Aaron is thorough in absenting himself from his sister’s life. When not with Saul in the study, he practices guitar in his room or, occasionally, goes to the park. Eliza isn’t invited on these outings. She initially mourns her exclusion, but her growing distance from Aaron allows her to observe more clearly his humble rung on the social acceptance ladder. The few times Eliza spots Aaron in the lunchroom, he is eating alone. When she secretly follows him to the park, she watches his attempts to join pickup basketball or soccer games with a combination of fascination and dread. If he is picked at all, it is reluctantly. Once during a basketball game the ball is slapped out of his arms so soundly that he falls sideways onto the pavement, his arm skidding against the asphalt. No one seems to hear him say foul. Eliza tells herself she is lucky to have learned the truth before her brother’s social standing rubbed off on her. The only really hard part is weathering her nightmares alone.
At a stoplight, Aaron looks over at Eliza. He tries to regard her objectively, the way he examined his chest, to determine if she looks intelligent, but she looks the same as always. He remembers what the smart girls looked like in his fifth-grade class: Denise Li and her purple plastic glasses frames, Jenny Howlitzer with her corny decal T-shirts. Eliza doesn’t look like those girls.
“Are you nervous?” he asks, neck craning toward the windshield, hands clawed onto the steering wheel.
“I don’t know,” she answers. “I wasn’t sure I’d be going until this morning.”
They’ve been stuck behind a truck for a while now, but Aaron won’t switch lanes even though Eliza’s checked a few times and it’s been completely safe. Underneath a cartoon picture of a grinning chicken wearing ear muffs and a scarf are the words “The Smart Frozzen Parts People,” and Eliza can’t help but think it’s a bad omen to be in such close proximity to such a stupid spelling error.
Aaron shakes his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you thought Dad knew about the bee and was ignoring it. I mean, Elly, he’s been waiting for something like this to happen ever since—”
Eliza knows he is about to say, “since you got skipped for TAG,” before he stops himself. After her father’s fateful visit to Parents’ Night, TAG became a word no one said in front of her, just as the word “puberty” became scarce when, by ninth grade, Aaron’s voice still hadn’t changed. When everything happened all at once for Aaron a year later, the p-word magically reintroduced itself into common parlance as if it had never been banished. TAG, however, has remained taboo. Aaron manages to switch to “since you started school” in time to think that Eliza hasn’t noticed, but Eliza hears “stupid” in her head as clearly as if her brother had spoken the word aloud.
Aaron is eight years old when he sees God. He is on a night flight home from his grandfather’s funeral, a man he never met while living. He has a window seat and has spent the entire flight staring at the tiny lights below which, intellectually, he knows correspond to buildings but which seem more like sequins on an endless black blanket. When the plane flies into a cloud, Aaron’s sense of unlimited span and distance disappears. His window is swathed in white. A pulsing red light emanates from the cloud’s whiteness. Aaron stares, awestruck. With each pulse of light the cloud is transformed into something magical. Aaron wonders if God lives in all clouds, or if his plane just happened to pick the right one. The experience is so intensely personal that it never occurs to Aaron to share it with anyone, thus extending his belief in an all-knowing, all-present God five years longer than if someone had had the opportunity to inform him he’d only witnessed the red blinker of the plane’s wing.
The spelling bee registrar’s face has a worn-out shoe leather softness to it specific to upper middle-aged women. She holds Eliza’s library card in her hands. “Eliza Naumann.” Her eyes scan her list. She crosses through Eliza’s name with a red pen. The soft folds of her neck remind Eliza of turtle skin. “Do you happen to have a picture ID?”
“A picture ID?”
The registrar’s glasses have slipped to the end of her nose, magnifying the age spots on her cheeks. One of them is shaped like Ohio. “You didn’t hear about Bucks County?”
Eliza shakes her head.
“A boy takes fifth place and it turns out he wasn’t even on the list. Turns out he lost his school bee but Mom wanted him to try again at the district. So I’m supposed to ask for a picture, but it’s okay if you don’t have one. What kind of little kid carries a picture ID? Besides, I can tell you belong.”
She winks. The air current created by her arm as she points Eliza in the direction of the auditorium smells of cigars and talcum powder.
The auditorium has cushy seats, a balcony, and a large stage concealed by a heavy purple curtain. Aaron chooses a seat toward the back, figuring it will be easier to make a quick exit without attracting notice. He expects they will be leaving early.
The bee contestants are split according to gender between two backstage dressing rooms. The girls’ has large mirrors along one cinder block wall, each mirror framed by light bulbs. A thick layer of dust has settled along each bulb, few of which are actually lit. One flickers like an amorous lightning bug.
A group of girls crowds around one mirror, mechanically brushing and rebrushing their bangs. One of the smaller girls seems to be praying. A few stand frozen as their mouths form strings of silent, hopeful letters. The only adult in the room is a badged bee chaperone. She sits ineffectually in the corner, splitting the silence at irregular intervals to remind the girls to pee.
Eliza is the only one not wearing a skirt or a dress. She sees word booklets and spelling lists from which girls are quizzing each other. She can’t believe she wasted the week waiting for her father’s nod when she could have been studying. She is suddenly grateful for Saul’s absence, realizes that having him here would have meant watching his face fold into disappointment on a larger scale than ever before.
When it is time for the bee to begin, the children are led onstage and told to take their seats according to their numbers. It’s a much bigger stage than the one in McKinley’s cafeteria, the first real stage Eliza has ever been on. She grasps her number tightly in her hands and gazes at the Times-Herald Spelling Bee banner for reassurance.
Children shuffle to their seats like convalescents who have hopelessly strayed from the hospital grounds and are waiting to be retrieved. A small boy in the back row quietly hyperventilates. Two rows up, a girl tears her cuticles with her teeth. Another energetically sucks her hair.
The curtain opens with a whoosh of heavy fabric, the creak of rusty pulleys, and isolated gasps from startled children. The impression of the audience as a wave about to crash over them is heightened by the sound of applause. One startled fifth grader cries out, “Mo-,” stopping himself before the incriminating final M, his gaffe mercifully concealed by the clapping. The same woman who moments ago had been exhorting Eliza and the others to urinate approaches the microphone. Her voice sounds like a soft-focus greeting card cover.
“Hello. I’m Katherine Rai and I’d like to welcome all of you here today to the Times-Herald District Spelling Bee.” More applause. “The spelling bee is a truly American tradition, one that encourages learning and greater familiarity with our language. Each young person sitting on this stage is a winner. Each is here because he or she has exhibited superior abilities and knowledge. Each is an example of the best and brightest in our area. We are not competing against each other today. This is not