The Aspen Experiments

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - Rosemary Choate

At three o'clock  I  hovered uncertainly in the doorway of the academic counselor. She looked up in a jerk.

"I’m Mrs. Webster. Nice to meet you," she said. It came out as one word: nicetmeeyou, and obviously meant, "Sit down already."

"I hear that you’ve been ill," she continued. "I’m planning to send you to the doctor after we finish, if you're well enough to do this first.” Her words were still clipped, yet mushed up. It took me a second to realize she'd asked a question. 

"Uh- Yeah. I mean, yes, I'm well enough."

She looked too thin for someone named Mrs. Webster. All the empty space on her desk bothered my eyes, too. I had the urge to knock over her tidy pen holder but I squelched it.

She stuck her pointy fingers in the desk and brought out a clipboard with at least 20 pages on it. She handed it to me. “We thought you should get right into the routine at Rosemary Choate, so if you’ll finish these…” She handed me a pen.

There had been a ton of paperwork to enroll in this school, with my parents living in Mexico, but she probably needed them in original triplicate or something.  The first page was normal personal info.  

Name: Dara McMann, etc. etc.

I'd only gotten to my social security number when she started with the questions.

"Are you prone to narcolepsy?" she asked.

I paused. "Umm, narcolepsy is when you fall asleep all the time right?”  

“Well, not necessarily ‘all the time,’ but without control,” Mrs. Webster said.

“I don't think so,” I said. She turned on the radio and kept typing at her computer, still shooting questions at me. Her fingers pounded in time with the radio. She had turned into a giant metronome.  

"How about fainting?" she asked.

"No." I tried to fill in my parents birth dates but couldn't focus.

"Excitability?"

"Um. No?"

"Is that a question?" she said. Her metronome fingers paused.

"Sorry. No, I guess I'm not excitable."

Fainting and excitability? When was this lady born? 1845?

"Have you ever been in or near a lightning strike? If so, how near?" she said.

Oooh, I had one to answer. When I was twelve lightning had struck roughly a quarter mile away from me. A mile had 5,000 and something feet, so a quarter mile would be? Maybe 1,200 feet? Math wasn't my thing.

"Yes! About a qaurter mile from my house there was this huge-"

"Fine. Are you sexually active?"

"Wow - I don't think the school needs to know -"

Her fingers paused again. "I'll take that as a no. Finish your papers."

I clenched my teeth, annoyed at the blush on my face. I wasn't ever coming back to Mrs. Webster's office if I could help it.

The next day, January 8th, Tuesday, was the first day of class. I was jittery and excited. (Maybe I should have said yes on excitability.)  I ate breakfast early in the cafeteria, when only a few people were there, all drooping over their food and ignoring me.  Perfect. I was happy to eat alone. The absolute worst part of a new school was finding a place to sit with a bunch of people who already had friends and groups and places to be. I resolved not to think about lunch until after my Physics and English classes.