The Darlings in Love Page 6

  “Hi!” she practically chirped.

  “Hey,” said Emily. “Mom just told me you’re off to do that farm-to-table community service thing, and I realized I totally spaced on asking how the first meeting went.” Before Victoria could answer, Emily added, “Your students will be happy to hear I eschewed the french fries in the dining hall and had soup made from locally grown squash for lunch!”

  “I’ll be sure and pass your story on to the junk food–obsessed children of New York City,” promised Victoria, surveying the crowded sidewalk for Jack.

  “Please do,” said Emily. “So tell me everything. How’d it go? Are you psyched to go back?”

  Jack pushed open the front door and stood for a minute, scanning the groups of students massed on the steps and sidewalk. Instead of answering her sister, Victoria waved to him. He smiled, waved back, then stopped to talk to a guy in their bio class who called him over.

  “Hello?” asked Emily irritably.

  “Sorry,” said Victoria, focusing back on the conversation. “What was your question?”

  “The moment’s passed,” said Emily. “What’s up in general?”

  “Wellll…” Victoria smiled wickedly. “Who’s spending the afternoon listening to a really cool band’s recording session in Chelsea?”

  “Um, someone other than you?” offered Emily.

  “Nope. Try again.”

  “I’m lost. Mom just told me you were cooking with those kids.” Emily rarely sounded confused, but she was clearly confused now.

  “My boyfriend invited me to go hear his friends who are in a band record their new CD.” The words tumbled breathlessly out of her. “And Georgia and Maeve said they’d totally cover for me.”

  “Wait, you’re bailing on the kids and you’re dumping the work on your friends? How uncool is that?” asked Emily.

  Since they’d been getting along better, Victoria had forgotten how annoying her older sister could be, but this conversation was definitely reminding her. “God, Emily, you sound like Mom sometimes, you know that?”

  “And you sound like one of those girls who never utters a sentence without the words ‘my boyfriend’ in it.”

  “I am not one of those girls.”

  Emily made her voice high and girlish. “My boyfriend’s in a band. My boyfriend invited me to hear him record. Do I like that? I don’t know. Let me go ask my boyfriend.”

  “I do not sound like that.” No one could make Victoria’s blood boil like her sister.

  “How do you know what you sound like?” Emily demanded.

  “You think you don’t sound that way when you have a boyfriend?” Victoria made her voice as breathy as Emily’s had been. “Oh, I just loooove foreign films now that I’m going out with James. Oh, did I say foreign films? I meant the World Cup. Oh, did I say James? I meant Bill.”

  “You’re hilarious,” said Emily, not laughing. “And let me just point out that even if I happened to date some guys who introduced me to new things, I did not drop all of my responsibilities the second they offered me a Scooby snack.”

  “I am not dropping all of my responsibilities, and an afternoon with Jack is not a Scooby snack!”

  Emily snorted.

  Jack finished his conversation, high-fived his friend, and jumped down the steps, making his way toward Victoria. His cheeks were flushed from the cold, and he looked even more adorable than usual. When he got to where she was standing, he gave a low bow.

  “Madam,” he said. “Your chariot awaits.”

  “I gotta go,” Victoria said into the phone.

  “Yeah, I’m sure you do,” said Emily.

  As she hit end call, Victoria took a second to wonder if it counted as hanging up on someone if the person had simultaneously hung up on you. Then Jack cocked his head, slipped his arm around Victoria’s waist, and squinted at her. “You know I don’t really have a chariot, right?”

  She shrugged, put her arm around his waist, and grinned back at him. “I figured as much.”

  He kissed her lightly on the top of her head, and they turned south, toward the subway. Still keeping her arm around Jack, she dropped her phone into her bag and, with it, put away all thoughts of Emily and their conversation.

  NATALYA WAS NORMALLY glad to have a double period of Bio, but Friday she had trouble focusing on what Dr. Clover was lecturing about. She was fuzzy. Distracted. She’d felt this way ever since her chess game on Wednesday night. This morning she’d stood in front of her closet for several minutes trying to decide what to wear, before remembering that Gainsford had a uniform, one she’d been wearing every day for the past six months. So what to wear wasn’t exactly a choice.

  u r 2 good 4 me!

  That was what Colin had written after she’d beaten him. u r 2 good 4 me!

  Was it a compliment? Did he mean he didn’t want to play chess with her again? Should she have tried to play less well so he could beat her? She twisted her pearl necklace around her index finger. It was almost like there were two chess games being played—the one with their pieces on the board, and the one with their sentences on the screen. She’d won the first one, but she’d spent the rest of the night and all day yesterday and today turning his sentence over and over in her mind, a little afraid it was just another way of saying checkmate. The fact that she hadn’t heard from him since they’d played only served to convince her that her fears were well-founded, not paranoid.

  She glanced down at her phone, which she had taken to holding on her lap, but of course if there’d been a new text, she would have felt it buzz. She shook her head, impatient with her phone and herself. She had to stop. More than forty minutes of the double period had passed, and she had barely any sense of what they were studying. Dropping her necklace, she turned the phone to silent, then put her left hand on the lab table, like touching the cool stone surface would keep her anchored in the present.

  Dr. Clover, all four and a half feet of her, stood at the board, using a piece of chalk in its metal holder to point at a dizzying array of lower- and uppercase R’s, G’s, P’s, and W ’s, linked one to the other with arrows, lines, and brackets. At various spots on the board, the letters were interspersed with phrases (“truebreeding,” “contrasting traits,” “tall v. dwarf ”) and individual words (“hybrid,” “recessive”).

  “As I’ve explained,” Dr. Clover concluded, “if you cross two heterozygous plants, one-third will be homozygous recessive, one-third will be homozygous dominant, and one-third will be heterozygous. That is why recessive genes can resurface even several generations later. In other words, it explains why two brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child. In theory, those parents could each have one gene for blue eyes inherited from their parents, the child’s grandparents. If they had three children, one could be homozygous brown-eyed, with two brown genes, one could be heterozygous brown-eyed, with one blue gene and one brown gene, and one could be homozygous blue-eyed.” She wrote a frantic combination of capital and lowercase Bs as she spoke.

  Natalya copied down homozygous blue-eyed as a quiet groan from her lab partner made her turn her head. Catching Natalya’s glance, Jordan rolled her eyes. She reached out her arm and wrote on the corner of Natalya’s paper, I GIVE UP. Natalya laughed, then wrote, COPY MINE, and slid her notebook over to Jordan just as Dr. Clover lowered the lights and pulled a white screen down over the board. Then she turned on her computer and projected a dozen Punnett squares onto the screen. Above them were the words “Mendel’s Peas.”

  These must have been reproductions of Gregor Mendel’s original experiments, scientific proof of the principles of reproduction that one man had discovered more than a hundred years before Natalya was born. Natalya squinted at the images, feeling a sense of calm descend upon her—something she hadn’t felt since before she’d seen Colin in Washington Square Park last week. She watched recessive genes hide behind dominant ones for generations, then reemerge when they met up with the same recessive trait. The diagrams were as predictable and orderl
y as a chessboard on which a game was about to begin. She could have studied them forever.

  “Now, who can tell me what’s wrong with Mendel’s experiment?” asked Dr. Clover.

  There was silence in the room. Natalya stared harder at the screen in front of her. If Ms. MacFadden’s questions made her want to disappear, Dr. Clover’s made something in Natalya’s chest rise up with excitement, like each query she put to the class was a direct challenge to Natalya, one she was desperate to meet.

  Still, Natalya couldn’t find anything wrong with these experiments. Mendel’s work was beautiful. It was perfect.

  The silence grew. Though everyone was looking at the front of the room, Natalya sensed that all eyes were somehow on her, as if the class was holding its collective breath, waiting for her to answer Dr. Clover’s question.

  “Anyone?” Was it her imagination or did Dr. Clover’s eyes linger on Natalya a bit longer than they did on anyone else.

  A hand went up at the front of the room, and Dr. Clover called on Alison Jones. Alison was the only girl in the grade besides Natalya who didn’t hate biology, and once, when both their lab partners had coincidentally been absent, they’d partnered. Natalya had been impressed by how much Alison knew about evolutionary biology, by how comfortably she’d used the microscope (unlike most of the other kids in the class, who didn’t understand that you were supposed to look into it normally, not scrunch up your entire face and mash your eyes against the top). Alison had explained that her mom was a microbiologist and that she’d practically grown up in her lab looking at slides.

  “Yes, Alison?” said Dr. Clover. Natalya felt a small slap of disappointment that Alison was able to answer the question when she wasn’t. “There’s nothing wrong with the experiments, Dr. Clover,” said Alison confidently. “They’re perfect.”

  Now Natalya was doubly annoyed with herself. She’d thought the experiments were perfect too, only she hadn’t wanted to say that when Dr. Clover had clearly been saying the experiments weren’t perfect. But apparently Dr. Clover hadn’t been saying that. Natalya felt a tiny bit of her irritation with herself spill over and become irritation with Dr. Clover for asking what had turned out to be a trick question—and with Alison for being able to answer it.

  “Yes,” agreed Dr. Clover, nodding at the image as if seeing it anew. “They are perfect.” She swiveled her head around to look back at the class. “Anyone else?”

  And suddenly, as if it had been telepathically communicated from Dr. Clover’s brain to hers, Natalya knew the answer. Her hand shot into the air so fast she thought she heard something in her shoulder pop.

  “Natalya?”

  “They’re too perfect!” Natalya said. “Exactly one-third of the offspring are heterozygous, one-third are homozygous recessive, one-third are homozygous dominant. He has one-hundred-percent accuracy. That’s impossible in a scientific experiment.” Natalya’s heart pounded with joy at her discovery.

  Dr. Clover seemed to have a rule against smiling, but Natalya thought she saw the slightest gleam of pleasure in her teacher’s face as she said, “That is correct, Natalya.” Flipping on the lights, Dr. Clover added, “An interesting footnote in the history of genetics is that it is generally believed that once Mendel discovered the general principles of inheritance, he either fudged some of his results or suppressed data that contradicted his theories.” Dr. Clover leaned on her podium and looked out at the class. “Biology, like life itself, is many impressive things. But it is never perfect.”

  Right at that second the bell rang, and though Dr. Clover did not seem impressed by the excellence of her timing, the class sat silently for a moment, something that never happened with the last period of the week. It took Dr. Clover’s breaking the spell of her own words to snap the students back to an awareness of the fact that school was over until Monday. “Read chapter eight in the textbook, do questions one through four on page two twenty-five. Type your answers, please.” And with that, she pivoted on one foot and left the room.

  “Oh my god, you’re a genius,” said Jordan, sliding Natalya’s notebook across the table to her.

  Natalya wanted to hug Jordan. She wanted to hug Dr. Clover. But instead, she said simply, “You should see me in English class.”

  Jordan rolled her eyes at Natalya’s modesty as Alison came over to their table.

  “Nice!” She high-fived Natalya. “I totally thought I had that one.” Natalya was impressed that Alison didn’t seem to mind Natalya’s getting the question right.

  “I thought you had it too,” admitted Natalya, shoving her textbook and notebook into her bag.

  Jordan shook her head, amazed. “How am I—Miss Faints-at-the-Sight-of-Blood—friends with the biggest bio geeks in the universe?”

  Alison shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess.” She and Natalya shared a conspiratorial grin as the girls headed into the hallway.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re crushed out on Clover too, okay? I can handle anything but that,” said Jordan. It was an ongoing joke that Natalya actually liked Dr. Clover, the most universally loathed and feared teacher at Gainsford.

  “You know,” said Alison, cocking her head to the side, “I think she’s kind of growing on me.”

  Jordan groaned as Natalya and Alison laughed. “You’re killing me.” She turned to Natalya. “You coming to the game on Saturday?”

  “I can’t; I’ve got plans.” Natalya, Victoria, and Jane were meeting at Act Two, their favorite vintage clothing store, to buy fabulous dresses to wear to the art opening at Barnard.

  “Bummer,” said Jordan.

  “Speaking of plans!” Alison snapped her fingers. “What’s your e-mail? I’ve been meaning to send you an invitation to my birthday party.”

  “Really? Thanks!” Natalya was surprised. She’d known she and Alison were have-lunch-and-study-together-sometimesbecause-we’re-both-friends-with-Jordan friends. But she hadn’t thought they were invite-each-other-to-your-birthday-party friends.

  It was nice to stroll through the emptying building with Alison and Jordan. Even if the three of them weren’t friends the way the Darlings were, they were still friends, and Alison’s invitation was like a tiny promise that they were about to become better friends. When Alison and Jordan peeled off to go to soccer practice, Natalya got the sense that they were honestly bummed they wouldn’t see her at Saturday’s game. She wondered, if they hadn’t had to play soccer, would they have wanted to come to Act Two with her, Jane, and Victoria?

  Something told her they would have.

  As Natalya made her way to the front door, she thought about Alison’s party. The day she and Jordan had gone over to Alison’s, the three girls had been driven in a town car by a chauffeur who called Alison Miss Jones. Alison hadn’t been snobbish about it, but she hadn’t seemed to find the experience weird or remarkable either. Which meant that her birthday party was pretty much guaranteed to be way more fabulous than the birthday parties Natalya’s friends at her old school had thrown, the ones where everyone had gone bowling or to Chuck E. Cheese.

  She’d have to get Alison a present. The thought made Natalya bite her lip nervously. What could she possibly get for Alison that Alison couldn’t afford to get for herself?

  She took out her phone to call Victoria and Jane. One of them would definitely have an idea.

  But when she opened her cell, there was a text waiting for her that made her forget all about Alison’s gift.

  i m ready 4 a rematch if u r. in person? wash sq park, tmrw, 12:00. b there or b square. colin.

  Square. Square. Natalya saw the Punnett squares Dr. Clover had drawn on the board, again heard her biology teacher speak her final words of the day’s lesson. Words that Colin’s text had just proven to be one hundred percent wrong.

  Racing to the front door of the building so she could tell Jane and Victoria this latest development, Natalya laughed out loud at her imagined correction of Dr. Clover.

  Maybe biology isn’t perfect, Dr. Clover.


  But my life definitely is.

  FRIDAY AFTER SCHOOL, as Jane pushed open the door to her apartment, she could hear her mother talking. At first she thought maybe her mom was on the phone, but then she heard her say, “Would you like another glass?” and her heart sank. You didn’t invite people you were on the phone with to have another glass of wine.

  Richard was there.

  “Hello!” her mother called, her voice cheerful. “Is that you, honey?”

  “Yes, Mom,” Jane answered, thinking, Who else would it be?

  She stepped into the living room. Her mother and Richard were sitting on the sofa, each holding a wineglass. She and her mom were supposed to be going to an eight o’clock showing of Auntie Mame at the Film Forum. Had her mother forgotten and made a plan with her beloved Richard?

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Richard.”

  Richard smiled, said nothing, and gave an awkward wave.

  “Hi, sweetheart!” Her mother’s words tumbled out in a nervous rush. “Richard’s plans got canceled, and so I invited him over for a drink.”

  Of course you did.

  Jane shrugged. “Okay.” Just because she and her mom had plans later didn’t mean her mother couldn’t have a drink with Richard now.

  Her mother was perched on the edge of the sofa, not speaking, still looking up at Jane with the weird, nervous expression that she always seemed to have when Richard was around.

  Finally Jane said, “Um, I guess I’ll get some homework done until it’s time to go.” She actually didn’t have that much work due Monday, but Mark had reserved the black box for rehearsal Tuesday afternoon, and he’d asked Simon and Natalya if they thought they could be off book by then. That meant a ton of dialogue to memorize. She’d been planning to ask her mother to run lines with her before the movie, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen.