The Revealers Page 6

  I had to stop this from getting worse. I had to. No more stupid experiments. No more pretending we were scientists or something; it was like painting a bull’s-eye on our faces, for some reason. Everyone was hurt, and hurt bad. I looked at Catalina. Her expression was complicated.

  That’s it, I thought. Enough is enough.

  “Elliot’s family seems nice,” Catalina said in the car on the way home. She was sitting up front with my mom.

  “It’s a good family,” my mom said. “His dad travels a lot. But I think they’re very close. He’s lucky.”

  I said, “Elliot’s lucky?”

  My mom glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Why shouldn’t Elliot be lucky?”

  “Mom, he gets dumped on by anybody who feels like it, anytime they feel like it.”

  “I know. But he has people. He has his family. And his mom’s right—now he has you two.”

  I sagged in my seat. Didn’t they understand what a disaster this was? Hadn’t we just come from a hospital? Hello?

  “You mentioned your dad, Catalina,” my mom said. “Did you … want to come with him to this country?”

  Catalina shook her head. “I wanted to stay with my mom. My dad said it was best for me to get an American education.”

  “You’re sure getting one,” I said. My mom looked sharply at me in the rearview mirror.

  “So,” I said to Catalina a little later. “This whole scientific investigation thing. What a boneheaded idea that was, huh?”

  She blinked. “What do you mean?”

  We were at AJ’s, a burger-and-ice-cream place, having hot chocolate. I suddenly remembered: The original idea was Catalina’s, wasn’t it?

  “It’s not that it was a bad idea,” I said quickly, “it’s just that … okay, we tried it. It didn’t work, to say the least. We better give it up and find something else to do. Right?”

  “But … why?”

  “Why what?” My mom was sitting down.

  “Oh,” I said, “we had this idea, but it didn’t work out.”

  “What idea?”

  “It’s nothing. Really.”

  “It’s not nothing,” Catalina said. “I don’t see why we should give up.”

  “Give up what?”

  “It’s really nothing,” I told my mom. I turned to Catalina. “Look,” I said, pointing at my eye. “See what happened to me? Remember where we just were? See how upset you are?”

  “Are you upset, Catalina?”

  “Mom …”

  “Okay,” she said. “I just wondered …”

  “Now Elliot can’t even walk,” I said to Catalina. “Why would we want any more of this?”

  “But,” she said, “if you’re doing an experiment and you don’t like your first results …”

  “It was a disaster. It didn’t work.”

  “It didn’t work at first,” Catalina said. “But that doesn’t mean we should just give up.”

  “Would someone please tell me what in the world you two are talking about?” my mom said.

  Catalina told her. “We said we would try to learn things about certain people who were … giving us trouble.”

  “Making our life hell,” I said.

  Catalina nodded. “So we tried doing some things differently, to see what they’d do. It was an experiment.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “It wasn’t nothing to me,” Catalina said, sitting back and crossing her arms.

  “I still want to be friends,” I said. “I just don’t want any more disasters. We’re not going to get people to change anyway, so why don’t we just let it go?”

  “I remember talking about this, the other night,” my mom said. “This was how you got punched, wasn’t it?”

  “Yep. It was idiotic. And it was my fault.”

  “It wasn’t anybody’s fault—it was just something we tried,” Catalina said. She looked at my mom. “What do scientists do if their experiments don’t work?”

  I said, “Visit their colleague in the emergency room and then go out for hot chocolate?”

  They both ignored me, for some reason.

  “Well,” my mom said, “pure scientists pretty much focus on understanding things. Did you just want to understand these people better, or did you want to change their behavior?”

  “Both,” Catalina said. “Especially the change.”

  My mom nodded. She thought for a minute.

  “If you’re trying to solve a problem and you haven’t had good results, you might try some creative thinking,” she said. “Try looking at your methods and your results differently. What have you tried? What might you try differently? There may be something in there that’s waiting for you to notice it, like a hidden key.”

  Catalina nodded.

  “Sometimes that’s where the breakthroughs come, the famous ones,” my mom said. “Almost by accident, after a whole lot of what seemed like failure. Like the man who first vulcanized rubber.”

  “Vulcanized rubber?” I said. I mean, come on.

  “Sure,” my mom said. “It was Charles Goodyear, the man they named the blimp after. Back in the 1800s, raw native rubber was very interesting to people, but not very useful. It was stretchy at normal temperatures, but when it got cold, it turned brittle and broke—and when it got hot, it went soft and melted. Goodyear was an inventor, and he was looking for a way to make rubber stay strong and flexible no matter what happened to it. A lot of other people were trying to do the same thing, but nobody could.

  “Everything Goodyear tried, failed. Then one day he was mixing some sulfur and other chemicals into a batch of raw india rubber, and he dropped some on a hot stove. He left it there. The next morning, the stove and the mix on top had cooled down, and it was still rubbery! He’d done it!”

  My mom was bright-eyed. She gets excited about strange things.

  “Well,” she said, “don’t you see? Strong and flexible rubber changed the world. Because we had it, people could invent tires and cars and airplanes and all kinds of machinery, along with basketballs and footballs and everything inflatable. Goodyear named his mixing and heating process vulcanizing, and it’s still done today. He found it by accident—but the accident happened because he tried. And because he kept trying.”

  Catalina stood up. “Ms. Trainor,” she said, “could you please take me home?”

  “Of course, Catalina,” my mom said, turning over the check. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No. I just want to do something.”

  “Do what?” I said as we walked toward the door.

  “I’ll call you later,” she said.

  “That’s an impressive girl,” my mom said after we dropped Catalina off. “Very bright and determined. And she’s going to be a great beauty.”

  “She’s going to be a what?”

  My mother gave me her patient smile. It meant, “You men have no clue.” I was familiar with it.

  “You just wait,” she said.

  “They call her Olive Oyl.”

  “Who does?”

  “The girls who give her trouble.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Well … Bethany DeMere.”

  “Bethany. Yes, I remember. She’s fairly glamorous, isn’t she?”

  “She thinks so.”

  My mom sighed. “Girls your age are so easily threatened,” she said. “It’s a shame.”

  “You think … you think Bethany DeMere is threatened by Catalina?”

  “I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.”

  “Why?”

  “Take a good look at Catalina sometime,” my mom said. “Imagine what happens when that long body fills in, and that black hair grows out a little. She has lovely features, and her color—it’s beautiful. If I were the reigning glamour queen of your grade, I’d be worried.”

  I shook my head, trying to clear it. “So you think that’s why Bethany’s trying to crush her?”

  “That would be my strong suspicion,” my mom said. “And it’
s too bad. Girls at this age can be really vicious, and so vulnerable. I almost think it’s more serious business than you boys with your physical stuff.”

  “You think that’s worse than being dropped off a bridge? Or punched in the face?”

  My mom glanced over at me.

  “I’m not saying any of this is easy. But that girl … she’s in a new country. She doesn’t have her mom here. Try to imagine how it must feel to have people in her new school suddenly turn on her.”

  But I didn’t have to imagine it. That part I got.

  ROSE

  After dinner Catalina called.

  “I sent you a message,” she said.

  “All right.”

  A pause.

  “I’m not sure what to do with it,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Another pause.

  “You’ll see,” she said finally. “Tell me what you think … but wait till tomorrow. In school. Okay?” She sounded nervous.

  “Well, okay. Sure.”

  I got on-line. Catalina’s message just said, “Please read this. I thought it was a good idea before. Now I don’t know.”

  KidNet downloaded the file she had attached to the message. I opened it. Here’s what it said:

  For some reason, sometimes when you are new or different in some way, people decide to tell lies about you. I don’t know why. Before I came to Parkland School I didn’t know people did that at all.

  My name is Catalina Aarons. I’m somebody people have been telling untrue things about. Maybe you have heard some things. In fact, if you are in seventh grade and you have heard anything about me, it’s probably not true. I haven’t really told people what is true, so maybe in a way it’s partly my fault.

  So here are some things about me that are true.

  I was born in the Philippines, on the biggest island, Luzon. My mother is a Filipina. My father is American. His company sent him to work in Manila, the capital city, and that’s where he met my mom. They got married, and they had me. So I am half-Filipina and half-American.

  Filipinos are a mix of types of people, just like Americans. Our ancestors include the people of our part of the Pacific, called Malays, and Chinese people, and also Spanish and Americans, because both of those countries used to control the Philippines. My mother’s name is Rosario. That’s Spanish. But everyone calls her by her American nickname, Rose.

  We lived near Manila but not right in it, in a house not that much different from the houses here. My dad went to work. He was gone a lot. My mom and I were best friends. My mom is really beautiful. Everyone said so! She is not as tall as me and she looks like a Spanish princess, with dark eyes, and she has long shining black hair like a Malay, and her eyes are almond-shaped like the Chinese. People used to tell me she got the best of everything.

  My mom teaches music, mostly piano but also singing, to kids and grownups who come to our home. She used to sing to me, since I was a baby. Her voice is like liquid silver.

  I rode to school and came home every day on a jeepney. That’s like an American school bus only it isn‘t—it’s a funny decorated contraption made from adding almost anything onto an old American jeep, or a small truck. There are jeepneys all over Manila. Some of them are incredible!

  Anyway, every day when the jeepney let me off after school I ran home, because my mom and I would have merienda.

  Merienda is an afternoon snack. It’s not like any American snack. We might have adobo, which is chicken or meat cooked in an incredible sauce—I can’t even describe how it tasted, tangy and just a little sweet. My mom would make panyo panyo, little pastries filled with banana and mango jam. They are fantastic! We’d have guapple pie, too. Guapple is a kind of hard fruit, like an apple but sweeter and softer in its taste. We’d have slices of mango with lime juice dripped over them, and hot chocolate whipped up smooth and frothy. And we’d have our own kind of limeade, which was incredible! My mom made it from our little calamansi limes, mixed up with melon juice and water.

  Every day my mom made merienda for her and me, and we would talk about everything. Everything! We were happy. But I guess my dad was not. I guess he missed America, and he did not like being a foreigner in Luzon. I guess he had some problems with my mom’s family. (He was the only one who was not Filipino.) When he was home he didn’t seem happy, and then my mom started to cry a lot. I would hear her playing the piano and crying. I didn’t really know what was wrong.

  One day they told me they were going to get a divorce, and I would be moving with my dad to America. My dad said I would get a much better education in America. He said I could go home every summer, to be with my mom. He said the schools are so much better here, and the opportunities are so much more. That is what he said.

  My mom did not want me to go. But she said my dad was probably right. I won’t tell you much about what it was like to leave my home and my family and my school, and especially my mom.

  I don’t know about the opportunities in America, but so far I don’t think very much of the schools. At least not this school. It’s not so much the school—the school is okay, I guess. It’s the way some kids treat you in it.

  It’s funny, in a way. Kids who want to hurt other kids treat them like they are not a human being, but at the same time they figure out the one thing that can hurt you most, as a human being. Like if you are new they make up terrible things about who they say you are, and what you’re like, and your family, especially your mom.

  I would like people to know that I am proud of where I come from, and I am proud of my family. I am proud of who I am. I don’t tell lies either.

  You don’t have to like me if you don’t want to. You don’t have to include me or invite me to anything at all if you don’t want to. I don’t mind. I am making friends. But I don’t like it when people get together to act like I am not a person.

  So now you know a little bit about me. I guess how you act is up to you.

  Catalina Aarons

  SYSTEM SERVER

  The next morning I brought Catalina’s letter to school on a disk. When she saw me coming, she hugged her books to her chest and closed her locker slowly.

  I walked up fast. “It’s incredible,” I said.

  “It is?”

  “Yeah! And you know what? This is the thing to do. It kicks the legs out from under the evil princess.”

  “The who?”

  “You know.” I lifted my chin and shook my head, as if rippling my golden tresses.

  “Oh, yes.” She nodded. “I got the idea from you.”

  “Huh?”

  “Elliot said you wrote down what happened. When that boy hit you.”

  “Oh. I forgot I did that.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  The bell rang. We started walking down the hall. “Anyway,” I said, “I brought it with me, what you wrote.” I lifted the disk out of my shirt pocket.

  “I don’t know what to do with it,” she said. “I mean, what if I did want people to read it? How would I do that?”

  “Well, we could print it out. You know, post it.”

  “Post it? You mean like on bulletin boards?” She shuddered. “That would be totally humiliating.”

  “Well … we could give it to certain people. Like a letter.”

  “You mean those people? Slip it into their lockers the way they do to me? What do you think they’d do with it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They’d ignore it. Or they’d laugh about it. And nobody else would know the difference.”

  “I guess.”

  We were almost to Ms. Hogeboom’s social studies class. The door was open and kids were slipping in around us. We hung back.

  “What else could we do?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think more about it.”

  I said, “Can I send it to Elliot? He might have some ideas.”

  The second bell rang. She nodded as she turned, took a deep breath, and stepped into class. I went
in, too.

  In activities block I signed into the computer lab so I could send a message to Elliot at home. The room was full, as usual. Kids sat at computers around the walls and at the back-to-back line of them down the center of the room. Everyone was plugged in, tapping at keys, slouched back or tilting forward to peer at screens. I found an empty station, sat down, and clicked up KidNet.

  Mostly kids use KidNet to send messages to each other, but as I’ve said we can also send messages to teachers, which is useful if you’re confused about some homework or you don’t understand something or you forgot which chapters to study for a test.

  There are three levels of access. They’re controlled by Mr. Dallas, the computer lab teacher and network administrator. The highest level, Staff, is for the teachers and administration. The second is MidStream, which everyone else has. This access can be suspended, or revoked, if you misuse it or behave badly on the system. Kids tend to be fairly careful about that because nobody wants to lose messaging privileges. We’re always checking our messages.

  Because KidNet is a local area network, it’s self-contained. That means it’s all ours, and it’s only us. We can access the Internet, also, from most school machines, though there’s safeguard software so you can’t download anything pornographic or even write swear words in an Internet message. But on KidNet we can pretty much say whatever we want. There’s no censorship, and also all the Net weirdos and the people selling stuff can’t get at us. You can’t get into KidNet from outside unless Mr. Dallas lets you.

  The third access level is just Library. That’s what you don’t want. You can call up encyclopedias, CD-ROMs, and other research stuff, but you can’t send messages or anything. If you lose MidStream access, you’re stuck in this cyber-punishment ghetto, where you can only find stuff they want you to learn. Obviously, nobody wants that.

  I tapped out a message for Elliot. I slipped my disk into the drive and attached Catalina’s file from the disk to the message. Elliot had nothing much else to do at home, so as I did some other stuff I wasn’t surprised to see a response pop up pretty quickly.