Chapter 50a

Flight of the pTerri-dactyl:

I'm not really flying, you know. I'm Terri, daughter of Alan. I have two moms, my birth mother who's in a hospital (again) in California, and my evil stepmother Tina, who knows I'm writing this.

Everybody I know of keeps a journal. I've read some of Tina's. I've read some of everybody's, really. I keep my own. I've shown it to some of the people at the university. It's interesting when I do that.

Dad worried when I first caught the interest of the people there. Doctor Stanton is a psychologist. Dad was very reluctant to let me talk to him at first. Cindy and Nikki both had extensive interviews with him, though, and they're both only a few years older than me. Since that first meeting, I've talked with Doctor Stanton several times. He's interested in me.

"You are very interesting, Terri."

"I must be, Mister Harold," I said. "Everybody sort of acts like it. I'm just me, though. This is all I know how to be."

"Before you got here, when you were around other children in class, how did you act?"

"Like I do now. Except I sort of learned to keep quiet."

"Keep quiet?"

"Yessir. In class I always knew the answers first. I could read all the words. I knew the numbers and the colors. I could read books out loud and I could read without saying the words. They just go right from my eyes to inside my head. But I found out that if I always acted like I knew the answers, other kids treated me different. Some of them were jealous and tried to make me feel bad."

"So you stopped telling people what you knew?"

"Yessir. It was the best way for me to stay out of trouble. If I had trouble in school it was bad for Mom. She had enough trouble when things were going good."

"I know a little bit about your mom. I talked with your dad and Tina."

"Then you know that she had trouble handling changes. I tried very hard to not make trouble for her."

"But with your dad and Tina..."

I sort of giggled. Now he was talking about my happy place. "Dad and Tina and Cindy and Nikki and Rachel and, well, everybody here, they want me to do what I can do. All out in the open." I looked at his eyes. He's a doctor and his job is to pay attention. He was paying attention. "Like you," I told him. "You don't say 'Terri, be careful or you'll make people nervous.' You just say 'Do what you can do.' And you're not holding back thoughts when you say it."

"I'm interested in your growth," he said. "You're the youngest person I've had the privilege of interviewing like this."

I smiled. "I hope that I do it right, then."

"Terri, you cannot do this wrong. All we're doing is talking about how things look and feel to you, how you fit into your world."

"It's not very hard," I said. "Mizz Beck is sort of my main teacher, since she's home-schooling Rachel and Tina's home-schooling me, but Tina's got a class load, so I spend a little time each day with Mizz Beck. She guides us, you know. Like she says 'Today we need to do something about history.' And we find something. Sometimes it's the Internet. Sometimes we go to the library. Real books are neat. I don't think they're archaic, you know."

"Archaic," he repeated.

"I don't mean to do that, Mister Harold. Use words like that. But honestly, what word would you use? I have e-books. But it's neat to go get a book off a shelf and see things on pages."

"Who goes with you?"

"Anybody I can get to take me. Dad. Tina. Susan. Nikki, now. I go with Rachel sometimes and her mom takes us. They're used to us now."

"Who's 'they'?"

"The librarians. At first they thought I was a little kid messing around in the wrong section, you know, not the juvenile literature section."

"What happened?"

"Tina was at a library table with her MacBook open, typing something and I was looking for a specific book. The lady came up to me and asked if I was looking for juvenile literature. I was very polite. 'No, ma'am, ' I told her, 'you have a field guide to southern insects. I have a project to identify several insects in the fencerow behind our apartments. Not just insects, either. We have arachnids and several other arthropods. It's for biology credit."

"What did she say?"

"Nothing for a few seconds. By that time Tina was coming up. She asked the lady if there was a problem. The lady told Tina 'this child just ripped off 'arachnid' and 'arthropod' and... ' I told Tina, 'You and Mizz Beck said I needed to do an in-depth evaluation of a single phylum. And the back yard is crawling with arthropods.' Tina laughed. She caught the joke. The lady didn't, I don't think."

"So you got the book?"

"The lady got it off the shelf for me and I opened it and showed her the centipede we found and then the millipede and the differences. I read the Latin names because this is supposed to be, like, high school level, so I can't just say 'bug'. Do you know that bugs are insects but all insects aren't bugs? 'Bug' is actually very specific." I looked at Mister Harold's eyes.

That's how you tell what people are thinking. You look at the eyes. His were a mixture of curiosity and just a little bit of happiness. At least I wasn't scaring him or making him nervous.

I've talked with professors of language arts, too. They've seen my writing. My typing, actually. I am trying very hard to learn to write well by hand. One of the students that comes to the Greenhouse to study knows calligraphy. That's writing as an art form. I find it interesting. Cindy says that science needs to be tempered with art to make life. Tina says I need to stop hanging around with Cindy, but she laughs when she says it.

That group of college students that comes into the Greenhouse, that's our study and tutoring center, those are interesting people. Everybody in my family tells me to be careful around other people, and I know about some of the bad people in the world and what they'd do to me if I wasn't careful, so I'm careful. I'm never there without Tina or my aunts or Dad, but when I'm there, I get to talk to the other college students.

One of them heard Cindy call me "Terri-dactyl". That's a most fantastic name given to me by another adopted red-headed aunt, Johanna. "How do you spell that?" the student asked.

Something just sort of went off in my head and I said. "P-T-E-R-R-I dash D-A-C-T-Y-L". That was the first time I thought of using the 'p' in my name. I like it. My namesake is spelled with a silent 'p'. They're quite common in English, like in 'psychologist' and 'pneumonia' but when I explained this to Cindy when she came over to see why that girl was giggling, Cindy said 'You're correct, but it is NOT common in the names of young ladies.

I laughed. "Gotcha, Aunt Cindy. I can show it to you in literature."

"Literature," I affirmed.

That student, Baylie, laughed with me. "Cindy, hit 'er up for a citation."

Cindy should know better. I think she questioned me just to show Bayli. "Citation?"

I stuck my tongue at her. Kids are supposed to do stuff like that and I do have to give in to the stereotype from time to time. "Contemporary literature, actually. Author is Terry Pratchett. The book is Pyramids. And Ptraci is the queen of Djelibeybi. And if Terry Pratchett does it, it's good enough for me."

Bayli looked shocked. "She reads Pratchett?"

Cindy touched me like I was her little sister. "She does. And obviously she remembers what she reads."

"I'm so sorry, Terri. I thought they were exaggerating," Bayli said.

"That's okay, Bayli," I said. "I understand."

"Cindy," Bayli said, "You're bad enough, but everybody's sort of getting used to you. I didn't know about Terri." She smiled at me. "pTerri-dactyl? That's soooo cute!"

"Don't let the 'cute' fool you. She's gonna have a high school diploma before the end of the year. People are sort of getting used to her at the school board and on campus."

And that's the truth. I feel bad that Rachel's not going to be able to do that. She's my friend and she's very smart, but I showed her some of the practice tests to get a high school certificate and she's lost. She can read most of the questions but she does not understand it. I understand most of it.

Mister Harold talked with the people at the school board. He told Dad and Tina that the university doesn't really care if I have a real high school diploma, but I don't want to be the only student in the university without one.

"You won't be," Dad tried to tell me.

"But Dad," I said, "Those are not the same. Besides, Cindy's got one. I want one." I don't do that 'I want' thing very often, but this was important to me. Dad and Tina know it. Tina's on my side and I don't think Dad's the least bit against it. He just doesn't understand why I'd go through the trouble.

"College students are supposed to have high school diplomas," I told him.

He grabbed me in his arms and lifted me off the floor. "College students are supposed to be eighteen, too, princess."

"I'm not a princess. Ptraci was a queen. I am pTerri, and I shall be a queen also."

He looked over me at Tina. "Keep her out of the Pratchett books."

"You started it, Hon," Tina told him. "You steered her away from Heinlein."

"Pratchett's funnier," I said. "But Mizz Beck says I need to look at other literature, like Shakespeare and Hemingway."

"Hemingway's over-rated," Dad said, "but don't tell Mizz Beck that unless you're ready to defend your assertion."

"That's why I like science, Dad," I said. "Literature is about opinion. Science is about facts and laws and rules. If I want to argue about Ohm's Law, it doesn't matter what my opinion is. It's a law. I may not like Ohm at all, and think he was ugly and not very nice, but the law is the law." I looked over at Tina. "What were we talking about the other day? Metaphors? Ohm didn't use metaphors. Or if he did they don't affect his work."

Tina mouthed 'Cindy' at me. I giggled.

"That's definitely YOUR daughter, Alan," she said. She joined our hug. The way it's supposed to be. This is my family.

Summer days in Alabama are hot. There are some days that I'd love to spend at the pool, but Rachel's mom runs us through exercises.