were poor and smart. Mom and her little sister (Aunt Deborah) had to work so their brother (Uncle Peter) could afford college tuition for physics. He did well in school and went to work for NASA at Cape Canaveral. Uncle Peter was literally a rocket scientist while my jealous mother had to redirect her science skills into a sometimes disturbingly logic-based theory of parenting.

  Now, years later, Mom had a good job writing educational science materials for elementary schools. But I knew that despite her many accomplishments, her brother's many laurels silently devastated her. NASA gave Uncle Peter a special award once for career achievement, and astronauts came for cocktails. Uncle Peter kept saying to everyone that it was my mom who really had “the knack” for science in his family, and that how she never ended up in the field still amazed him. Whenever anyone privately asked her what her genius brother was like growing up, Mom bizarrely offered him or her a peppermint Chiclet.

  Thus, with double guilt over money and Mom's dreams for me, I gave it my all.

  My surprisingly okay math score (how the bleep did that happen!) coupled with an exceedingly high English score got me in. I passed by just three points. But in is in.

  Switching schools from middle school to high school must be petrifying for anyone. But going from my coddled little world to a huge public magnet school was a real trauma.

  Now there were seven hundred people in my grade, as opposed to fifty-one. And as my family's rent-controlled apartment building has no doorman, at Clarkson I had been on the lower end of the economic scale. I soon found out at Manhattan Science that a poorer kid at a fancy school still meant my family had money. That was the biggest eye-opener of my transfer. For the first time in my life some of my classmates were from housing projects. If they passed the entrance exam, they could come. Money supposedly didn't matter at Manhattan Science; but keeping up your test scores certainly did.

  I immediately loved the surprising fact that being fabulously dressed and stupid was not tolerated at my new school. At Clarkson, one of my classmates was a beautiful daughter of movie stars who was always in danger of failing everything. She never bothered to read a word of The Catcher in the Rye. She got six Fs in seventh grade, but her parents donated a new wooden floor for the gym. In the fall there she was back at school again, her teachers baffled and slightly annoyed at the sight of her.

  But without a good friend, the first weeks of freshman year at Manhattan Science were frightening. Wending my way from overwhelming class to overwhelming class, I was more than mildly freaked, beyond convinced that I would never pass the tough goals each teacher had passed out on day one. I desperately needed one good friend to get over the shy hump. All was well after I met Clara Langostini.

  It was a case of instant best friendship. Clara had her locker near mine and pointed out she had the same Danish school bag that I had. It was a relief to have anyone besides a teacher communicating with me, and I instantly became Super Talky Girl. I confessed that I had searched online, tormenting myself over what bookbag would be coolest for a new school. Her warm smile was reassuring after she whispered, “So did I!” We had lunch that day in the back of the cafeteria. Clara admitted that she'd also taken the Manhattan Science test to please her struggling middle-class parents, and that she also wanted to be a journalist one day.

  Later on in the year, people couldn't believe we hadn't met until ninth grade. “You seem like sisters,” they'd say all the time.

  Over the years, Clara and I experienced many important moments together.

  Of course, part of being a best friend was sharing everything you heard being said about each other, bad or good. That was another one of our important pacts we always honored, most recently a week before junior internships started. In between classes when I was about to enter French class on the second floor, Clara called me from the fifth floor on my cell. She was whispering something, and the phone connection was staticky. “I can't hear a freaking word, Clara. Tell me in five.”

  When she was standing before me, I said, “So, what's the big news?”

  Turns out she had waited for the crush of stair traffic to subside so she could retie her sneaker, and she'd overheard other stragglers talking in the echoey stairwell a floor above her. Her ears perked because she heard my name. The only two notably cute guys from the math team, Mark Bruin and Doug Erps, were ranking the returning class, and using very precise math team calculations gave me an 8.57 out of a possible 10 on desirability, doing a mean of looks, intelligence, and sense of humor. She admitted they gave Virginia Kline a 9.34, and Tara Jones an uncontested 10—but we both thought that 8.57 was pretty good, and frankly about the same number we then gave both of the rankers. (Except we rounded our numbers.)

  To keep the high of being respectably desirable, I didn't ask Clara if they'd given her a score. I had good reason to be nervous, as Clara is definitely prettier than I am. That's just a cold fact. Her dark blond hair was trimmed with short ba
ngs that accentuated her perfectly proportioned heart-shaped face.

  My second best friend at Manhattan Science was the wisecracking Jeremy Hart, a tall, deep-voiced guy who Clara introduced me to the first week of school—she had gone to a public middle school with him in Greenwich Village. I asked Jeremy how he'd changed since seventh and eighth grades, and Clara demanded that her old pal confess he'd talked ridiculously in a high, squeaky voice even though his voice changed earlier than everyone else's.

  “I sounded like one of those Chipmunks cartoons,” he said in a baritone. And then he laughed louder than both of us did.

  By sophomore year the Hernandez twins transferred in after passing the test on their second try. I shared my history class with both of them and introduced them to Clara and Jeremy. The siblings were born in the Dominican Republic, and their English scores were the reason that they had barely missed two spots in the freshman class. Willie and Blanca, who lived with their mom in a housing project in Spanish Harlem, got a perfect score on every math exam. Despite their easy math grades, they both desperately wanted to be jazz musicians. Willie was the one who told me math and music are complementary skills. He confessed once that he was not allowed to apply to the High School for Performing Arts. His mother wanted her twins to be professionals—a lawyer, a doctor, almost anything but a musician.

  In a public math and science school, a kind of radar thing exists if you're there for the free tuition or for your parents' pride and not for yourself.

  The waywards always find each other.

  One of the first phrases you hear used in the marketing world is target market. I can safely say that at the beginning of junior year there was no other target market for me besides Vaughan Nussman. I lusted for him, to put it mildly, but alas, so did Clara, so did every other girl in our grade. But I'd basically accepted he was still barely aware of me— even though the precalculus class he was in with me in the afternoon was not the first class we'd had together. Vaughan Nussman.

  It's not enough to say he was merely a good-looking blue-eyed blond.

  He had deep-set blue eyes that were hypnotic.

  His lips were really big and red. Think young Elvis lips.

  His nice-sized nose had just a bit of a bump that gavehim real character, not one of those cutesy button noses like you see on gooey guys in boy bands.

  His hair was long, not greasy long, but fashionably funky without any evidence of hair product. He had dazzling white teeth, and a dimple on one of his cheeks.

  Every time he opened his mouth, he seemed very confident. His voice had none of the unevenness about it that his adolescent classmates suffered from.

  As far as I could tell, he was zit free. Nobody I knew, even the other A-listers, were zit free.

  He was extremely fit, with muscles. In fact, I never saw him with a gangly physique, even in ninth grade. One late spring afternoon in second-semester freshman year, I saw Vaughan do a one-arm pushup in the nearby park when he thought no one was looking. He was very pleased with his own strength, and his confidence in himself was really sexy. All the other sixteen-year-olds I knew were constantly apologizing for what they said to me. Vaughan must have gone through puberty in elementary school.

  What kind of teen boy never gets a zit or a cracked voice?

  A Greek god, maybe.

  There was also another guy in precalculus who I semi-had on my radar, Zane Minton. Zane was tall, but unlike Vaughan he was very quiet, so quiet that I knew very little about him—except that he was always bright in class and after a rather rocky hormonal start our freshman year he had turned out surprisingly good-looking. No one I knew had the scoop on Zane. He was one of those blushers who made me feel a bit uncomfortable for not being afflicted with that problem. His cheeks turned purple every time he talked to anyone of the female sex. Personally, I was still a little shocked every time I heard Zane speak. Back when we were all fourteen, Zane had straight blond hair, was four or so inches shorter, and occasionally squeaked when he talked. But his hair had darkened to a sandy brown and curled as puberty kicked in. I knew it wasn't a perm or anything, because that's what my father says happened to him when he was teenager. Now Zane was all the more awkward, as his new tall frame had not filled in yet with muscle. Clara acknowledged that he was cute, but she dismissed him as just far too awkward. Still, I kind of wanted to hold his hand whenever he addressed me, which was rarely.

  “I like the place,” I said once again to my mother the night of my internship offer from Out of the Box. “What's so bad about enjoying something to do with school for a change?”

  “Ask your coordinator for something other than hamburger premiums.”

  “All of the other good internships are already filled, and that's not my fault.”

  “Are you saying it's my fault?”

  Well, yes, I thought. Maybe I would still have had a chance of landing my first choice work experience internship—the science desk of the New York Times—if I hadn't been sick with a fever. I tried to go to school for my counseling session, got showered and dressed in time, but Mom had kept repeating “one hundred and two degrees” like a mantra in a yoga studio. She went to work but made my father stand guard as her stand-in naysayer. He'd literally sat in front of our door as he fired up his laptop.

  What I said instead was “You really want me to be stuck in an arctic-cold room with a bunch of nude dead bodies?”

  “Please, cut the drama. No high school on Earth would send a kid to work in a morgue.”

  “I'm not being dramatic!” I practically wailed.

  “There actually is a morgue internship, Mom,” Sari interjected in her calm, measured voice. “Forensic science gets the nod from Dr. D.”

  I pointed to Sari like a worked-up contestant on reality TV. “See, stop ragging on me, Mom! Sari knows I'm not lying!”

  “You know as well as I do that unless you had a burning desire to work in a morgue, they would never make you go. All I want you to do is call and see if there's something more serious available. Something more … career furthering. Something that will actually benefit humanity.”

  How else could I convince my always-knows-best Mom what a dire situation she'd placed me in by making me stay home in bed while Jeremy and Clara no doubt charmed the pants off the editors at the Times?. Was there even a chance now for the Times interview at such a late date?

  Jeremy had a 96 average and was Mr. Likeable, while Clara was a very talented writer just like her mother, who wrote for nonprofit consumer magazines. With sharp competition like my very own friends for the only internships I wanted, I was doomed. I'd personally have hired them both in a flash.

  So instead of being stuck in a boring office—surely my destiny if I was up against them—I decided that I needed to get that funky premiums internship. I had the court advantage, as Jeremy would say.

  Sari was home because she was on one of those week-long breaks college students get all the time for no particular reason. Well, my only hope was to get Mom's pet to knock some sense into her.

  Once upon a time Sari and I were very close. When I was eleven, we smooched the fridge, and she told me I'd be a good kisser since the kissy lipstick marks on the door were impressively even. I sometimes braided her hair for her, and vice versa. Even if we broke out in catfights all the time, wasn't that still a sign of a working sisterhood?

  But then, once Sari hit high school, she achieved in a massive way, and this weird kindness tainted by a superior air set in.

  Mom was forever accusing me of being her drama queen teen. Even when I was little she called me her “expressive” child.

  I thought some more about a lost opportunity to have fun and learn something. I burst out with “Can't you just listen to what I want once, Mom? Once! Not insist on what you want for me?”

  “When have I ever done that?” she demanded quietly.

  “The unicorns, Mom.”

  “What unicorns?”

  “The lab scientist party,” Sari said neutrally
. “Jordie wanted unicorns.”

  Mom shook her head at me. “You're crazy. That party was fabulous.”

  I moaned. “No, it was not. Not to eight-year-old girls. That party was humiliating.”

  Her mouth crimped.

  Where do you go with an argument after you've already brought up the morgue and yearned-for unicorns and received zero sympathy? I lay on the corner of my bed in the fetal position.

  Mom threw her thin arms up in the air. “Uncoil, Jordie. You'll hurt your back.”

  “There's always a sciencey Goth kid who's dying to take that morgue slot,” Sari offered. I could tell Sari genuinely thought she was helping, even as she poured cold water on my protest. “You'll get a good one if you hang in there. They'll love you on the internship interviews. Little Miss Lively.”

  Yeah, thanks a lot, team player. “I missed out on the interviews!” I said quickly to curb this horribly chipper line of thought. “This is one of the only okay ones left—maybe the only one!”

  But Sari was not done with her interference. “You could always do the internship I had. The colleges I applied to loved it. I'll call Harry to see if he has selected someone yet. Even if he has, maybe he'll want another Popkin.”

  “That's a good idea, Sari,” Mom said. “See? Problem solved.”

  I grimaced. My sister's high school work experience internship was with Dr. Harry Finneran, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist at Columbia University. I've never exactly followed what she did for him, but it had something to do with analyzing the behavior of adolescent dung beetles.

  Sometimes I can't believe I incubated in the same womb as her.

  “That was great for you, but I'm not the science whiz. It'd never work out.”

  Sari shrugged her shoulders again. “I'm sure with my pull you could get it.”