Fiction


The Girl Who Can Take The Most Electricity

I am the girl who can take the most electricity. Mr. Lemons, the fifth grade teacher, has me stand in front of the class and place my hands on the glass ball filled with thin tangled pink wires as he turns the long arm of the crank.

“An experiment,” he says biting his lower lip.

My hair fans out like a scared exotic bird as a small jolt of electricity runs through my body. I stand with my arms extended like shaking plywood until he says, “Agatha, it’s not safe to stay on that long.” When I return to my desk still reeling from the currents that have raced through my blood, Douglas Beckman pokes my neck and says, “Agatha Papadopolis, Bride of Frankenstein.”

At the age of eleven my name is something I am eager to abandon. At home, one of my favorite activities is to “christen” myself. I come up with names I wish I had. “I christen thee Summer Bartholomeu,” I say making a gesture of the cross and flicking lemonade on myself. “I christen thee Sarah Harper Morgan.” With the names I give myself, I imagine I could change. With the right name, I could have stick-straight blond hair, a small nose. I could stretch out my long pale legs and dip my feet in a backyard pool. With a different name I would some day grow tall into the sky. But I was named Agatha. Agatha Papadopolis. A name you could cut your tongue on. It sounded like a dinosaur or a sore throat. What I wish more than anything was that I had been named Hannah. The perfect spelling, the same forwards and backwards. As Hannah, I imagined I would have skated through grade school in one town. I would have been the girl who wore a heart-shaped pendant on a gold chain from Fimmer Brothers. I would have walked the halls with a friend on each side, a new notebook under my arm. Hannah would have gone on to have Friday night parties in her parents’ modern den, and guys invited over from the Lacrosse team. Hannah’s mother would have brought down Ellio’s mini pizzas. She wouldn’t have tried to make her daughter’s friends eat bitter chalky halvah, and show them her rosary beads. Hannah would never know the smell of the carnival grounds on an August morning.

As Hannah, I could have been perfect, the same, any way you looked at me.

 

E-mail to read more.