Hannah, Divided Read online

  34. 11

  ON THE MORNING OF the eighteenth, Mrs. Sweet appeared in the kitchen, all dressed up with a fresh metallic rinse in her coppery-brown hair and crimson paint on her pointed fingernails.

  “A valet from the garage is bringing around the Packard,” she bellowed. “We’ll all drive to Thomas Jefferson High School together. It’s an important day to be spot on the dot! Hurry and finish your breakfasts. I’ll be waiting outside.”

  Joe rolled his eyes, but did not say anything as he and Hannah cleared their dishes, collected their coats, and joined Mrs. Sweet outside on the front stoop.

  “I’ve got terrible butterflies,” whispered Hannah low enough so that Mrs. Sweet, plucking dry leaves from her window box, did not hear her.

  “Naw, it’s a banner day for test taking,” Joe answered cheerfully as he tugged his cap lower on his head. He inhaled and pounded his chest. “The air’s so clean, it even smells like pencil shavings. And there’s the car!” he announced as it swung rakishly around the curb.

  Hannah had to suppress a smile when she noticed that Mrs. Sweet’s precious automobile was being driven around by none other than Joe’s friend Francis, who took Mrs. Sweet’s ten-cent tip with a wink in Joe’s direction, before touching his cap and dashing off.

  “It’s a super job, I hear. Tips galore,” Joe whispered. “But if Sweet saw Fran steer a skato, she’d never let him inside fifty feet of her precious Packard.” Joe smirked as he and Hannah climbed into the backseat.

  “Try not to muss the leather,” warned Mrs. Sweet. “Hands on your laps.”

  “Truth be told, I never rode in this boat before today,” said Joe.

  “Me, either,” Hannah whispered back.

  Mrs. Sweet was a careful driver, and her automobile was so padded and upholstered that the city streets and sounds reeled past like a silent movie or a dream. Hannah stared out at the landmark and lesser buildings that she had come to recognize. She bet that she could find her way through most of Philadelphia. The thought gave her quiet pleasure.

  Suddenly, Mrs. Sweet’s face appeared slant-ways in the rearview mirror.

  “Whatever happens, children,” she said, “it was I who spoke up for you both. I was your first sponsor. Everyone is aware of my charitable causes. It’s been rumored that the mayor might appoint me Special Educational Advisor to the City. And I’m not even a lawyer or a man. But my good works will not go unnoticed!”

  “My sister, Sally, was my first real sponsor,” mumbled Joe.

  “Granddad McNaughton was my first real sponsor,” Hannah answered. They shared a private smile as the car rolled up to Thomas Jefferson High School’s brick walls and slate painted doors.

  “Aw, but nobody’s standing outside to see our Hollywood entrance!” Joe lamented as they climbed out.

  “It’s been my experience that most schools have too many children lurking around for my auto to be safe,” said Mrs. Sweet. “Therefore, I’m off. Good luck, both of you. The school has arranged for a bus to take you home at the end of the day.”

  They both waved good-bye as Mrs. Sweet and her Packard drove off.

  “By this time next year, ole Sweet won’t remember our names,” said Joe. “Suppose she’s a good egg, anyhow. She sees a problem and works to fix it.”

  “Guess that’s better than most people. Well, Joe, if nothing else goes right today,” said Hannah, “it was a beautiful ride.”

  “Don’t be such a wet blanket. You gotta pass this thing, Hannah. You can’t leave me stuck at 5 Delancey all by myself till June! Everything’ll go swell,” Joe assured.

  He was wrong, though.

  Problems began to shake loose and rattle Hannah right from the registration table, crowded with students of all ages. Half as many scholarships, Hannah recalled. No, it wasn’t fair. Not when she looked at all of these serious, hopeful faces. It wasn’t right to give out a taste of learning, as Joe said. A taste was just enough to know the strength of your appetite.

  “Bennett, Bennett. Yes, here you are,” said the registration proctor, a balding man squeezed too tight into a loud checkerboard suit. He crossed off Hannah’s name with his fountain pen and handed her a placard marked with the number 11.

  Hannah stared at the two dark lines, straight and hard as prison bars.

  “Eleven?” She took the placard and blinked. It couldn’t be.

  “Eee-lev-en.” The proctor drew out the sound as if he were an auctioneer.

  Eleven! It was the worst numbers luck she had ever faced. Not in her wildest imagination had Hannah figured that numbers would fail her.

  Not today of all days.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Hannah said. She held the placard from its strings so that it would not touch her. “I can’t quite manage this number. I’ll have to be another number.”

  “You can’t be another number because you are Bennett, Eleven,” countered the proctor. “Right after Barrington, Ten, Right before Boote, Twelve.”

  “Please, let me be ten or twelve,” she volunteered.

  “That is not the way it works, miss.”

  “C’mon, will ya!” The boy standing behind her butted Hannah’s heel with the toe of his shoe.

  “See, because a prime number can’t be reduced,” Hannah argued. “It’s divisible only by one and itself. Eleven is an odd, upsetting sort of number for me, sir. Though perhaps somebody else might not mind it?” She did not expect the proctor to soften his position. Not with law of the alphabet on his side.

  “Go on, Bennett, Eleven.” The proctor pointed a finger on her.

  “C’mon, Hannah.” Suddenly Joe appeared next to her. He grabbed her hand and pulled her away. She could not believe her eyes.

  Joe was wearing a placard marked with the number 32.

  “Thirty-two! I’ll trade you,” she exclaimed. “Quick, before anyone sees!”

  “I would, but we’d be found out in a minute, because we’re alphabetized. Christmas, Hannah, you could turn all the milk in Philadelphia sour with that face.”

  “You don’t understand! Thirty-two is my number. My magic number.” She reached out and tapped the corners of Joe’s placard. She tapped again. Then she couldn’t stop.

  Joe caught her fingers and held them. “There’s no such thing as a magic number, Hannah. Fact is, there’s no such thing as a number! You can’t get bit or punched or shot or scratched by eleven, ’cause eleven is not even really here! So cut it out. Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four—it doesn’t make a jot of difference.” He released her fingers, his face softening. “C’mon. Keep your head up. I’m only one classroom down from you. Remember, it’s you against me, right?”

  Hannah was speechless. She wanted to touch thirty-two again and to have some of its numbers luck rub off on her. Her fingers tapped a scrambled minuet along the sides of her legs. Her mind seemed to be made of soup, and she felt the support in her legs begin to crumble.

  “Eighteen days was too few,” she said.

  “Stop that talk.” Joe snapped his fingers in her face. “I’ve got a bright idea. When all this is over, don’t take the bus. It’s hardly two miles to Rittenhouse Park. It’s cold, but it’s clear. Tree weather. You just hafta get to the end of the test. Think of Baby Face! Even when he knew his gig was up, he kept right on driving. Drove himself all the way into that ditch, and all on his own will. Right?”

  “Sure.” Hannah frowned. Was taking this exam as bad as driving into a ditch?

  A loud crowd of boys moved past them. Joe turned.

  “I know that fella. Hey, there, sport! You, in the yellow shirt!” And Joe was gone, whistling, as he ran down the hall to catch up. Ready for anything.

  Hannah was left alone with eleven. Her mind worked to sweeten it.

  Her great-great-great-great grandfather Bennett had distinguished himself in the Battle of Brandywine with the 11th Pennsylvania Regiment.

  Backward, eleven spelled nevele. That was pretty, although it meant nothing.

  Another proctor, a woman
with springy hair and plunking footstep, appeared in the crowded hall. She clapped her hands and asked that Numbers One through Twenty follow her. On a wave of other students, Hannah allowed herself to be swept along, as the woman led them to a large plain classroom at the end of the hall.

  I could have been Number One, she thought. Or Twenty-one. Or any other number. Easily.

  She slumped to her assigned desk. Desk Eleven. She blocked off the noises of the other students as they scuffled to their seats, or sharpened pencils at the sharpener, or loitered by the room’s one sun-flooded window that gave a view of playing fields and bright blue sky. Everyone seemed a bit nervous, or lost, or out of place.

  At the front of the room, the springy-haired proctor explained the rules, and then she passed out brand-new Blue Jay notebooks, one for each student. Hannah rolled her pencil in her hands, back and forth, in four sequences of eight. She tapped the corners of the book’s mottled black-and-white pasteboard cover. Then she flipped through its endless blank, blue-lined pages, closed it, and tapped thirty-two again.

  The morning passed in a fog of squeaking pencils and smothered coughing. Immediately, Hannah sensed that her reading would drag her down. Other students’ workbook pages turned too quickly. She would not be able to keep up with them.

  Worse, she could not make eleven leave. Her brain was plunging off into odd directions no matter how she tried to make it drop anchor.

  Pascal’s Triangle could be computed in powers of eleven. 11, 121, 1331 …

  Giving into the impulse, she tapped the corners of her placard. Eight, eight, eight, eight. Eight, eight, eight, eight. Eight, eight, eight, eight. Eight, eight, eight, eight.

  Time was slipping away.

  The slithery sounds of essay-writing filled her ears while she struggled through the multiple-choice section. Occasionally she cast sidelong looks at her fellow test takers. All of these girls and boys had spent the past few months living in variations of luck and upheaval, and all of them knew it would come to this day, and some of them even knew they would fail.

  The pale-lashed boy sitting next to her fidgeted in his chair. Barrington, she recalled. Number Ten. The number Hannah might have been if Barrington had not existed.

  At the front of the room, the proctor clanked a small cowbell. “Fifteen-minute break,” she said. “Close your books. Apples and rolls are being served in the registration hall. We will resume with more reading comprehension, and then math.”

  Hannah shut her book and sat in her chair through the break. She bet by now Joe had made half a dozen friends.

  “Psst. Hey, girl,” Barrington said when he returned to his chair. “You, Bennett. Cut it out with that clicking on your card. It’s distracting.”

  “I’ll trade you my eleven for your ten,” Hannah offered.

  “No chance. Ten’s lucky.”

  Hannah’s stomach lurched. Even Barrington knew.

  The bell rang, and the test resumed. In the next room, Hannah sensed that Joe was moving deftly through this exam, easy as fish stew. Elway, Number 32, and the Voice of Ulysses besides. He would pass this exam and the next, and the next, and on and on. Reciting, filling in the blanks, inching himself smoothly forward. He was smart and he was ready.

  But she was not quite ready. She would not get this scholarship.

  Not this time, but maybe next time.

  The thought surprised her. Next time, yes. She would try again, and she would find her second chance. That’s what Mr. Cole had been telling her. Next year, when she knew more things. When she could read better. When she could manage her tapping easier.

  If a taste was just enough to know the strength of your appetite, perhaps that was not such a bad thing, after all.

  At the final clank of the bell, Hannah passed up her notebook. She apologized to Barrington for her disruptions.

  He nodded, his pale eyes flickering cautiously. “Think ya did all right?”

  “Better than I expected,” she answered, “but I didn’t pass.”

  “Sorry.” Barrington tried to blank his face over his obvious relief.

  Outside the classroom, she saw Joe, his shoulder to the wall, thick in a conversation with a group of boys. She did not want to interrupt, but she was too impatient to wait for him. She would start and he could catch up later.

  Hannah buttoned her coat, pulled her beret over her ears, and pocketed a roll from the basket at the registration table. Then she stepped through Thomas Jefferson’s doors and into an ordinary beautiful winter afternoon. Piercing blue sky and needle thin air. It was almost three o’clock, and it would grow dark soon, but now there was some light and time.

  Her feet carried her swiftly to Rittenhouse Park. Along the way, she counted off all of the beautiful objects in the city. The iron gates, the fire hydrants, the cars and carts and horses and street signs and storefront awnings. The city ticked and clacked and hummed and made a different pattern every day. It was always changing, there was no fixed and final answer, and, actually, she had come to appreciate it, because she was the same way.

  I’ll find the right doors and I’ll push them as hard as I can, she thought. Math is everywhere, and it has always belonged to me if I wanted it. And now I know that I do, more than anything. I’ll go anywhere for it.

  At the gate’s entrance, Hannah kicked off her shoes and rolled her socks into a ball. Her bare feet sang with cold as she walked across the grass to her willow tree. She tested a hand to its base and caught hold of one branch. Pulled herself up and caught another.

  Up and up.

  Climbing a tree was the silliest thing in the world. It didn’t really get a person to anywhere in particular, and once up, you were immediately presented with the puzzle of how to get down.

  That hardly mattered, though. What did matter was that she had found a perfect place to enjoy a perfect hour. She pressed her nose against the bark, inhaling the scent of the tree and the faint woods of where it came from. Then she swung her legs free, back and forth, delighting in the fresh air on her skin and the wide-open view of the city, as she waited for Joe to join her.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  FOR THEIR TREMENDOUS ASSISTANCE with the particular details of this story, I thank my editor, Donna Bray, as well as Brian Carey, Allison Heiny, Erich Mauff, Monica Mayper, Adele Sands, James Sands, Bill Stedman, Thorin Tritter, Kathy Wandersee, and Robert Watson. These books also were especially useful: Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America, by Frederick Lewis Allen; Philadelphia Boyhood: Growing Up in the 1930s, by Paul Hogan; An Architectural Guidebook to Philadelphia, by Francis Morrone with James Iska; and Hard Times, An Oral History of the Great Depression, by Studs Terkel. Additional guidance was provided by the following Web pages: “American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project” (memory, loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html), “The Hollywood Thirties: The Daring Films of 1930-1934” (www.geocities.com/hollywood/lot/4344/stage7.html), “The Original Old Time Radio” (www.old-time.com), and “The Chadds Ford Historical Society”(www.chaddsfordhistory.org).

  A Personal History by Adele Griffin

  I was born in 1970 in my mother’s hometown of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I was the oldest of three children, and spent my early childhood as a “military brat,” moving between bases in North Carolina, California, Panama, and Rhode Island. I returned to Pennsylvania for high school, and then attended college at the University of Pennsylvania. After earning a bachelor of arts and sciences degree in 1993, I eagerly answered a “help wanted” ad in the New York Times and an “apartment rentals” ad in the Village Voice. That same week, I secured both my first job and my first apartment. I began working for Macmillan Children’s Books as an editorial assistant; living two blocks away from the office ensured that I didn’t get lost on my commute.

  While balancing days working in the editorial department with nights writing fiction, I discovered my abiding love of New York City, and knew that I would want to live there for the long haul. At Macmillan, and later Hyperi
on Books for Children, I read old favorites and new favorite fiction for younger readers, and in doing so rediscovered classic stories that had been so riveting in my youth. I was particularly enthralled to connect with Robert Cormier, an author whose work I idolized when I was a child—years later, I got to spend a day with him at Simmons College. It wasn’t long before I completed my first novel, Rainy Season (1996), which was accepted by Houghton Mifflin & Co. A semi-autobiographical account of family life on an army base in Panama, the book was recommended by Publishers Weekly as a “Flying Start” notable debut. My second book, Split Just Right (1997), told the story of a bohemian single mother raising her daughter. My third book, Sons of Liberty, a drama set in New England that addressed child abuse, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1997. I followed this novel with a contemporary supernatural story, The Other Shepards (1998), and then Dive (1999), a novel that grappled with the real-life unexpected death of my stepbrother, Jason.

  Turning to more lighthearted fare, I created a middle-grade series, Witch Twins, about identical twins living in Philadelphia (based on my nieces) who work to become “five-star” witches—with some help from their eccentric, spell-casting grandmother. The four-book series includes Witch Twins, Witch Twins at Camp Bliss, Witch Twins and Melody Malady, and Witch Twins and the Ghost of Glenn Bly. I also completed Amandine (2001), a novel loosely based on Lillian Hellman’s chilling play The Children’s Hour. Themes of friendship, deceit, and betrayal surfaced again in my next book, Overnight (2003), about a sleepover that goes horribly wrong.

  In Hannah, Divided (2002), I tried my hand at historical fiction, crafting a story of a young math prodigy living in 1930s rural Pennsylvania, who then wins a scholarship to study in Philadelphia. In 2010, I returned to the genre with Picture the Dead, collaborating with my friend Lisa Brown, an author and illustrator, on an illustrated novel about Spiritualist photographers in the Civil War era.