Hazel's Theory of Evolution Read online

  Dedication

  For Brian, who gets me in a way only a sibling can

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Lisa Jenn Bigelow

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Mom said to think positive because the first face I saw at Finley might belong to my first new friend. I don’t think she was accounting for the giant bronze fish statue on the lawn. The bus stopped right in front of it. I almost lost an eye on its harpoon.

  I figured it was a brook trout, Michigan’s state fish. It looked dimwitted—the kind of fish that swam wherever the current took it, never wondering what lay past the next bend, never suspecting its life could change in a splash, until a heron’s beak broke the surface and skewered it like a marshmallow. At which point, of course, it was too late.

  Not that this was its fault. It was who it was. But at that moment I hated that fish. It was stuck staring at a swarm of pimply kids for all eternity and didn’t even seem to mind. The plaque at its base said Finley Middle School, Home of the Fighting Fish. Yeah, right.

  I wished I could take a selfie with it and send it to Mom. Here’s me and my new bestie!

  The truth was I wasn’t planning to make friends at Finley. First because, if the past eight years were any indication, the probability was low, so why waste my energy? Second because I didn’t need more friends. I had Becca. Sure, she was at my old school, but since there was only one high school in our county, all I had to do was make it through the year, and we’d be together again.

  It was too bad humans couldn’t hibernate. I’d hug myself like a bat slumbering through the coldest, darkest days of winter, a “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging at the entrance of my cozy cave. Instead, my plan for this year was to do my best imitation. I’d function at the most basic level: going to class, doing my homework. But as far as other people were concerned, I’d be deep asleep. Then, come next summer, I’d awake refreshed, stretch my wings, and fly to high school, as if eighth grade had never happened.

  Right now, I felt anything but refreshed. The bus ride had left me as sticky as a caramel oozing in someone’s pocket, collecting lint. My hair frizzed around my face where my elastic didn’t quite hold it back. My glasses steamed. I’d worn a button-down shirt and jeans because Mom said they made me look grown-up, but I wished I’d gone with my gut and worn my usual T-shirt and cut-offs. I hiked up my backpack and let the stream of kids wash me into the brick building.

  School was a half day, so the teachers had barely enough time to introduce themselves, take roll, and go over our plan for the fall—that’s what they always called it, our plan for the fall, even though syllabus would have been more efficient and precise—before the next bell rang. Some kids seemed to notice I was new, but when I didn’t make eye contact, they lost interest. I trudged from class to class, sat quietly at my desk, and kept an eye on the clock.

  In other words, everything was going according to my own plan for the fall—until my last class.

  The first problem was getting there. My schedule said it was in Room T4, but I spent all of passing period without finding it or any other room labeled with T. The bell rang before I finally found it at the end of a long hallway in the basement, past the cafeteria, along with the wood shop, art studio, and family and consumer science room with its rows of kitchenettes and sewing machines. Apparently, T stood for technology. Maybe Finley’s idea of health and human development involved brain implants and robotic limbs. My brother, Rowan, would love that.

  I slid into the room, and for the first time all morning, everyone’s eyes fell on me.

  The class was perched on stools around tall black tables that looked like castoffs from a chemistry lab—and judging by the scorch marks and stains, they were. The exception was a low table along the side, where one boy sat alone. He stood out from everyone else for another reason, too: his neon green mohawk. He noticed me noticing him, and his dark eyes narrowed.

  The teacher, who looked like a tiny gray sparrow in a pantsuit, came to the door. I wondered if she’d hand me a tardy slip, but she said only, “Hello, what’s your name?”

  “Hazel Brownlee-Wellington.”

  She consulted her roster. “There you are! Except my list says, ‘Hazel Brownlee-Welli.’ Guess it was too much for the computer to handle!”

  She smiled. I didn’t. Teachers had been making some variation on the comment all morning.

  “I’m Mrs. Paradisi,” she said. “We’ve got a chair for you next to Yoshi—excuse me, Yosh—Fukuzawa. Consider that your seat for the semester.”

  I didn’t need her to tell me who Yosh was. The only seat left was a folding chair beside the boy with the green mohawk. I squeezed over to his table, sliding my backpack from my shoulders and myself into the chair.

  Yosh rolled his eyes. “Oh, good. Company at the kids’ table.”

  That’s when I noticed he didn’t have a folding chair of his own. He was sitting in a wheelchair. He didn’t have a cast that I could see, so I guessed the reason was something more permanent. My tongue itched with the urge to ask, but I clamped my mouth shut. My moms said there was a fine line between healthy curiosity and invasiveness, but I wasn’t always sure where it was. Besides, I reminded myself, I couldn’t ask personal questions if I was hibernating.

  Mrs. Paradisi said, “I was just going over our plan for the fall. Class, as I was saying, we’ll be approaching health and human development—or H and HD as we call it—from many angles. Nutrition and exercise, hygiene, drugs and alcohol, and mental health, not to mention friendships, dating, and sexuality.”

  Titters rippled around the room at the last word. Mrs. Paradisi ignored them.

  “Basically, my job is to give you information and strategies to make smart choices, so you can be the healthiest, happiest human you can be. See that poster with the three Hs?”

  I followed her finger to a triangle with an H at each side. At the peak was a stick figure raising its arms in the stick figure version of triumph.

  “That’s your formula for success,” Mrs. Paradisi said. “Happy—healthy—human.”

  She held up a package of index cards. “I’m going to pass out these cards, and I’d like each of you to write down something you’d like to learn in H and HD. This is anonymous, so ask anything. When you’re finished, put your card in this box. I’ll read out the questions, and we’ll see where we should put extra emphasis this semester.”

  I dug in my backpack for a pencil and stared at the blank card Mrs. Paradisi set in front of me. I knew what would make me a healthy, happy human: letting me go back to my old school, where I knew my way around. Where my teachers knew my name—all of it. Where I had Becca. H&HD couldn’t help with that.

  In fact, as far as I could tell, it would be a complete waste of time. I was one of the healthiest people I knew. I barely eve
r caught a cold, and I hadn’t vomited since I was three, on the spinning teacups at the county fair. Judging by the posters hanging around the room, the curriculum would boil down to eating vegetables, saying no to drugs, and getting a good night’s sleep. Why did we need an entire class for that? Couldn’t I take extra science instead?

  My pencil moved quickly. I wrote small so I could squeeze in everything I wanted to say, then folded my card in half. Stools screeched against the tile floor as the class scrambled up. I turned to the boy next to me, Yosh, and reached for his card. “Here, I can take yours up.”

  He snatched it back as my fingertips brushed the edge.

  “Relax,” I said. “I wasn’t going to peek. I just wanted to help.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “Don’t bother.”

  “It’s not any bother,” I protested. But he was already wheeling through the mob. I watched, confused, then slowly followed and slipped my card through the slot in Mrs. Paradisi’s shoebox. So much for being helpful. I was definitely better off hibernating.

  “All right, class,” Mrs. Paradisi said, clapping her hands for attention. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” She gave the box a shake before removing the lid and drawing out the first card.

  “‘What’s the best way to pop a zit?’” she read. The room burst into giggles. “Hey, now. I told you to ask anything, and I meant it. We’ll talk about skin care during our hygiene unit.”

  She pulled out the next card. “‘How to make girls like me.’ Well, nobody can force anyone to like them, but hopefully our unit on relationships will give you ideas on how to be a good friend and partner.”

  Mrs. Paradisi continued to read questions. Most of them were pretty funny—or, more accurately, they made people laugh. Sometimes the laughter seemed nervous, as if other kids were wondering the same thing but were too embarrassed to ask themselves. Which was irrational, in my opinion. The activity was anonymous, after all.

  I knew when Mrs. Paradisi had reached my question because it took her a long time to read it. Her eyebrows knit. Eventually she cleared her throat and read, “‘Earthworms have been on Earth for hundreds of millions of years. They were here before the dinosaurs and will be here after humans become extinct. If anyone knows the formula for success, they do, and I bet they never had to take a class in earthworm development. So how come we have to take H and HD?’”

  There was an uneasy quiet as kids exchanged expressions of amusement and disbelief.

  “Are they saying worms are smarter than we are?” a kid whispered.

  “Nah, they’re just trying to get out of class.”

  “Somebody wants detention,” another kid sang in a low voice.

  A girl whipped up her pencil and held it out to one of the boys like a microphone. “Good morning, Mr. Worm, what’s your secret for staying so fresh after millions of years?”

  “Moisturizer,” he answered. “Lots and lots of moisturizer.”

  “Also, I poop a hundred times a day,” another kid said. “It keeps me happy and healthy!”

  The room roared with laughter, except for Mrs. Paradisi and me. She was waiting out the hijinks, twiddling her thumbs. I, on the other hand, didn’t see what was funny about my question. Didn’t anyone appreciate what an achievement it was for a species to survive hundreds of millions of years, when modern humans had only existed for two hundred thousand?

  The way they were laughing, I bet no one knew, much less cared, that the mucus on worms’ skin allowed them to breathe underground, so they could plow and fertilize the soil so plants could grow. To everyone else, worms were slimy and gross, end of story.

  That’s when Yosh glanced over. Abruptly he stopped laughing, and I realized how I must look with my flushed cheeks and pressed-together lips. My stomach dropped as I imagined him pointing at me and saying, Hey, New Girl’s a worm lover! Which, honestly, wasn’t that off base. Earthworms benefited the planet a lot more than humans. But I couldn’t defend them without calling the entire class’s attention to myself. Keep calm and hibernate.

  But to my surprise, Yosh said, “Hey, worms do valuable work when they’re not getting washed up in rainstorms or used as bait. And everyone knows gummy worms are better than any of the other gummy species. Give them some credit.”

  The laughter grew scattered, uncertain. The class wasn’t sure whether he was serious.

  I was sure: he wasn’t. I could tell by his smirk and the gleam in his eyes that Yosh didn’t care one iota about the dignity of the earthworm. He cared about—well, I wasn’t sure what he cared about, and that bothered me. It also bugged me that he’d effectively claimed authorship of my question. It didn’t matter that I’d wanted to stay anonymous. It wasn’t his right.

  “If I could answer this question,” Mrs. Paradisi said, her voice quiet but sharp. The room went still. “The short answer is, whether or not you find it useful, Finley requires one semester of H and HD for you to graduate eighth grade. The other, you’ll take PE. This is nonnegotiable.”

  I bit my lip. One of my moms, Mimi, was a lawyer. She said everything was negotiable. But if it wasn’t the right time to argue about worms, it wasn’t the right time to argue about graduation requirements either.

  “Earthworms have done very well for themselves as a species, yes, but the life of the average worm hasn’t changed much in millions of years. They do what they’ve always done.” Mrs. Paradisi smiled. “For humans, I think you’ll agree, life is more complicated. And it’s changing all the time. I don’t know if Finley taught H and HD fifty years ago, but I promise you some of the content would have been very different.”

  She gave a little shrug. “You can go through life following your instincts alone, like a worm. Or, since you’re in my class anyway, you can open yourself to the possibility that you’ll learn something new. I’m confident you will. Now, we’ve got two minutes left. Next question.”

  When the bell rang, everyone rushed for the door. As I hurried by, I overheard Mrs. Paradisi say, “Yosh, can I speak with you a moment?” I felt like a mouse narrowly escaping a trap, scurrying for the safety of home.

  Chapter 2

  The truth was I’d had worse first days.

  Top honors went to the first day of kindergarten. Our teacher had asked what we’d done over the summer, and I’d told everyone about moving to Thimbleweed Farm. The other kids had wanted to know all about my family’s goats. What were their names? Did I get to milk them? How did the milk taste?

  Then Kirsten, a girl with perfect French braids, had said, “PU. You smell like goat poo.”

  I’d frowned. “No, I don’t. I took a bath last night.”

  “And goats eat garbage, which means you smell like garbage poo.”

  My face had gone hot. My heart beat faster. The problem wasn’t so much that Kirsten was insulting me. It was that she was insulting the goats. In the past month, I’d learned that goats were clever and curious and way cleaner than the average kindergartner.

  I’d said, “That’s not true! Goats eat plants. They’re herbivores.”

  Kirsten hadn’t been impressed by the scientific terminology—or the truth. “Then why do cartoons always show goats eating tin cans and dirty old socks?”

  I’d jumped off my carpet square, hands in fists. “Because cartoons are made up, stupid!”

  The room had erupted, some kids shrieking with shock and delight that I’d used the S-word, others pinching their noses and singing, “PU, PU, you smell like garbage poo.” It hadn’t mattered that the farm had seemed like a wonderland a moment before, or that other kids lived on farms themselves, farms you could smell a mile down the road if the wind blew right. Kirsten Van Hoorn had said PU about me, and no one wanted to be friends with a girl who stank.

  Making the whole thing even more unfair, the teacher had sent me to time-out, while Kirsten told the class all about her family’s trip to Paris. Apparently calling someone stupid was worse than telling them they smelled like poo.

  From that day on, I was lucky
if anyone called me Hazel. Mostly they called me Goat Girl. Over time, most kids seemed to forget it had started as an insult. It was simply habit. Who knows? Maybe they’d forgotten my real name. But whenever Kirsten called me Goat Girl, it was as if she were identifying something gross she’d scraped off her shoe.

  That was one good thing to be said about being forced to go to Finley: there was no Kirsten.

  Our house was silent when I got home, except for the discordant pounding of piano keys drifting down from the attic. Probably Stravinsky. Rowan always listened to Stravinsky like it was heavy metal. Personally, it stressed me out. I preferred Mimi’s old-timey jazz.

  Risking permanent hearing loss, I went up to my room, across the stairs from Rowan’s, to change into shorts and a T-shirt. Then I went back down to the kitchen to make a goat cheese and tomato sandwich. I shoved an apple in my pocket and went out to the soap shack.

  That was what Mom called our second kitchen between the house and the barn, where she cooked up her goat’s milk bath products. She sold them at health food stores, “Made in Michigan” gift shops, farmers’ markets, and craft bazaars across the state, plus online. Everything had the Thimbleweed Farm label. She’d designed that, too.

  A gust of lavender-and-orange-scented steam hit my face as I opened the door. Arby, our beagle mix, bounced up from the rag rug in the corner where she’d been lying with her chin on her paws. She weaved through my legs in a figure eight, tail wagging. I fished a slice of tomato from my sandwich and tossed it to her. She wolfed it down, then panted for more. I petted her with my free hand.

  Mom was stirring a giant pot at the stove. Her freckled skin sparkled with sweat. Her hair was braided around her head as intricately as a weaver bird’s nest. She turned. “Hazy! How was school?”

  I shrugged. “I survived.”

  “Always a good first step.” She gave me a sympathetic smile. “Were the kids friendly, at least? How about the teachers?”

  I made a face, remembering everyone’s reactions to my earthworm question. “I’d rather not talk about it. I’m going out to the half-ton.”