The Genius of Little Things (3 page)

I disliked organized religion because of my BiMo. She hated it because her biological mother had basically disowned her for not accepting Jesus Christ as her savior. I hadn’t heard from my grandmother since my BiMo’s death. She was sure it happened because the Lord was angry. And she was sure that I was tainted for having been raised for thirteen years by a heathen. Whatever.

On the bus ride back to Carl and Janet’s, I made a chart of the costs and benefits of keeping the catering job versus finding a new one. A man wearing a t-shirt that said
Vagitarian
sat next to me. He looked down at my paper and made burbling sounds that may have been laughter, or an effort to dislodge a phlegm ball. In the costs column of my chart I wrote, in large letters, right under low pay, incompetent owner, proselytizing, and commuting time
, Riding Two Busses With People With Stupid T-Shirts Who COUGH Without Covering Their Mouths And Stare At You.

**

September 3. A partial list of tutees, past and present, from longest to shortest:

·
        
Levi Butler, a sixteen-year-old home schooled Mormon. Ongoing.

·
        
Eddie Kim, an eight-year-old hellion with mystery parents.

·
        
Danny, who lasted until he received a 95 on his science test. His parents had expected me to eke out a perfect score from him.

·
        
Nathan Niedermyer, a crybaby whose mother had some undiagnosed illness that caused her to hide in another room and bark orders at me.

·
        
Stacy, who absorbed nothing and spoke only to make obtuse jokes.

·
        
Sheri, Stacy’s younger sister, who insisted on listening to her iPod when I tutored her in English.

·
        
Eric, an aggressive ten-year-old who often tried to punch me. His mother cried because I was supposed to be Eric’s last hope.

**

The easiest solution to the money deficit was to entice former tutees to re-hire me. I called several numbers in my book, using my parent-pleasing upbeat voice that made me sound insanely happy. Conversations went like this.

“Hi, it’s Tyler Superanaskaia. I tutored your—”

“Super-
who
?”

“Just Tyler. I tutored your son/daughter last year and I’m inquiring about his/her exam/paper/final grade/SAT result.”

One line was disconnected, one father said they were about to move out of state, and two mothers said they were broke. Another gave me a long story about how she got sick and lost her job and her husband left. Several people were not home.

I did reach Mrs. Niedermyer, whose son had trouble with pre-algebra, a worthless training-wheels type class. “You made Nathan cry,” she said. “You made him feel stupid. He’s just a boy and your words cut him like a knife.” She ended the call with “Thank you,” in a tone people usually use with the F-word.

I was left with no choice but to advertise. I printed a dozen fliers to promote my tutoring skills.
Award-winning student tutor. Math and science are my specialties
. I arrived at Firebird High early to put up the fliers in semi-conspicuous places. It took exactly two periods before they were completely defaced. On one flier, the -
ent
in student had been crossed out. Math and science had been replaced with
bondage, domination, sniffing feet, eating underpants,
and some swear words. I took down three of the fliers, but Principal Steve Nicks found the others.

He called to his office during sixth period. It was difficult to discern Principal Nicks’ mood. His atavistic moustache covered his lips. His eyebrows were also bushy and partly hid his eyes.

“So… Mister…” He was looking down at a sheet of paper. I knew he was trying to figure out how to pronounce my last name. Often people breezed past the first two syllables, and then slowed down, making odd mouth contortions. Ordinarily I would say my name before they could mangle it. But this was tricky. If I said it too slowly they would think I considered them dumb. When I said it too fast they thought I was casting a spell.

“Superanaskaia,” I said. “It’s Russian.” My explanation sounded like an apology.

“
Tyler
. Is this your work?” He held up a flier in which someone had written on with black marker,
I give great cunny lingus
!

I told him the original text was mine but not the defacement. There was no point in lying. My full name and number were printed right above
cunny
. He scolded me for not placing fliers on the kiosk in the courtyard cafeteria. I apologized and promised to do so in the future.

“No, you won’t. Not unless you get office approval.”

I promised him I would seek approval to post fliers on the courtyard kiosks.

“No, you won’t. Students are forbidden to advertise for personal services.”

I promised to do nothing in the future. This was the answer he wanted, apparently.

When he dismissed me, I asked him whether this run-in would go into my student file. “If you call me
Stevie
, maybe.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

I snail-mailed extra fliers that weren’t defaced to parents of past tutees who hadn’t outright rejected me. One parent responded via email.

Eddie has problems. I hope you can help. Mrs. Kim.

Mrs. Kim was the mistress of understatement. To say that Eddie Kim had problems was like saying Dalton’s theory was a little bit helpful in understanding our atomic world. That was a chemistry joke.

Eddie Kim was the only tutee I ever fired. The final straw was when he stabbed my dress pants with a leaky pen. The commute to the Kim’s house from my previous FoHo required one 20-minute bus ride and a seven-minute walk. From my current FoHo it would be an eighty-minute bus ride. Then again, Mrs. Kim voluntarily paid $25 an hour, even though my asking rate was $20.

The Kims lived in an area called Mystic Lakes. One may wonder what kind of lakes are natural features of Las Vegas. The correct answer—none. It was a planned community of houses ranging from huge to gargantuan, all surrounding man-made water features. The Kims had a moderately-sized house for the area, one that would be a mansion in any other neighborhood. They had enrolled Eddie in a variety of private academies, but he didn’t last at any school for very long. His latest school, unless he converted to Judaism, was his last shot in Vegas.

I was running late, so the bus was not an option. I rode my bike. It was something I avoided during the afternoons due to the heat and aggressive drivers, and something I would never do when wearing dress clothes.

My usual attire was an oversized, generic polo shirt and loose khaki pants, an outfit that allowed greater airflow, which was helpful in the heat. But for Eddie’s mom I needed to dress to impress. At my first session, Mrs. Kim told me she trusted tutors who wore professional clothes. So before the second session, I dropped a lot of money on dress shoes, dress shirt and a tie. But Mrs. Kim was almost never home. The new clothes turned out to be a pointless investment.

As I pedaled past a supermarket, a huge insect dive bombed my head. My BiMo didn’t believe in killing insects. “Other living things have as much right to live as we do,” she said. She made an exception for ants, temporarily, when they invaded our apartment. She would have been saddened by the current plight of honeybees. The combination of swatting that insect and thinking of my BiMo made me temporarily inattentive. I did not see the SUV swerving into the lot until it was almost too late. I braked hard. My bike skidded. I did an extended pratfall on the pavement.

When these things happen, your life supposedly flashes before your eyes. What flashed before my eyes were the sun, the supermarket’s sign and the grill of a Toyota, which screeched to a stop about a foot from my head. The driver, an egg-shaped woman with an absurd straw hat, jumped out, stood over me and helplessly waved her arms. “Are you all right? Tell me you’re all right!”

I showed how all right I was by hobbling away with my broken bike while snarling “fine.” I carried my bike on the bus. By the time I reached the gates of Mystic Lakes, late for the session, I felt the injuries. It was like someone had taken a branding iron to my shins, elbows and chin.

Mrs. Kim would have been appalled by my torn, bloodied clothing. As usual, she was not there. I was met by Sun, their housekeeper, a demure Chinese woman who didn’t care what I wore and whose mangled syntax often involved a smutty-sounding misuse of the word
come
. Today she had a new double entendre.

“Oh no you going down!”

I thanked her for her concern. I promised her I was all right, even though I wasn’t. With the agility of an arthritic octogenarian, I climbed the winding and unnecessarily elaborate brass-trimmed staircase to the second floor where Eddie was kept.

Eddie lay on his bed, surrounded by dozens of electronic gadgets and toys. He jumped up on his knees when he saw my bloody clothes. “Are you on your period? Hahahaha!” Someone, not I, had taught him about reproduction since our last tutoring session.

I asked for antiseptic. Eddie marched toward his own bathroom and made a grand gesture with his arm, as if heralding the approach of a king.

My image in the mirror was not pretty. My jaw looked like I had been clawed. I picked off a few black bits of parking lot gunk from my chin. My lips seemed swollen, but after staring at them I decided they might normally be that large. I washed off my wounds and used the clean part of my pant leg to dry them, to avoid bloodying any towels. I used hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin for my flayed skin. The last thing I needed was an infection from flesh-eating bacteria leading to an amputation. Days later, I considered whether being an amputee might make me a unique and more desirable Caltech applicant. But losing a limb was too high a price to pay, even for Caltech.

Now bandaged, I told Eddie we had arithmetic to do, and that his solar system mobile should not include Pluto because it had been demoted to non-planet status. His science textbooks, I said, were woefully out of date. “Astronomers realized it’s just an icy rock with no purpose.”

“Nooooooo! Pluto is not a rock.” He jumped up and down on the bed, causing his gadgets to fling themselves onto the floor.

Sun shouted from downstairs. “You scream and I come!”

 “Apologize about Pluto,” Eddie demanded.

 “Pluto is officially a planetoid, a cross between a planet and an asteroid,” I said. “And you can’t hurt its feelings.”

“Take it back!” He kicked me in the leg. Fortunately, it was in an area I hadn’t scraped too badly. Unfortunately, it still hurt.

 “I take it back,” I said, grimacing. “Now do your arithmetic or you’ll have no future.”

Eddie behaved for the rest of the session. I almost reconsidered my vow to fire him again.

When I left, Sun met me at the door. “You feeling your legs and face good?”

“I do. They are. Better. Thanks.”

“We see you coming next week, okay?”

“The problem is, the commuting time is longer than the tutoring session itself. And I don’t like having to dress up for Mrs. Kim when she isn’t even here to see me. And what I’m being paid, given Eddie’s antics and the commute...”

I was using complex sentence structures and too many unfamiliar words. Sun stared as if I were giving an oral report about nuclear fusion. I had given an oral report on nuclear fusion in eleventh grade. I was not unfamiliar with the look.

Sun thrust the pay envelope at me. Inside was a check for fifty dollars, which was our agreement, plus three twenty-dollar bills, which was not.

“For your broken bad clothes.” She probably meant the rips stemming from my bike mishap, but it could have been a value judgment on my fashion sense.

“Okay we see you coming.”

I thanked her, and agreed to return the next week. I was flustered by the extra cash, so I mistakenly mimicked her syntax.

“Yes, you see me coming.”

THREE

September 7. Things that are annoying:

·
        
The sound of
ch
combined with
k
, in words like
chunk
or
checking
, or the
k
sound twice in a row, like credit card. It is particularly bad when a chicken commercial comes after an ad for a bank with a credit card and free checking. This is one reason I don’t watch much TV. At any given time you can hear sounds that are like nails on a chalkboard. Actually, the sound of nails on a chalkboard doesn’t bother me, but many normal people are disturbed by it. The sound of someone
saying
chalkboard, especially when combined with another CHK word, would be far more upsetting.