The Meaning of Maggie (12 page)

“She's stuck at work, so she sent me. You're not mad, are you?”

“Mad? Mad? Of course I'm mad!” I whisper-yelled. “Mom said she wouldn't miss this for the world!” What was she, some kind of world hater?

“Shh, Maggie. She couldn't make it, so I'm here. Okay?”

“This is great. This is just
great.”

Mr. Shoemaker started the breakfast with an orange juice toast to me and my fellow students of the month, each from a different grade. He called each of us up one at a time to get our certificate. And everyone paused and posed for a picture. And their moms and dads applauded their hands off. And I was the only one without a parent applauding. Geez Louise.

I ate my strawberry jammed biscuit in silence while Layla mingled with the parents. She laughed at their unfunny jokes and answered all of their questions and looked perfect and on my second grape jammed biscuit, she turned to me.

“This is great, Maggie. You're doing really well here. Way better than me. I hated middle school.”

“You hate all school,” I said with a perfectly timed roll of my eyes.

“That's not true,” she defended herself. “I like high school. But in middle school, I just got made fun of.”

I actually stopped chewing and looked at her. “Yeah right.”

She took the teeniest amount of orange marmalade and spread it on her toast. “I did. You don't remember me back then? I guess you were really little. I was so skinny I looked like a skeleton and kids were so mean and ugh, I begged Mom to let me stay home from school every day.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” she said.

“Well, when did you get so popular?”

“I'm not popular,” Layla said. “Actually, everyone thinks I'm a goody-goody.”

Now I was interested. “No way.”

“Yes way. I may not be as good at school as you, but I do try really hard. I just really suck at math. And science. And English,” she continued. “And history,” she added with a laugh. “And French.”

“I can help anytime, you know.”

“Thanks. That would be great.”

The weirdest part? She was starting to feel less like my bossy big sister who hogged the bathroom and constantly left the curling iron on. She felt like more of a friend who was also a bossy big sister who
hogged the bathroom and constantly left the curling iron on.

Layla checked her makeup in her hand mirror and I nudged her with my elbow.

“Hey, thanks for coming. I'm sure you didn't want to.”

“Thanks for letting me stay. It was fun,” she said. “Mom's really bummed she missed it, you know.”

“I guess,” I muttered.

“I'm serious, Maggie.” She lifted my chin up and took a good look at me. “Hold on a sec.” She pulled out a tiny jar from her bag and dotted some strawberry lip gloss on my lips.

“Yep, that's definitely your color. Do you want it?”

“Really?”

She folded my fingers over the jar of gloss. “It's all yours. But you have to pinky swear you'll wipe it off every day before you get home from school.”

I wrapped my pinky around hers and squeezed.

“I don't want to be the one to corrupt you.” She winked. “That's Tiffany's job.”

By the final bell I had gone a little crazy but not like on Valentine's Day. I had gone a little crazy with the lip gloss. I had a strawberry stomachache the size of Texas. I held my tummy as I walked out to the bus lane, but instead of my bus, I found Mom waiting for me.

“Maggie! Over here!”

I walked slowly, trying to decide how many miles long I should make this guilt trip. Her eyes were filled
with apologies. “I'm so sorry, honey. I tried to make it, I really did. And then the dryer broke and I had twenty guests with no clean towels and it was a mess and I am just so sorry.”

“It's okay. I guess.” I shrugged. “I'll be student of the month at least six more times. Maybe even seven.”

She exhaled with relief. “Well, I have to make it up to you. Want to go to the mall?” She must have forgotten whom she was talking to. “No,” I said with absolute conviction.

“Want to go to Dairy Queen?”

“Yes,” I said with even more absolute conviction.

I ordered my usual Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard and Mom ordered the same, which was weird because I wasn't sure we'd ever have anything in common again. Every time I let myself trust her, she betrayed me. Well, maybe it wasn't as extreme as “betrayal.” She wasn't Benedict Arnold or anything. But she did let me down. More than once. And I couldn't forget it. And a Blizzard wouldn't fix it. But maybe two or three Blizzards down the line would. I searched the bottom of my cup for more candy in a silence so cold I got an allover freeze, not just a brain one.

“Maggie, I hope you can forgive me. I know I messed up, but I promise—”

“Promise to never break another promise ever again?”

She looked defeated. “Oh, I can't promise that. I'm not perfect, Maggie. Not even close.”

That wasn't what I wanted to hear. “So what do you promise?”

“I promise to try harder.” She thought for a second. “And I promise to never—Hey! Are you wearing lip gloss?”

I pulled my lips into my mouth. “No ma'am.”

I could tell she didn't believe me but she let me get away with lying for some reason. She hugged me close to her side as we walked toward the car, and I liked that for once, I was the one who couldn't be trusted.

Around mid-March the halls at school filled with the glorious smell of rubber cement, the sharp sound of scissors cutting construction paper, and the wonderful buzz of facts being questioned over and over again. It was time for the science fair and it wasn't just any science fair. This was the science fair where I would be defending my blue ribbon.

The year before I'd won top prize for an amazing, no-holds-barred exposé on rain forest destruction. I'd written an extensive report filled with facts and interviews with local tree-hugging hippies. And for my big ta-da, I hadn't done one of those typical, super boring, three-paneled boards everyone else had done. With Mom's help, I'd stapled together over a hundred giant sheets of bulletin board paper and rolled them out across the gym floor. Each piece of paper represented
one hundred square miles of rain forest destroyed. It had been a precise dramatization of the crazy amount of rain forest that was chopped down every hour, and it had clinched my victory.

I'd walked away with my head held high triumphantly and I'd even gotten my picture in the paper, which was fun, but ironic because the local paper is probably printed on paper made from rain forest trees. ANYWAY. I'd won, I'd gotten a blue ribbon, and I was going back for another.

Mom and Dad knew the science fair meant A LOT to me and they did whatever they could do to help. Mom excused me from my chores for a couple weeks so I could immerse myself in research and Werther's Originals.
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And Dad helped me comb through
National Geographic
s, even the scary ones with naked tribal people. And their help made Tiffany furious because she had to do her chores and mine for a few weeks, but whatever. I was trying to change the world. The only thing she ever changed was boyfriends.

I usually announced my science fair topic in a big to-do at dinner. Dad would drumroll his fingers on the table and when he stopped, I'd announce my topic and Mom and Dad would
ooh
and
aah
because they're my number-one fans. And you need your number-one fans when you're doing big deal stuff.

But this year, I was keeping my topic a secret. A Top Secret to be revealed when I was too far into research for my parents to make me choose another topic. Which I knew they would do as soon as they found out that I hadn't picked just any of the world's problems to research. I'd chosen a problem that lived in our own house.

This year, I was doing my project on Dad. I was going to get one step closer to fixing him.

When Mom and Tiffany dropped me off at the library, Mom begged me to tell her what I was doing. “Come on, Maggie. A hint?”

I rubbed my hands together like a mad scientist. “In due time, my lady. In due time.”

Tiffany rolled her eyes. “You're such a weirdo.”

Mom gave her a Mom look. “Knock it off. Maggie, we'll be back after we get your sister a pair of jeans.”

“Okay.” I reached for my backpack from the backseat and gave Tiffany my most brilliant smile. “Hey Tiffany, know what else you should get at the mall?”

“What?”

“A new face.”

Slam! Mom drove away and I high-fived myself for ending on such a zinger.

I opened the library door and the smell of knowledge and dust hit me in the face. I loved everything about the library. I loved the rows and rows of books. I loved the cranky old ladies who read about knitting
while knitting. I loved the book alarm that caught book thieves. I loved that while technology progressed, I could still depend on books because no one ever lied in books. And I loved that the librarian loved books just as much as I did and she brought me juice boxes and pretzels when I was studying and I enjoyed them even though you're never supposed to eat or drink in the library but she was in charge and well, the pretzels were sourdough and the juice box was cran-apple. My favorites.

I set up my research lab at my preferred table, next to the A–F American History row. It was the only table in the whole place that didn't wobble and today it was mine. ALL. MINE. I spread out my pencils and my papers and my color-coded index cards. Pink for encyclopedia facts, blue for other reference book facts, and yellow for random thoughts along the way.

I started with the basics: the elusive M encyclopedia. I began at the end and found what I was looking for between Morpheus (the Greek god of dreams) and Mumbai (which is in India, where cows walk around in the streets like they're people).

I had never seen all seventeen letters of Dad's disease in print before:

M-u-l-t-i-p-l-e S-c-l-e-r-o-s-i-s.

They looked like a big deal. I sounded the words out phonetically under my breath so I could understand them fully.

Each letter carried a different weight of its own. The
M
wasn't warm and cozy like a muffin. It was cold and distant like Mars. And the
S
curved like a snake but instead of scales I imagined it was made up of thousands of pins and needles like the ones that pricked and pinched Dad's hands and feet from the inside out. All seventeen letters together felt heavy. Heavier than an elephant. Heavier than a whale shark. Heavier than the biggest meteor in all the universe. It was a heaviness that metaphorically weighed me down from head to toe.

I pushed the encyclopedia away, not wanting the letters to touch me. For the first time I was scared of catching Dad's disease. Because right then I realized I didn't know as much about his disease as I'd thought. In fact, according to the facts, I hardly knew anything. It was time to pull up my bootstraps like I never had before. It was time to get to work.

I filled my pink note cards with one new something after another. Dad's disease was “an inflammatory disease in which the fatty myelin sheaths around the axons of the brain and spinal cord are damaged, leading to demyelization and scarring as well as a broad spectrum of signs and symptoms.” I didn't know what any of that meant, but it sounded serious.

Next, I moved on to symptoms. There were so many I decided to highlight the ones Dad had. Symptoms included:
tingling, prickling, or numbness in the
extremities, muscle weakness or difficulty moving, difficulties with coordination and balance
, problems in speech or swallowing,
visual problems, fatigue
, loss of bladder control, cognitive impairment,
intermittent tremors, sensitivity to heat
, unstable mood,
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depression, and
paralysis either partial or complete
.

I had seen all of these words before, but never all in one place and never specifically related to Dad. My eyes leapt ahead of my brain. I was reading things I didn't understand. I had goose bumps everywhere you get goose bumps.

There was no clear cause. It wasn't a cold. It wasn't something you could catch. The medicines had long names and no one knew if they really worked.
⁴⁶
The disease evolved over decades and there were two types of it. One kind went away and came back. Another type never went away and only got worse. There were varying degrees of severity with both.

Then I read the last thing in the last paragraph of the entry: There was no known cure.

THERE. WAS. NO. KNOWN. CURE.

A big lump formed in my throat. My eyes filled with water but it wasn't tears. It was sweat from my brain
working double time. I closed my eyes and let the brain sweat roll down my face. My brain was learning things my heart didn't want to know. And it was making me mad.

How could my parents keep all of this from me? Did they even know everything that I now knew? Unlikely, since I never saw them do any research. And how could these scientists and doctors be perfectly okay with calling things “unknown” or “inconclusive”? They needed to get with it! Do their jobs! Put on their goggles and not take them off until they'd put together all the pieces of the puzzle! Maybe start with the corner pieces and then work in toward the middle, and if they were missing a piece, they should've looked under the couch.

As soon as I exhausted my mad at them I got even more mad at myself. Why had I never thought about all of this before? I mean, I spent so much time with Dad and most of the time his arms and legs were asleep but I'd never really thought about waking them up. I looked down at my hands. They looked just like his. We even had the same palm lines and knuckle creases. But mine were awake and his were falling asleep. Maybe forever. Why was I just now realizing all of this?