Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Among new children, she always spotted the outcasts first, and had read enough novels to prefer them. Sometimes this let her down — certain kids deserved social banishment. But hidden among the losers, she suspected, were her kind. What she longed for was a person who’d say, as none ever had, “This is all so fake, isn’t it? Wink at me sometimes and it’ll be our sign.”

The main field lacked cover from the scorching sun, so parasols were out, hats were on, and hands shaded brows. Parents occupied the plastic seats before the temporary stage, while hundreds of children sat on the grass around them. Tooly scanned the crowd. She found Paul nowhere.

The principal, Mr. Cutter, tapped the microphone, exhorting the kids to simmer down and take a seat. Tooly knelt on the grass, layering hair over her face to block the sunlight. After a tedious welcome, the principal inaugurated the International Day parade, in which kids from the fifty-two countries represented at the school tromped across the stage in traditional outfits from their homelands, sweating under headdresses, tripping in curl-toed boots, stating into the malfunctioning microphone “Welcome!” in different mother tongues. The procession — every nation in alphabetical order to avoid charges of political favoritism — concluded with the lanky daughter of Zaire’s ambassador, who whispered her greeting and scurried away.

Principal Cutter retook the microphone to announce the winner of the pet-naming contest. “After much discussion, we decided not to allow names of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sorry, boys,” he said. “Drum roll: our school pet for the year 1988-89 is henceforth known as …” He drew out the suspense. “Her name is … Myrtle the Turtle!”

“Myrtle?” snorted the parent of a losing entrant. “Are you kidding me?”

“A turtle?” another grumbled. “Isn’t it a tortoise?”

“What’s the difference?”

While this perplexing question rustled through the crowd, hundreds of kids scrambled for the picnic tables, aware that a potluck lunch was soon to materialize.

“Not all at once, you guys!” Principal Cutter said, to no avail.

Thai support staff distributed plastic plates and forks, paper napkins, bottled water. Many mothers and the occasional father opened Tupperware containers of homemade (maid-made) food across the tables. Tooly entered a queue at random and exited holding a plateful of parsley-flecked meatballs with spicy sauce for hats, the native dish of a country she never identified.

She weaved through the crowd, attempting to appear headed somewhere, then sneaked into a building, past an Olympic pool, through the girls’ changing room, down a long hallway of lockers, passing a Thai janitor to whom she said hello, though he only looked down. The cafeteria was empty except for six boys younger than she, all boasting of disgusting food they’d eaten, including (they said) elephant and live snakes. One claimed to have eaten human being, though this turned out to be only his own toenails. At the presence of a girl, they fled.

Alone at the long refectory table, Tooly chased a slippery meatball around her plate, then parted her hair curtains and consulted the wall clock. A teacher had once told her that, viewed in the timespan of the universe, a human life lasts just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second. Her life didn’t feel like a fraction of a second; things took ages. Time may pass quickly for the universe, but she had never been a universe.

When she returned to the administrative offices, Paul had still not materialized. The secretaries paged him with no result, finally dispatching a search party of sixth graders. A Malaysian girl found him locked in one of the basketball courts. “Like a labyrinth in there,” he muttered in the taxi home.

“I’m not in ninth grade now, am I?” Tooly asked.

“No, no — they’ll find space in fourth or fifth.”

“Fourth?” she exclaimed, looking at him. “Didn’t I do most of that already?”

“Let’s not make a fuss. There’s not a huge difference.”

But how could grades be compared? Each person you fought or befriended would be different, every teacher changed, your life unfolded in another way. Instead of escaping school after eight more years, she’d be sentenced to nine. An extra year of life wasted.

Being young was so unfair, and you couldn’t leave. That was the difference between childhood and adulthood: children couldn’t go; grown-ups could. Paul made them leave every year. Just packed up — another city. Whatever you hated disappeared.

She looked out the taxi window. “I only …”

He waited. “Finish your sentence, Tooly.”

“They named the tortoise.”

“What?”

“Tim,” she lied.

“That was your suggestion,” he said. “Good, Tooly.”

“You thought of it.”

“Well, it was our idea.” He reached over to shake her hand. “Let’s take it as a sign — this is the school for you.”

CLASSES DIDN’T START till the following Monday, so Tooly found herself confined to the apartment again, though the live-in maid had now arrived. Previous housekeepers had been beloved friends to Tooly, so she greeted this woman with much optimism. Shelly was a Lao speaker from the northeast with a slight hunchback, possessing every skill required to endear herself to a Western household: she ironed flawlessly, kept purified water in the fridge, knew how to make spaghetti bolognese and to fry eggs, kept the floors sparkling, the surfaces dustless. Yet she proved a less-than-calming presence. When Paul or Tooly entered a room, Shelly bowed her head, pressed her palms together in the wai praying gesture, and hurried away as if someone had stamped at her.

To avoid provoking this distressing reaction, Tooly hid in her bedroom much of that first week, bounced on her bed, and read. When she needed food, she listened until the sounds of Shelly — the slop and slurp of rags squeezed into the water bucket, the scuff of flip-flops, her surprisingly sweet singing — had passed before darting into the kitchen to eat pomelo segments. When Tooly returned, her bed had been made, dirty clothes removed from the floor, pencils lined up on the dresser table beside her sketchbook of noses.

Minutes after Paul returned from work each evening, Shelly tinkled a brass bell in the living room, calling “sir and madam” to dinner. Tooly bounded from her room, and the maid ran away into the kitchen. During the meal, Paul studied software manuals or lists of birds. Tooly tried to think of something to say.

He looked up. “A man from the embassy invited himself over. He’s considering a move around here and wants to see the building. I couldn’t get out of it. He’s here for dinner Wednesday.”

“I can’t come, can I?”

He shook his head.

But on the day of the dinner Paul tried to compensate by returning home early with a special treat for her, a videotape of WrestleMania III . Owing to a misapprehension, Paul believed her to be a pro-wrestling enthusiast. She was not. But Tooly couldn’t find a way to say otherwise without disappointing him. So they spent hours watching the TV spectacles together, always with the sound off, since he considered the commentary biased.

“Can you remind me,” he asked, slotting the tape into the VCR, “is George ‘the Animal’ Steele on André the Giant’s side?”

“He isn’t on anybody’s side,” she answered. “He’s part animal and helps whoever he wants.”

“Where’s he from, Tooly?”

“Parts unknown.”

They watched in silence, Paul wincing whenever a wrestler slammed a folding chair into the forehead of a rival. “It’s said to be fake,” he remarked. “What do you make of that whole controversy?”