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TWO
THE FEAR HAD MOSTLY SWEATED OUT OF ME, but as I walked from the cafeteria to history class, I couldn't stop myself from taking out my phone and rereading the horror story that is the "Human Microbiota" Wikipedia article. I was reading and walking when I heard my mother shout at me through her open classroom door. She was seated behind her metal desk, leaning over a book. Mom was a math teacher, but reading was her great love.
"No phones in the hallway, Aza!" I put my phone away and went into her classroom. There were four minutes remaining in my lunch period, which was the perfect length for a Mom conversation. She looked up and must've seen something in my eyes. "You okay?"
"Yeah," I said.
"You're not anxious?" she asked. At some point, Dr. Singh had told Mom not to ask if I was feeling anxious, so she'd stopped phrasing it as a direct question.
"I'm fine."
"You've been taking your meds," she said. Again, not a direct question.
"Yeah," I said, which was broadly true. I'd had a bit of a crack-up my freshman year, after which I was prescribed a circular white pill to be taken once daily. I took it, on average, maybe thrice weekly.
"You look . . ." Sweaty, is what I knew she meant.
"Who decides when the bells ring?" I asked. "Like, the school bells?"
"You know what, I have no idea. I suppose that's decided by someone on the superintendent's staff."
"Like, why are lunch periods thirty-seven minutes long instead of fifty? Or twenty-two? Or whatever?"
"Your brain seems like a very intense place," Mom answered.
"It's just weird, how this is decided by someone I don't know and then I have to live by it. Like, I live on someone else's schedule. And I've never even met them."
"Yes, well, in that respect and many others, American high schools do rather resemble prisons."
My eyes widened. "Oh my God, Mom, you're so right. The metal detectors. The cinder-block walls."
"They're both overcrowded and underfunded," Mom said. "And both have bells that ring to tell you when to move."
"And you don't get to choose when you eat lunch," I said. "And prisons have power-thirsty, corrupt guards, just like schools have teachers."
She shot me a look, but then started laughing. "You headed straight home after school?"
"Yeah, then I gotta take Daisy to work."
Mom nodded. "Sometimes I miss you being a little kid, but then I remember Chuck E. Cheese."
"She's just trying to save money for college."
My mom glanced back down at her book. "You know, if we lived in Europe, college wouldn't cost much." I braced myself for Mom's cost-of-college rant. "There are free universities in Brazil. Most of Europe. China. But here they want to charge you twenty-five thousand dollars a year, for in-state tuition. I just finished paying off my loans a few years ago, and soon we'll have to take out ones for you."
"I'm only a junior. I've got plenty of time to win the lottery. And if that doesn't work out, I'll just pay for school by selling meth."
She smiled wanly. Mom really worried about paying for me to go to school. "You sure you're okay?" she asked.
I nodded as the bell sounded from on high, sending me to history.
--
By the time I made it to my car after school, Daisy was already in the passenger seat. She'd changed out of the stained shirt she'd been wearing into her red Chuck E. Cheese polo, and was sitting with her backpack in her lap, drinking a container of school milk. Daisy was the only person I'd trusted with a key to Harold. Mom didn't even have her own Harold key, but Daisy did.
"Please do not drink non-clear liquids in Harold," I told her.
"Milk is a clear liquid," she said.
