13 Is the New 18 (21 page)

And yet he has a certain charm. He is cool and confident. He has a lot of friends. He is suave, like James Bond without the spying. I can't take credit for any of this; he's been that way since he was a little kid. In fact, it's one of the humbling— dare I say nerve- racking— aspects of being a mother that your kid's personality is a function of nature, not nurture. I read somewhere once
that as long as you feed them and don't lock them in a closet, most of them will turn out fine, and we're just deluding ourselves to think that all the fine- tuning and obsessing we do makes any difference. Maybe Taz's inborn charm would allow him to jump through the hoops; certainly, if he aced the interview, it would have nothing to do with me.

Interview day arrived. Elon and I wished him luck and watched him walk in. He seemed totally nonchalant about the whole thing, but we were ready to throw up.

A half hour later, he emerged from the school, beaming.

“I'm in!” he announced in the cocky tone that can only be voiced by an adolescent who hasn't lived long enough to be disappointed by life's randomness.

Elon rolled his eyes. “Right,” he said.

“You're in?” I said. “How could you possibly know that? It'll be months before they tell us if you've been accepted.”

“I just know,” he said. He folded himself into the car, bouncing his knee, a grin on his face, stuck his iPod buds in his ears, and shut his eyes. If Elon and I were a TV station, Taz had just changed the channel.

But I had to smile at his sheer hubris. God, it's great to have no self- doubt! I wish I could be that way sometimes. Then I reminded myself that it's attitudes like that that lead adolescents to indulge in Dangerous Risk-Taking Behavior! Like Failing to Put on Seat Belts! Riding Motorcycles Too Fast! Taking Ecstasy, Even! Not that
Taz had done those things, mind you, but they are all among the ten thousand things I make lists of when I can't sleep.

Later, a girl we know who attends the school Taz was applying to asked Taz what the surprise essay topic had been.

“You were supposed to write about a memory,” he said.

Uh- oh, I thought, not the “write about a memory” assignment again! I hoped he hadn't frozen up, like the kid in the newspaper column who told his mom he didn't have any memories.

“So what did you write about?” the girl asked.

“I wrote about the time my uncle took me to a Mets game,” Taz said.

“That was a mistake,” she said. “You should have written about someone who died!”

“My uncle
did
die!” Taz said.

I marveled how the both of them had intuitively understood that the assignment wasn't
really
about a memory. It was really about whether you have Soul. Pity the kid who's had nothing but happiness in life and has no dead relatives to write about. A kid like that, writing about his first pony ride or some other wonderful moment from childhood, doesn't stand a chance in an essay exam these days.

Still, even though Taz appeared to have understood what was being sought in an essay topic, and thought he did well in the interview, the school seemed like a reach.
For a second choice, I insisted that he put a school I was certain he'd be accepted to— one that I liked, but he didn't. (Yes, my thirteen- year- old needed a safety school. Back in my day you didn't need a safety school until you were applying for college.)

At one minute after three o'clock on notification day, my office phone rang.

“Mom?” he said, his voice small and sad. “I got into number two. The one you wanted.”

I hated myself. I suddenly realized what a stupid thing I had done. “I'm so sorry,” I said.

“Just kidding!” he shouted boisterously. “I got into you-know-where!”

“WHAT? No way! Are you sure? Read me the letter! I don't believe it!”

He read the letter aloud, and it seemed indisputable that indeed he had been accepted to his first choice. He had been right that day after the interview when he told us he was in. He had been right not to doubt himself. And to tell the truth, I felt bad that the doubts had come from us.

Maybe, I thought, just maybe, things would work out for Taz after all.

In the months that followed, the summer of Taz's thirteenth year came and went, and with it, the trip to Australia and the discovery of contraband in Taz's room, along with the usual “I Am a Terrible Mother” self-pronouncements. Then, finally, after Labor Day, high school began. Thank GOD! He would be someone else's worry, at least for a few hours each day.

I offered to accompany him to the building the first day, but he had no interest in being delivered to high school by his mother. He said he'd have no trouble figuring it out on his own. The first day was only a half day and he promised to call me when it was over.

When he reached me, he sounded positively jubilant. Our conversation went something like this.

Yes, it definitely sounded like a mad fun school. But does trigonometry happen at mad fun schools? Does World War I get studied? Or would that be too boring for a mad fun school? I was beginning to worry.

The next day, Taz came home and said that his English teacher was starting them on SAT words. Every kid had to bring in a word that might appear on the SATs, and teach it to the class. And you'd get brownie points if you could use the SAT word in a sentence, or if other people did, during class discussions.

Taz asked if I knew any good SAT words. I was pretty sure I hadn't started studying for the SATs when I was in ninth grade; in fact, I'm not even sure that I knew what the SATs were when I was in ninth grade. But I recognized that the teacher was doing the right thing in building their vocabulary well in advance of the exam, and I thought hard for a minute about a good word for Taz to share with the class.

Suddenly, one popped into my head, along with an image of my old English teacher, Mrs. Laster, and some vague recollection of her using this word to make a point about a James Joyce story.

“Epiphany,” I said triumphantly. “That's a great word. Your teacher will love it.”

“Epiphany? What's that?”

“It's when you're trying to understand something, and then, all of a sudden, you get it, and you're so excited, it's like you had a vision. It's when you realize something, but not gradually. You figure it out all at once, so it's almost like it was revealed to you. You understand?”

He nodded. He seemed kind of into it. “Epiphany,” he repeated. “I think I get it. It's cool.” He grinned.

Over the next few days, Taz had more epiphanies than Sir Isaac Newton. There were epiphanies about cheats in Halo, epiphanies about the dog, epiphanies about pizza. And Taz said that when it was his turn to teach his SAT word, the entire class had an epiphany about the word
epiphany.
It was a word that described an experience they'd all had, and it was especially useful in English class. The teacher would ask a question about why Holden Caulfield said or did a certain thing, and some kid would inevitably raise his hand to answer, calling out, “I just had an epiphany about that!”

I guess when you are thirteen, epiphanies just pop up in your brain all the time, like dandelions on a lawn. By the time you are forty, though, your reflexes are sufficiently slowed, and your knowledge of the world sufficiently broad, that an epiphany is about as rare as drinking whole milk.

But, eventually, I did have an epiphany. It was about Taz's relationship to his mad fun school. He was going
every morning, and coming home every afternoon, but there didn't appear to be any epiphanies related to homework. “Don't worry about it,” he'd say, night after night, when I asked about homework, after observing that none was getting done. “It's under control.”

Even the activities he'd signed up for that first day had mysteriously evaporated. Bowling, he claimed, turned out to be stupid. Tennis was for people who were practically tennis pros. There was hardly any snow that winter, so the ski trip didn't happen, and the Fris-bee team practiced at dawn, which is Taz's least favorite time of day. As for the trips, well, I couldn't afford to send him to France or Cuba— or North Korea, for that matter— so soon after Australia.

About a week before his fourteenth birthday, we got the first report card. The epiphanies flowed fast and furious as I surveyed all those Cs and Ds. Oh, I almost forgot— there was one B. For drama! Wait, let me share with you the epiphany I had about the B he got in drama: Taz is Good at Acting. As in Acting Like an Idiot!

What he did not appear to be good at was a much longer list, a list that included English, history, math, science, and Spanish. Also known as Every Single Subject That Matters.

The day after the report card came home was my flashback nightmare to the old Worst Night of the Year scenario, also known as parent- teacher night. Reluctantly, I dragged myself up to Taz's mad fun school for a meeting that I knew would be anything but mad fun.

There was only one good thing about parent- teacher night at Taz's new school. Instead of having you go from teacher to teacher, to hear six different people tell you how awful your child is, you only meet with one person, the child's adviser, who has collected reports from the other six about how awful your child is.

What's good about this is, it takes a lot less time than the other way, when you have to go from room to room hearing the same horrible stories over and over again. And also, this way, you only have to be polite to one person who thinks you are a Terrible Mother, instead of to a half dozen.

But what was good about the old system, where you did see all these different teachers, was that in each case you could act totally surprised by the news that your child is a screw up. You could sort of hint, or imply, that your child wasn't doing nearly as badly in the other classes. You could even say sly things that suggested, without really saying so, that maybe it's the teacher's fault that your child is doing badly in this particular class, because, well, it goes without saying that he might be doing OK in the other classes.

Of course, it goes without saying because you can't bring yourself to say it, because it would be a Total Lie.

So, instead, you resort to saying things that are slightly misleading, yet face- saving, without being Utter Crap. Things like “Well, you know, I think his major interests probably lie elsewhere— history's not really his thing,” and “Huh, I guess he just doesn't have an ear for
foreign languages— some people don't, you know,” or “It's funny, I was never very good at math either, and when he asks me for help, I'm just
clueless.”

What's bad about the system where you only see one person is that you really can't get away with all this equivocation. You walk into that room, the adviser has evidence from six teachers to make her case about your child. You can't pretend there are no patterns. There's no place to hide.

And in Taz's case, the pattern was clear. He wasn't doing his homework. He wasn't studying for tests. He wasn't learning the material. About the only thing he was doing right was that he was showing up for class. Thank goodness for small miracles— at least he wasn't a truant! Although apparently when he got there, he forgot to turn his brain on. At least there were no complaints about the type of disrespectful behavior that got him in so much trouble in eighth grade. No soda cans, no confrontations, no calling teachers a “retard.”

There was one nervy attempt to backpedal, however. After the adviser went over the reports from pretty much every teacher about how Taz hadn't turned any homework in, he began to insist that he had actually done all the homework, but he'd left it on the floor of his room.

For all the assignments.

In all his classes.

The adviser just stared at him for a moment. “I guess the floor of your room is a pretty messy place, huh?”

Taz nodded and smiled idiotically, and the meeting went even further downhill from there.

The grades were so bad, and the conference was so depressing, that Elon was pretty much stunned into silence. You have to understand something about Elon. He is the smartest person I have ever met, but unlike some people who are really smart, he doesn't think everyone around him is stupid. In fact, he thinks the opposite. He starts out assuming that everyone else is smart, too, so it's always a terrible disappointment for him to find out that the rest of us can't multiply four-digit numbers in our head. We don't all know the population of every country in the world. We can't all convert kilometers to miles, Fahrenheit to Celsius, and euros to dollars. If he were a dog, he would win the Stupid Pet Trick contest every time, but the problem is, he wants the rest of us to win the contest with him, and we just can't.

Plus, he went to Yale. He was number two in his law school class. His brain is so big that we have entire teams of people playing Boggle against him, but even when two grown- ups and four kids add up all their scores, we still can't beat him. We're all making lists of words from the board like
hat
and
pen,
and he's offering up words like
conundrum.
We had to give up playing Scrabble because if you came up with a crappy word, he'd want to look at your letters and help you find a better one. Even when the only letters available were
Q
and
Z
, he could think of words
(quiz).
Eventually, we realized
he had memorized a Scrabble dictionary when he was eight.