The Necessary Beggar by Susan Palwick

Author:Susan Palwick
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

8

Honors

Zamatryna kept Gallicina in her closet for years. She didn’t know what else to do; the command for silence never changed. She wondered what Gallicina was learning from being in the beetle, if she was learning anything. Gallicina must have been a very complicated person. Clearly the force of her will was sustaining her beetle body, which should have died after one summer.

The girl concocted theories. She read ghost stories—careful not to let Stan know that she was doing so, since he wouldn’t have approved—and watched soap operas with Lisa. The plots of soap operas also went on for years, every bit as improbable as the beetle’s survival. Soap operas were always about love and money, and so Zamatryna found herself spinning stories about Gallicina and Darroti. They must have known each other, for Gallicina to have followed the family into exile, and for her spirit to be so stubborn now. They must have either loved or hated each other, or maybe both, and there had probably been money involved too, since Gallicina’s family had been rich. But whenever Zamatryna thought about her uncle, she could only summon increasingly blurry snapshots of a laughing clown, often drunk, but never hurtful. It was hard to fit the Darroti she remembered into a soap opera.

The ghost stories all agreed that the living needed to take action on behalf of the dead, to release them, to free them from having to haunt. Here in America, spirits needed to be freed from the world, whereas in Gandiffri, they lived within it. And so perhaps Gallicina, for whom the beetle’s body would have been a blessing back home, found it a prison here, in this new world. But Zamatryna had no idea how to free her. She knew only that she was not allowed to speak of the beetle to anyone else, and that she dared not release it from its jar, lest Stan find and kill it.

She did not think about the beetle all the time, of course. She had too much else to do. Although the subjects she studied in school were very easy, she quickly learned that there were other challenges. Her family, and Stan and Lisa, wanted her to be successful, to get good grades. But success also meant being accepted as an American, being seen as normal, and being very smart was not considered normal. Part of success was popularity. The smartest students were rarely also popular. They were excluded and called names, “nerd” and “freak,” the things that Zamatryna had been called her first day in school. Some were put in special classes for gifted and talented children; the grown-ups said this made you special, but special was also what they called children whose brains had been damaged at birth. Special children of either type weren’t popular, and therefore weren’t successful, and therefore weren’t the best Americans.

The trick, then, was to be as much like other, normal children as you could, while being smart enough to please the adults. So Zamatryna worked very hard at making friends.

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