“But that’s different,” Chloe Daniels said quietly to her notes in her notebook, the direction she says most of what she says in class.
“Why?” said Mrs. Shriver.
“Cause and effect?” Chloe guessed.
“That’s exactly what it is.” Mrs. Shriver nodded. “I don’t believe in cause and effect. At least not in cause and effect you make up afterward. What happens next is not necessarily caused by what came before.”
“Isn’t that what history is, though?” Petra pressed. “Precipitative?” Petra and I have been studying vocabulary for the SATs since sixth grade.
But Mrs. Shriver was unimpressed. “Not if you teach it out of order.”
At the time, we thought she was making some kind of weird point for the hell of it, like to show off, the way teachers do sometimes just because they can, not because they really believe it. Now, though, I think about the ways cause and effect might break you. Bourne is a town of unexpected consequences, a place where what no one sees coming runs you over like a truck.
This morning we start with the Treaty of Versailles, the end of a war we haven’t studied yet. There’s no lead-in. There’s no welcome-back speech. There’s no preview of the year ahead. Mrs. Shriver collects the earliest-memory essays, but we don’t discuss them. We have too much to do to waste time talking about it. It’s true there’s a lot of history in history, but that’s not why Mrs. Shriver’s in such a rush. It’s because there’s only two years left to get us ready for the world, and we’re the so-called smart kids, the hope for the future and all that crap, the normal ones. There’s a ban at Bourne Memorial High School on the word “normal,” and I get their point, but it’s not like kids don’t know how adults see them, here and everywhere. Most schools call some classes “honors” or “gifted” or “advanced” or whatever, and no one objects to that, but here they just call us Track A. The dozen of us are like grocery-store eggs: full of potential in theory but really unlikely to grow into the full-fledged beings Mrs. Shriver hopes for. She plows on anyway.
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.”