Second to None

One

An isosceles triangle, on the other hand, has angles which are of the same length and the corners are from equidistant…

I had been staring for some time at the workbook in front of us. Me and my tutor. Me and Grant. Grant’s hand pointed out one geometrical figure after another—but his fingers were shaking, and, when I thought I would absolutely die from watching them tremble, I touched his index finger with the tip of my pen.

Are you all right? I asked.

Grant’s cheeks turned as red as the Target logo, and he looked out the window, studying the black-topped basketball court outside the library

I liked him.

Not liked him.

Just, well, maybe tolerated him is a better way to put it.

Yes, I tolerated Grant Crzanowski much more than one would expect—given that he was a geek. A nerd. A dork. A laser brain. Every school has them. You know—the guys in the Computer Club. The ones doing science projects. The ones who know what an isosceles triangle is without any coaching.

It hurt my pride that here I was a senior relying on a sophomore to help me do well on the SATs, but I never held that against Grant. Maybe because he never tried to make me feel stupid. That—the feeling stupid part—just came with the territory.

I have nothing against brains. You may think they’re idiots until senior year when they’re talking about University of this and of that—and you know that they have a future that’s opening up. Everyone else is just scraping by, thinking about the factory, a job at the mall, or the city colleges. Then you realize that all that brain-power is there for a reason. For these kids, high school was a bad dream that was going to be followed by a rosy morning. For the rest of us slugs, high school was it—the last best moment when nothing quite counts. Then you get a job, have kids, get old.  Don’t look at the stars—it’s not where you’re going—look at your parents and how they turned out.

I might not be a brain, I told myself, but I’m determined to get out of my neighborhood. I might be average, but I’m not going to be a loser.  I can’t sing, I can’t act, I’m not model pretty, I don’t blog and I don’t think I’d be very interesting on a reality show.

On that day in the library with Grant, I was a senior, a month and a half into the first semester. Sometimes it made me feel great—you know, freedom just around the corner, the prison walls about to tumble, throwing your weight around when it came to freshmen.

But sometimes it wasn’t the greatest. Sometimes, it scared me when I realized that there wasn’t anything out there waiting for me.

That was what Grant was for.

Grant is about a zillion times smarter than me and the rest of the planet. I’ve gotten used to having a lot of people be smarter than me, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

But I am more determined than most people, which gets me through.

Let’s keep talking about isosceles triangles, he said, pulling his hand back from the page.

He was nicer-looking than the average brain. He could have had a girlfriend, I guessed, if she was the sort of girl who was, well, whatever it is that dorks who join the Computer Club like.

An hour after school every Monday and Friday was what he volunteered for. He did Chess Club on Tuesday and Computer Club on Thursday.

Peer tutoring was supposed to help both of us, something about enrichment for him.

But really it was for me. I had screwed up big time on the PSATs, and I didn’t want the SATs to turn out the same way. There are seven city colleges in Chicago. I didn’t want to go to any of them, because none of them would get me out. If I screwed up again, I’d be consigned to a life as an administrative assistant to the assistant head of bookkeeping somewhere. I wanted University of Illinois—and, if I really let my imagination run away with me, Northwestern University. Then maybe I’d be somebody.

My grades were good, but I knew enough to know that good grades in a terrible school wouldn’t cut it—Chicago public schools are supposed to be the worst in the country.

After the PSAT disaster, I knew I needed extra help.

Do you want to talk about it? I asked, wondering what kind of problems someone like Grant could have. After all, his future was something that would expand, bigger and bigger, to include anything he wanted. What kind of problems could he have? Maybe girl problems. Maybe…nah. He probably spent all his nervous energy worrying about physics.

He shook his head quickly, ducking his head down toward the page of the workbook in a way that made his wavy black hair capture the lights from above. Okay, they might have been fluorescent library lights and his hair might have been cut just a little too short for my taste, but the point was that Grant certainly could have had a girl if he had wanted one.

If he could stop talking about computers and science projects and brainy stuff long enough he might actually get a girl. A weird girl, but a female nonetheless.  Unless maybe he liked guys and just didn’t admit it to himself. . .

We finished up real fast that particular day in October, giving up on the math section because I was getting it, really getting it, and some of our sessions were starting to repeat themselves.

I had to get home and change for Andy. It was Friday. Party time. Grant wanted to walk home with me, but I said forget it. I had had just about enough of isosceles triangles for one day. I might have been determined to get out of the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago, but that doesn’t mean I had to like the work I had to do to escape.

It was the last afternoon before everything went haywire. Hard to believe, but a couple of hours after I saw Grant, everything would be changed.

I’d still be seventeen, a senior at Harold Washington High School. I’d still have straight brown hair that exactly matched my eyes. I’d still be my mom’s daughter, but the difference is that I’d be my dad’s, too. I’d still think Grant Crzanowski was a brain, but the difference is…. Well, I’m not sure what you’d call the difference.

I had to think about what kind of people were around me. I had to think about who really loved me for me.

Just me.

Garnet Brown.

They were standing on the porch of our apartment building when I got there. Mom at the door, Dad on the steps. I’m not sure I had ever before seen them within five feet of each other. Not separated by lawyers either.

I knew it was my dad long before I turned the corner on Provident street. Because he didn’t belong. People in our neighborhood wear Sears clothes and drive cars that almost always have rust at the edges. They don’t wear mint green polo shirts and plaid pants.

He kept looking back at his car—it was a nice one but at the time I didn’t know what kind—as if he expected it to get stolen. I’d later find out it was a Jaguar, one of the most expensive kinds of car you can buy. He had a right to be worried, I guess.

But, still.

People from outside the city always think that they’re about to be robbed.

I had only seen my dad a few times, mostly in court.

But I recognized him anyway.

He has a family. A real family.

Two sons, one three years older than me and one four years younger. He has a wife that my mom used to call the Bitch under her breath when she was angry and thought I wasn’t listening. He also has a house in Lake Forest, which is a wealthy suburb on the Lake—I’d even seen the house a few times long ago when my mom got so angry that she wanted to park outside and look. Just look. You couldn’t have fit his house in our apartment building, it was so big.

I’m what happened when they had an affair.

My mom had thought he would get a divorce. My mom had thought he would marry her. This was a long time ago, when she was working for him as a secretary. Instead, she got fired.

She says she was young, too young. She’s not bitter anymore, but she was once—when she found out that she was pregnant and that he wasn’t going anywhere. Except back to his real family. Her parents were furious; people gave her grief. It’s a huge deal to some nosy people when a kid has no dad.

For years, she let herself be angry, even in front of me. Not angry at me; I think she very quickly decided she loved me and all that. But she stayed pretty angry at him. Then, somewhere along the line, she stopped even talking about him.

The only times I’ve seen my dad have been in court. Every few years, they’d go back—to fight about something new. Actually, it sounded like something old to me—always money. She told me that the first time, she had to get blood tests to prove I was his kid. He said I wasn’t. But the blood tests proved him wrong. I’m his kid all right.

And it would turn out that those blood tests were important. He would end up using them to claim me as his own daughter. When he needed me.

I walked right up to the porch, because there wasn’t anywhere else to go. Besides, I was curious about what he was doing in our neighborhood.

Hello, Garnet, you’ve certainly grown, my dad said, with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. He looked nervous and sad, and there were sweat rings on the underarms of his polo shirt even though it was a crisp fall afternoon. Grown into a beautiful young lady, he added.

I wondered how he would know whether I had grown or not. I could have been this tall forever for all he knew.

By the way, just so you know, I hate my name. It was picked by Mom when she was too young to know that garnets aren’t nearly as precious as rubies and diamonds and sapphires. She named me after a second-class jewel, even though she was trying to name me after something expensive, to give me cachet. Like how a lot of kids are named Tiffany, after the jewelry store, or Lauren, after Ralph Lauren the designer.

I didn’t know whether I should smile at him or look stern. My mom was standing right there