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  I had plenty of experience filing during my summer job at my mother's office. Filing is as enjoyable as pulling clumps of matted wool off an old sweater, but I was guessing that despite the stinky flower water incident, I had it good for the Manhattan Science interns. I could more than deal with half my “duties” being seriously fun.

  Soon enough, it was noon. When the receptionist called Paulette's line, she asked me to go bring in the rep. “Her name is Daisy,” she told me.

  “Daisy?” Marcus wrinkled his nose.

  She stared at him. “Hush now, idiot, your big fat voice 1 carries.”

  I went to the reception couches.

  There was a very beautiful blond woman sitting down with her legs crossed. Dressed to the nines, as Grandma Pearl says.

  “Are you Paulette?” she asked.

  “Oh no, I'm the intern,” I said. “Can I show you the way?” I'd seen just enough movies that I knew I should say something professional like that.

  “Welcome, welcome.” Marcus took her through the Burger Man presentation, which meant everything they had talked about to me before, including the tie-in to the Eggcups movie. Nothing from our crazy morning brain-storming session was brought up. Maybe that insanity was just a warm-up exercise for them.

  Daisy spoke in a monotone, but only from time to time.

  She had less personality than a statue of a Russian despot. Marcus was talking strangely during the meeting, even for him. Maybe the switcheroo of executives was the cause, but I suspected it was because both Daisy's preppy pink twinset and straight black skirt were so tight and revealing. She was also wearing shiny stockings, the pricey kind Mom buys from Bloomingdale's for weddings.

  “Victor asked me to remind you of the value of bank-ability,” she said at one point.

  “Yes, of course,” Marcus said automatically.

  “Anyone can give you bankability,” Joel cut in.

  Marcus, alarmed, continued his pitch. “What you need is creativity and a smart team. Everyone knows that the inducement for the parent to get a toy with a meal is a few minutes of peaceful eating. But just cranking out anything tying in to a current movie is a shortsighted approach. Because the kids are your word-of-mouth sellers here, and no kid is going to tell his or her friends to go to Burger Man if the toy is dull to play with. Our toys are timely and fun. That's what differentiates our approach.”

  I wrote the word bankability in that spiral notebook I was keeping for my semester-end report.

  The woman looked at me curiously when I put the pen on my pad. “Why are you actually in this room, by the way? I thought you said you are the intern.”

  I coughed uncomfortably.

  Paulette spoke for the first time before I could respond. “She's learning all about marketing for high school credit.”

  “Has she signed a confidentiality contract?” Daisy asked sternly.

  “What?” Paulette said.

  “At Burger Man, we have all our temps and interns sign a confidentiality clause.”

  “We have a better method,” Marcus said.

  “What's that?” she asked.

  Yes. What was he talking about?

  “Jordie, can you look at me for a second?”

  I did.

  “If you ever give these ideas to the competition, do you know what will happen?”

  “What?”

  “I'll moider you!” He said that exactly like Moe from the Three Stooges.

  I laughed. “Understood.”

  Paulette laughed.

  Joel laughed.

  Daisy, however, had a blank look on her face. “So, when do you think you can get it to us?” she said finally.

  “Monday.”

  “Good. If you are doing anything too outlandish, change the calculus. By the way, is there a funny odor in here?”

  “Wash those hands again,” Paulette whispered to me on the way out.

  “She was incredibly smart,” Marcus said after the bland woman left.

  “I sure hope that was a joke,” Joel said immediately.

  “Why, because she said the word 'calculus'?” Paulette chimed in. “You could tell she was just repeating what her boss was saying to her. Otherwise she just nodded at everything you said, even when you were talking utter garbage.”

  “That's why he thinks she's so smart,” Joel cracked.

  Marcus smirked. “Could it be that our Paulette is threatened by another talented woman on the scene?”

  “Idiot,” Paulette muttered not so quietly.

  Marcus continued, “You'd be shocked, Jordie, but our Paulette has a lovely figure. I don't know why she hides it from the world.”

  “No one's hiding anything!”

  Marcus gave Paulette's outfit a long look and then gave Joel a really mean smile. I hated him slightly for being so awful to Paulette, but I had to agree with him about her lack of caring. Paulette had on an unflattering winking dog sweatshirt, another pair of vintage Levi's that were ratty, and on her feet a pair of cutesy socks with little hearts all over them. It was as if she was wearing exactly what she'd worn to junior high years earlier.

  “Why are you so happy when you insult me?” Paulette said finally.

  “I think he was flattering you,” Joel said.

  “Both of you, leave,” Paulette said with a snap-to-it voice. “Go to lunch at the coffee shop. I have real work to do.”

  “I bought my lunch,” Joel protested.

  “Whadja buy?” Marcus asked.

  “Minestrone soup from the deli—”

  Paulette sliced the air with an arm. “I said leave.”

  My assigned task for the remaining thirty minutes of my internship day was to try my hand at writing a summary of the meeting. I sat in front of a computer and tried my best. At one point the phone rang, and Paulette cut the caller off with a quick “No, tomorrow it'll be ready.”

  After she hung up we said nothing for the longest while, but I could tell when I stretched out for a second that she was still mulling over Marcus's comments. She was just sitting there with such an agonized expression I almost wanted to hug her.

  “Do you agree with him?” she said unexpectedly.

  “Marcus? I don't think it's my place to give you a critique.”

  “You have permission. I think a lot of people are thinking things around here and not telling me what they are really thinking.”

  She sounded a bit lunatic when she addressed me. Another expression my grandmother says popped into my head: her voice was unbuttoned.

  I sighed. By mentioning her appearance so heartlessly, Marcus had dropped a bomb and left others to deal with the consequences.

  “Oh boy, is it that bad?” she said at my nonanswer.

  “You look like you're in nice shape to me.”

  Her face brightened. “Both of my parents are ectomorphs—the naturally skinny body type. I'm lucky there.”

  “I'm sure when you decide to dress up nicely, you'll look great.”

  She winced.

  That didn't exactly come out the way I wanted it to, but I'd said enough.

  She reached over to Joel's desk for his vintage bicycle bell and flicked it with her thumb until it made its noise.

  “She was an office flunky sent to spy on us,” she said a minute or two later. “She wasn't a creative at all.”

  Joel and Marcus returned shortly.

  “I'm sorry if I offended you,” Marcus said. “You egged me on.”

  “Don't worry about it,” Paulette said, as if he should worry. She handed Joel back his bicycle bell and everyone silently went back to work, except me. It was time to go back to school, and the God of Room 207.

  The subway train was mercifully right there when I got to the station. I looked at my watch when I was about a block away from school: I was over thirty minutes early for pre-calculus. There was no traffic, so as I crossed the last street, I looked up, something I rarely do. I'd never noticed the words chiseled in the long capstone above my high school before. Words
attributed to Albert Einstein: IMAGINATION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN KNOWLEDGE. I stopped walking and retreated a bit. I sat on that brownstone stoop across the street from school that my little gang favored, and for a minute or so I thought about Einstein's advice.

  I wondered what Marcus, Joel, and Paulette would have been like in high school.

  I bet Joel was hilarious in those days, but he probably got picked on.

  Marcus could have been a chronic overachiever. Imagine having his sister as sibling competition, though. I had a lot of issues with my sister, but she was overall a nice person, unlike Dr. D.

  And Paulette? What on earth was she like? Did she have that awful frizzy hair in school? That shocking fashion sense? I sure hoped Paulette's dry, funny cracks made her popular despite her offbeat looks. Her comments reminded me of that writer Dorothy Parker, who Mrs. Kleinman told us about in her class. I did a report on her life after Klein-man's brief introduction. Dorothy Parker was a depressed person, but she always had a sharp comment to make. And it wasn't just her one-liners like “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” that were really funny. “The Waltz,” the short story we had to read by her, was so wonderfully written and so, so funny. Or as my teacher put it, “jaunty stuff.” I bet Dorothy Parker would have been awesome to have as a friend in school.

  I laughed to myself about Marcus and the stupid milk theory.

  But just to be on the safe side, I took a detour to a Burger Man a block from school to buy two vanilla milk shakes. I would never admit it to Marcus, but when it came to Vaughan, I was willing to try anything to get him to appreciate me.

  As I was second in line the little kid in front of me begged his mother to get him a Happy Box.

  “A Happy Box? Oh, honey, those things are so babyish. You're a big kid now.”

  “I want it, Mommy. I want it. I only have the hand buzzer and the flower squirter.”

  “How did you even get those?”

  “Daddy always gets me a Happy Box!”

  The mother groaned and ordered a Happy Box.

  Field research I could give to my supervisors. The premiums worked. But did they really need to hear that? They wouldn't have a job if it didn't work. People like Vaughan would say I was part of the system. Corrupting youth. I was sure he wouldn't see an iota of worth in what I was doing.

  Was there any?

  Those disturbing thoughts were poking in my brain again, but it was a little too late to do some real doubting. Was advertising to kids really where my creative energy should go? I wondered if that was why Paulette asked me if I was morally opposed to what they did. Maybe she had wrestled with this dilemma herself. Maybe she had wanted to be a journalist once and hated that her bills were paid this way.

  When they installed an electronic scoreboard with a Burger Man logo in our auditorium, I had accepted that as the way things are.

  “Two vanilla milk shakes,” I said softly when it was my turn.

  Whatever the morality of the premiums business, I wasn't the one to fix it in an afternoon. Right now, I just wanted to see if Marcus's milk tip would work with Vaughan.

  My high school had an elaborate security “gun and knife” checkpoint you needed to clear to get past the door. That's another reality of a New York public school—even though the crimes more likely to be committed inside the sacred walls of Manhattan Science were of the cheating kind. I had to show my student ID even though the guards had seen me come in and out of the building for two years. Dr. D wasn't taking any risks after a shocking gun death at a nearby public high school of high repute.

  Even with my stop for the milk shakes, even with the ID check, I was the first one in the precalculus classroom. Mr. Etchingham wasn't even in the room yet.

  “Hi,” I said when Vaughan entered room 207. He must have been coming directly from his ER internship. He was so achishly a hottie that I flinched a bit.

  “Hey, how's it going?” he responded nonchalantly.

  “Good. How's your internship going?”

  “I got off early today, but I can see it's going to be really challenging. But rewarding.”

  “Are there two of you there?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Oh, I just heard.” I hesitated for moment and added, “So, who is the other intern?” I felt a little queasy in anticipation as I asked that.

  “Robert Mitchelson.”

  Good, good, good. Not a girl.

  “Hey, you want a milk shake?”

  I was hoping to be jaunty like Dorothy Parker, but my “irreverent” statement got no smile out of him, just a confused look.

  “A milk shake,” I repeated. “From Burger Man. I have an extra one.”

  “Why do you have an extra milk shake?”

  “Well, this girl I know works at Burger Man as a supervisor, and she ran out and gave me two when she saw me passing by the window.”

  “Okay,” he said, and he looked amused as I pulled the shakes from my bag and leaned toward him with one in the most seductive way I could without giving away my greater scheme. “Thanks,” he said a bit uneasily, like the next thing I was going to say was that I enjoyed kicking tin cans for fun.

  He continued to drink my “love offering” even as our fellow classmates scrambled in and finished the last of their between-classes sodas and corn chips. But then Etchingham pushed through the door, and in a pleasant voice he'd never used addressing me, asked Vaughan to trash it. Vaughan winked at me as the empty cup went into the bin, and I am sure both Jeremy and Zane noticed that, because they looked at both of us again quickly, especially when I quietly got up and threw a half-empty milk shake in the trash can too.

  “By the way,” Vaughan said. “Does something in that trash stink?”

  “There's some rotting fruit in there,” I lied, and hid my hands behind my back.

  “Oh, that's it.”

  Of course after precalculus I washed my hands about five times before heading to French class.

  This afternoon Moskowitz decided not to break out the portable player. For some reason, perhaps out of pity after his concert, my class behaved better, silently listening as he finally hit us with new study material. The only extra noise in the room this time was from the rattly radiator.

  Since I planned on taking my New York State French Regents Exam the next term, a statewide test whose results were reported to colleges, I obediently wrote down his list of ten French adverbs. Moskowitz's handwriting, like his personality, was tilted. The last parts of his words rose several inches above the first few letters.

  happily … gaiment

  shyly … timidement

  softly … doucement

  carefully … attentivement

  neatly … proprement

  weakly … faiblement

  easily … facilement

  first… premierement

  now … maintenant

  never … jamais

  It was dulldom as usual. Clara passed me a note: What is that awful smell in here?

  “So, what did you do in your new internship today?” my father asked when I got home.

  “We were brainstorming premium ideas.”

  You could hear my mom's scoff from the sink as she sprinkled salt and pepper on our pork loins. She was home early after having an iffy stomach. Was that really it? How could it be iffy if she was cooking pork? And remember, she never took sick days.

  “I just can't imagine that it would be so hard to do that they need a team,” my mother said.

  Dad turned toward me with an apologetic expression.

  “Mom, these are professional brainstormers,” I tried again.

  Dad coughed loudly.

  “What did your work entail?” she said a bit more agreeably.

  “We were thinking about different scents that kids like.”

  “That sounds fascinating,” my father said. He caught sight of my mother's barely hidden grimace. “Doesn't that sound great?”

  “Fascinating,” Mom said with
great effort.

  “Mom,” I directly challenged her, “do you even believe that what I'm doing during the day is stimulating my brain?”

  “Nearly,” she said softly as she portioned off a serving to cook for each of us.

  Nearly? What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  While she was lining the bottom of our stove with tin foil, she said, “So, I heard from Sari. She's doing nicely.”

  “Good,” Dad said.

  “She's getting close to committing to her thesis.”

  “What's she thinking of?”

  “The luminosity of the lanterneye fish.”

  “Oh,” Dad said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “A lot of research has been done on the fish, but not too many people have taken a closer look at the phosphorescent bacteria that form in the fish's luminosity organ.”

  Dad kicked me under the table to be sure I wouldn't snicker.

  “She has to be so careful because as a scientist, even an undergraduate, when you commit, it could be your life's work.”

  “Of course,” Dad said.

  Actually, I was more annoyed than amused. It was always the same pattern. I would bring something up about my day and she would bring something up about my sister's day. I wondered if she ever sang my praises to my sister when I wasn't around. I suspected not.

  “I'm glad Sari's getting so close.” Dad scrunched his nose and added, “Does something stink?”

  “Something is a little foul,” Mom agreed. “Could it be a moldy towel somewhere?”

  “I think it's your hands,” Dad said.

  “My hands?” Mom said.

  “Jordie's.”

  “Still? I had to change the dirty flower water, but I've been washing all—”

  “For crying out loud. They have my daughter changing flower water?”

  It was my turn to clean up after dinner, but they both insisted I take a bath.

  A bath rather than a shower was my favorite thing now, especially since my sister's departure. Sari's favorite habit besides using my mascara—she was the scientist with training wheels on, didn't she know that sharing mascara breeds germs?—was the forty-five-minute shower. As I've said, except for her calm temperament, she's scarily like my mother. Now our shared bathroom was all mine, mine, mine.