“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.