On the Road to Find Out (6 page)

The main differences, as far as I could tell, were among the people who gave the presentations. The lady from Duke, with shiny, precise hair, wore a trim navy-blue suit and pearls, smiled during her entire talk, and seemed genuinely thrilled to be there. I wondered if she was like Walter-the-Man's Deborah.

The dude from Georgetown, however, thought he was a stand-up comic and cracked jokes that were not at all funny. Often they were directed at the girl from Harvard, who looked younger than me and had to keep pushing up her glasses when she spoke.

During the slide show, she talked about how the university was founded in 1636 and named after John Harvard. She showed a photo of a statue of a man sitting in a chair. People in the audience began to whisper and giggle.

The Harvard girl turned to look at the slide and said, “Jason, you asshat!” and then covered her mouth with her hand while the guy from the University of Pennsylvania stood in the back of the room cackling. He'd jacked her PowerPoint presentation so the photo we saw was of Ben Franklin, the founder of Penn, a much more recognizable figure than John Harvard, whoever he was.

These people had clearly been on the road together for too long.

Mostly parents asked the questions: “What's the acceptance rate?”

For Harvard and Stanford, it was single digits. They didn't need to spell out the math: only six students out of a hundred would get in. The percentages at the others were higher, but still, the odds were against you.

One girl raised her hand and wanted to know if it was better to take an honors class and get an A or take an AP and maybe get a B.

The comedian from Georgetown said, “Take the harder class and get an A!” The others nodded. People laughed not because it was funny but because everyone was so tense any opportunity to laugh was a gift.

“What's the median SAT score?” one dad wanted to know.

“Where do students get jobs after graduation?” asked a mom with puffy hair.

“What's the crime rate on campus?” a dad with a military bearing inquired.

“How many get into medical school?” There was no question in my mind that the dad who asked the question was a doctor.

These parents were starting to get on my nerves. It was like they were the ones going to college.

I looked at Mom in a way that said,
If you ask a question I will storm out of here and never speak to you again.

According to Deborah via Walter-the-Man, the whole purpose of these nighttime programs was to generate more applications. Deborah described her job as getting the kids all excited about applying so she could deny them in the spring. The more applicants you deny, the fewer you accept, the more selective you look.

The last question of the night was about SAT prep classes. Were they worth the expense? The presenters all agreed that they could be helpful in boosting scores. When Mom heard that I could see her brain-wheels turning.

As we drove back to the hotel, she said she wanted to sign me up for a class. I said, “No way, José,” something she said all the time.

“Why wouldn't you want to maximize your chances?”

I told her I'd study on my own.

“There might be tricks you could learn.”

“I'm not a dancing elephant. I don't want to do tricks. I want to do it my way. By learning shit.”

“Alice.”

“What?”

“Can't you ever just be easy?”

 

9

After my second run, I had second thoughts about the wisdom of my New Year's resolution.

And third thoughts.

And 7,234th thoughts.

It was nearly impossible to get out of bed the next day. My legs felt like someone had put them through a meat grinder. My butt hurt, which was not surprising, but so did my arms, which was. If it wasn't already dead, my hair would have hurt.

But still, I stuffed myself into my jeggings and went out again the next day. And the next. And the next.

Pretty quickly I gave up on the idea of following a program. My running turned out to be a lot like how I make sandwiches. I can't ever seem to stop being me. Even though there are ways that I am superorganized, there are also ways in which I'm kind of a mess.

From all the stuff I'd read on the Web I learned the mistake most people make—the reason so many people hate running—is they start out too fast and then burn out and die. So instead of doing the whole timed walk-run thing, I forced myself to run slower than I thought I could. Each day I ran for a few minutes longer than the previous time.

I tried to go when there weren't too many people around, but the boulevard was always swarming with runners. The worst was going past the playground, where I was afraid kids would point at me and laugh. They hadn't yet, but you can't trust kids not to laugh at you. Especially if you look funny, which I'm sure I did.

At one point, I tried this breathing technique I read about online where you inhale for three steps and exhale for two.

That did not go well.

I started to feel self-conscious about the way I was breathing. Then I spiraled into a bizarre analytical thought process where I decided my elbows were swinging weirdly.

My nose got all runny in the cold and of course I never brought any tissues with me. So I started using my sleeve to wipe it. Gross, I know.

Sometimes I'd have to walk. But one day about midway through switching between walking and jogging, I started to feel pretty good. I breathed easily and my legs didn't hurt and my feet didn't hurt and it didn't feel like my heart was going to burst. At one point, I was full-on sprinting and it was great. The sprinting probably only lasted, like, three seconds, but it felt like I covered a lot of ground fast.

I checked my watch and realized that I'd been running for just over thirty minutes. Thirty minutes of running!

I was so happy I ran for that long that I gave it a try again the next day.

Worst. Run. Ever. That run only lasted, like, ten minutes.

And that's the way it went. One good run, one (or two or three) bad ones. But the good ones felt so great, it kept me going.

Sometimes I'd get a song stuck in my head and hear it for the whole run. Usually I didn't know all the lyrics, so it would be the same lines over and over. Sometimes I noticed the leafless trees along the boulevard I'd never paid attention to before or counted the different colors of houses. I began to recognize people too, other runners. I'd see the older woman with the big poodle, the guy with the blaze-orange hat who went so fast I could hear him breathing as he zoomed by, the heavy man who ran even more slowly than me if you can believe it, wearing a UCLA sweatshirt and thick black sweatpants with long baggy shorts over them. He made me look like a
Project Runway
model.

Another time, I saw the tasty morsel with the Toto dog again. They ran really, really fast. And made me feel really, really slow.

 

10

It was one of those late-January after-school afternoons, gray and chilly, with a light dusting of snow on the ground, where all you want to do is curl up in a chair in a closet under a heavy blanket with a rat on your shoulder and read six novels. I contemplated going out for a run for about fifteen seconds, but:

  1.  Walter's cage needed cleaning.

  2.  I had to read “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell for English.

  3.  A 62.9-kg downhill skier was moving at a speed of 12.9 m/s as he started his descent from a level plateau at 123 m height to the ground below. The slope had an angle of 14.1 degrees and a coefficient of friction of 0.121. The skier coasted the entire descent without using his poles; upon reaching the bottom he continued to coast to a stop; the coefficient of friction along the level surface was 0.623. I had to figure out how far the dude would coast along the level area at the bottom of the slope.

I opened the door to Walter's cage to see if the munchkin wanted to come out. Since he'd been sleeping all day, he stretched one paw, reaching like Michelangelo's Adam trying to touch his finger to the finger of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Then he flicked his wrist in the gay-positive gesture and made the biggest yawn you've ever seen. When you see something that adorable it kind of makes your heart hurt.

Walter's teeth are orangish yellow. They are big. Part of what it means to be a rodent is that your teeth never stop growing, so you have to do a lot of gnawing. For the
uninitiated
(“without special knowledge or experience”), his teeth can look kind of scary. Jenni freaked the first time she saw him yawn, but that's the only time you ever see his teeth. When he yawns. He never bites. He has never bitten anyone. Ever.

Walter is a clean freak. Not only is he an enthusiastic self-groomer, he also generously offers up his talents as a manicurist. After he's satisfied he's clean enough, he will come onto my lap and work on my nails. He thinks I'm
slovenly
(“messy or dirty”). He may be right. So I let him go about his business.

“It's good to have a job,” I say to him. “Work, Walter, work.”

While he keeps himself
pristine
(review: “remaining in a pure state”) and he always pees in the same spot in the corner of his cage, Walter's housekeeping skills leave something to be desired. I had to get him out of there so I could be his maid.

“Out, damned spot, out!” I said to him, quoting Lady Macbeth.

He ambled through the door of his cage and I picked him up and we smooched for a while. Then I put him on the floor and went to get a garbage bag. His cage is really easy to clean: there's a wire part that sits on top of a big plastic tray and I just dump all the litter into a bag, wash the bottom, and fill it up with fluffy fresh bedding. I did research when I first got him about what would be the best and safest environment for him.

Have I mentioned that I love doing research about rats?

Walter is a Norway rat, or
Rattus norvegicus,
also known as the brown rat. This is kind of funny since like many things having to do with rats, it's completely wrong. Norway rats are not from Norway and they are not necessarily brown. They are from Asia and they come in a Baskin-Robbins assortment of colors and hairstyles. There are rex rats that look like they have bad '80s perms and hairless rats that look like fetal pigs. There are also Dumbo rats, who are more round than pointy, with big circle ears set far back on their heads.

The American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association recognizes thirty-eight distinct colors, including champagne, chocolate, cocoa, lilac, mink, platinum, Russian blue, sky blue, cinnamon, cinnamon pearl, fawn, lynx, pearl, and blue point Siamese. Yes, you can have a Siamese rat.

The splotches on Walter's back make him, as far as I can tell, a
variegated
(“having patches, stripes, or marks of different colors”) rat. I got him at the pet store in the mall before I did all my rat research and learned about breeders and ratteries.

When I brought him home that first day Dad began to recite a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called “Pied Beauty.”
Pied
means “patchy in color, splotched, or piebald” and is a better word than
variegated
. I'm not sure I totally understand the poem but I love the way it sounds. It starts out: “Glory be to God for dappled things— / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.”

When I finished cleaning his cage, my own pied beauty was MIA. I looked around for him. Walter likes to snuggle in bed even when I'm not there. This requires an Olympian feat of scaling the quilt that hangs over the side. He gets a running start, launches himself so he lands a little way up, and then, hand over tiny hand, ascends. It's a bit like the rope climb we had to do in school: surprisingly hard. But Walter makes it look easy. You've never seen a more graceful, acrobatic rat.

When he arrives at the top, he does a crazy hop, kind of like a victory dance.

Walter wasn't on the bed.

He wasn't under the desk.

He wasn't back in his cage.

I called him.

Nothing.

Usually he comes running when I say his name. At times, I get scared I've lost him and walk around the room and yell, “Walter, Walter,” and finally turn around to find he's been following me the whole time. The truth is, he's about as likely to run away from me as I am from him.

I looked over at the door to my bathroom and saw a long unbroken stream of toilet paper going from the bathroom, around the dresser, and continuing into the closet. I walked over to the closet, opened the door all the way, and there was Walter, concentrating so hard he didn't even hear me, busy making a fluffy bed of toilet paper in the corner.

I wondered about the coefficient of friction when it comes to dragging bathroom tissue.

I figured out that the skier would coast for 116 m (115.95, actually, but I rounded up) and then finished up the rest of my physics problem set, which was all about work and energy—balls being thrown, carts getting pushed, mugs of beer gliding along bar counters.

Ms. Chan had given me an extra-credit assignment for English. Even though I didn't need any more credit—I had the highest average in the class—we both pretended I did it for the grade and not because I was a dork who could never get enough homework. Ms. Chan asked me to write a report on George Orwell's essay “Shooting an Elephant.” When she told me the title I was skeptical. I didn't want to read about dead animals.

“Trust me,” she said.

“I thought you were never supposed to trust someone who said ‘Trust me.' In fact, I thought you told us that.”

She shrugged her shoulders and said, “It's your grade.”

The essay totally rocked.

Orwell basically says
imperialism
(“extending the power of one nation over another one”) is evil and then shows you how and why it's bad by telling a story. The story he tells made me cry. But when I'd gone through it a second time, I realized I'd cried at the wrong place. I cried when the elephant suffered and died but barely even noticed that a person had also been killed. And that's his point: imperialism dehumanizes the people in power as well as the colonized. After I finished my report, which got long because I wanted to look carefully at how he embeds his argument into what looks like a straight narrative, I settled in for a few rounds of Freerice.