If I were a year younger or a druggie I would’ve been at the New Kingstown roller rink last Saturday. At the roller rink, elementary school kids clank around and gossip as fast as they can. Kids my age smoke up in the room where cheeseless pizza strips come out of, looking like a can of red paint tipped over on them. Nobody’s wearing a helmet because they’re indoors. The rink itself is spotless as the moon but as soon as you tumble out of it, into the shoe-changing or restaurant area, you feel like you’re in a tent. At 3:30 everyone does the chicken dance. It’s shakiness cubed: flapping elbows on wobbly people in strobing blue light.
But I’m not a little kid or a druggie, so on Saturday I was arguing with my best friend Marco in his basement. He’s the opposite of me and not just because he’s a guy. Normally our debates don’t have real world consequences, but that day I said something that was maybe over the line.
To understand it you need to know what school’s been like this year.
There are two Advanced Language Arts classes for sixth grade. One is taught by Mrs. Santoloho. She rides her bike around town even in the winter and says, “notice how I always wear a helmet?” Marco’s neighbor Aya is in that class. The other teacher is Ms. Swann. (We mess up and call her Mrs. Swann a lot though, which is fine.) Ms. Swann is not as nonsensical as Mrs. Santoloho.
In fact, Ms. Swann is pretty much on the kids’ side. You can tell from little things she does. For example, in October both the Advanced Language Arts classes went on a field trip together to the Slavery Museum in New Manchester. New Manchester is a half hour away from North Kingstown, where we live, and more urban. When our school bus (which felt like an expired bag of oreos) turned off Route 1 and onto one of the woodsy North Kingstown streets, all the chaperones at the front of the bus started cheering. Mrs. Santoloho said, “country roads, take me home!” (Which was weird because I think of the country as being more South and/or West, like the desert.) Ms. Swann clapped along with them, but at the same time she turned around toward where Marco and I sat and smirked. Like, “oh yeah, I’m so psyched to be back where the most sophisticated thing in walking distance is a telephone pole.”
“Mrs. Swann has a crush on you,” I said to Marco. He was in the aisle seat and he jerked forward, like he was trying to block my voice from Ms. Swann’s ears.
“Shut up Mary!”
Marco has a crush on Ms. Swann. It’s not that weird. She’s blonde and has cheekbones so high they butt into her eyes. You can imagine Ms. Swann having a younger sister who wears more makeup and is an extra on Gossip Girl. Marco, on the other hand, will never be on TV. He has an army haircut and little eyes that are constantly going OMG Mary! Maybe if he keeps up the exercise they’ll grow.
“Good news,” Marco said to me the second week of school this year. He’d fought after-school-exodus traffic to find me at my locker way in the back of the school. “I think we’re in the real Advanced Language Arts class.”
We hadn’t been sure, because of how Aya was in Mrs. Santoloho’s class. Aya has been our only competition for years. She’s smart in an overflowing energy kind of way, with her black ponytail always swinging. So when she ended up in the other Advanced Language Arts class, it made us wonder if that was the real one and ours was just a parental appeasement policy (as Marco’s dad would say).
But it was just the opposite.
“Aya’s parents are telling the principal they’ll send her to Catholic school unless she gets into Ms. Swann’s class.”
“Why!” I said. This was our first substantive clue. So far our classes had had the same homework and class activities except for one day, when we examined a map of Africa and Aya’s class learned bicycle/scooter turn signals.
“I don’t know,” Marco said. He was holding his backback in his arms because of the thick crowd. When people bump against his backpack and it’s on his back, Marco tips over. His dad says it’s just a matter of physics. Anyway, Marco didn’t know why Aya’s parents thought Ms. Swann was the real Advanced Language Arts teacher. “Aya’s acting all embarrassed about it.”
The even better news happened slowly-they never did let Aya into our Advanced Language Arts class. (And of course she didn’t really end up in Catholic school.) Meanwhile, more clues surfaced. For example, Ms. Swann gave us worksheets that she normally uses for her Honors Holocaust class. Honors Holocaust is for 8th graders. About once per week I’d see Aya when I went over Marco’s house. She was miserable.
“Mrs. Santoloho’s husband brought her cat in today and then we had to write a journal entry about the cat’s character!” Aya said once while it was Marco’s turn on Guitar Hero. “I wrote that he’s the type of character who keeps his feelings bottled up inside.”
I rolled around on the carpet laughing but Marco didn’t even hear her. He was keeping all his attention on the TV and thumping in the guitar notes like a dancing clothes hanger. I pretended to be laughing at Aya’s wit but really it was laughter of relief. Aya was two points better than I was in pre-algebra, but when it came to Language Arts I was an entire class ahead.
*
Four weeks ago Ms. Swann announced a new assignment.
“Write a three paragraph essay about the furthest away place to which you have ever traveled,” the instructions said. “If you have never travelled outside of New England, then write about a distant place to which you want to travel.”
Guess where the furthest away place I’ve ever been to is?
Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, New England.
“Mrs. Santoloho has agreed to give her Advanced Language Arts class the same assignment,” Ms. Swann said. She was smiling so hard that her eyes were quickly becoming tick-sized. “And we’re all going to use this opportunity to teach each other a little bit about the outside world. Next Friday Mrs. Santoloho’s class will cram on in here, and the best five authors out of everyone will read their essays out loud.”
Everyone started talking to each other at once-Ms. Swann generally lets that go for a few minutes-figuring out the furthest place they’d ever been to. I heard Florida, Nova Scotia, and Arizona; Treblinka, the Gold Coast, and West Central Africa. Some of those places, I now know, were places kids just wanted to travel to.
But I was really just hearing Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, New England.
“Ms. Swann is a hypocrite when you think about it,” I said to Marco on the phone that night. I was standing on my parents’ bed because they weren’t home yet. Marco was probably slouched back on his basement couch so his feet would read the pretentious brown ottoman. “She always tells us books can take you anywhere in the world, but now she’s making a big deal about where we’ve actually been in the world. According to Ms. Swann’s logic it should only matter what books we’ve read.”
“No wait, it’s logical,” Marco said after some pointless squeaks and mumblings, “because the whole point is to listen to each other’s essays at the end. So it’s just like reading books, except the books are written by other kids instead of authors.”
“You always take teachers’ sides,” I said. “Like when you defended Silent Lunch.” I did a big jump and hit the mattress with my knees instead of feet.
“That’s ad hominem,” Marco said. “You’re attacking me personally because you don’t have a rational response to my argument.” And then he said, as if to gallantly rescue me from being jealous of his IQ, “my dad taught me that theory.”
Anyway, I was right. I just couldn’t prove it at the time. Ms. Swann gives too much credit to people who’ve travelled far away.
*
All weekend I thought about my essay. First I brainstormed places I wanted to travel to. Africa, Space Camp, the White House? It all felt pathetic, like I was some bald kid writing an email to “Make a Wish!”
I decided to be witty instead. The essay should actually be a satire of one of my lame ideas, because honestly, my travel dreams deserved to be satirized. When Ms. Swann found herself laughing she would realize, at least unconsciously, that her assignment was silly.
That was roughly the logic.
Here was my final draft:
If I had to leave New England, I would travel to Old England. Everything there is like my homeland, except older. Old things, like my TV and grown ups, are too big. So Old England must be Brobdingnagian. That is the reason I am curious to go to Old England.
Obviously the first place I would attend in Old England is Old Kingstown. The Old Kingstown Roller Rink is so large, it is like a gutted high school. Instead of a blue strobe light it has a rainbow. The rainbow is so strong that it leaves colorful marks on kids that last for days, like a sunburn. The cul de sacs are so rotund in Old Kingstown that they have lakes in the middle, and you have to rent a jet ski to visit your neighbors. Nobody has to wear knee pads or helmets on them because stores do not sell them in sizes that fit. That is the reason Old Kingstown is the first place I would visit in Old England.
To get to Old England I will ride on a Virgin Atlantic airplane. The flight attendants, because they are English and I am American, will not be able to tell how old I am. So they will offer me a cocktail. I will demur so that I can view Old England soberly once we get close. That is the method by which I will travel to Old England.
The stuff about the airplane was mostly because I’d run out of things to say about England.
*
Two days before our essays were due, Aya invited me over her house after school. That was weird. Usually we were each primarily friends with Marco, and just happened to hang out each other when we were at his house. I didn’t ask her if he was coming too because I thought maybe she was planning to confess to me that she had a crush on him.
It turned out she wanted me to proofread her essay-at least, that’s the first thing we did when we got inside.
Predictably, Aya had written about the last time she flew to Tokyo to visit her grandparents. The writing style was a 3.5/5 at best. Most of her sentences started with the word “I.” The spelling was all fine, though.
“Wow, this is really good,” I said to Aya. “Only flaw is that the second paragraph is missing a concluding sentence. Or maybe you could just change it to ‘That is why I like Tokyo arcades better than the one in New Manchester.’”
“Oh my gosh,” Aya said, “thanks so much. Do you want me to proofread yours? You could email it to me when you get home.”
“I haven’t decided which vacation to write about yet,” I lied. I didn’t want to show her my essay before the due date because she might copy the idea.
Next we called Marco to see if he wanted to hang out. He said yes and we met in his driveway a few minutes later. I borrowed Aya’s extra helmet and Marco’s extra scooter. Even though it’s just a spare it has a kick bar over the back wheel, so I was ollying all the way to the hill. Aya and Marco can’t olly, so they raced each other.
Remember it was winter. Heat bumped into cold on its way out of me, and my skin hurt everywhere it wasn’t covered. Where it was covered, I sweated and itched. Hi-ya! I ripped my coat open and felt like I’d just earned a third lung. Up ahead, Aya and Marco crumpled down against the hill. When I got there I snapped my helmet off and tossed it a few feet above me on the grass. So did they. We panted and our red skin tried to get back to normal.
“Hi Aya!” Mrs. Santoloho was standing on the sidewalk with a bike between her legs.
“Hi!” Aya said. I caught myself wanting her to introduce me: this is my friend Mary, from Ms. Swann’s class.
She didn’t.
“Are these you guys’ scooters?” Mrs Santoloho asked. We all nodded. “You’d better wear some protection if you want to ride them off the grass. Notice how I always wear a helmet?” We nodded again. Aya is like me-socially awkward around teachers-so Marco was the one to explain.
“We do wear helmets! We just took them off to relax.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” Mrs. Santoloho said. Then she waved, kicked off, stuck out her right arm as a turn signal, and wheeled away.
“I can’t believe she would think that about us,” Aya said.
“Your Advanced Language Arts teacher is kind of ridiculous,” I said.
*
Ms. Swann didn’t keep us in much suspense on presentation day. She rang off all five names at once as soon as Mrs. Santoloho’s class had filled in all the space in our room (Aya nodding to me before crouching onto the floor and out of my vision).
None of the names was mine. One was Aya’s. Marco’s name wasn’t called either, but secretly I wasn’t surprised-he’d written about Colonial Williamsburg, which sounded a lot like any old New England museum from what he’d told me.
Aya!?
“Aya, that is so cool that your family is from Japan,” Ms. Swann said. “I was really, truly fascinated to learn about the arcade game where you play a frog. Would you mind if I asked you questions after you read your essay?” Aya nodded because words weren’t necessary. She had won. “Great! I knew Mrs. Santoloho’s class would have a lot to teach my guys.”
I try not to talk like this too often but: omG whatever.
Now I was reading the comments on my essay, which had just made its way back to me through the jellyfish crowd. Every time I’d written “Old England,” there was Ms. Swann’s cursive red “e” through “Old,” meaning “delete this word.” The grade: 3.
“Diversity is what we’re all about,” Mrs. Santoloho was saying.
No f****** s***.
*
“Well, Martin Luther King preached nonviolence,” Marco said, his feet on the pretentious ottoman.
“But nonviolence was the whole problem with the Holocaust,” I said. My back was against the TV stand. “Nobody would fight Hitler until it was too late.”
There was a pause.
“Aya isn’t Hitler.”
“Yeah and New Kingstown isn’t the German Empire. But you know what I mean.”
“She told me she quote unquote really enjoyed spending time in our classroom.”
“Who talks like that,” I said, not even pretending it was a real question.
“Chinks,” Marco said, and we both laughed.
We waited a few minutes, so that Aya would get to the driveway first, and then we tip-toed into the garage. Marco held a finger over his lips the whole time in an infinite shush. There was Aya, sitting on the curb at the end of the driveway just two car-lengths away. I took a few steps forward-Marco’s eyes growing with each one, scared I’d make a noise-and then I threw the baseball.
“NNNG!” Aya yelled, like some kind of Asian stereotype. She rolled forward into her own lap, hands over her head.
“I’m so sorry!” I yelled. “Marco was supposed to catch that. Marco you’re such a spaz!”
Aya acted like she hadn’t heard. At the time I was getting totally into my part. It was like, I could have been trying to throw to Marco. And then the same minute it was like, I was trying to throw to Marco. And who cares because Aya is faking.
“This is so embarrassing,” Marco said. “My dad is going to kill me.” He rubbed his hands against the sides of his head and then dropped them again. “Can we tell people you fell off your scooter?”
Maybe I shouldn’t have written all that down.
