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Chapter 23 - Scholarship Examination

Wilson found his women in the ounfò. Nadine was on a couch and Tamara was lying there, apparently asleep, her head in Nadine’s lap.

“She’s really traumatized by what happened, honey,” Nadine whispered tiredly.

“Did she say anything about why she came home?” he whispered back.

“No, I was comforting her and telling her to relax; then she just fell asleep.”

“Maybe the sleep is good. Help her mind heal a bit. I’ll check on...”

Just then, Tamara stretched and yawned; her eyes opened.

“Oh, it’s real; not just a bad dream then,” she sighed.

Nadine kissed her. “No. Tell us what happened, if you’re able to, that is.”

Tamara sighed again. “That was so awful... Yeah, I can tell you. So, when I woke this morning, I had the most powerful feeling of foreboding I ever had. So when my driver got out of our driveway, I asked him to just drop me off at that fast-food place down near the highway. I told him I was playing hooky today and he laughed and said okay. While I was sitting there nursing a Coke, I got such a headache and suddenly felt like I was outside my body. Then... then ... Emily... came to me...”

She fingered the amulet hanging at her neck.

“But it wasn’t Emily anymore. It was Tamara, your manman, Mom. The images were so confusing, like it wasn’t speech or thought—it was urges. Like I had to get home now, and I had to keep small, and I had to do things. It was all a jumble. I ran all the way back here, like a half mile, as fast as I could. My daily running paid off, see? Anyway, while I was running home, things got clearer. Like maybe the other Tamara in me was figuring out how things worked. But there was such a strong feeling of ‘Finally the end comes!’

“Just before I got to the driveway, I saw a car that was blocking it down near the house and saw a woman get out of it, so I hid so she wouldn’t see me. Then I heard two BOOMS, the front door disappeared—so did the guy who was kicking it—and the witch staggered a bit so I guessed that something had hit her, but she stood up again. That gave me the chance to get the car between me and the witch, so I would be kinda close to her. I hid behind the car but I saw that you knew I was there—you looked right at me. Then that urge came on me again; you had to keep her busy talking. So I motioned that to you. And suddenly I knew that Vanessa—I never tasted anything so putrid and rotten and vile as that aura—had a heart implant thing. I just knew it, the urge told me, and knew I could make it burn out. With that thought, I had the most incredible feeling of relief and thanksgiving I ever felt.

“You know about my masers. I had found out that they can short out delicate electronics, even melt it sometimes. Well, I had made a second one and they both have a very high power output. I pointed them at that witch and turned them on. Then she pulled out the gun and the urge came that I needed to make sure she was... well. I was close enough that they worked on her pretty quickly. When Vanessa fell down, the urge told me to finish what I had started... and then I heard myself say, ‘Stay back, Cassandra, I need to finish her.’ When the witch died, the Emily/Tamara presence gave me a mental hug and kiss, praised me for being brave and smart, and said she could finally rest peacefully now.

“Manman, that was your own manman!” Tamara wailed. “When she left, she left behind some of her memories. Some are hard to understand, but one was that our ancestry goes back thousands of years to when Granne Erzulie was human, she’s our family’s many-greats grandmother and is now the lwa of kindness and love—so Erzulie Mansur is our ancestor too. Other memories are about what that witch did to Granmanman Tamara. In one of her battles with Vanessa, Tamara damaged Vanessa’s heart somehow. That’s how she knew about the implant. Other memories that Tamara had? I don’t want to look at those memories—at least not yet.”

Nadine was weeping as she listened. “Was Manman with you the whole time you were growing up, then?”

“No... yes... no... oh, maybe not. I can feel that her presence has left me now and I know what it felt like when it happened back at that fast food place—it was nothing like when the lwa mount you—yes, I’ve experienced that; don’t look at me like that, Mother—but I feel the same as I used to, now that her presence is gone from me. So it’s probably no. I’m sure I communed with her spirit through Emily and whenever I think of her, my amulet feels warm. So I know there must be some kind of connection.”

“So Manman was the defeat of Vanessa after all... so fitting,” Nadine mused. “And it was done by technology, not magic. We will need to give thanks to our protecting lwa for their warnings and support, my husband and daughter. But Tamara, are you not traumatized by what you did? Like after what happened with Leger?”

“No, Manman... What happened here was... right. And it wasn’t like I was the person who did it to her; I was guided and urged to use my masers like that. Now I feel... like... complete? Fulfilled? Yes, like that.”

“Oh, that’s excellent, darling,” Nadine said. “I worry for you. Oh! But how is my poor house?”

“Well, it needs new doors for sure. Some cleanup, but most of that is outside. I think the police should be done by now; let’s look,” Wilson said.

They went outside and the area was empty; even the car that Vanessa had used had been towed away.

Wilson looked around. “I want to call the handyman who fixed up the place to come to do the repairs. Don’t use the front porch; that will need professional cleaning. Your aim was perfect, Nadine. Oh, the FBI agent, Norris, should be back soon. He’s heard my story; I’d like to hear his—what he learned about Vanessa—and see if there are any more people who we have to watch out for.”

About a half hour later, Norris returned. By then Wilson had cleaned up the remains of the blood in the kitchen and sanitized the floor, so except for the door and frame, the kitchen looked normal.

Nadine heard the car pull into the yard, so she waved for Norris to go around to the back.

“Done with the cops?” he asked as he sat at the kitchen table and accepted a cup of coffee as Wilson told him about Vanessa’s likely cause of death.

The family sat at the table with him.

“I heard you were at my school,” Tamara said. “I want to know what happened there.”

“And if you learned any more about Vanessa’s intentions than you heard from us here,” Wilson added.

“Okay, let’s start at the beginning. We did find that she entered through Tampa over a week ago. She had a bogus diplomatic passport but she got the passport control people so confused that she was out of the airport before they could find her. That info came in just about an hour ago; Tampa didn’t know about the Vanessa connection and the passport was in a different name.

“The school. What happened there was sheer coincidence. The Miami police were investigating claims of a possible assault on two school district employees by some kind of invisible ‘aliens,’ so the police invited the FBI to be there too. They thought it was a national security matter. I had told Wilson about that.”

Wilson nodded.

“Well, when we were in the principal’s office, talking to her about Monday’s events, there was a commotion in the outer office; a guy was demanding that the secretary call for Fabienne Bernard, that her parents needed her, and he had a letter signed by them to release her. The secretary told him that the school had no student by that name, so he showed her a picture but it was of a nine- or ten-year-old girl. The secretary pointed out that this was a high school; possibly he was looking for an elementary school.

“I saw, from inside the principal’s office, the man go around the counter. He said to her, ‘Let me look at your student list,’ and then grabbed her arm and pulled her out of her chair and she screamed; that’s when the two cops ran out behind me, grabbed the guy, and wrestled him to the floor. They cuffed him and told him they were charging him for assault, battery, obstruction, you know how they lay on the charges. But that name he asked for? I have a good memory for names and I recalled a certain Bernard family who had arrived on a military medical airlift, a family who my office helped obtain new identities. Wilson and I had just discussed the likelihood that Vanessa was searching for his wife—and Vanessa probably would only know the family’s Haitian names. So I stepped in and took over the arrest.

“I wasn’t sure if the cops loved or hated that. They were damned sure confused. Well, attempted kidnapping is a federal offense too and we had the guy cold, with physical evidence too. I told him that attempted child kidnappers had about a thirty-day life expectancy in prison and he opened right up. To hell with Miranda rights. Oh, I did mention them in passing.

“He said that he was supposed to grab you, Tamara, and when Vanessa got Nadine, she was going to take you both to a remote house she’d rented outside Florida City. To do what, he didn’t know. He said that they’d been casing your place for several days and had followed Tamara to her school; that’s how he knew you went to Edison. He didn’t know that you also went to classes at U of Miami. And he said that you, Wilson, went to work every day like clockwork, at 6:30 a.m. When he got the call that Tamara had left and the plan was to go ahead, he had to wait for the classes to start because he had never gotten a good enough look at you, Tamara, to recognize you well enough to grab you out of a group and that you came by a different car each day that he watched. Vanessa’s thugs knew that simply trying to grab Tamara would be difficult, so they concocted that fake letter.”

“Did he know how Vanessa found out where we lived?” Wilson asked.

“Not a whole lot, except he did tell us that she visited Leger in prison in Haiti a few times and that he knows that Leger’s dead now. So somehow Vanessa got the info about you from Leger.”

“You think there were any more plans against Nadine?”

Norris shook his head. “The quality of these guys she hired shows that she was scraping the bottom. That was slipshod planning for a smash-and-grab attempt at your home and a very stupid kidnapping attempt. She must have been at the end of her resources; we learned that she got pretty well financially tied up in Haiti. Maybe she thought if she could get Nadine to work with her, she could make a comeback. Hey, gotta go; thanks for the coffee and the story. And keep safe, although you seem to do fine on your own.”

They shook hands and Norris left.

Wilson sighed. “Gotta get the repairs started.”

University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida: mid-November

During the past summer, Tamara had taken two writing courses and she had kept in contact with one of her instructors, Joyce Winters, an English literature doctoral student, who taught part of the creative writing course. Tamara was most concerned about the Clarke exam’s literature question, so she had been writing some sample essays to answer past exam questions and sending them to her instructor to critique. She had met with Winters once in October and it was time for her November meeting.

“Hey, Tamara,” Winters greeted her. “Your last two essays were pretty good.”

Tamara frowned. “Hmmm. Just ‘pretty good’? I want them to be... excellent.”

“Ha! Grading essays is what I do. Much is very subjective. Your writing is excellent, technically. The grammar, word usage, spelling, sentence structure, all that stuff—that’s as good as any college senior English major or even grad student. The other part, the creative part—that’s what grabs the reader. You could do more there. That’s where the difference between a good essay and a great essay lies. For example, where you wrote on the topic of Moby Dick, here it’s...”

Winters went on to show Tamara some places where her writing could be tightened up and to remove the instances where she overused the passive voice.

“Writing becomes dull when you use the passive voice. When I read it, it makes it sound like the writer is pushing the topic away, distancing himself from the words. It’s a turnoff for creative writing, and even in narrative and expository writing, you should use the passive voice very judiciously.”

“So I need to be more creative in how I deal with the subject,” Tamara said and Winters nodded. “I have an idea. All of the essay questions I tackled could apply to novels other than the one that the question mentions. The essay questions name the novel and say ‘for example’ or ‘as an example.’ Do you think that, in addition to exploring the issue in the named work, I could mention other works and use examples from them to support my reasoning?”

Winters looked at her. “Say now, that’s an interesting idea. Hmmm, if I were grading an essay like that, it would definitely stand out among any others. That would show creativity and analytic abilities too. Why don’t you try that for the next two essays you send me? You just gave me a wonderful idea for the course I’m T.A.-ing in—thank you! And with the holidays coming, let’s meet again the first week of December instead of the second. Let’s check our schedules.”

When Tamara left Winters, her mind was full of possible ways to bring more novels into her essay question responses.

One week later

On Friday a week later, Tamara was at lunch when a commotion broke out around several tables; kids started celebrating loudly. Quickly the news spread through the room and Linda went to a nearby table to find out what the kids were looking at. A few minutes later she came back, told the others to wait a bit, and pulled up a website to display on her tablet.

“Here’s what that was about. This morning there was an article in a newspaper from an Atlanta high school about the Program there. Look, the article in that paper talks about how the Program is a complete failure—none of its objectives can be met. Let’s see... It says it makes kids suffer psychological damage; everyone’s grades in the school get lowered, and kids have all kinds of problems including assaults and injuries.

“And look here: it also suggests resistance tactics like we had planned on doing here. Let’s see, um, those selected for the Program should refuse to participate, but if they do have to participate, then others should support and protect them. Look, it says that even the network news blogs are picking up the story and the school’s news article has gone viral.”

“So maybe that story will end the Program in Florida too,” Jamie, one of the table’s regulars, said.

“I sure hope,” Linda replied.

Late November

The winter musical was approaching and Tamara found that a lot of her free time was now committed to the AV squad and her part in the lighting design and execution. She had recently gotten her acceptance to take the Clarke Scholar exam in January and the SAT exam date was approaching too.

Thank the spirits I don’t have lines to learn, too. How do those kids do that? she wondered at one point when Peary was going over the scene blocking and Tamara was marking cues on her stage map.

A few times Tamara had to stop Peary and get her assistant at the light board to aim and adjust a lantern to fill in the shadows on a character’s face or to create a scene highlight; other times Peary had a request for a special lighting effect. Sometimes she had to get Rojas to help her, but those times were becoming less frequent. She was learning and this was fun.

As Peary was staging the production by blocking the actors’ movements and Rojas was finalizing the lighting design, Tamara was tagging the lantern setup to the lighting cues in the script, to be entered into the lighting computer. Tamara did this job after every rehearsal under Rojas’ watchful eye. Soon it would be time for the dress rehearsal, but Rojas wanted to do a few lighting run-throughs before that. Tamara was quite busy.

The lighting rehearsal and then the dress rehearsal were both productive and the final bugs in the performance were worked out. The musical had three showings, all well received, and now Tamara was a show-business veteran.

She spent the holidays doing more preparation work for the Clarke exam. To practice her idea of incorporating more than one literary work into her literature essay, she went over several essays which she had already written, and added the new analyses to them. Then she reviewed them, looking for instances where she over-used the passive voice. After the holidays, she emailed two of her revised essays to Winters and got a double ‘thumbs-up’ emoji as a reply.

University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida: late January

It was late January and the date for Tamara to take the Clarke Scholars’ exam had arrived. The exam was being held in a classroom on the University of Miami campus and she found that she was one of just seven students there for the exam. When she finished four hours later, she felt that all of her preparation, including her use of multiple sample tests, had prepared her well for the math and physics parts. The current events topic turned out to be on a issue about which she and her parents had differing opinions, so she had gone on the web with them to find information which would bolster her point of view. When she wrote her essay, she was able to present the two leading perspectives on the issue, arguing her own position and refuting the opposing one.

The literature essay question lent itself perfectly to Tamara’s plan to write about more than the single work that the essay topic cited. She recalled the topic question.

“How is the author’s life reflected in his or her fiction?

“Most fictional works are portrayals of the author’s vision of the events in their characters’ lives. Many of these stories are totally fictional; however, in a large number of works, the author may base some or most of the story on incidents or experiences drawn from his or her own life in some way. In fact, many authors may even model the primary character or characters in their novel on themselves: their characters may reflect their own personalities, experiences, and ambitions. Using Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as an example, discuss how the author portrayed herself as one of her characters, showing how she viewed the world through her character’s behavior, desires, and thoughts.”

In Tamara’s essay, she addressed how Austen had invested her own personality into her main character, Elizabeth Bennett, exploring how Elizabeth is portrayed as a realist for whom social mobility was limited and class-consciousness was strong, which in all ways mirrored Austen’s own background, the social structure of her family, and that period of English history. She illustrated her points with examples drawn from Elizabeth’s interactions with other leading characters in the novel and showed how Elizabeth reacted to the social stratification that she noticed in her community.

Then Tamara discussed the similarities of Austen’s treatment of Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice to her treatment of the protagonist in her novel Emma, where again Austen seemed to invest her main character, Emma Woodhouse, with elements of Austen’s own background. From there, Tamara branched out to discuss two other authors and their works which were included on the Clarke Scholar reading list.

She analyzed Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess and Amerika, showing how Kafka’s lifelong relationship with his father influenced the main characters’ development in those works. She ended with showing how Samuel Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, used his own boyhood experiences in building the main character in Tom Sawyer and that of his boyhood acquaintances in writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She summarized her analysis by showing how the life of each author had a major influence on the nature of their works: the romantic but stratified and staid British society life of Austen; the dark, brooding, and menacing plots that reflected Kafka’s unpleasant childhood; and Twain’s light-hearted and humorous stories which incorporated the experiences of his own youth.

Tamara was very pleased with her literature essay. The Clarke Scholars website mentioned that to be successful, applicants must be able to show that they are well-rounded in both the physical sciences as well as in literature and current events, and could demonstrate their ability to effectively communicate. She felt that she had met those standards.

She had also recently taken the SAT exam and was irritated that she scored 1599, instead of a perfect score of 1600.

Oh, well, she thought. At least I improved from when I took the PSAT. Even if it’s only by one point.

Little Haiti, Miami, Florida: mid-March

Tamara finished her work on the MRI later than usual on a Tuesday evening in mid-March, so when she got home, both of her parents were also home.

She had already decided that getting a Clarke Scholarship or not, she wanted to study at Johns Hopkins, mainly because her research interests were so similar to some of the projects she had seen on the APL website.

“Tamara, a big envelope came for you from the Clarke program,” Nadine told her after she greeted her parents.

Tamara squealed. “Oh! A packet is good news. If I hadn’t made the cut, they’d just send a letter,” she explained as she tore the envelope open.

“Yes! I’m a finalist in the Clarke selection process,” she exclaimed, thrilled with the news. “The letter says I got one of the top ten scores. The five top-scoring boys and the five top-scoring girls are the finalists and my choice for attending Johns Hopkins is set. If I want to be considered for the award, I need to contact the program to arrange an interview date. Yes, I want!”

“I thought that only one girl would get into Hopkins,” Wilson said.

“Dad, every finalist gets a scholarship. Of the ten finalists, just four get a full ride and the other six get their tuition and fees covered. There were two full ones for girls—one to go to Hopkins and one to Maryland. I applied to Hopkins only so that means I either get the full ride or the partial one. I have to go to an interview where they make the final choices.”

“Who does the interviews? College professors?”

“This letter says that there’s a selection committee that decides, and the committee has some professors, some engineers, and some business people. I need to meet with the committee first and talk to them, then they decide who interviews me—it says ‘in depth’—then I get a tour. That’s when I get to meet with potential faculty mentors.”

Nadine hugged her. “I’m so happy for you, darling. When do you need to go?”

“They have a list of available dates here. They’re Fridays through Sunday mornings. I would get there Thursday evening, a Clarke official would meet me at the airport and I would be paired with a current Clarke scholar as a peer mentor. Oh, the Clarke Program pays the travel costs.”

“Where do you stay for the weekend?” Wilson asked.

“A hotel. Here’s the hotel flyer.” Tamara gave him the folder, “The letter says that’s where I’ll be meeting the committee and doing the interview. It’s across the street from the college. They have rooms reserved for the visitors. I’m guessing that with four weekends to pick from, maybe three or even four winners will be there on the weekend I pick. I suppose I’ll get to meet them too.”

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland: early April

She did get to meet two of the other finalists, a boy and a girl, after she arrived at the hotel on the Thursday of her interview. She met them in the evening at dinner. They shared some of their background with each other but, being a little nervous about the following day, they mostly discussed the scholarship exam, but they did reveal a little personal information.

Terence, the boy, was a big, muscular fellow, well over six feet tall with very wide shoulders. He admitted to being a football player.

“But Ah’m not a jock,” he insisted. “Ah’m a second-string interior defensive lineman. Dad was a college football hero and decided that Ah should be one, too. My folks ‘red-shirted’ me for kindergarten so Ah’d be bigger than the other kids. Ah did get some play time, so Dad got his fix.”

Tamara grinned at him. “So you’re a star off the field then. You must be; look at where we are.”

Terence blushed. “It does seem surreal. My guidance counselor really pushed me to apply t’the Clarke program. Ah guess she was right; Ah did make it t’being a finalist. Ah want to study astrophysics and Hopkins has a very strong program.”

Charlene grinned. “Program. Hate that word. Reminds me of that idiot Naked in School one. I’m getting out of high school without doing it. I was just picked for it three weeks ago but I’m out of the high school building two days every week; I’m in a special college-high school AP-course program. They wanted me to miss a week of college classes to stay in the high school to do the Program but I declined. Then they told me that I could go to my college classes but had to stay naked. Sure... That was a non-starter. I told them to stuff it. The Program coordinator person hates that I’m getting away with that. But they won’t let me go to the graduation ceremony. Like I care. Terence?”

“No Program for me,” Terence smiled. “My school’s a private one, gets no federal bucks. We don’t have the Program ‘cause the feds can’t force us t’have it. We have a huge football program, lots ‘a Texas schools do, but we have great academics too.”

The two looked at Tamara.

“Me? My school never got it started. But, first, Charlene, they still had it in your school, even after all that publicity that it was so bad? I thought that it was stopped everywhere.”

“Ha, hasn’t stopped at my school. Yet. It stops at the end of this school year. That’s because—well, my school’s on Ohio State’s campus and the Psych Department there was doing a study on the Program, so they forced the school to keep it going for as long as possible. Tamara, how was it possible that your school held out so long so that it never got started, anyway?”

Tamara grinned at them. “‘Cause of a conflict between laws. Florida was behind the rest of the country ‘cause its laws made it illegal for kids to be naked in public unless they had a special implanted chip. It took maybe two years for them to fix that law, so it couldn’t get started in Florida until recently.”

Terence looked blank but Charlene exclaimed, “Oh, right. I did hear about the Stripped in Florida thing. Now that was a really stupid idea.”

They had to explain to Terence what that was about.

“Yeah... Ah did hear a rumor... thought it was a joke. So that was a real thing?”

Tamara assured him it was real. “That program’s moribund now, if not dead,” she said. “The last I heard, parents could buy a chip at the same office where they get their auto license tags. But why bother paying a fee if the laws forbidding public nudity for kids no longer exist?”

“Hey, Charlene,” Terence asked, “y’said y’all’s school’s at Ohio State? How does that work?”

“Yeah, my high school’s on Ohio State’s campus; it’s tied to the university, like a charter school, but it’s a public school. My dad’s a prof there. My school has one of the top STEM programs in the state and I was always good at tech stuff. I’m planning to study mechanical engineering and either Maryland or Hopkins would be great since they both have top-notch engineering programs.”

The three teens met again at breakfast the following morning and after breakfast, they left to face the Clarke Scholars committee.

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