None of her new teachers at Show World High were particularly bad, but they seemed either tense, exhausted, or flat-out bored. Zoe sat in her English, history, and geometry classes, and after each one couldn’t remember a word anyone had said.
Then there was Mr. Danvers. He taught biology. The moment she walked into his classroom, the dull fog she’d drifted into since she’d started at Show World lifted. Mr. Danvers’s classroom had enormous posters displaying the anatomy of humans, horses, and cats. Some were antiques that he found at flea markets and estate sales. Behind him were floor-to-ceiling shelves crowded with animal skulls, fossils, piles of bones, owl pellets, and jars of animal teeth.
While people were still getting to their seats, Mr. Danvers looked up from his papers and asked, as if the question was off the top of his head, “How tall was the tallest human being on record? And don’t say Goliath because we don’t really know how tall he was and, anyway, it was two thousand years and everyone else could have been Munchkins back then.”
The talking in the room faded. Zoe found an empty desk near the back.
“No one? For your information,” said Mr. Danvers, “the tallest human on record was Robert Wadlow from Alton, Illinois. He was born in 1918, and when he died, he was just under nine feet tall.” Mr. Danvers climbed on top of the long black lab table and strode across it to the nearest wall. “That would put him about here,” he said, leveling his hand with a mark a foot below the ceiling. “To give you an idea how big he was, the tallest player in the NBA right now is only seven foot seven,” said Mr. Danvers, pointing to a lower mark, “making him almost a foot and a half shorter than Wadlow.” Mr. Danvers stepped from the lab table onto his chair and back to the floor. He reached below the table, grasped an enormous pumpkin, and put it on top. “This pumpkin is just about the size of Mr. Wadlow’s head. Imagine how big his skull was and how much it weighed. What it must have felt like carrying the thing around all day.”
There was impressed murmuring in the room, a few giggles. Zoe sat forward in her chair, staring at the pumpkin. It was kind of cool having a mad scientist for a teacher.
Crossing his arms, Danvers leaned on the pumpkin. “Any of you jocks envy Mr. Wadlow? Don’t. Humans aren’t supposed to be nine feet tall. The weight of Wadlow’s own body nearly crippled him. He had acromegaly, a hormone condition where his body produced too much growth hormone. André the Giant, the wrestler, also had acromegaly. He died in his forties. Mr. Wadlow died at twenty-two.”
Another burst of murmurs.
“Like all humans, Wadlow was a mammal. In terms of humans he was huge. In terms of mammals he was a speck. The biggest mammal in the world is the blue whale. Ever seen an elephant? Imagine twenty-five elephants all strung out in a conga line. That’s a blue whale.” He pointed to the back of the room. For a moment Zoe’s stomach tightened as she thought he was going to call on her. But he turned back to the class and said, “A blue whale wouldn’t even fit in this room. And this enormous animal, maybe the largest animal that ever lived, eats one of the smallest: plankton. Microscopic shrimp. That has to mean something, but I don’t know what. Maybe just some cosmic irony. And I’m not talking about Intelligent Design. The first person to say ‘Intelligent Design’ has to wear the Charles Darwin beard I keep in my desk for the rest of the year.”
Zoe smiled. It felt a little funny, like exercising muscles she hadn’t used in a while, but it felt good.
Later at the apartment, she tried hooking up the TV to the cable and was delighted to discover that it hadn’t been turned off. She watched a documentary about how ancient Egyptians made mummies, taking out all the organs, finishing with the brain, and wrapping the hollowed-out body in layers of beeswax and linen. Zoe’s mother got home after dark, wearing high heels, her good cream-colored job-interview suit, and carrying a big bucket of KFC under her arm.
“Hey, you got the TV working,” she said.
“Yep.”
“You know how I used to think this was my lucky suit?”
“You never told me that,” said Zoe.
“Really? I didn’t?” her mother asked. “Anyway, the luck in this thing has officially flown south for the winter.” She dropped down onto the sofa and kicked off her high heels, groaning as each shoe slid off. “Whoever invented these things should be burned at the stake.”
“You don’t have to wear them.”
Her mother sighed.
“Yeah, I do, darling. It’s like part of the uniform when you’re a woman looking for a job,” she said. “Sometimes, out in the world. . being exactly what people want and expect. . well, maybe it isn’t a good thing but it’s a smart thing.”
“But not today?”
“No, not today.” Zoe’s mother rested her head on the back of the couch and draped her arm across her face to cut out the light. After a moment she sat up and asked, “How’s it going at the new school? Have you made any friends yet?”
“Sure,” Zoe said. She knew the question was coming and had an answer ready. She’d even made up a friend in case her mother wanted details. A girl from the drama club who had a big part in the school’s annual musical. She knew her mother would like her to know someone into music.
“Good. I’m glad you’re not alone all the time.”
Zoe nodded. “Classes are pretty easy compared to Danville. A lot of the teachers look like they’re on Valium. Except for one. He’s okay.”
Her mother rubbed her feet through her stockings. “What’s so special about him?”
“He teaches biology and has this pretty cool collection of animal bones and body parts,” said Zoe. “He showed us the skeleton of a bat the size of your thumb.”
Zoe’s mother gave her a tired smile. “Nice. He sounds like Matt Everson. Did you ever meet him? He was a friend of your father’s back in the old, olden days.”
Whenever she said the “old, olden days,” Zoe knew her mother meant back when she and Zoe’s father had lived in an old warehouse populated by artists in the industrial part of San Francisco. Back then, Zoe’s mother had been a graphic designer, designing album covers for little punk record labels. Her father had been road manager for a couple of bands and played around with computers in his spare time. Later, he wrote software all the time and started making money, but Zoe had been an infant and didn’t remember when they moved from the leaking warehouse to the house in Danville with the backyard full of almond trees. Sometimes she wished they had stayed in the warehouse. It would have been so great growing up around paintings and sculptures, the plasma cutters, and the welding equipment the artists used. Maybe things would have turned out differently. Maybe Dad wouldn’t be dead.
She heard her mother sigh. She’d picked up the mail Zoe had piled on the coffee table. Her mother was staring at a fat official-looking envelope. “Shit. More insurance papers.”
“I still don’t understand what the problem is. Do they think Dad’s alive and hiding in the basement or something?” asked Zoe.
“I don’t know,” said Zoe’s mother wearily. “It’s some goddamn thing. A piece of paper that should have been filed with some department and wasn’t. Or it was and got lost. Suddenly, to these people, your father never existed.” She opened the envelope and looked at the papers. Very quietly she repeated, “Like he was never even here. .”
Zoe turned up the TV. She couldn’t stand hearing her mother talk like that. It hurt seeing her so lost and hurt. Zoe knew she should tell her mother she loved her but she couldn’t do it because she didn’t really feel it. Where that feeling, and a lot of others, should be was a deep dark void. Instead of talking and maybe saying the wrong thing and making things worse, she watched people on the TV screen praying to old, animal-headed Egyptian gods.
“I swear I’m not a stupid woman, but these insurance people speak Martian or something.” Her mother shook her head and put the papers back in the envelope. “That’s why we have a lawyer now, so he can speak Martian to the insurance company’s Martians.”