“Subterfuge!” Mab insists.
“Ho hum,” I repeat.
And no one except Mab cares where anyone else goes to college. Only the people who also go there are impressed, and you already know them so they will be evaluating you on your other merits or lack thereof anyway.
But talking about where other people are going to college is something people do care about, and it is contagious like yawns or strep throat, so Mama gets mad at me for not doing my homework, and the person whose fault that is is River.
“Monday,” she says while I am cutting up a box that pasta came in. “What are you doing?”
“I am cutting up a box that pasta came in,” I tell her although I do not know why since that is obvious from looking at me which she is.
“You need to do your homework,” she says.
“Lie.”
“I’m not playing a game,” Mama says. “You need to do your homework and get into college.”
“I am not doing my homework because there is no point,” I tell her, “and I am not going to college.”
“Of course you are,” Mama says.
“Which?”
“Both.”
“There is no point doing Spanish homework because I do not speak Spanish,” I explain patiently, which is nice of me because we have already had this conversation many times. “There is no point writing an essay about what Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote, ‘I heard a Fly buzz—when I died’ because if she meant to be understood she would not have written something so impossible and untrue.”
“Oh, Monday”—Mama closes her eyes—“it’s so true.”
“If she were dead, she would not hear anything. Or write any more words.”
“Well, it’s poetry,” Mama says, like that is an excuse to not make sense. “What did you write in your essay?”
“I did not write anything in my essay because there is no point in doing my homework, but if I were going to do my homework what I would have written is ‘Emily Dickinson means for me, the reader, to be confused. I am. So she has done her job. And so have I.’”
“What does Mrs. Lasserstein say when you hand in essays like that?” Mama asks although I do not know why because she knows the answer.
“Mrs. Lasserstein says I am being too literal, but there is no such thing as too literal. Literal does not come in degrees. That is like being too seventy-seven point four. That is like being too bicycle.”
“Monday, you do not know everything.”
“There are many things I do not know,” I agree.
“Just do your homework. I’m not arguing with you about it.”
“Lie.”
“You’re being too literal.”
“There is no such thing as too literal!”
Mama has two plans, a first-things-first plan and a then-save-the-world plan. Her first-things-first plan is to win a class action lawsuit against Belsum and make them pay for what they did. You would think this would be an easy goal to achieve because so many things are obviously true facts. It is an obviously true fact that our water used to be clear and then it was cloudy and smelly and then it was green, but Belsum said water did not need to be clear, odor-free, and colorless to be safe. It is an obviously true fact that my father did not use to have cancer and then he did, but Belsum said he ate a lot of red meat and felt a lot of stress, and that was probably why. It is an obviously true fact that a lot more babies were born with birth defects than before Belsum came or than in towns where Belsum is not located, but Belsum said we were eating chemicals in our food and putting chemicals on our lawns and wearing chemicals in our clothes and sitting on chemicals in our sofas, and probably those were the chemicals that were causing our problems and not Belsum’s chemicals at all.
Then Belsum said they had scientists study GL606 and those scientists said it was perfectly safe, but that was because those scientists worked for Belsum, but that turned out not to be illegal. Then it turned out Belsum measured the amount of GL606 that was in the water and issued a statement saying that amount was the amount that was safe, but that turned out not to be illegal either. Then it turned out that it is very expensive to run for government office and the people who had done so successfully had had their campaigns paid for by Belsum. And they were the ones who decided whether or not things were illegal.
That is how I know Mab’s idea to get River to take pictures of the bottles of water under his sinks will not work. Russell says notoriously. These cases are notoriously hard to try successfully. That means cases like ours are famous for failing.