Octavia Boone's Big Questions About Life, the Universe, and Everything Read online

  Also it wasn’t clear to me what we’d do with Ray once we got her. Ray had changed.

  I read about this bush from West Africa that has little red berries that are called miracle berries because after you eat them, they make everything sour taste sweet. That’s what Ray was like, like she’d eaten miracle berries and now nothing was like the way it had been before. It was as if she was off in a whole new world, with lemons suddenly as sweet as maple sugar. And you could say, “Hey, those things are sour enough to shrivel your tongue,” over and over until you turned blue, but to her it didn’t taste like that, so she didn’t believe you.

  With Ray turned into a religious maniac and Boone practically living in his shed, I found that I really missed Priscilla. Which I know sounds dumb, but there are times in your life when you really need an understanding friend, even if it’s an invisible one with flippers. That doesn’t mean Andrew isn’t a great friend, because he is, but this was different.

  I kept thinking how nice it used to be when Priscilla slept in my bed, and how I used to imagine the two of us wearing matching pajamas, and how Priscilla was afraid of the dark but I didn’t mind asking for a night-light as long as it was for her. I used to tell her all my problems and my secrets, and she always knew just what I was talking about and she always agreed with me.

  In the future, Andrew says, there will be robots who do this for us.

  Then I thought about Ray’s weird new relationship with God. Maybe Ray had needed a Priscilla too, I thought. Maybe that’s what she was getting from the Redeemers: an invisible friend who always supported her and understood everything she had to say. Who wouldn’t want that? I thought.

  On the other hand, even though I wouldn’t ever admit it to anybody at the time, and I still don’t, I always knew, deep down, that Priscilla wasn’t real.

  At school in Winton Falls, everybody was beginning to obsess over the science fair. Even though it was still months away, we had to hand in our plans in advance, which I think was because of Mr. Clover Harrison still being mad about the cabbage.

  Polly Pelletier’s science-fair project was titled “The Chemistry of the Permanent Wave.” On a Monday, the day that her mother’s Creative Clip Shoppe was closed, Polly was going to try out different combinations of permanent chemicals on five of us and then put photographs of the results on a poster showing what it takes to make hair curly. I was Subject #3, and I knew I was going to give Polly a run for her money since my hair is straight as a board.

  Sara Boudreau was Subject #1. Polly and Sara’s friendship was back on track again, since all of a sudden they both showed up in class wearing purple leggings and purple plaid tops and purple headbands and gold-flecked purple nail polish.

  Jean-Claude Chevalier’s project was on crime-scene investigation. Jean-Claude is a fan of CSI. He was making blood-splatter patterns with his brother’s paintball gun.

  Aaron Pennebaker was making a model of the radioactive spider that turned Peter Parker into Spider-Man.

  Angelique Soulier was evaluating what kind of nutrients belong in the ideal hamster diet. Her name on her project was going to appear as Jennifer, because she thought it was time her family started getting used to the idea.

  Celeste Olavson was soaking chicken bones in vinegar and then tying them into knots, which was meant to show the importance of calcium in the diet and the future benefits of physical therapy.

  Nobody knew yet what Andrew was going to do because he still wouldn’t tell, and Ms. Hodges wouldn’t either, due to respecting confidentiality.

  And I still hadn’t made up my mind.

  Then I found out that there was a science fair at the Redeemers’ school too, because the next Sunday, when Ray forced me to go to class, even though I explained how the Constitution banned cruel and unusual punishment, which this was, and the Supreme Court would have backed me up, all the science projects were on display on tables in the lobby. Everybody in Mrs. Prescott’s class had an entry, except me and Ronnie, whose special academy does not do science fairs.

  It wasn’t like any science fair I’d ever seen, since the projects all had titles like “Evidence for Noah’s Flood” and “On the Sixth Day, God Created Horses” and “Apples: Botany in the Garden of Eden.” Under each title there was a quotation from the Bible.

  At the middle-grade level, Paul won first prize and Marjean got an honorable mention.

  Paul’s project was called “The Origin of Life,” and his Bible quotation was “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven” (Genesis 1:20).

  What Paul did was put all the ingredients of life in a mason jar. He crushed a charcoal briquette for carbon and ground up a multivitamin pill for minerals and nutrients, and then he mixed it all up with boiled water. Then he left the jar on his bedroom windowsill in the sun for two months. Then he looked at the water under a microscope to see if any life had developed, and it hadn’t. His conclusion was that life could only appear if there is a miraculous intervention by God.

  The jar was there, full of gray muddy water, and Paul had a microscope set up so that you could look and see that there was nothing alive in it.

  Marjean’s project was called “Adam’s Help Meet: A Woman’s Place,” and her Bible quotation was “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God” (I Corinthians 11:3). Her exhibit was a poster showing how God designed women to be housewives and mothers. She had pictures of pelvises, showing how women’s are different from men’s and specially suited for carrying babies, and a chart showing how women aren’t as good as men at math and science, which proves that God didn’t give them the sort of logical minds that would allow them to do either, and a graph showing how women don’t make as much money as men in the workplace, which proves that God doesn’t want them to work outside the home. She also had a lot of cassette tapes of interviews with women who had quit jobs, and all of them said they were much happier now that they were where God wanted them to be.

  I thought they were pretty lousy experiments.

  I looked around for Ray, because no matter what kind of revelation Ray had had, I knew she wouldn’t agree about women being Adam’s Help Meet. All the time I’d been growing up, she’d always been telling me that I could do anything if I set my mind to it and not to ever let anybody make me believe that I couldn’t. Ray was in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. Back when she was in college, she marched in parades and burned her bra. But Ray wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  And it was right then that I got my brilliant idea for the school science fair. I realized that if I could convince Ray through science that the Redeemers were all wrong, she’d have to stop believing and snap back to how she was before. And I’d thought of a way of getting incontrovertible proof. If I believed in revelations, I would have said that I’d had a revelation, except that would have meant that God was showing me how to prove that there is no God.

  This was my hypothesis: If there is a God, prayer must work.

  Here are some of the things different people say prayer cures: high blood pressure, heart attacks, tumors, and ulcers. They also claim that prayer keeps bacteria from growing, which helps people fight off infections. It makes wounds heal faster, and it boosts people out of depression and keeps them from committing suicide. On the other hand, a scientist named Sir Francis Galton, who lived in the nineteenth century and invented a lot of stuff like fingerprinting and the dog whistle, said that he had evidence that prayer didn’t work at all. Galton said that in spite of everybody in England constantly saying “God save the king!” or “God save the queen!” which made the king and queen the most prayed-for people in the country, kings and queens didn’t live any longer than anybody else. Some of them even ended up with their heads chopped off.

  So here’s what I decided to pray for: beans. I thought that was a nice touch, seeing as Boone’
s pal Henry David Thoreau was always growing beans in his garden at Walden Pond.

  I decided to plant eight pots of beans and treat them all exactly alike, except that I’d pray for four of them, asking God to make them grow enormous like the magic beans in Jack and the Beanstalk. The other four, I’d spiritually ignore. I figured that if all my beans turned out pretty much the same, that would show that prayer didn’t make any difference. And if prayer didn’t make any difference, that would be absolute scientific proof that there wasn’t any God. With scientific proof right there in front of her, Ray would have to give up the Redeemers and be normal again.

  And it would answer the biggest of my big questions too.

  My O words for that day were Outmaneuver, Outwit, and Outsmart. Because that’s what I was so sure that I’d be able to do.

  HERE IS WHAT I FOUND in December, written by Mrs. Prescott on the board:

  Thus saith the Lord: Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

  — JEREMIAH 10:2–4

  By now I could pretty much figure out where this was heading without any help from Marjean, but Marjean translated anyway.

  “It’s about Christmas,” Marjean said. She was wearing her black cardigan, a long green wool skirt, and lumpy lace-up shoes that looked like combat boots.

  She was going to say more, but I got there first.

  “It’s a pagan holiday and you don’t celebrate it,” I said, which made Marjean look crushed, but I didn’t care.

  By then, Ray was beginning to seem as alien as Andrew’s intelligent jellyfish. It’s one thing to give up Halloween, I thought, but how could anybody chuck Christmas? I thought of what a beautiful word Christmas was, like stained-glass windows and tinsel, and how Ray had always loved everything about it.

  “There’s nothing in the Bible that says December twenty-fifth has anything to do with the birth of our Lord,” Marjean said.

  Shut up, Margarine, I thought.

  I couldn’t believe Ray would give up Christmas. And I wasn’t thinking about the presents either, not that those aren’t fun and that there weren’t a few things I wanted. I meant all our family things. Every family has them, no matter what holidays you celebrate: Christmas or Kwanzaa or Hanukkah, or something else that I haven’t heard of. Andrew says that his parents are always threatening to celebrate Festivus, which is for people who are minimalists and don’t like Christmas at all, so instead of a Christmas tree, they put up a plain pole in a bucket. But it never happens, because Andrew’s mother is a sucker for Christmas. She bakes these cookies called moon pies and hangs lights on everything and puts red feng shui ribbons all over their Christmas tree.

  Here’s what Boone and Ray and I always do. We make gingerbread men and chocolate-covered orange peel, and Boone bakes a special Christmas cake with flattened-out gumdrops on it in the shape of a poinsettia or a star. We get our tree from Chevalier’s Christmas Tree Farm — not Jean-Claude’s farm, but his uncle Al’s — and we cut it down ourselves and bring it home on top of the car, and Boone always says that it’s too tall and will never fit in the house unless we cut a hole in the ceiling, but it always does and we never have to. Then we make paper chains and popcorn and cranberry strings to put on it, and we all have special ornaments. Ray has some from when she was a little girl: a Santa Claus and an angel with a gold halo and a sled with red letters on it that says RAY.

  Boone reads all our Christmas books out loud every year on Christmas Eve, even though I’ve gotten way too old for some of them — How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol — and then late at night, like midnight, we bundle up and go for a night walk, all three of us, and every year Boone says that he hears reindeer hooves and the bells of Santa’s sleigh.

  “Shhh!” Boone says, and he holds up his hand, and then I play along and say that I hear hooves and bells too.

  Then Ray starts to sing. She sings “O Holy Night,” which is her favorite Christmas carol, and then Boone sings something called “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” which he claims is his.

  “Mrs. Prescott is going to ask us to promise that we won’t give in to the materialism of secular Christmas,” Marjean said.

  I thought that Marjean didn’t know what she was talking about. I bet that she and Bud and Grover had never been taken for a night walk on Christmas Eve. I bet she and Bud and Grover wouldn’t know a Christmas tradition if it bit them in the rear end.

  “Your mom will be here with us because she’s found God’s grace,” Marjean said. “I feel sorry for you and your dad.”

  Right then everything inside me just exploded. I felt like the Redeemers had taken those Christmas Eve walks that I always thought were so beautiful and holy and made them shallow and selfish and wrong.

  “JUST SHUT UP!” I screamed, and I jumped out of my chair and grabbed Marjean with both hands by those long braids and tried to yank them right out of her head. Marjean shrieked at the top of her lungs and tried to kick me with her combat boots, but I wouldn’t let go.

  I was sort of hysterical.

  It took Mrs. Prescott and Ronnie and Paul and the teacher from the eighth-grade room across the hall to pry us apart. Then Mrs. Prescott took Marjean, who was sobbing and clutching the top of her head, to the ladies’ room, and I was sent to sit in the hall to wait for Ray.

  I hoped I’d given Marjean a concussion or snatched her bald.

  I hoped I’d disgraced Ray so much that the Redeemers would throw her out and never let her come back.

  But they didn’t.

  The next thing that happened was that we had a family talk. That’s what Ray called it, but by that time it was less of a talk than an announcement.

  HERE’S WHAT I THINK: people should not do irrevocable painful things on holidays. Because then the holidays are never just holidays anymore. From then on they’re also anniversaries of awful events. Like for Boone and me, Halloween is now the anniversary of when we first realized that Ray had turned away from us. And now, as long as I live, even when I’m grown up with kids of my own, even when I’m old, I won’t be able to think about Christmas the way I did once, when I was really young. For me, it will always be an anniversary.

  We were all sitting in the living room, Boone and me on the blue plaid couch, the one about which Boone had said that he’d rather sit alone on a pumpkin, and Ray in the matching blue plaid easy chair. Outside it was snowing. What people called spitting snow. Just a few flakes every now and then falling down from a thick steel-colored sky. Everything was cold and gray. Nobody much was out except a couple of little kids down the street who were trying to make a snowman, but the snow didn’t stick together very well, so then they just started chasing each other around. Everybody else was inside staying close to their woodstoves. The birds at the bird feeder were just sitting there with their feathers all fluffed up, trying to keep warm.

  “I want you to know that this is really hard for me,” Ray said.

  Boone didn’t say anything. I felt cold all the way through to my bones.

  Ray took a deep breath and turned toward me.

  “I’ve already talked to your father about this, Octavia,” she said. “I’m giving up my law practice. I’ve already told them at the office, and they’ve been very understanding. I’ll be leaving as of the first of the year.”

  Ray started twisting her hair, so I knew there was more.

  Then she said, all in a rush, “And I’m moving over to Wolverton, where I’m going to share a house with a couple of friends. I signed the lease early last week.”

  Boone looked shocked, like this was new to him too.

  I felt like somebody had stabbed me in the stomach with an icicle.

  “What friends?” I sai
d. My voice sounded funny, like it was making words out of wires. “From the Redeemers?”

  “Yes,” Ray said. “I’ve made a commitment to the Redeemers. I’ll be doing legal work for the church and helping with fund-raising campaigns. Eventually I’ll be teaching. I think it’s going to be a way of helping other people, and of helping myself at the same time.”

  I thought about my beans.

  I’d planted them and they were sitting in a row on my bedroom windowsill, so far looking pretty much alike. They all had tiny little curved sprouts that looked like somebody had buried a pale-green paper clip.

  I’d expanded the experiment by giving Mr. and Mrs. Peacock and Andrew Wochak’s parents eight pots of beans too. Andrew’s father, who was a Buddhist, was meditating for four of their beans, and Andrew’s mother had tied red ribbons around the pots and was subjecting them to protective feng shui. Mrs. Peacock was offering Baptist prayers for four of their beans, but Mr. Peacock wasn’t, since he said he wasn’t about to hassle the Almighty over some tomfool vegetable.

  What if I’m wrong? I thought. What if the prayed-for beans grow like maniacs and the not-prayed-for beans stay pitiful stunted twigs?

  “You might have given us a chance to talk before just dropping it on me like this,” Boone said.

  “I’ve tried,” Ray said. She had started to cry. Tears welled up behind her horn-rimmed glasses and rolled down her cheeks. “I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks. But you wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Ray, this is all a mistake,” Boone said. He didn’t sound angry, just sad. He talked soft and quiet, like people do when they’re talking to an animal that’s spooked and might take off running at any minute. “Why don’t you give it a little more time? Why don’t we go away for a weekend somewhere and talk? We can work this out. You know I love you.”