I looked up from my spot in the beanbag chair by the Junior section.
“I know, I know,” my mother said, lowering her voice, glancing my way, “but maybe, you know, someone else—”
“Mine is fixated on the money.”
“Oh God.”
“…already planning how to finance college.”
They both laughed.
“You think we could rig it?” my mother said, which made them laugh again.
“Oh well, Mrs. Lombard,” Dolly sang out.
“It’s in the Lord’s hands, I guess,” my mother said.
Maybe I had heard most all of their conversation and maybe I hadn’t but whatever drift I’d gotten made me understand that my mother, who was not religious, who for some reason had invoked Jesus, was talking about me.
In those weeks before the bee I was only happy in school, when Mrs. Kraselnik said to all of us, but looking at me, that she’d never had a group of students who were so enthusiastic about geography. She’d never seen all of her boys and girls working so hard together to learn such interesting facts and to master map reading. In her book, she said, we were all winners, even though Amanda and I, and maybe Max Peterson and Derek Casper, were clearly in a realm apart from our classmates. Sometimes, though, in the middle of thinking and working, in the middle of eating or brushing my teeth, Gloria’s absurd question rang out: Do you understand that it can be harder to be the winner?
I’d chew briskly. I’d brush with more vigor. If Gloria ever had a real baby, I felt sorry for it already.
The night of the competition we were lined up on stage in the gym, all twenty-seven of Mrs. Kraselnik’s champions. I was wearing a French brushed cotton blue-and-white-striped dress with a yoke, which Gloria had found in a resale shop, white tights, and blue ballet flats. My clean straight hair was without tangles in the customary pageboy. For the occasion Amanda had decided on navy pants and a red blazer, a jacket a businesswoman, a banker, would wear. She had nylon stockings under her pants, and black pumps with a slight heel. Nowhere in evidence was the girl who wanted to eat her crackers like a beaver. She stood next to me with her hands folded behind her back, and she stared far past the audience, the EXIT sign apparently her portal to knowledge. I remembered right then that I should put good in the world, a generosity that surely would ricochet back to me. And so I said to that weirdly dressed girl, my cousin, I said, “Good luck, Amanda.” That moment was something no one knew about but the two of us, a secret, the virtue of Mary Frances, a point on the scorecard.
I looked out to the audience, to the way the spectators had arranged themselves, as if there were the bride’s section and the groom’s section. Sherwood and Dolly and Adam were on one side of the gym, and my mother and father and William and Gloria were on the other. Everyone in their proper places, waiting for the action to begin. Even before Derek Casper was eliminated, before it was just the two of us, Amanda and I, goodness must have been working its wayward logic in my mind, winding itself up of its own accord. Goodness waiting to pop up again, the cheery clown, goodness bobbling helplessly.
Many of our classmates were serious and well prepared and it therefore took an hour for everyone else to go down. Sherwood always blinked in that thoughtful way of his when Mrs. Kraselnik asked the question, Sherwood thinking, thinking, weighing his own answer. You felt he was on the side of each contestant in the freighted moment. Adam was playing his very own new Game Boy, a forbidden item for us. Dolly also had a new haircut, her hair spun into a glossy black bubble. She had taken so much trouble with her hair but nothing she could do would ever make her beautiful. I didn’t want anyone in the world to be ugly—what if you were ugly?—and yet ugliness for some reason had to exist. Someone had to do the job of carrying it.
When Derek Casper was finally out we arranged ourselves, Amanda and I, on either side of Mrs. Kraselnik.
“Well, here we are,” she said. “Amanda. Mary Frances.”
I looked at Amanda, her shoulders pinched back, her hands clasped by her rear, her long gaze past the audience. She didn’t seem to be aware that I was on the stage with her. It was as if she were already the ambassador to Egypt, so that I both wanted to laugh and also was slightly unnerved.
“Which state,” Mrs. Kraselnik asked Amanda, “has a climate suitable for growing citrus fruits—California or Maine?”
That was so easy it was not in any way funny. “Cali-FONia,” Amanda snapped.