Rob and Laurel quickly fell in love on the moving bus. They stayed on board as long as they could, taking brief, seasonal jobs, showering at local YMCAs, and sometimes eating cold food out of cans. At first their life felt unconstrained, but after a while they couldn’t ignore the limitations of a bus existence, and they came to hate waking up in the morning with a corrugated cheek from sleeping against the emergency lever on a window, or a rash on a leg from a night’s adhesion to a vinyl seat. They wanted to have privacy, and love and sex, and a bathroom.
Life on the bus became unbearable, but regular life still seemed unbearable, too. Caught between a conventional life and an alternative one, Rob and Laurel came east and split the difference. The house in working-class Macopee, Massachusetts, bought with a little family money on Laurel’s side, became not dissimilar to a school bus. It remained underdecorated and slightly uncomfortable, and it seemed almost in motion, never fully grounded. There were bathrooms, though, and running water, and no parking tickets clustered on the window.
Rob unsuccessfully tried to get companies interested in his inventions again, and he did his painting jobs, and he and Laurel sold protein bars, and they had Greer, and eventually Laurel became an occasional library clown. Over the years, they struggled financially and in other ways, never getting a grip on the world, smoking much too much pot and letting the smell of the smoke wind through the house, though Greer kept her knowledge of all this a hazy, inchoate thing, the way children both perceive and don’t perceive their parents’ sex lives.
But it was more than that. She had the sense, itself as strong as a trail of smoke, that the life she had with her parents wasn’t normal, wasn’t right. But if she told anyone about it, if anyone really knew, that would have been worse. It wasn’t that she would be taken away by Child Protective Services; it wasn’t like that. But families were supposed to eat together, weren’t they? Parents were supposed to dole out food and ask questions like “How was your day?”
The Kadetskys had a kitchen table, though it was often spread with cases of protein bars and stacks of order sheets. Her parents weren’t “social,” they said, when she asked why they didn’t eat meals as a family very often. “Plus, you like to read while you eat,” her mother had said. Greer definitely remembered her saying it, but she wasn’t sure which had come first: that comment or the actual fact. In any case, from then on she did think she liked to read while she ate. The two acts became inextricable. Greer usually made dinner for everyone: nothing elaborate, usually chili or soup or chicken parts breaded with cornflakes. Her parents would wander in at some point, grab plates of food, and take them upstairs. Sometimes she could hear giggling. Primly she stood at the oven, her face heated from the blast. Finally she made a plate for herself and sat alone at the table, or cross-legged in her bed upstairs, a book propped up behind her plate.
All that reading took. It became as basic as any other need. To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life, the drafty, disorganized, lumbering bus of a house, the uninterested parents.
At night she stayed up in bed reading by a flashlight, its beam quickly dwindling. But even as the light bailed, Greer read until the very last minute, consuming a yellowing circle of stories and concepts that comforted and compelled her in her aloneness, which went on year after year.
It was the middle of fourth grade when the new boy showed up in school. She realized that she had seen him on her block over the weekend. Cory Pinto, a tall, skinny, lightly olive-skinned kid, had moved into the house diagonally across the street. Within a few days after he appeared in school, Greer understood that he was as intelligent as she was, though unlike her not at all afraid to speak up. The two of them outpaced all the other students in their class, who often seemed as though they had been blindfolded and spun around each day and then told to make their way through the curriculum.
In the past, whenever the class had been broken up into reading groups, Miss Berger could do little for Greer besides let her go off by herself into the top group, the Pumas. Or, more exactly, the Puma. But suddenly Cory was with her in the corner, and there were two Pumas now, a pair of them. A few yards away, they could hear Kristin Vells, a member of the lowly Koalas—an odd-looking animal weighed down by its thick pelt and chunky legs—sounding out a line in her red reader, Paths of Wonder. “Billy wan-ted to go to the ro . . . to the ro . . . ,” she tried.
“To the rodeo,” Nick Fuchs finally cut in with impatience. “Jeez, can’t you go any faster?”
There in the corner where Greer sat with the intense, too-tall new boy, they both had goldenrod-colored readers called Paths of Imagination open on their laps. “Book 5,” it read at the top in discreet Garamond font. The plots of the stories in Paths of Imagination were extraordinarily dull, and in this dullness Greer trained herself the way a soldier preps through deprivation, knowing that one day it might all be useful. Apparently Cory Pinto felt the same way, for he too tolerated and absorbed the true story of Taryn the Recycling Girl from Toledo, who by third grade had collected more bottles than any child ever had, getting into The Guinness Book of World Records and potentially saving the world.
Cory Pinto was still a novelty, being new, but he was more than that. His voice was strong, though not obnoxious, making itself known among the other boys’ voices, some of which were both strong and obnoxious, prompting Miss Berger to stand up at the front of the classroom a number of times and stare down at all the boys, sternly reminding them, “Use your inside voices!”
Greer only possessed an inside voice, no other. During breaks she sat on the floor under the whiteboard eating Pringles from a can with the other incredibly quiet girl in the class, Elise Bostwick, who had a dark, slightly troubling personality. “Do you ever think about poisoning our teacher?” Elise casually asked her one day.
“No,” Greer said.
“Yeah, neither do I,” said Elise.
But Cory, as skinny as anything, spoke up easily, and was popular and confident. What made it worse was that he barely ever seemed to be paying attention, and instead had a dreamy carelessness about him. Greer could see it when he stood at the bus stop on Woburn Road each morning. At age nine he resembled a thin, easygoing, quietly handsome scarecrow. She could even see it when he used the water fountain, the way he closed his eyes and articulated his mouth to anticipate the shape of the flowing water before he pressed the metal button.
Greer, in her little acrylic pressed shirts and with her Smurf pencil case, felt mowed down by him. He wasn’t only smart, he was also somehow joyous and independent. Again and again, because of their intelligence and their test scores, they were thrown together, but they never discussed anything at all unless they had to. She didn’t want to know him, and she didn’t want him to know her either. Or her family. Greer felt hotly ashamed of her parents, as well as their house. The Pinto house, however, was spare and clean, and their refrigerator door was a vertical leaf bed of Cory’s report cards and certificates and papers with gold stars, all of which Greer had seen because once, the month he’d moved in, she’d been assigned to work on an after-school project with him on Navajo customs.
She had entered his house that first time and taken note of how neat it was, and, more unhappily, the refrigerator shrine to Cory. “You’re like God around here,” she said to him.
“Don’t say that. My mom will get mad. She’s very religious.”