The Best Possible Answer(5)

“No. I will not pay for it, and neither will your father. I have already talked to him. We can get a refund, and it is done.”

“What? You talked to Dad?” My dad’s had to go on business trips since I was little, but this is the longest he’s ever been away, and I don’t know what’s happening with him and my mom. “When?”

“I’m sorry, Viviana. I spoke to him last night.”

“Mama, please—”

“You will stay home and rest this summer.”

Mila gets excited. “I want to stay at home, too! I want to stay home with Vivi!” I know she would be perfectly happy to stay home from Camp Sportz, where she said the third and fourth graders were mean to her last summer, but that’s not what we had planned.

“I can’t just sit around all summer doing nothing. It won’t look good on my college applications.”

“You’re not going back,” my mom says. “End of discussion.”

“Please, Vivi,” Mila begs. “Let us both stay home. We’ll have so much fun.”

My mom shakes her head and says something to herself in Russian and then finally instructs Mila to get her bag together for school. After Mila’s left the room, my mom turns back to me. “It’s been too much, Viviana. Didn’t you hear anything the doctors said? They told you to slow down. You need to slow down.”

She can’t do this to me. She can’t just strip away the only good thing I have.

But she can.

I can’t speak. I can’t breathe.

I try to force out the words: “I don’t need to slow down. I don’t want to slow down. I can fix this—”

She throws her hands up. “You haven’t been making good decisions. Not at all. So I will make the decision for you.” And then she half-whispers at me: “We need to keep a close eye on you. You are not living away at a camp for that long. We need to know we can trust you. Right now, you’re a bad role model for your little sister.”

I know what this dig is about.

I know it’s not about the fall or my academic stuff or even my health.

I know it’s really about what I did with Dean.

She’s caught me. And there’s nothing I can say.

She’s made her decision.

And so has my father, apparently.

Without even talking to me.





Habits of an Effective Test Taker #3

Effective test takers are honest with themselves about how much effort they’re willing to put in to do well on the exam. It’s true that you can learn anything, but you have to be willing to commit to doing the work.


My mom makes sure I’ve calmed down before she and Mila leave for school. She makes me promise not to study for the other AP exams I have next week. I lie and say that I won’t.

After they leave, I text Sammie to tell her the news. She’s already on the bus on her way to school, but she texts back that she’s sorry and wishes she could do something for me.

And then, I’m alone. I try to study for the AP English exam that’s next week, but I can’t. I try to read, to memorize the definitions of all the tropes and schemes, but it’s all a blur. So I stay true to my promise to my mom and I close the book. I head outside and sit on our balcony. We live on the sixteenth floor in a three-bedroom apartment that my parents rent. But that might be one of the other things we’ll lose if my father doesn’t come back and they decide to divorce. I might as well enjoy it before it’s all gone.

I never do this. I never just sit. I lean my forehead against the iron railing and identify the patterns of the buses, cars, and people below me. The city below me wakes up. I start thinking about ant trails and power lines and circuitry connections, about the difference between a meandering labyrinth and a strategic maze. In the Design and Engineering Academy, we had to memorize the different patterns of nature, like the spirals and whorls that communicate regeneration and connectivity, and tessellating shapes that stack and pack and communicate stability and organization. We were instructed to use these patterns in our own designs, and the lessons are ingrained in me. My mind won’t turn off. I can’t just see the cab as a cab or the bus as a bus. Instead, I see how they move, how they’re designed, how they could be improved.

My father would love this.

If he were here.

I wish that he were here.

I try to just watch the clouds, but even they make me think about energy and movement and space.

And physics exams.

And failure.

The Academy.

My mom talked to my dad. They talked about me. They talked about what they want for me.

I haven’t talked to my dad in three months. He won’t communicate with me to tell me why he left, why he’s not coming home. I can’t think of any other reason why he left so suddenly.

I don’t know how to fix this.

And then come the palpitations. They flutter inside my chest.

It’s happening again. The panic. The worry. The dizzying nausea. The caving in.

I go inside and crawl into my bed, try to breathe like they told me to at the hospital.

Deep breaths. Belly breaths, they said.

I try, but in my belly there’s this pit of regret and disgust and exhaustion, and breathing into it only makes it worse.

I should call someone.