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For all of the teachers and librarians who make kids + school = magic.
—H. B.
For Zayna and Zaayan.
—A. S.
You know that feeling, when you’re sure you’ve met someone before but you just can’t quite remember where it was? It’s different than when you see someone you know but they just got a crazy new haircut and suddenly you can’t remember what they looked like yesterday. It’s also different than when you see your teacher at the grocery store and she’s buying the same cereal you like.
Right now, I’m having that first feeling. Not the other two.
Haven’t we met, you and I?
Don’t I know you?
Maybe it’s because you’re holding this book and it’s the second book with this monster and this boy in it. Do I know you from the first Monster and Boy book? The one where the monster swallowed the boy and then the boy was tiny and he fell in the toilet and there was another monster in the kitchen?
That must be it.
You just look so familiar.
Anyway.
If that’s not where I know you from, you might want to go get the first Monster and Boy book now. I mean, this one is perfectly good to read all on its own, but if you’re the kind of person who likes to do things in the proper order …
Well, it’s really up to you.
I’m just the narrator.
1.
Once there was a monster who loved a boy. And a boy who loved a monster.
They hadn’t always known each other. The monster lived under the boy’s bed for a long time before they met, and the boy didn’t know the monster was there until one night when the monster decided to introduce himself. And now they were friends.
Here is a list of things the boy and the monster liked to do together:
Use the boy’s mother’s fancy gels and sprays to make funny hairstyles on the boy and furstyles on the monster.
Draw pictures of themselves having adventures, saving the world, and wearing matching hero suits.
Ask questions.
That third one was really more the monster’s thing.
The monster had a lot of questions.
“Why don’t eyebrows grow long like the rest of your hair? Why are eggs so smooth? Why do elbows only bend one way? How fast can a duck run?”
The boy did his best to answer the monster’s questions.
Luckily, the monster didn’t mind at all if the boy’s answer was “I don’t know.”
(Some people will try and tell you that “I don’t know” is not a proper answer to a question. If that ever happens to you, you may inform them that curiosity is a valuable thing.)
If the boy didn’t know an answer, he did his best to find it. The first place he always looked was his bookshelf. The boy had a huge bookshelf with lots and lots of books on it.
When the monster had a question about stars, the boy showed him a book about space.
When the monster had a question about teeth, the boy showed him a book about bodies.
When the monster had a question about raccoons, the boy showed the monster a book about animals.
The book said that some animals were awake at night. That was called nocturnal. Some animals were awake during the day. That was called diurnal. And some animals were awake at the beginning of the day and at the end.
“That sounds like me,” said the monster.
“Then you are crepuscular,” the boy told him.
“Ooh,” said the monster. “That sounds fancy.”
“And it rhymes with muscular,” the boy pointed out.
“Am I that, too?”
The boy studied the monster for a minute. “I can’t really tell,” he said.
Then the monster and the boy went back to what they had been doing before, which was spying on animals through their binoculars.
(Binoculars was another word that the monster thought sounded fancy. And he didn’t know this yet, but those binoculars were about to become very, very important.)
2.
Now that they were friends, the monster missed the boy while he was gone all day. There were many things to look at in the boy’s room: toys, books, interesting clothes with interesting patterns.
But playing alone was no fun. The monster didn’t know how to read. And most of the boy’s clothes were much too small for the monster to wear.
The monster didn’t understand why some days were different than other days, if they all ended with day. He especially didn’t understand why, on some days, the boy stayed home and played and read books and built pillow forts and snuck cookies upstairs, but on other days, the boy woke up, got dressed, and went somewhere else.
He didn’t understand it, and he definitely didn’t like it.
Finally, one afternoon, he had a little bit of what you and I might call “a tantrum.”
He stomped. He huffed. He kicked a wall and hurt his toe.
“What’s wrong?” asked the boy.
“Nothing,” said the monster.
“Usually, when I say nothing’s wrong, I actually mean that everything’s wrong,” the boy remarked.
“Well, not everything is wrong,” the monster said.
“Then what?”
The monster looked at the boy, who he loved even though he was mad.
“Why do you keep leaving every day?” he asked. “I don’t like it here when I’m by myself.”
“I’m sorry,” said the boy. “But I have to go to school.”
“That sounds made up.”
“It’s real,” the boy promised.
“What is it?”
“It’s more of a where than a what. It’s a big building where kids go to learn new things.”
“You have to learn new things every day? Don’t you know everything already?”
3.
There were a few small problems with the monster’s plan to go to school, as you can imagine.
For one thing, the monster had never gone anywhere. Unless you count the kitchen.
Also, the monster was not—as far as he knew—invisible. Which meant that everyone else at school would be able to see him.
Also, the monster was crepuscular. Which meant that he slept for most of the day. Which was when school was happening.
There seemed very little point in going to school if he was just going to fall asleep as soon as he got there.
The monster needed to ask more questions.
“How do you get to school?” he asked the boy.
“I ride the bus,” the boy said.
The monster didn’t know this word, but it sounded a bit like horse, and he knew people rode on the backs of those. “How big is the bus?”
“Oh, it’s huge. There’s probably fifty seats in it.”
“You ride inside the bus?”
“Ew,” said the monster. But then he remembered that the boy had been inside of him, and hadn’t minded too much. Maybe the boy was just used to being inside of things. He asked his next question.
“Do you have to stay awake the whole time?”
“Yes.”
“Hm,” said the monster. He would have to work on his endurance. “Are the other kids at school easily frightened?”
“These are strange questions,” said the boy.
“Not at all,” said the monster. “These are things I need to know if I’m going to come with you. I am simply trying to be prepared.”
“Come with me?”
“Of course,” said the monster.
“Oh boy,” said the boy.
The monster had learned that sometimes oh boy meant “exciting,” but sometimes it meant “uh-oh.” This sounded like the “uh-oh” kind.
“I can’t just take you with me. Everyone will see you.”
“What if I could hide?”
“You’re too big to hide.”
“What if I was invisible?”
“You can make yourself invisible?”
The monster sniffed. “No.”
“Maybe if you were smaller…”
“Hey, remember when I swallowed you and it made you tiny?”
“Yes. I don’t think I’m going to forget that. Like, ever.”
“Maybe it works the other way, too.”
“But there’s no way I can swallow you. You’re way too big. And you’re covered in fur. And your antlers are really pointy.”
The monster and the boy sat without saying anything for what felt like a very long time but was probably only two minutes.
(Neither of them set a timer, so we can’t be exactly sure.)
Then the boy said one of the monster’s favorite words. “Binoculars!”
The monster was always happy to hear a word he loved, but he didn’t understand why the boy was saying it now.
Binoculars made things look bigger, not smaller. And he didn’t want to look bigger. He wanted to get smaller.
He also didn’t want to admit that he didn’t understand.
Maybe you don’t understand, either.
I think I can help.
4.
Here I shall share something from the first story about the monster and the boy, which is a sort of monster’s nursery rhyme:
Monsters have a special way of making dreams come true.
Anything a monster dreams is what the world must do.
When you sleep, what’s all around turns into what you see.
So close your eyes, and make the world a bit more monsterly.
The monster learned this rhyme from his mother, and it came in very handy when the boy shrank to the size of a grasshopper and he and the monster wanted to make him big again.
I will also tell you something interesting about binoculars.
If you look through the small end, things look bigger. But if you look through the big end, things look smaller.
One more thing: Chances are good that you will dream about the last thing you see before you fall asleep.
The boy knew all these things and the monster only knew one of them. But after the boy told the monster all three, then the monster knew them, too. That’s why it’s important to talk about what you know instead of just keeping it all inside your head. It also gives you less stuff to have to remember. And it makes room for new stuff.
The alphabet song is the same as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”!
A cow has four stomachs!
So does a goat!
I feel so much better.
Thank you for listening.
5.
Once the boy had explained all the things to the monster that I just explained to you—well, not all the things, just the one about the big end of the binoculars—the monster began to understand the boy’s idea much, much better. Which made him want to go to school even more, because he found that he quite liked the feeling of learning new things.
“Are you sure it will work?” the monster asked.
“I think it will. And if it doesn’t, we’ll think of something else.”
The monster admired the boy’s positive attitude. He also admired the boy’s hair and how the boy kept it all on just his head instead of all over his arms and legs.
“Do the other kids at school all look like you?” the monster asked.
“Not exactly,” said the boy. “Some are boys like me, and some are girls like my sister.”
“Do the girls all wear monster costumes?”
“Almost never,” said the boy.
“What else?” asked the monster.
The boy shrugged. “You don’t need to remember everything,” he said. “I’ll be there the whole time.”
That made the monster feel much better.
That night, before the boy went to bed, he set up the plan.
“Lie down,” he told the monster. The monster did. He wanted to show the boy that he was a good listener and very ready to go to school.
The boy made a tower out of books that reached his knee. Then he placed a small, square mirror on top of the stack of books so the monster could see himself in it. Then he handed the monster his binoculars.
“Look through the big end,” said the boy, and the monster did. He saw himself in the mirror. He looked far away. He looked smaller.
But he still didn’t look small.
“What if I don’t get small enough?” he asked the boy.
The boy thought. “We might need to do this for a few nights in a row,” he said, “and then you could get a little bit smaller every day until we find the right size.”
The monster liked this idea. He had always just been one size. Or, he couldn’t remember being any other size than the size he was now. Either way, he thought it would be fun to try out some different sizes.
What the monster didn’t know is that it can be very frustrating to be smaller than you were before.
The monster didn’t know this.
But he was about to learn.
6.
While we wait to find out whether or not the boy’s plan worked, we can talk about something you are interested in. I’ve done so much talking already, and I’ve barely given you a turn. How terribly rude of me!
Go ahead! Anything you want!
Ah.
Mm-hm. That is fascinating.
You don’t say!
Well, I am certainly glad that we had this little chat. I had no idea that you were such an interesting person.
Shall we get back to our story?
7.
When the monster woke up in the morning …
Wait, you’re thinking, I thought the monster was nocturnal. That’s what you said in the first book. Why was he sleeping during the night?
Well, you are correct that the monster was nocturnal when he and the boy first met. But the monster liked spending time with the boy so much that he trained himself to sleep a little bit at night and a little bit during the day. So now, instead of being nocturnal, the monster was crepuscular.
So, being crepuscular, the monster woke up just before dawn.
When he first woke up, he completely forgot to check to see if he was a different size.
Has that ever happened to you? You’re really excited about something when you fall asleep but then you wake up and think it’s just a regular morning. So you just do all your regular morning things—you blow up a balloon and pet your llama and put your bathing suit on over your clothes—and then suddenly you remember the exciting thing and it’s not a regular morning anymore.
This is what happened to the monster.
But it’s not what happened to the boy, who leaped out of bed and stuck his head into the underneath-the-bed and shouted, “Are you small?”
The monster was so startled that he rolled into a ball and then rolled to the farthest corner of the underneath-the-bed. And then he thought, Oh. Beca
use he had always been much too big to roll around under the bed like that.
He unrolled himself.
He crept out into the boy’s room.
He stood up in front of the boy.
He stared at the boy’s knee, which was right in front of his face.
“It worked!” they both shouted.
A voice called from downstairs, “Are you dressed yet? You’re going to be late!”
(The voice belonged to the boy’s mother, who was a little cranky after discovering that she was mysteriously out of fancy hair gels and sprays.)
“Coming!” the boy called back, and then he looked at the monster.
“You’re still kind of big,” he said.
The monster looked down at himself. He looked up at the boy. “I don’t feel very big,” he said.
“Let’s see if you fit in my backpack,” said the boy.
He tucked his hands under the monster’s arms to pick him up. That was when they learned something new.
The monster was very, very ticklish.
This worked much better, and the monster fit in the backpack quite well (once he had tucked all his fur in so it didn’t get stuck in the zipper). The boy hoisted the backpack up onto his shoulders with a grunt.
“You’re still kind of heavy, too,” he said.
The monster tried to make himself lighter by thinking about feathers. “Did that help?” he called.
“I don’t know what you mean,” the boy replied, “and please try to remember not to talk.”
Monster's First Day of School Page 1
