“Just no questions about the sex lives of the presidents,” she says, which makes the boys roar with laughter and the girls giggle hysterically.
When the day comes, the questions cover a wide range. Frankie Stone wants to know if the Aztecs really ate human hearts, and Billy Day wants to know who made the statues on Easter Island, but most of the questions on Curiosity Day in January of 1975 are what-ifs. What if the South had won the Civil War? What if George Washington had died of, like, starvation or frostbite at Valley Forge? What if Hitler had drowned in the bathtub when he was a baby?
When Gwendy’s turn comes, she is prepared, but still a tiny bit nervous. “I don’t know if this actually fits the assignment or not,” she says, “but I think it might at least have historical… um…”
“Historical implications?” Miss Chiles asks.
“Yes! That!”
“Fine. Lay it on us.”
“What if you had a button, a special magic button, and if you pushed it, you could kill somebody, or maybe just make them disappear, or blow up any place you were thinking of? What person would you make disappear, or what place would you blow up?”
A respectful silence falls as the class considers this wonderfully bloodthirsty concept, but Miss Chiles is frowning. “As a rule,” she says, “erasing people from the world, either by murder or disappearance, is a very bad idea. So is blowing up any place.”
Nancy Riordan says, “What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Are you saying blowing them up was bad?”
Miss Chiles looks taken aback. “No, not exactly,” she says, “but think of all the innocent civilians that were killed when we bombed those cities. The women and children. The babies. And the radiation afterward! That killed even more.”
“I get that,” Joey Lawrence says, “but my grampa fought the Japs in the war, he was on Guadalcanal and Tarawa, and he said lots of the guys he fought with died. He said it was a miracle he didn’t die. Grampy says dropping those bombs kept us from having to invade Japan, and we might have lost a million men if we had to do that.”
The idea of killing someone (or making them disappear) has kind of gotten lost, but that’s okay with Gwendy. She’s listening, rapt.
“That’s a very good point,” Miss Chiles says. “Class, what do you think? Would you destroy a place if you could, in spite of the loss of civilian life? And if so, which place, and why?”
They talk about it for the rest of the class. Hanoi, says Henry Dussault. Knock out that guy Ho Chi Minh and end the stupid Vietnam War once and for all. Many agree with this. Ginny Brooks thinks it would be just grand if Russia could be obliterated. Mindy Ellerton is for eradicating China, because her dad says the Chinese are willing to start a nuclear war because they have so many people. Frankie Stone suggests getting rid of the American ghettos, where “those black people are making dope and killing cops.”
After school, while Gwendy is getting her Huffy out of the bike rack, Miss Chiles comes over to her, smiling. “I just wanted to thank you for your question,” she says. “I was a little shocked by it to begin with, but that turned out to be one of the best classes we’ve had this year. I believe everybody participated but you, which is strange, since you posed the question in the first place. Is there a place you would blow up, if you had that power? Or someone you’d… er… get rid of?”
Gwendy smiles back. “I don’t know,” she says. “That’s why I asked the question.”
“Good thing there isn’t really a button like that,” Miss Chiles says.
“But there is,” Gwendy says. “Nixon has one. So does Brezhnev. Some other people, too.”
Having given Miss Chiles this lesson—not in history, but in current events—Gwendy rides away on a bike that is rapidly becoming too small for her.
5
In June of 1975, Gwendy stops wearing her glasses.
Mrs. Peterson remonstrates with her. “I know that girls your age start thinking about boys, I haven’t forgotten everything about being thirteen, but that saying about how boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses is just—don’t tell your father I said this—full of shit. The truth, Gwennie, is that boys will make passes at anything in a skirt, and you’re far too young for that business, anyway.”
“Mom, how old were you when you first made out with a boy?”
“Sixteen,” says Mrs. Peterson without hesitation. She was actually eleven, kissing with Georgie McClelland, up in the loft of the McClelland barn. Oh, they smacked up a storm. “And listen, Gwennie, you’re a very pretty girl, with or without glasses.”
“It’s nice of you to say so,” Gwendy tells her, “but I really see better without them. They hurt my eyes now.”
Mrs. Peterson doesn’t believe it, so she takes her daughter to Dr. Emerson, the Rock’s resident optician. He doesn’t believe it, either… at least until Gwendy hands him her glasses and then reads the eye chart all the way to the bottom.
“Well I’ll be darned,” he says. “I’ve heard of this, but it’s extremely rare. You must have been eating a lot of carrots, Gwendy.”
“I guess that must be it,” she smiles, thinking, It’s chocolates I’ve been eating. Magic chocolate animals, and they never run out.
6
Gwendy’s worries about the box being discovered or stolen are like a constant background hum in her head, but those worries never come close to ruling her life. It occurs to her that might have been one of the reasons why Mr. Farris gave it to her. Why he said you are the one.
She does well in her classes, she has a big role in the eighth grade play (and never forgets a single line), she continues to run track. Track is the best; when that runner’s high kicks in, even the background hum of worry disappears. Sometimes she resents Mr. Farris for saddling her with the responsibility of the box, but mostly she doesn’t. As he told her, it gives gifts. Small recompense, he said, but the gifts don’t seem so small to Gwendy; her memory is better, she no longer wants to eat everything in the fridge, her vision is twenty-twenty, she can run like the wind, and there’s something else, too. Her mother called her very pretty, but her friend Olive is willing to go farther.
“Jesus, you’re gorgeous,” she says to Gwendy one day, not sounding pleased about it. They are in Olive’s room again, this time discussing the mysteries of high school, which they will soon begin to unravel. “No more glasses, and not even one frickin’ pimple. It’s not fair. You’ll have to beat the guys off with a stick.”
Gwendy laughs it off, but she knows that Olive is onto something. She really is good-looking, and gorgeosity isn’t out of the realm of possibility at some point in the future. Perhaps by the time she gets to college. Only when she goes away to school, what will she do with the button box? She can’t simply leave it under the tree in the backyard, can she?
Henry Dussault asks her to the freshman mixer dance on their first Friday night of high school, holds her hand on the walk home, and kisses her when they get to the Peterson house. It’s not bad, being kissed, except Henry’s breath is sort of yuck. She hopes the next boy with whom she lip-locks will be a regular Listerine user.