At the end of the week, Mab swapped her scissors for a staple gun and made our ceiling into a sky full of stars. They’ve faded over the years, as if it’s perpetually dawning now, but we sleep beneath them still.
I didn’t say anything that week because it was not a good week for me, and this was before my Voice came. Out there in the rest of the world, the brazen, ignorant, nosy, rude, and clueless come right up to people who use wheelchairs and say things like “What’s wrong with you?” In Bourne, no one says things like that, not because we’re not sometimes brazen, ignorant, nosy, rude, and clueless, but because, at least on this front, we know it’s not that simple. “Nothing” would be a true answer. So would “Many things.” But it would never be a single fill-in-the-blank response. My muscles are spastic except for the ones that are hypotonic. My body is often too rigid though my neck will only sometimes support my head. I have no control over my limbs except for my right arm and hand which are as finely honed as something NASA built.
Plus idioglossia. It comes from the Greek—idio, meaning personal, yours alone in all the world; glossa, meaning tongue. If you’re a doctor, “idioglossia” means speech so unformed or distorted it’s unintelligible. I can’t articulate much more than a single, wide syllable, and even that you probably couldn’t understand. But if you’re a linguist, “idioglossia” means a private language, one developed and understood exclusively by a tiny number of very close speakers. The secret language of twins. It is raised, in our case, to the power of three.
My sisters can usually understand my speech. They get my grunts and expressions and hand signals nearly as well as I get theirs. They share my finger taps. And when I want to say something more complex, with my one very gifted limb and an app on my tablet, my Voice can tell them anything at all. It’s not fast. I can’t type like you can—not with all ten fingers, not seventy words a minute, not in that quick, deft way that sounds like pouring rain. More like a leaking tap. Drip … drip … drip. But if you stopper a leaky sink and give it a day or two, even at that rate, it will eventually spill over. And we are in no rush. We have plenty of time.
So every night, as we fade beneath our fading stars, my sisters and I discuss all the immensities and all the minutiae, the everything and nothing of our lives. But mostly the nothing. All the intrigue that happened here—all the intrigue that happened to us—happened before we were born. We don’t need something to have happened to talk about it, though. Teenage girls don’t get enough credit for this, their ability to see the potential import of everything, no matter how insignificant it seems, and analyze it endlessly. It’s written off—we’re written off—as silly, but it’s the opposite. We understand instinctively that, like me, change is slow. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it.
For instance, the night before school starts Mab is talking about her friends Pooh and Petra, which leads Monday to note that P is one of the few letters of the alphabet that is also the name of a food (along with T and, she considers, maybe U if you were a cannibal talking to your lunch). Mab talks about how Pooh was cleaning out her closet and gave her a pair of really cute black leather mules with silver tassels, and Monday informs us that before there were school buses kids got picked up in carts drawn by really cute mules. Mab muses with wonder that we’re halfway done with high school now, and Monday corrects her: we have been halfway done with high school all summer long.
And I tell them about what I saw on Maple Avenue this morning, the most astonishing thing: a backhoe. Maybe it just looked weird. Towering over the cars on the road, wings clutched up against its body like a bride keeping her dress off the ground, it would have been conspicuous in any town. But I can’t remember the last time I saw a piece of construction equipment in Bourne. Nothing ever gets built here. So maybe it’s no big deal, just more idle girl-chat.
Or maybe, like the second half of high school, something momentous is about to begin.
One
“WELCOME BACK.” The next morning there’s a sign looped over the railing of one of the ramps between the parking lot and the front door. Otherwise though, everything looks exactly the same as it did in June.
Mirabel’s wheelchair pauses momentarily when she takes her hand off her joystick to wave goodbye to me. Then she presses it forward again and glides past.
But Monday stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk. “Rude,” she says.
“Oh good.” Petra comes up behind us. “Irony.”
“They don’t really mean it,” I tell Monday. It would be better if she didn’t start the school year overwrought about something completely pointless. “They’re just being nice.”
“It is not accurate to welcome everyone back,” Monday continues as if she hasn’t heard me because probably she hasn’t, “if no one left.”
“Or ever does,” Petra adds. Unnecessarily.
“Just go in the side door,” I say. Sometimes it’s easier for Monday to take the long way around than to work her way through.
“I will.” She narrows her eyes at me. “But as my angry facial expression should tell you, I do not think I should have to.”
Petra and I take another moment to stand there looking at that stupid sign before everything begins again. Not really begins, Monday would insist. Before everything continues. Before everything keeps going. And Bourne Memorial High School limps, rolls, and motors in around us as if we’re not even there.
In the hallway, it’s loud. Usually, the first day of school is subdued. It’s not like there’s much to catch up on. No one went to Europe for the summer or to seven weeks of sleepaway camp. No one interned with a senator or a software company. But this morning there’s a buzz. Rock Ramundi saw Mirabel’s backhoe yesterday too. Alex Malden saw a truck full of gardening tools—shovels, rakes, “those giant clipper thingies”—plus four guys he didn’t recognize inside. No one can think who they could be, how they could be here, where they could be going. If there were news, we’d all have it already. But that doesn’t stop everyone from speculating. Maybe Mirabel was on to something. And that’s all before the first bell even rings.
First period this year is World History. Mrs. Shriver is our history teacher—this year and every year—but she does not believe in doing history in order. In ninth grade, American History, we did the Civil Rights Movement then colonial Boston then the Civil War then Ponce de León then the Pilgrims. The day we left Plymouth Rock for the Great Depression, I finally raised my hand to ask why.
She cocked her head like it was a smart but difficult question that had never occurred to her.
“Well, you don’t do English class in order,” she said. “You jump all around. Jazz Age poetry then Shakespeare then some god-awful Victorian novel then a short story that ran in the New Yorker last year.”
“Or math,” Rock Ramundi put in. Rock’s is always the first hand up, whether he knows the answer or not.
“Math?” Mrs. Shriver said.
“We don’t do math in the order it was discovered in.”
“Right.” Mrs. Shriver clapped her hands together. “Exactly.”