Letters

The Icing on the Cake

I woke up to my alarm early on Wednesday and groaned. I was finally falling into a place where the burn of homecoming was becoming a little easier to bear, but as a result I had spent the entire night tossing and turning; trying to decided who I should ask to come with me to the ALS support group meeting. Bryce was out of the question, so I mostly debated asking Nathan. He didn't seem like that kind of person, though, and he wouldn't understand why I cared.

Unhappily, I showered and threw out another soggy bowl of cereal, after waiting to long to eat it. I then caught the bus at 6:45 as usual.

The day went by as it did normally, after suffering through an awkward Math class with Mia and a slightly less awkward Tech Ed class with Karen and Bryce, I finally got to Biology and felt like I could breath.

Mr. Hans was giving another lecture today and very quickly my brain fell off track. I began debating if I should ask Nathan to come with me on Friday and how I would do that. I could maybe approach him at lunch and ask him to come with me....and then what? Tell him we were chasing down someone who knew a random girl named Charlotte so we could give her husband the love letter she left him? How would that sound to a 14 year old boy?

I shoved the thoughts viscously aside and tried to focus on the lecture Mr. Hans was giving. We were learning about genetics and something about dominant traits and non dominant traits.

"A dominant trait," he explained. "Is one that will mask another trait. For example brown eyes is a dominant trait, and it will dominate over blue eyes." He stopped to switch the power point slide. "A recessive trait is one that will be covered by a dominant trait."

He went on to explain that each person has two alleles that make up a gene. These alleles are represented by letters. Dominant traits are capital letters and non-dominant traits are lowercase letters. He then went on to show us how you can use something called a punnet square to determine what traits a child is going to have if you knew what four alleles their parents had.

It was all very confusing, and I was about to zone out of the lecture again when Mr. Hans said something that caught my attention.

"Therefore," he said, motioning to where there was a very complicated diagram on the bored. "Because these parents both have blue eyes, and blue eyes are a recessive trait, there is a 100% chance that all their kids will have blue eyes."

That didn't make any sense. Mr. Hans must have made a mistake. Both my parents had blue eyes and I had brown eyes. I raised my hand.

"Yes, Zeke?" he asked, turning to me.

"I'm confused," I said. "Is it impossible for two blue eyed parents to have a brown eyed child?" He sucked in a breath and rubbed his chin.

"Well, see it's a bit more complicated then we teach in high school, but no it's not impossible, just very unlikely. However," he continued. "For the sake of 9th grade science we are going to say that yes it is impossible."

For some reason I couldn't drop this. "But, sir, I have brown eyes and both my parents and my sister have blue eyes."

He nodded. "That's interesting. Well, you must be one of the very small percentage of brown-eyed children who come from two blue-eyed parents."

I fell silent but for some reason that fact stayed with me. From then on, everything that Mr. Hans said in class made it seemed like I was an impossible child.

That night at dinner, my mind was still on biology class. I decided to mention it to my parents when I got a chance.

"Hey so I learned something interesting in biology today," I spoke up, taking a bite of spaghetti. Both my mom and dad turned to me with interest. Sadie kept eating. "We learning about the genetics unit in class and apparently I'm like a weird child." By now both my parents had stopped eating. Out of the corner of my eye I watched my mom shoot my dad a worried look. "It's very uncommon for two blue eyes parents to have a brown eyed child."