Yesterday, when I should have been working on my essay but was not, my friend Pooh had me over for lunch to give me back-to-school shoes and back-to-school advice. Both were of a variety you never find in Bourne: actually cool, genuinely retro, and virtually impossible.
The shoes are beautiful, but I have absolutely nowhere to wear them.
“You don’t need anywhere to wear them,” Pooh said. “Just knowing they’re in your closet will make you feel better.”
“Better about what?”
“Whatever you feel bad about. Or if you have a date!” She clapped her hands, delighted. “That’s what these will be. Your dating shoes.”
“I don’t need dating shoes.”
“No one needs dating shoes.”
“Maybe. But I don’t need them more than most.” I took the shoes anyway though, just in case.
The advice was to skip history altogether and take something practical instead.
“We don’t have a choice,” I told her. “It’s different than when you were there.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Nothing ever changes around here, especially not that school.”
“There are all these required classes now.”
She tsked. “History’s so…”
“What?”
“Passé.”
“You graduated in 1947.”
“That’s how I know,” she said.
Pooh Lewis used to be my service project in middle school. We had to pick a volunteer opportunity and then write a paper about what we learned. I learned old people lie just as much as everybody else but for better reasons. Pooh had only pretended to be blind so someone would sign up to come read to her, and when someone (me) did, she had no desire to be read to. She wasn’t really blind, so could read to herself. She just wanted the company.
“Don’t you want to hang out with people your own age?” I asked when I showed up the first day and clued in to the fact that she didn’t need me when I found her in her kitchen reading Baseball America.
“God no,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Old people are boring. And they smell weird. And around here, most of them are gone anyway.”
“You think I’m interesting?” That seemed to be the implication, but no one had ever thought so before.
“I don’t know yet.” She’d looked me over carefully, like when you’re trying to buy apples and half of them are bruised. “I’ll keep you posted.”
It’s been four years, so I guess she decided I was interesting enough. Every few months Monday demands to know why I keep going to read to Pooh since the program is over and I already graduated from middle school, and I reply that I was never reading to Pooh.
This is the kind of logic required to unstick Monday from whatever she’s stuck on.
“I also do not like that ‘Pooh’ sounds like ‘poo,’” she sometimes says.
“It’s short for ‘Winifred,’” I explained the first time.
“I do not like when things are short for things,” said Monday. As if I didn’t know. “And neither ‘Poo’ nor ‘Pooh’ is short for ‘Winifred.’”
“Her name is Winifred so people called her Winnie and then they called her Winnie-the-Pooh and then they called her Pooh.”
“‘Pooh’ can be short for ‘Winnie-the-Pooh,’ and ‘Winnie’ can be short for ‘Winifred,’ but you cannot combine them, and you cannot read to a blind person for your middle school service project if she is not blind and you are not in middle school.”
“That’s true,” I always eventually agree, both because it is and because it’s faster.
Pooh was four when she came to the United States from Korea with her parents. They changed their last name from Lee to Lewis to sound more American. Then they tried to pick the most patriotic name they could think of for their little girl and came up with Winifred.
“How is Winifred a patriotic name?” I asked the first time she told me this story.
“How should I know?” said Pooh. “You think you’re the only one whose mother is crazy?”
Yesterday, she argued, “You should skip history and enjoy yourself. Sixteen was one of the best years of my life.”
“Nineteen-sixteen?” I asked.
She swatted at me. “Do I look like I’m a hundred and two?” She does, kind of. “The year I was sixteen. At your very high school. Trust me. I’ve already been all the ages. Sixteen is one of the good ones.”
I made a face. “Small towns were more fun back then.”
“What makes you think so?”
“It was all hoedowns and hayrides.”
“Neither one.” Pooh shook her head. “Not even once.”
“And the neighbors all pitched in to build a barn or whatever.”
“It wasn’t Witness.”
“The world was small back then”—I couldn’t quite find the words to mean what I meant, but I’m pretty sure she got it anyway. She almost always does—“so it didn’t matter if your town was too.”
“We did know the earth was round even when I was a child.”
“Now the world is big.” I spread my arms to show her. “Huge. You can’t spend your life in a tiny nowhere town like Bourne.”
“The world is smaller than it ever was,” Pooh said. “And no matter what town they’re in, sixteen-year-olds want to leave it. Nowhere in the world is big enough to satisfy a teenager.”
“But it’s different here from other places.”
“What other places?”
“All the other places.” I waved at them. “Out there where high school is the best time of your life. It’s exciting. It’s dangerous—”
“If you’re looking for dangerous…” Pooh began, and I saw her point, but it wasn’t the one I was making.
“Other schools are full of drama. Weekends are fun. Everyone’s beautiful and startling and in love—”
“Where?” Pooh demanded.
“Out there. Everywhere.”
She peered at me like I was fruit again. “What makes you think so?”
“I don’t know,” I tried, but eventually admitted, “TV. Movies.”
Her eyebrows smugly rested their case, but she didn’t say a word.
Two
The main thing that is good about my school is it is painted yellow.
Everything else about it can be very disappointing.
It has forty-three yellow rooms and is named Bourne Memorial High School. Some students call it BM High and some call it Bourne High. Both names are funny for different reasons, and both of those reasons had to be explained to me by Mab, but once they were, I saw that she was right. She says if you have to explain why something is funny it is not funny anymore, but she explained it anyway, and it still was. Of the forty-three rooms, including not only classrooms and bathrooms but other rooms that do not contain the word “room” but still are, like the auditorium and the cafeteria and the principal’s office, most are unused.
This is because most of the citizens of Bourne do not live here anymore.
After what happened happened, some people died and some people left. The only people who did not die or leave were the ones who could not. So a better name than Bourne Memorial would be Left Behind High. I told this to Mab as a joke, and I did not explain it, but she said it was not funny anyway. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference.
This morning is the first day of school, but just like every morning, Mr. Beechman sings my name when I walk into class. “Monday, Monday,” he sings, “so good to me.” This is not because I am good to him but because my name shares that of a song by an old band called the Mamas and the Papas. Some mornings he sings, “Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day,” which is the second verse of the song but which is not accurate because I am very trustworthy. I know a lot of facts. I relate them responsibly and appropriately. I never lie. I am also not a day.
Mr. Beechman is our homeroom and math teacher so he got to decide how we sit, and he decided alphabetical (which I like
because it makes sense) and by first name (which is not traditional but does not matter to me since I am Monday Mitchell so would be in the middle either way). I sit between Lulu Isaacs, who is what other towns would call neurodivergent but is not stupid, and Nellie Long. Who is stupid. It is not mean for me to think this though because it is just a true fact, and also Mrs. Radcliffe says there are more important things to be than smart, like kind and trying hard.
How it works at our school is students who need extra help with their bodies are Track C, no matter how well their brains work. As an example, Mirabel’s brain is smarter than anyone’s. And students who do not need extra help with their brains or their bodies are Track A, for example Mab, even though Mab’s brain is often annoyed, annoying, obsessed with vocabulary words, and deciding to touch me even though it knows I do not like to be touched. Our class is Track B which means the bodies of the students in my class mostly work all the way but our brains mostly do not.
None of this is a lie, but it is also not true, even though lie and true are opposites. It would be more accurate to say that in Track B our bodies mostly work like people’s bodies on television and our brains mostly do not work like people’s brains on television. Bourne may not be normal, but, as Mab’s not-a-service-project-anymore friend Pooh is always trying to remind her, television is not normal either. No one thinks our tracks are a great or fair system, but great and fair systems are expensive, and tracks-with-flaws are all we can afford.
A stereotype is that students who are Track B and do not lie and are picky about things like colors are also very good at math. I am only normal-good at math, and I do not see what math has to do with colors. But when the bell rings and Mr. Beechman gathers up his things and leaves, Mrs. Lasserstein comes in, and everything is ruined because I love books, but I do not love studying books for English class.
Mrs. Lasserstein passes out copies of Lord of the Flies and says this will be our fall book, but a whole season seems too long because Lord of the Flies is only 208 pages, and I have already read it, and it is not very interesting. It is by William Golding who won an award for showing that boys are mean and badly behaved, even somewhere nice like the beach. This seems like something anyone in the entire world who has ever met a boy could tell you, but they gave William Golding a Nobel Prize for it. While Mrs. Lasserstein is telling us the book is about the unraveling of civilization, Nigel Peterman and Adam Fell are in the back of the room shooting staples at each other, and Kyle M. and Kyle R. are doing a burping contest in the corner. This is called irony which we learned about in English class last year.
When we were in fifth grade and the state required us to do science and we could not do science, an independent contractor called Effective Education Passport was sent to observe us. Effective education was what they were supposed to make sure we had. The passport part was so they could give us each a little book to record our progress in so they could prove they were doing a good job. They thought it would be easy since our progress in science when they came was zero, so even if we only did a little bit, that would still be more, and anyone who looked in our passports could see it. But when they met with us, they discovered there were some problems.
Nellie Long would not do Dissecting a Frog because it was sticky when you touched it, and she would not do Dissecting a Fake Frog because it was sticky too. “No frogs were harmed in the making of this science experiment,” Mr. Farer joked with her, but she did not laugh because her objection was not ethical but tactile and also it was not funny.
Nigel Peterman would not do the Is Your Mouth Cleaner Than a Dog’s experiment or the Roast a Marshmallow in an Oven You Built Yourself experiment or the What Food Will Rot First experiment because they smelled like dogs, marshmallows, and rotten, soon-to-be-rotten, and weirdly-not-rotten food, and Nigel Peterman does not like things that smell like anything.
Lulu Isaacs would not do the experiment where you listened to your partner’s heart and then you both did jumping jacks and then listened again because the hearts were loud in her ears and the stethoscope was pressing, also in her ears.
When Effective Education Passport called me into an empty classroom and asked what experiment was my favorite, I said, “Eep,” and when they asked if any of the experiments had upset me, I said, “Eep,” and when they asked if I had felt the need to skip any of the experiments or leave the room while they occurred, I said, “Eep,” and when they asked if there was any way the experiments could be modified or augmented to make me more comfortable or able to participate, I said, “Eep,” and when they asked me why I would not answer them, I protested that I was answering them by saying, “Eep,” and when they asked me why I kept peeping like a duck, I pointed to their clipboards, notebooks, pencils, pens, and shirt pockets, all of which read, “E.E.P. Your passport to education effectiveness.” And I also told them ducks do not say “Eep.” That is when the Effective Education Passport team got up and left the room.
They did not close the door, however, so I overheard the conversation they had with our principal. It went like this:
Mrs. Mussbaum: You’re leaving?
E.E.P.: I’m afraid we’ve accomplished all we can here. Too many of your students are special needs. Too many are on the spectrum. What you need is professional help.
Mrs. Mussbaum: You are professionals.
E.E.P.: Not the kind you need. We’re sorry we can’t offer more assistance. As a gesture of goodwill, we’ll waive half our fee.
Mrs. Mussbaum: Half? You didn’t do anything.
E.E.P.: We’re consultants. We consulted. Implementation of our recommendations is the school’s responsibility.
Mrs. Mussbaum: You didn’t recommend anything either.
E.E.P.: We recommend seeking professional help. You’ll have our bill by the end of the week.
Mrs. Mussbaum: Eep.
Before that I did not know what “special needs” meant, and I did not know what “on the spectrum” meant. So I asked Pastor Jeff.
Or, to be more accurate, I asked Dr. Lilly. Dr. Lilly is Bourne’s only doctor, but he prefers to go by Pastor Jeff because he is also Bourne’s only priest. He used to be a Catholic priest, but there are not enough people in Bourne anymore for everyone to have different religions. Whatever sickness you have and whatever prayers you pray, Pastor Jeff is your only option anyway. Mab, Mirabel, and I are a trinity, but we are not a Trinity—which is how capital letters work—and we are not religious, but this does not matter to Pastor Jeff. We are his flock, he says. A doctor’s job and a priest’s job are both to spread care and love and healing no matter what you believe, he says. Bourne could use some ministering, he says. When I was little, I hoped he would marry our mother because he is nice and because husband and father are also both jobs with lots of ministering, but he said that is not how it works with Catholic priests.
When I told him what Effective Education Passport said about us, he said, “Everyone needs air, water, food, shelter, and clothing all the time, Monday. Everyone needs care when they’re sick or hurt, love when they’re sad or scared, someone to tell them no or stop when they’re being unsafe. Everything else people need sometimes—and it’s a lot—is special. All of us have special needs.”
I felt happy because that made sense, and I like when things make sense.
“Do you know what a spectrum is?” he asked me.
I did not because I was only ten.
“A spectrum is a classification system that arranges everyone or everything between two opposite extremes, which means a spectrum, by definition, includes everyone. For a spectrum to be a thing, we all have to be on it.”
“So E.E.P. is wrong about us?”
He shrugged. “Some people really like labels, Monday.”
“I do!” I waved my hand like he was across a parking lot or at the other end of a grocery store aisle. “I like labels because they mean organized and order and control and correct.”
“Sometimes they do. And sometimes they just give you the ill
usion of those things. Giving something a label and putting it in a box makes you feel like you’ve understood it and accounted for it and can keep track of it, and that’s great for things like paperwork or books, but sometimes things get mislabeled or misfiled, and then they get misunderstood or misaccounted for.”
“That is why you have to label things carefully,” I told him.
“Sure. But when those things aren’t things but people, it’s not just a question of careful. People are complicated. They’re more than one thing. They’re less than another. You, for instance. We could file you under ‘Girl’ or ‘Student’ or ‘Triplet’ or ‘Tall.’”
“I did not think of that.” Thinking about it then made my skin feel itchy.
“We could file me under ‘Pastor’ or ‘Doctor’ or ‘Man’ or ‘Black’ because I’m all of those things, but we could also file me under ‘Catholic’ or ‘Priest’ or ‘Yoga Teacher’ or ‘Irish’ because I’m those things too.”
He was right, so I thought hard until I came up with a solution. “Extra labels. Extra files.”
He tilted his head back and forth. “Except labels separate things that actually overlap. I’m different from other medical professionals because I’m also a religious professional. I’m different from other Catholic priests because I also practice other religions. I’m different from other Black men because my mother was white.”
“I do not like when things overlap.”
“Don’t think of them as overlapping then. Think of them as having more than one side. We could say your preference for yellow things is a detriment in a world full of other colors, or we could say it’s an advantage in a world that demands quick decisions and clarity of purpose.”
“I am able to choose what to wear to school every morning more quickly than Mab,” I agreed. “And it is only one color so it always matches.”
“Exactly. So one good solution is we could decide not to file you at all. Some people really like labels, and some people need them to access other things.”
“Like what?”
“Like medical care. But since I’m all you’ve got on that front under any circumstances, that part doesn’t matter. And since I happen to know Bourne’s spectrum looks different than most, I haven’t found labels and official diagnoses terribly useful.”
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