“The Anomalies,” she says.

  x equals my desk thesaurus that was under a pile of clothes.

  While Ashley gives reasons why this is going to be Great! / Awesome! / Amazing! I look through the book. The synonyms are not good. Deviant, aberration, heretic, exception, bohemian, fanatic, flake, freak, three-dollar bill, dingbat, ding-a-ling, weirdo, teratogeny. There are better ones. I wonder if Ashley would go for “The Punks” but I doubt it. And teratogeny is just insulting.

  “So—they’re making us look like freaks?” I ask.

  “No! Not at all!” Ashely says. “Have you seen that kid who can fly? She’s amazing! It’s magical!”

  “So—breaking the world record in women’s javelin is magic,” I say.

  “It is pretty, um, extraordinary.” I am quiet for so long, it seems, that Ashley has to say, “So, what do you think?”

  “Yeah, I think I’m just a normal kid who’s good at something. Not a freak. I can’t, you know, fly. I’ll have to think about it.”

  There’s a quiet gap as if Ashley didn’t expect this / most people want to be on TV / Daddy says it’s the American mindset / I have a Paleolithic mindset.

  “We’ll have to know before tomorrow morning,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “I kinda need to know now,” she says.

  “I guess you can always interview the coaches,” I say.

  “I don’t get it,” she says. “Why did you write to us and give us your number if you didn’t want to do this?”

  “I didn’t give you my number.”

  “I have an email from you right here.”

  “I didn’t send you an email.”

  “Huh,” she says. “Well. It was really nice talking to you. I hope you’ll watch the story, anyway. I know you’ve been a 60 Minutes fan your whole life.”

  Sometimes the red hang-up button is just so obviously there for a reason. I press it / Ashley goes away / I look around my room / hear heavy rain outside / run.

  Storm

  MAKING DEALS WITH ENERGY

  To understand anything is to understand energy.

  Present tense. Here / Now.

  I am your anomaly.

  * * *

  —

  On the fifty-yard line / stadium around me. Soaking wet / I sit. Raindrops the size of golf balls fill the turf / half-inch-deep lotus position. I think about Plutchik’s Clock and run through the colors. Can’t feel a thing but cold / my project is a lie.

  Lightning hits / the stadium is purple and bright. When I stand, my leg joints are sore. Walk to the shed / know the combination by heart / retrieve my jav. The whole way, I talk to the storm and make wishes.

  This is not my first time.

  I’ve been asking thunderstorms for things since I learned about Benjamin Franklin and his kite / key / probably six. To understand anything is to understand energy.

  I didn’t want to throw a javelin two hundred and ninety feet. I wanted to be powerful enough to change things / people giving a shit about people / find the truth. That’s what I asked for. I got this instead.

  x equals me never watching 60 Minutes again.

  Thunder makes the aluminum bleachers shiver / tinny. Lightning hits over by the scoreboard and I think I feel the energy in my shoes—metal spikes in a quarter inch of water.

  I look up. I don’t say anything, but inside my head, I’m screaming. I hold the jav up above my head like a lightning rod. I put all of my energy into my wish.

  I wish to be normal Truda.

  I wish to have a normal family.

  I wish to be allowed structural integrity / pride.

  Lightning comes right down to the field. There’s a cracking sound that’s impossible. A tree next to the shot-put area splits in two / explodes outward / limbs and leaves everywhere.

  Three steps / bounce / throw / sprint.

  Stop time / I keep flying / land in front of it / start time again.

  I reach up, snatch the jav from its path, and I have completed the cycle / played catch with myself / feel completely alive.

  Only it’s impossible to tell anymore which of us are dead or alive / who is telling the truth or lies / we need more rest / fewer N3WATCHes.

  Same as it’s impossible to tell anymore who in my family is coming or going / telling the truth. Until Mama and Daddy learn how to ballroom dance again, everything steps on my toes.

  * * *

  —

  My me-shaped hole is blocked when I get home. I try to push through the plywood, but it won’t budge.

  I use the front door.

  The house has turned again, but not a full twist / diamond shape / emergency. Gravity makes us walk in corners. On corners. Straddle / navigate / struggle through valleys and rills. Daddy and Richard are in the living room, pushing as hard as they can to make the wall flat / any sane angle will do. They jump up and down as hard as they can / look like cartoon zoo gorillas. But nothing moves it.

  “Truda, you are making stain on wall,” Daddy says. I look down and see that I’m dripping rain onto the one place where you can still see a wall. The rest of the surface that’s supposed to be the floor is jammed up with all the stuff that used to be in the room. I step forward and stand on an upturned living room chair.

  “Why are you wet?” Mama asks me from the kitchen where she’s trying to balance the fridge and a wall cabinet before they fall over.

  “Went for a run. Why is everything dark?”

  “The electricity went,” she says. “Thunderstorm.”

  I crawl the passage to my room and find dry clothing. Three layers of it.

  I head northwest, where Daddy said we’d be safe to sleep. It’s impossible to walk upright with a house in this position / everything gathers in the corners / we live in a V.

  I find the linen closet for a blanket and pillow, then a relatively empty area in the northwest passageway, and I balance myself against the exterior wall of a box and the slanted pieces of corridor under my feet. Once I recline, lying at the angle my jav lands when it sticks into the dirt, I turn on my side, and I close my eyes.

  FAMILY WRESTLING

  I wake up in NØTIME / it’s still pitch-dark / Mama is propped next to me on the slanted, windowless wall. Richard has made a bed out of a pile of old towels—down in the valley of the now-floor. He is singing a song in Portuguese.

  “Richard,” I whisper.

  He sings louder.

  “I love you,” I say.

  “I love you, too,” he sings.

  “I love all of you,” Mama says, her breath aimed right at my nose.

  Daddy makes his Somewhere-Else sound. It’s hard to know what it means. He uses it for all of Plutchik’s emotions.

  “We’re all pretending to sleep,” I say.

  “Wishful napping,” Mama says. “Your sister used to call it that.”

  Tiny bombs in the sheltered walls explode at the sound of this word / sister / none of us even flinch.

  “She told me that you used to take her into your room at night and stab her with quilting pins,” Richard says.

  Mama says, “I don’t even own quilting pins.”

  “Me too,” I say. “She said when you did it, you’d tell her the whole time that she was ugly.”

  “Did you ever see me make a quilt?” Mama says.

  “She said that you could kill us,” I add. “Like really kill us.”

  Mama says, “I don’t even kill spiders.”

  Richard says, “I was the one who put a scratch in the coffee table. I was ten and was playing with my Matchbox cars. I’m also the one who broke the toilet when I was in seventh grade. It was an accident. I didn’t know not to put polymer beads in the drains.”

  “Such old things to talk about,” Daddy says.

  “She said you would kill us,” I say.

  Mama says, “I don’t even own a quilt!”

  Richard tells the story about being twelve and how sister locked him in the garden shed and how he missed dinner and how mad Mama was when he finally squeezed his way out the window and ran in the back door.

  “Oh!” Mama says. “I remember that day! I scolded you so much! I’m sorry, son.”

  The plywood creaks.

  “You told me that you’d been playing baseball,” Mama adds.

  “When did Richard ever play baseball?” I asked. “I was eight and I knew he was lying.”

  X

  The only way to get my work done—stop time while everyone is sleeping / pretend-sleeping—slip away. My crowbar is in the valley of box #7. Next to it is my class ring and chunks of cracked eyeshadow powder / an old ant trap / a sports bra.

  Southeast is the only logical option / opposite direction. That’s my room, and next to it, box #9. Locked from the outside / locked from the inside.

  x equals 334 nails, tonight.

  KNOCK / “LATE”

  At whatever-o’clock, Richard and Daddy move toward the rest of the house, still balancing on forty-five-degree-angled walls / floors. Mama and I are slowly trying to clear up our sleeping mess of pillows, blankets, and hallway flotsam, when I hear a knock on the door.

  I walk to the front of the house / look through the window. It’s Carrie. “Do you even turn on your phone or are you just ignoring me?” she says through the glass. I give her the gimme-a-minute finger / find my phone in my backpack.

  x equals three texts from Carrie:

  Where were you at practice?

  You okay?

  Len says you’re not in class. Did you go in this morning or need a ride?

  “We’re late,” she says through the door glass. “Power outage. My alarm failed.”

  I open the door. The look on her face as she sees me balancing on two slanted walls—inside the diamond of our house with all the foyer furniture and stuff under me—changes from annoyed to pitying.

  I look to Daddy, who is standing in the diagonal, upside-down doorway of the kitchen, groggy and still in his boxer-short underwear and a T-shirt. “I’ll need a late note.”

  He looks around as if he will find normal things like a pen and paper in our sinking boat. I sift through the stuff under me in the foyer. We had a coffee mug full of pens on a little table here once. I find a ballpoint and a random index card.

  I say, “Here,” and hand it to him.

  He hovers the pen over the card’s surface for a full thirty seconds and says, “I am very sorry, Truda. I cannot find words to write.”

  I look into his eyes and they are wet.

  When he cries, his shoulders shake. I rub his back. The plywood creaks and I can hear nails bending and popping from their holes.

  When the maze turns, the fridge clunks against the nearest wall, and stays at the angle in which Daddy and Carmichael had propped it up.

  “Hey!” Richard says from somewhere near the southwest conduit.

  Daddy continues to cry, but heads east from the kitchen.

  I take the paper and pen and go back to Carrie. The floor / wall is still slanted, but becoming flatter / saner.

  She says, “What the fuck is going on in there?”

  I look past her to the trees in our neighbors’ front lawns. Nothing outside the house is turning. Only us. In a tumble dryer set to eternity / insect in our brains / normalized fight / flight. And I became a javelin so I could fly.

  I squeeze through to my room and dig through piles of furniture, clothing, papers, and shards of shattered light bulb / nick my index finger / and find something not slept-in to wear.

  I stop and write Daddy’s note.

  Truda Becker was late today because it’s still June 23, 2020, and there is no such thing as late. Even when the lights go out. Even if a world record is set. Even if cars still run and supermarkets still sell magazines. Also, never flush polymer beads down the toilet.

  I forge his signature at the bottom.

  TROJAN HORSE

  Len says we should handle Nigel’s destruction like a Trojan horse.

  “I’m late,” Carrie says. “What’s the horse?”

  Len says, “It’s one thing to post this on social media or whatever, but I don’t care what some dude-bro in South Dakota thinks of Nigel.”

  “What’s the horse, though?” I ask.

  “We invite Nigel in to see the fruits of our labor. Call it a presentation or something. Invite the principal. Once a few of us talk about what we learned in our projects, it’s my turn. I run the documentary, and Nigel will be right there, front-row seat.”

  “And you’re Odysseus, rushing out of the horse?”

  “Something like that,” Len says.

  “I like it,” Eric says. “But I can’t tell how much trouble we’re going to get into for it.”

  “Yeah,” Ellie says. “I think we should send it to the board, the administration, and my dad all at the same time. Believe me, that’ll work.”

  The classroom phone beeps twice. We ignore it.

  “I’m with Ellie on this. No offense to your horse,” I say.

  “It’s cool. I was just trying to make it an event, you know? But low-key is fine, too.”

  We get back to Solution Time / were supposed to do Sadness today, and I wasn’t looking forward to it / look at me. But since I was late, Eric took the class.

  The whiteboard is filled with Sadness feelings in Eric’s handwriting. Unmotivated, tired, crying, pessimistic, scared of worse sadness, suicidal, feel like a burden, quiet, reserved, just want to stay in bed, regretful, grief feelings even if no one died, grief feelings if someone has died, wanting to punch things (anger?), rejected, not belonging with other people (no one wants to be with sad people—Eric), end of the world feelings, nothing will ever be right, scream into a pillow, being bitchy, saying depressing things, not saying anything, feels illegal, feels wrong (when my cat died, my grandmother told me it was just a cat—Len), outcast, adults get afraid, adults say we have it better, adults are untrustworthy around teen sadness.

  I tell him I appreciate it.

  “No, no. You don’t get it,” Eric says. “If it weren’t for your Plutchik’s Clock, I wouldn’t have figured out the real conclusion for my paper. In one generation, if we do it right, we can change the entire world’s general mental health,” he says. “This is the solution to fourteen generations of bullshit that we don’t have to pass down to our kids. That’s our job. Generation fifteen. We’ll be the generation who heals.”

  Healing / not on any syllabus / should be.

  The classroom phone beeps again and the secretary says, “Truda Becker, report to the office.”

  “I wish they’d fuck off. I’m sorry, Eric,” I say.

  Eric says, “Tru, you broke a world record. Of course you have things to do.”

  Door opens. A slightly ruffled Nigel tumbles in as if he’d intended to, though we know he was pushed into the room by the athletic director.

  “Truda, you’re needed in the office,” Nigel says. “The mayor’s here.”

  PHOTO OP

  I ask Carrie to come with me. The athletic director looks her up and down. She says, “Long jump and triple jump. Carrie. Nice to meet you.” He shakes her hand because her outstretched arm / truce / is there.

  He walks ahead and Carrie asks, “Why won’t you tell me where you went yesterday instead of practice? And what’s going on at your house? I don’t understand your dad’s art.”

  “Long story about the house. And I quit track. That’s why I wasn’t there yesterday.”

  “Quit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Look at me,” I say.

  It goes right over her head.

  Before she can answer, the athletic director slows down and falls in step with us and asks, “About that world record. Did you know you could do that? Turner says you knew.”

  “I knew.”

  “So why didn’t you throw that far before?”

  “I didn’t want to make anyone feel bad,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  Waiting for me in the school lobby are the mayor, our state senator, Daddy, and Mama. Daddy is in his Trojan windbreaker / Mama is wearing her psychic outfit, complete with bells at the hem of her skirt. Behind them all, outside in the hedgerow of nondescript evergreen bushes, is Richard, who drove them here. None of them show signs of living in a barn-style hamster wheel / sobbing about it earlier this morning.

  I whisper to Mama, “Why is Richard in the bushes?”

  “He doesn’t want his picture taken, but he wanted to watch. You know how he is.”

  “It’s very nice to meet you!” the mayor says, and shakes my hand. The senator does the same. We get our photos taken in front of the Trojan logo in the hallway in front of the main office. I don’t hear a word they say to me.

  The whole time, I quit track in my head / fail all my tests in school / decide to stay in bed forever, wherever my bed is, now, in the plywood rotisserie of our house. I have had my AFT3RMATH / I have had my EV3NT / My OR1G1N is coming / be reborn without residue / become who I was meant to be.

  Part Three

  OR1G1N

  Anomalies

  THE DISAPPOINTMENT

  N3WCLOCK had become so stunningly normal by the day I beat the world record in women’s javelin, people hadn’t stopped to think about anything new. Schedules didn’t change. People didn’t change. No one used the fold in time and space as an opportunity for growth mindset / for learning new recipes / taking naps / visiting anywhere they hadn’t been before. No solutions were coming out of any classroom other than to hide the problem / make new time just like the old time.