8. Trivia

TRIVIA

Later that morning, as the boy was filling his bleach bucket, Maya-Jade poked her head into the utility closet.

"I thought you might want to do something different today," she said as she peeled at the Band-Aid on her elbow, revealing a bumpy scab underneath. For a moment, he wondered what had happened, then remembered he didn't care.

"What? Clean the toilets with a toothbrush?" he retorted.

"Actually, it's almost time for trivia. I thought you might want to help with it."

Was Maya-Jade being nice? He didn't want her to be nice. Hating her had been the fire on which he warmed himself. He might be cold without it.

And also, why was she being nice? A suspicion crawled up his spine. "Did you talk to him?"

"Who?"

"The social worker."

"What social worker?"

"Mr. Johnson."

"I have no idea who that is."

"Yeah, right," he replied, remembering how awful he'd felt when Vivian had accused him of being a criminal. They were all liars! All of them. He didn't trust any of them.

"Look," she said, tapping her clipboard, "trivia is starting in five minutes. If you want to help me, fine, and if you don't want to, you can go back to that."

He didn't know why he was arguing with her. He liked trivia. He was good at trivia. And he really wanted off germ duty.

"Fine, I'll help," he said grudgingly, like he was doing her the favor.

"Okay. You can sit over in the back. A lot of the residents are hard of hearing, so you can repeat what I say. Then I don't have to use the microphone, which has feedback and hurts their ears, especially if they have hearing aids."

"Fine. Whatever."

They walked through the corridors into the common room where the boy situated himself in the back near me as the residents began to trickle in, some in wheelchairs, some pushing walkers, the spry ones using their two feet.

I didn't go to many of the activities. Most required speaking. Or seeing. But similar to the boy, I liked trivia. I was 107 years old, and I remembered everything. Mostly this was a curse. But not in trivia. I was excellent at trivia. Even if I was the only one who knew it.

"Welcome," Maya-Jade said, clapping her hands and enunciating slowly. "Today's trivia topic is American presidents."

"American pheasants?" asked Arnold Myerson, who as I mentioned was nearly deaf.

"Don't be ridiculous," Vivian replied. "Who would have trivia about pheasants?"

"Nana," Maya-Jade scolded. "Be nice." She turned toward Arnold. "Today's trivia subject is American pre-si-dents," she said, enunciating like a kindergarten teacher.

"Oh, I'm much better at those," Arnold said.

US presidents were something the boy happened to know a lot about. He had spent the first half of third grade under the tutelage of a teacher named Mr. Carbine, who had leavened the civics lessons with fun facts about presidents. Like: George Washington really did have false teeth, but they weren't wood, as many people believed, but gold, ivory, and even other human teeth. And FDR was paralyzed by polio and used a wheelchair, but he kept it a secret by leaning on things—or his wife—for support or hiding his legs behind tablecloths.

The boy always had more questions, so many more questions that Mr. Carbine could not answer and still get through the more boring stuff about every state having two state legislatures except for one (Nebraska). One day after class, Mr. Carbine beckoned him over. The boy thought he was in trouble for disrupting with all his questions, but he was not. The teacher handed him a book called Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents ; a sticker inside read FROM THE LIbrARY OF JOHN C. CARBINE . That was amazing enough, but even more amazing was that Mr. Carbine had told him he could keep it. And he had, for years, dragging it from apartment to apartment until, during one of the moves, he lost it.

"How many times were a father and son president?" Maya-Jade asked.

"Oh, I know," Minna said. "There were the Bush ones. I liked the younger one's wife. She was a teacher, I think."

"And the Roosevelts!" shouted out Nelson Lippincott.

The boy rolled his eyes. Duh! Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt were cousins, not father and son.

The Adamses and the Bushes , I thought.

"George H. W. and George W. Bush," the boy muttered quietly to himself. "And John Adams and John Quincy Adams."

"The correct answer is two," Maya-Jade said. "Bonus points if you named them. John Adams and John Quincy Adams. George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush."

"They're practically the same names," Vivian said, her tone offended as if it had been a trick question.

"They are," Maya-Jade agreed. "Here's the next question: How many US presidents have been assassinated?"

"I know there's Abraham Lincoln," Minna said.

"The actor," Vivian added. "The handsome one."

The boy shook his head. Vivian had meant Ronald Reagan, who was shot, but not fatally. You had to be killed to have it count as being assassinated.

"There were those nice Kennedy boys," Minna said. "So handsome."

"Their poor mother," Vivian said. "Losing them both."

"I seem to remember the Black one was killed," Minna was saying. "I remember Steven crying."

"I think you're thinking of Martin Luther King," Vivian said haughtily.

"Oh, you're right. I am."

"Final answers," Maya-Jade called. "How many American presidents were assassinated?"

A chorus of numbers rang out: One, five, twelve.

Four, I thought.

"Four," the boy muttered to himself.

"The correct answer is four," Maya-Jade replied. "Bonus round: Who were they?"

Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy, I thought just as the boy muttered quietly, under his breath, "Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy."

"Smart boy," I said. It came out somewhere between a whisper and a wad of phlegm. Voices deteriorate if you don't use them. Everything does.

The boy didn't hear me. No one did. And even if he had, he wouldn't have known what it meant for an old zombie to speak for the first time in five years.

Did I think it was strange to have broken my silence? Did I question why I had done it in response to some boy? Did I follow up my proclamation with anything else?

I did not. Because at that exact moment, Dickie McGinity threw up his breakfast. He'd eaten extra helpings of cantaloupe and cottage cheese, so it was a colorful and fragrant display. It ended trivia.

But it started something else.