The Genius of Little Things (2 page)

Then he asked about my first day of school.

“It could have been worse,” I said.

He laughed, although I didn’t see what was funny. He inquired about my classes, so I provided my new schedule—calculus, applied physics, German IV, biology II, and English lit. I omitted the Creative Soul class because it would require too much explaining.

He wanted to know what topics would be covered in physics.

“Quantum chromodynamics.” The teacher hadn’t given us a syllabus yet. Quantum chromodynamics was the first physics phrase that came into my head. It was something I read in
Scientific American
magazine. I don’t know why I didn’t tell Carl the truth.

“I wish I could help you out,” he said. “If you need to know a thing or two about software design, I can help.”

My Cap’n Crunch was becoming a pond of tan sugar slurry. I thanked Carl for his offer. I took my bowl back to the kitchen to start over. I stared out the kitchen window and waited for the milk to transform the cereal into the perfect consistency, Cap’n Crunch al dente, while considering my approach to Caltech’s “community” essay. The blinds in the neighbor’s kitchen window pinched apart. I saw an eye. The blinds closed.

I must have lost track of time, because by the time I headed back to my room with my new bowl of cereal, Janet, my FoMo, had materialized in the living room. She was watching a TV show about convicted killers. The announcer said one murderer had “turned to the Bible to help him in his new career as a talk show host.”

Janet snorted. “Good luck.” At first, I thought she was talking to me, but I quickly realized she was making a crack about the killer. She pressed pause and the screen froze on the convict making a pucker face in front of a Bible.

“How was the first day of school?” I noticed Janet and Carl often asked the same questions separately. I wished they would be in the same room at the same time so I could avoid redundancy. I stopped next to an enormous Indonesian cabinet and told her nothing terrible had happened.

She laughed. “No bombs went off?”

I assured her no bombs had exploded. I didn’t know what was funny about bombs. I wondered whether there had been bomb threats at Firebird High in the past. I made a mental note to research that.

She started talking about her day. After a minute, it still wasn’t clear what her job was. I narrowed it down to something sales-related. My small talk session with Carl hadn’t gone as well as I had hoped, so I tried to be more proactive in chitchatting with Janet. “The bees are still dying,” I said.

“Whose bees?”

I explained colony collapse syndrome, in which honeybees were leaving their hives and dying by the billions. The latest research showed that the die-off could be caused by anything from an undiscovered fungus to cell phone signals that mess up their internal radar. I segued into an explanation of why bees were so important. For the record, they pollinate a huge variety of crops. Take away the bees and you take away up to one third of the human diet, from almonds to zucchini.

“Guess we’ll have to live on granola bars pretty soon,” she laughed.

I was silent. I could have pointed out that some granola bars have almonds, but I chose not to.

“Speaking of food, we need to have dinner together,” she said.

We
needed
to?

I told her I worked at my catering job four nights a week, and that I had to prepare for my Caltech application.

“Aren’t you the busy one?” Her tone indicated this was a statement borne of annoyance, rather than a question.

I said Friday would be all right.

“That wasn’t so hard. I’ll make something with almonds or zucchini, before the bees go extinct.” She laughed. She was doing a lot of laughing about serious subjects. But that was better than yelling and throwing a breast pump for no reason. One of my past FoMos did that.

I took my bowl of Cap’n no-longer-Crunch to the kitchen, hurled it down the drain, and gave up. I gave up on the essays, too. I spent the rest of the evening culling some useless items from my Box o’ Crap.

My Box o’ Crap was a fairly ornate wooden box, about a foot by two feet, and eight inches deep. My BiMo gave it to me when I was ten. I’m sorry to bring up my BiMo again.

**

August 27. Things in my Box o’ Crap:

·
        
A ancient tin of Altoids.

·
        
Programs from all of my science fairs.

·
        
A name tag from a horrible supermarket job.

·
        
Birthday cards from Nevada Department of Family Services.

·
        
Photocopied Christmas letters from biological grandmother, supposedly written by her cat.

·
        
Every letter from Family Services informing me of a transfer to a new FoHo.

·
        
A movie ticket stub, from
The Pursuit of Happyness
. It was an okay movie, but it bothered me that they misspelled happiness on purpose.

·
        
My BiMo’s unmarked CDs of some of her favorite songs.

**

Sometime around 2 a.m., I remembered I had to work on Friday, so I wouldn’t be able to have dinner with Carl and Janet. And I was scheduled for Saturday and Sunday evening shifts as well. I got up and wrote a note to that effect on the refrigerator white board. As much as I wanted to be accommodating and pleasant, I didn’t want to rearrange my schedule for a FoPa dinner. It was nice of them to offer, but I assumed my case manager put them up to it.

I could imagine the conversation.

Case manager: “Do something for your new foster kid so he doesn’t become a prostitute or drug addict.”

Janet: “Is that likely?”

Case manager: “Happens all the time. Many end up dead.”

Janet: “Oh dear. We should make dinner.”

Case manager: “Awesome, awesome! And keep asking about his school.”

Carl: “We will! And I’ll talk about old clocks!”

I hoped they would forget about dinner. FoPas and biological parents made a lot of promises. By the time they were ready to follow through on any of them, it was usually too late.

TWO

A room with a locking door in a quiet house was all I needed. That’s what Carl and Janet offered. It was a very nice house in an older subdivision, which meant it was built at least a decade ago. Bordering this subdivision was a megastore, a strip mall with a pharmacy, a strip mall with a gas station, and a dusty patch awaiting a chain store. All of these stores were in walking distance.

On the day I moved in, they took me on a tour of the house. They spent more than five minutes showing off their dining table, a heavy, primitive carved wood piece that looked like it belonged in the jungle. Actually, it was made in the jungle. They had it shipped from a village in rural Thailand. I appreciated them taking the time to show me everything. But I received their implicit message
. Don’t mess up our beautiful stuff
.

Just before the Foster-go-Round transferred me to Carl and Janet’s house, I submitted an application for emancipation. The emancipation process would take four months under the best of circumstances. With the state cutbacks, the system was working even slower than usual. I anticipated that my hearing would be Thanksgiving at the earliest. After that, it would be another month until I was cut loose from the system.

I didn’t bring up the issue of emancipation to Carl and Janet. I assumed my case manager had informed them. Either way, they didn’t need to be involved with the process until the hearing. All I needed to do was stay out of their hair.

My plan required money for an apartment, plus tuition and living expenses for Caltech. There was no guarantee I would receive enough financial aid. That meant I needed to boost my earning potential, stat. The crummiest bachelor apartment in the vicinity of Firebird High would be at least $400 a month. After seven jobs in two years and over two-dozen tutees, I managed to save only $10,588.

Unfortunately my hours at my latest job were dwindling, and the owner, Mr. Ferguson, had cut our already paltry wages. All catering businesses in Las Vegas were in a slump, but Covenant Catering was in dire shape.

It didn’t help that Mr. Ferguson had been turning away business due to his religious beliefs. He was a devout, newly-converted Mormon who was making up for his “first forty-five years in the spiritual wilderness” by going completely overboard. He would cater no events with alcohol or caffeine and would not work with organizations that promoted moral depravity. He was also against catering functions that had anything to do with gambling.
In Las Vegas
. He turned down the chance to cater the grand opening of a dental clinic. He thought x-rays were blasphemous. After only three jobs in a month—two wedding receptions and a small office party—he relented on his no caffeine rule and he saw the light on x-rays. I think that’s a pun
and
an idiom.

Mr. Ferguson kept reminding me that I was the first employee he had hired outside the “flock,” which meant Mormons. He said this so I would feel even more grateful for the job. In the interview I told him I had thought about Mormonism and I was “looking for answers.” I put it exactly that way so he would hire me, thinking he could convert me.

I like to believe that my culinary skills helped in the hiring decision. I was self-taught. My BiMo was not so much a bad cook as an inconsistent one. I had to read labels carefully whenever she was too lethargic to do so. In her last two years she became increasingly careless about avoiding eggs and shellfish. One time I checked the label of a new protein powder. One of the ingredients was apovitellin. I had not heard of that substance before and I told her to wait until I checked it out. Apovitellin, the Web site said, was derived from the low-density lipoprotein of eggs and could cause even worse reactions in allergic individuals than the egg itself. It could have killed her. She gave the tub of protein to her then-boyfriend and thanked me for being so conscientious. I was eleven, by the way. In her last year, I did most of the cooking for us, at least when she was at home. By doing this, I saved her life. Or, rather, I prolonged it a bit.

I said I wasn’t going to mention my BiMo any more and I meant it.

For weeks, Mr. Ferguson had been giving me pamphlets about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. At the end of every shift he would ask whether I had any questions. I said I had read them, which was a lie, and that everything was clear, which was also a lie. This led Mr. Ferguson to keep badgering me to ask questions.

After a few weeks, my questions turned silly. Do astronomical associations have any qualms about each faithful member of the church having his own planet? If the Garden of Eden were really in Missouri, would St. Louis be a holier place than Boston? If Satan was Jesus’ brother, is the main conflict in the world sibling rivalry? He valiantly struggled to answer, treating each question as if it were the key to unlocking my appreciation of his religion.

Mr. Ferguson asked at beginning of every shift if I had made any “progress” at school. Progress to him meant leads for new customers. I told him I had not, and that it was a new school, and it had only been in session for a few days. “A bright young man like you should have no trouble making friends,” he said.

It was flattering that he thought I could pull in business. But it bothered me that he expected me to do his youth outreach for free. After a few days of pestering me about bringing in new business, I told him there were two students who wanted an engagement party. He lit up like a kid in front of a bottle rocket.

“There won’t be any tobacco. Jenny quit smoking because Amber hated the taste of nicotine when they kissed.”

Mr. Ferguson looked like he accidentally swallowed a marble. “Those are girls’ names.”

“Right. There won’t be any alcohol or caffeine. Wicca ceremonies usually have punch and cake.” I started to enjoy this ruse.

He squinted as if trying to see something in the distance. He said he would think about it. For the rest of the shift, I worried he might be desperate enough to accept these fake clients. Maybe Wiccan lesbians were more acceptable than caffeine. What did I know? As it turned out, either Wicca ceremonies or lesbianism was a bridge too far. When I clocked out, he thanked me for my efforts. He sent me off with some more LDS reading materials and an extra weekend shift.