Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders by Julianna Baggott Page B

hadn’t been told to pack my belongings, but I had arranged them neatly on my cot.
    “So, you’re Harriet.”
    “Harriet Wolf,” I said. This seemed to surprise him—Wolf. Did I have a right to it? “Nice to meet you.”
    Dr. Brumus was towering over us. My father looked out the window as if searching for a pigeon to shoot. Eppitt had told me that rich people shoot pigeons.
    “I’ll leave you two to talk,” Brumus said. He nudged my father. “You’ve got a gift?”
    “I do,” my father said, but he didn’t hand it over.
    Brumus sighed and left.
    Once Brumus was gone, my father seemed a little softer. “It’s not much, but I hope you like it.” He handed me the gift.
    “Thank you,” I said, holding it in my lap.
    “Open it!” my father said.
    My fingers were too nervous to tug correctly. I felt spastic. I had opened only a few gifts in my life—an orange, new shoelaces.
    “Do you need help?” Maybe he suspected that I lacked fine motor skills.
    “No, I’m fine.”
    “Just tear into it!” he said.
    And so I did, but then immediately worried that I seemed vicious. I looked up to see if he seemed to think I was.
    Instead he was impatient. “It’s a book!” he announced.
    “Thank you.”
    “Not just any book!” he said.
    I opened the book to its middle. The pages were blank. “It’s an empty book.”
    “For you to fill!” he said. “I’ve gotten you a subscription to a number of newspapers. You must know what’s going on out there! You clip the things of interest, paste them in the book, and make notations.”
    “Out there?” I said.
    “You don’t really need a newspaper to fill you in on what’s going on in here!” A joke. He laughed a little.
    My heart, already charged, started to beat faster. “So this book and the newspapers are to help me know what goes on out there,” I said, clarifying, “while I’m in here.”
    “And to organize those thoughts, yes,” he said. “Dr. Brumus says you’re very clever.”
    I looked out onto the wide lawn. I wanted to crawl under the Duck Porch. “I’m a genius,” I corrected him.
    “Well, yes, but you’re a girl,” he said. “I don’t know how much I trust a test like that. Plus, if it’s accurate, then it’s kind of ironic. I mean, a girl genius. What will you specialize in? Hems? Tulle?”
    I closed my eyes and imagined living under the Duck Porch forever. “My mother will want to see me. How about her?”
    “Oh, her nerves would never withstand it. But she is so proud of you! So proud!”
    “But I’m a genius. I could help her. I could help her nerves. Ask Dr. Brumus!”
    “No, no,” my father told me. “This has worked out well enough. It’s best for everyone.” He jabbed the book with his index finger. “Look at the first page. I’ve started it for you!”
    I opened the book, and there was a clipping—the smudgy small photograph of me in front of the administration building, holding the IQ test. The Owl hadn’t shown me the photograph. She’d chopped it from the article she’d shown me, and now I knew why. I looked austere, too gangly and small for thirteen, practically stricken by the flash, with my eyes flared and my hands gripping the test page as the wind kicked up one side of my hair. Dr. Brumus looked like a barrel, and we seemed trapped between the building’s columns. Beneath the picture, a subtitle: “Wolf, 13, is interested in ornithology.” I didn’t know what ornithology was or where the information had come from. When I saw that photograph, I wondered how Eppitt could love me. I was ugly. I was diseased. I had conditions. The test couldn’t be trusted. I was only a girl. If I was a genius, it was a waste of genius.
    Brumus showed up once my father had said his quick good-bye. My nose didn’t bleed, but I still felt the light-headedness that sometimes came with it. I remember it being dusk, and the old doctor picking me up, cradling me to his chest—even though I was too old for it. He