It was Homeroom, a hot, muggy Friday—the last day of school. Our teacher, Mrs. Woods, let us open all the windows, but it didn’t really help. The sky was overcast outside, with a mix of light and dark gray clouds, and there was that wet metal smell in the air like rain was coming, or at least might be.

I was in my usual seat near the back of the room in the row by the windows, just in front of Lance, Danny, and Ben. In the opposite corner by the door were Myrna, Rose, and the other cool girls who liked to sit by Myrna. Ramona was back in her corner, in the back of the room across from us. Martin was up in the front row, just in front of the teacher’s desk, and Kate, who never talked to anyone, was as usual sitting wherever she could that wasn’t next to other people.

Mrs. Woods asked for volunteers to hand out the yearbooks. That photographer guy had taken all our yearbook pictures back in the fall, and Mom had paid to get copies of them, so I’d already seen my picture. I kind of looked like a dork, but Mom liked it and said I had a “nice smile.” Martin, Rose, Myrna, and a couple of other girls raised their hands to help hand them out to everybody. So she gave five to each of them because there were twenty-five kids in our class—at least, who were here today for the last day of school.

When Myrna got her five, she put one on her desk and then headed right across the room to our corner and stood over my desk.

“Oh look,” said Lance to Danny and Ben next to him, “it’s the evil Myrna, teacher’s pet.” Danny and Ben chuckled.

Myrna didn’t even look mad or worried; she just looked at them and said with a soft, almost regular voice, “Shut up, idiots.”

She handed me a yearbook and then looked at me. “I don’t know WHAT happened between you and Rose at the end of the dance—she wouldn’t say. But I don’t think she hates you.” Lance, Danny, and Ben kind of laughed, blowing air out of their mouths.

Smiling and trying to make a pretend nice face, she said to them in a regular, unbothered voice, “I’m looking forward to never having to see you three again. So in the fall, make sure you go to a different school.” She tossed a yearbook onto each of their desks, turned, and walked back to her corner of the room.

Lance looked at me, shook his head, made a face, and said, “What a total bitch!” Danny and Ben laughed again. I was suddenly afraid to say anything, though part of me felt like I should be defending Myrna—that somehow she was more on my “team” than Lance was. But the other parts of me didn’t want Lance, Danny, and Ben to think I was a wuss. All I could figure to do was shake my head, like I didn’t want to be involved in all this, but Lance took my head shake differently, like I was agreeing with him.

“Yeah, right,” he said, smiling. “Hey, Coop. When you’re out getting your yearbook signed after school, make sure you find us so we can sign yours.”

I kind of nodded, hoping that would make him stop talking to me. And luckily, he finally did, turning to Danny and Ben to brag about how he had made out with Ramona again yesterday after school.

Of all the bad stuff that had happened to me during this past year at Tappan, having to deal with Lance was probably the worst. Worse than feeling like a little kid when I was out in the halls like eight times a day between classes, surrounded by a bunch of kids who all looked older and more grown up than me. Worse than having to write all those stupid papers and book reports in Unified Studies that I always waited till the last day to finish. Worse than getting a “B” in Math for the first half of second semester, a “C” in Industrial Arts, and my only “3” rating. Worse than watching Mr. Wash in Phys. Ed. totally embarrass Martin during the physical fitness test, making him try to climb that rope to the ceiling of the gym when he couldn’t even get off the ground—and I even laughed a little, just like a lot of the other boys in class. Maybe even worse than all of us boys being naked when we did swimming class, and my body seeming to look more like a little kid’s than anyone else’s. Worse than hating Sundays because I had to go back to school on Monday.

I mean, I guess school wasn’t ALL bad. I read some interesting books in Unified Studies, and others I got out of the school library. I learned about Set Theory in Math, which was really cool, and also got to know Abby better in Math Club. I learned about how cells grow inside your body in Science, and that our blood is our substitute for the sea water that tiny microscopic animals live in. I got to know Alice in Art class and got to draw and paint stuff, even though Mr. Beenhower had me do that stupid “Skip the Drip… Swim Suitless” poster.

And I actually danced with a girl, Rose, at two different school dances. We slow-danced, even, and we held each other and lots of parts of our bodies touched, which felt good. But then, during that last slow dance at the end of the spring dance, it all got way too much, too something—like if we kept going we’d want to make out with each other, and I got totally scared and maybe she did, too. It had been two weeks since the dance and she was right across the room here in Homeroom, but I hadn’t dared even LOOK at her, let alone talk to her.

It startled me when the bell rang.

“Have a great summer everyone”, Mrs. Woods said, “I’ve enjoyed having all of you in my Homeroom!”

Kate stood up, and just walked quickly to the door and out of the room, even bumping into a couple girls on the way out.  Lance went over to Ramona’s desk and said something quietly to her and she laughed, but it was that uncomfortable kind of laugh and she headed out the classroom door with him behind her still saying things to her.  Danny and Ben ran after them.  

Myrna and Rose were standing by the door with a couple other girls.  Myrna looked at me looking worried for a second but then went out the door and the other girls followed her.  Before Rose went out the door she looked back at me and did a little wave with her hand.  Since Lance, Danny and Ben were gone already, I waved back and she left the room.  I was one of the last kids to leave.  I think Martin was the last.

***

FINALLY, it was the last class of the last day: Industrial Arts for me. It was the first time I’d had a teacher who was a Black man, Mr. Jackson. He was okay, I guess, though I didn’t like it when he gave me a mid-semester grade of a “C+.” A “C” was just “average,” and though I didn’t really have those letter grades in elementary school, I always got mostly the “excellent” and a few of the “good” ones, which were like As and Bs in junior high. This year, though I’d gotten some Bs in Phys. Ed. and Band first semester, I was now getting As in all my classes, except my Math teacher gave me a “B” for my mid-second-semester grade because I missed a math test when I was sick and never made it up. But I’d gotten As on all my Math tests since then, so I figured I’d get an “A” for my final grade.

Mr. Jackson was also the only teacher to give me a “3” rating along with my “C+,” which was also just “average,” and was supposed to be how well the teacher thought you were ACTUALLY doing compared to how well he thought you COULD do. Mrs. Woods, my Unified Studies teacher, had given me all “2”s even though she gave me all “A-”s for grades. And my Band teacher, Mr. Balfort, gave me all “2”s, too—and Bs first semester, but an “A-” for the first half of second.

I wanted to get As, or at worst A-s, in all my classes, so when Mom or Dad saw my grades they’d still think I was a “bright” kid, like they always said I was since I was little. As long as they thought that way—especially Mom, since Dad didn’t live with us anymore—she’d keep letting me do stuff on my own and not try to be in charge of me. But I guess it was okay if I actually got a “C” in Industrial Arts, because it wasn’t like REAL school—reading, doing problems, taking tests, and writing papers.

Mom never said anything to me when she got my grades, but I figured she looked at them and was still THINKING about them, and if they weren’t really good, THEN she might say something, and I really didn’t want anything like that to happen, ever.

Just like all my other classes today, we didn’t really do any learning or working type stuff in Industrial Arts. Mr. Jackson gave us bags to take home the projects we were working on that we hadn’t finished. Mine was another bookend just like the one I’d finished that I hadn’t been able to glue together yet or rasp and sand down and put linseed oil on. Then he told us how much he had enjoyed having all of us in his class, and that he hoped we would continue to make things at home, but make them safely.

In my other classes the teachers had also said that they’d really enjoyed having us as their students, like that was what they were supposed to say. I mean, our French teacher, Miss Hulot, and our Science teacher, Mrs. Dumont, both seemed to really like teaching us, though I wasn’t sure why. And even though Mr. Balfort SAID he liked having all of us in the band, he had sure gotten mad at us a lot during the year.

For the last half of Industrial Arts class we just all sat there, watching and listening for that clock’s big hand to make that little tiny noise before it moved to the next minute. The clocks in elementary school had been like that, too—not like our clocks at home or in stores or other people’s houses where the hands, I guess, moved all the time, but so slow you could never see them move, only see that they HAD moved.

Then the clock finally got to three-fourteen, and I actually liked that it seemed to take forever before it clicked over to three-FIFTEEN, when that final bell would ring. It was weird, but sometimes WAITING for something really good that you knew was about to happen was even better than the thing happening.

***

It was hard to believe it was actually DONE! No more Tappan—at least until September. No more Lance and Myrna. No more feeling like a little kid in the hallways between classes. No more seven classes and stupid homework, having to carry one armful of schoolbooks and then my saxophone in the other arm on “T” days to and from school. It was hard to believe I had actually SURVIVED—well, at least kind of survived. I had thought sixth grade was bad. Part of me felt like crying.

There was just one more thing I had to do now: go out on the front lawn with my yearbook and get all the other school kids I knew to sign it. Teddy and Craig said they’d meet me out there. That was supposed to be the FUN part!

I could barely fit my saxophone in my locker, along with my notebook and the bag with my reversible yellow and blue gym shirt, blue gym shorts, and jock strap. All I had now was the yearbook and a pen.

“Ready to go out there?” Teddy asked. “We should see which one of us can get the most kids to sign our yearbook, plus who can get the most girls.” He and Craig, who had been in the Industrial Arts class with me, had gone to their lockers, too, and just had their yearbooks.

“I don’t know about asking any girls,” Craig said. He was kind of a brain, and he liked Avalon Hill wargames like I did, but he didn’t talk to a lot of kids, and I’d never seen him dance with or even talk to a girl.

“Ah, c’mon, Craigy-boy,” Teddy said. “Girls just love it when guys sign their yearbooks. It makes all the other girls think they’re super cool. Makes them jealous.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Craig said. “But I don’t know.” Teddy shook his head and blew air through his teeth.

“How ’bout you?” Teddy asked me. “You’re a real ‘ladies’ man,’ dancing with that girl with the wild hair. What’s her name? And evil Myrna even tried to dance with you. Plus, I saw you a bunch of times walking home from school with Abby.” It scared me that Teddy, I guess, had been watching me and knew so much about the girls I danced with or talked to. I didn’t trust him not to say something stupid to the other Burns Park guys that we knew, especially Billy.

“I don’t know,” I said—the exact same thing Craig had said.

“Geez,” said Teddy, shaking his head as he pushed open one of the doors leading out onto the big front lawn.

We walked out onto the grass of the big, usually empty lawn, now full of kids from the school, that sloped down from the building to Stadium Boulevard below with lots of cars rushing by. All my life we had driven out Stadium to the restaurants out there—Friar Tuck’s, Frontier Beef Buffet, and Howard Johnson’s—and I had looked up at Tappan, looking like some big rectangular factory without the smokestacks. Now everything was turned around; I was at that place looking DOWN at the cars on Stadium.

The big sky above us was full of gray clouds in front of other gray clouds, with little parts of blue in between. It was warm but windy, and still had that metal smell like rain might be coming.

And below the sky were all us kids, just everywhere—more than I’d EVER seen before, mostly standing, but some sitting in the grass. There were so many that I could barely even see Stadium Boulevard below or the driveway and parking lot off to the right. And I figured I was probably the youngest one there, because I’d skipped kindergarten and was only twelve years old while all my friends and the other seventh graders were thirteen, and we were the YOUNGEST grade in the school. And other than Teddy and Craig, who walked out with me, I couldn’t see anybody else that I knew.

“Wow,” said Craig, “that’s a LOT of kids. How do we find everybody we know?”

The kids around us were mostly boys and looked older, like mostly eighth or ninth-graders, all excited and talking loud, laughing, and opening up and writing stuff in each other’s yearbooks. There looked like a whole area off to the right towards the driveway that was mostly all girls, again none that I recognized.

“We just have to plunge into the crowd,” said Teddy, acting like he was in charge and knew what to do. “They’re out there somewhere.” It made me kind of mad that he came up with a plan just like that without talking to Craig and me first.

I remembered that time last summer when Teddy, Billy, Gill, and I went to the Arb and walked all the way down to that pond by the railroad tracks. There was this big tree right on the edge of the pond that you could climb, and someone had even tied a long, thick rope to one of the upper branches. If you climbed up on this one branch out over the edge of the pond, one of your friends on the ground could bring the rope over to you, and you could grab it with both hands and swing out over the water and let go and splash into the pond. I mean, I’d always liked climbing trees, but this looked pretty scary to me.

Teddy had gone first, taking off his shoes and socks, climbing up to that branch over the water. Billy brought him the rope and he did it, grabbing the rope and swinging out above the pond, letting go and falling in with a big splash, yelling and laughing as he did, and swam and waded back out of the water to where the rest of us were, all feeling like he was super cool and the leader of the group. Then Billy did it next. And they even got Gill to do it, even though he didn’t want to at first, but Teddy kept telling him to not be a “wuss,” and if he DIDN’T, he would remember and regret it, and it would affect his whole life. I don’t think Gill WANTED TO, but he finally climbed the tree and did it.

Then Teddy turned to me, and when I said I didn’t want to, he told me all those same things he had told Gill—that I would regret it all my life. Even though I didn’t GET angry at Teddy, since I never got angry at anybody, I was scared to do it, and I wasn’t going to let him like bully me into doing it anyway. He had NO BUSINESS telling me about how it would affect MY future, trying to make me do it. So I DIDN’T.

So Teddy just headed into the crowd, and Craig followed about ten feet behind him, glancing back at me and waving to me to come along. I just stood there and watched them and thought about all the kids I might run into and whether I even wanted to. Like Lance, Danny, and Ben—they’d be all trying to see how many girls they each could get to sign their yearbooks. Or Myrna and Rose. Myrna would probably ask me again what happened at the dance between Rose and me—and Rose would be right next to her, and it would be TOTALLY EMBARRASSING!

And all my other Burns Park school friends, like Mike, Arthur, Stuart, Gill, even Billy—I’d see them all the time over at the park, so why did I need them to sign the stupid yearbook? Alice and Abby, too, though Abby probably wouldn’t even talk to me here around all these other kids, because we were secret friends.

So I waited until I couldn’t see Teddy and Craig anymore, looked around to make sure that no one I knew was around, and turned and walked back through the doors into the school. It felt good to be in the fairly quiet hallway of the building as I went to my locker and pulled everything out: my saxophone case, notebook, and gym clothes. I stuffed other papers and books into the bag with the gym clothes. I wanted to get out of there before I ran into anyone else that I knew. I’d see them in the park and we’d talk about all this, but I didn’t want to talk to anybody now. I just wanted to be done with this crazy place, at least ’til September!

***

I headed out of the building by the portable classrooms where my math class was, or had been, since now I was done. Just thinking that I was finally done was SO exciting. I was thankful that there was no one else around, though it would have been fun to walk home with Abby; she and I actually talked about real stuff—we were secret friends instead of regular ones.

I walked my regular route home up Copley. It was still windy and there were lots of gray clouds in the sky, and it still smelled like there was rain out there somewhere. I wondered if it would start raining before I got home, because I was carrying my saxophone, my gym clothes, my notebook, and all these papers that had been in my locker. I guess that wouldn’t be TOO bad, because the saxophone case was kind of watertight and the gym clothes were already dirty, so they could be wet and dirty, too—no biggie. And my notebook had some tests I had taken and papers I had written, but I really didn’t care about them. I wrote them for my teachers to get a good grade, not for me.

I still couldn’t really believe that it was over. I mean, EVERY year on that last day of school I was so glad it was done. But THIS year school had been way more complicated and way more of a problem than it had EVER been before. I just never got comfortable being with ALL the kids in all my different classes.

Last year, in sixth grade at Burns Park, there were like the same twenty-five other kids in my one class. And a lot of the boys in my class then were my regular friends, who I saw in the park or went over to their houses, so it felt okay to be around them in my class, too. The other boys in class weren’t really my friends, but I knew their names and they knew mine, and maybe we’d just say “hi” when we saw each other in the park or something. And the girls were like on the other team, so I didn’t talk to them much, but I knew all their names and they knew mine. When we had our secret clubs I would spy on some of them, like Abby and Myrna and Beth and any of the other girls in my class who went to Abby’s house. So after the first month of school, I at least kind of knew everybody, so even though school was boring sometimes, I didn’t feel worried about the other kids. They were just other kids in my neighborhood.

And in sixth grade you only had to deal mostly with ONE grownup, your teacher, and once you kind of knew what they liked or what they didn’t like, you just did the things they liked enough so they didn’t worry about you and you could just be with all your friends.

Yeah, they were in charge of you, because that was how school worked, but you at least got used to the WAY they were in charge of you, and got used to doing things their way when you were in class. But you knew that before, at lunchtime, and after class you would be with your friends instead, and that was the important part of your life. And you and your friends in class were dealing with your one teacher TOGETHER, like you were a team, so it didn’t feel so bad to have that one grownup in charge, who you’d at least gotten to know pretty well. And school had been pretty much that same way since first grade, whether the school was Burns Park or Bach—the school I used to go to before we moved here.

But in seventh grade, at Tappan, it was all completely different. There were seven different classes in seven different rooms with seven different teachers and seven different bunches of kids, most of them you didn’t know and you never saw anywhere except in that one class where nobody really got much of a chance to talk to anybody else. So you had seven different grownup teachers in charge of you that you had to try to figure out what they wanted, and since you only saw each of them for like fifty minutes a day it took much longer to figure them out. And because there were always bells ringing and everything changing, it felt like your teachers weren’t REALLY in charge either—just other grownups, like the principal and the counselors or whoever it was in the office that did the schedule and you never really ever talked to.

And with all that going on there was nowhere before, after, or during school when you could get together with all your real friends and be a kind of team and figure out how to deal with all these different classes and teachers and kids in your classes, plus all the OTHER kids, including older kids, that saw you in the hallways that you didn’t know. So you were like a team of one against everybody else, which was not fun at all.

Plus, instead of going out in the park and home for lunch like in elementary school, it was in this cafeteria place in the school and you had like twenty minutes to eat and talk to people instead of an hour. And then most of your friends weren’t in the same lunch as you, so you couldn’t talk to them anyway.

And finally, they had that crazy Homeroom thing, which was also only twenty minutes and maybe for half of it the teacher would talk about stuff, and for the second half you could actually talk to other kids there. But most of those other kids WEREN’T your friends or you didn’t really know them at all. I mean, I got to know Lance, Danny, and Ben in MY Homeroom, but we only kind of pretended to be friends, but weren’t really on the same team. And there was that girl Rose in my Homeroom that I liked, and we danced together at BOTH dances, but I was afraid to even TALK to her there, even though Myrna thought it was stupid that I didn’t.

And then if all that wasn’t bad enough, the absolute worst thing was in Phys. Ed. when we did swimming—they wanted us all to swim without any clothes on, like totally naked. It was just completely embarrassing; I mean, what crazy, stupid grownup thought THAT up? Even my crazy art teacher, Mr. Beenhower, thought that us kids swimming naked was pretty cool and he got me to do that stupid “Skip the Drip, Swim Suitless” poster. When he finally gave us the posters we made to take home, I took mine, and when no one was watching, ripped it into pieces and jammed it down into the bottom of a trash bin in the hall so hopefully no one would ever find it.

I mean, I’d learned a bunch of interesting stuff in school. I learned about Set Theory in Math, which didn’t necessarily have to do with numbers at all, though numbers could be sets, but so could just about anything else. And it could also be about logic, and a systematic way you could prove things were right or wrong, by using what you knew to build an answer to what you were trying to figure out. I learned about bases other than the regular base ten, like base two, which just had lots of zeros and ones—kind of like just off and on, like what computers used. And also algebra, where you put letters in where you didn’t know the numbers yet but then you followed these rules to move stuff around so the letter was on one side of the equals sign and all the numbers and arithmetic part was on the other side so you could figure out what the letter was.

And in science, we looked at tiny plants and animals through a microscope, and we learned how cells divided. Plus there was this super cool movie about evolution that explained how, when the first animals left the ocean to become bigger land animals like us, they had to take the ocean with them. Their bodies just enclosed the sea water and turned it into blood.

In Unified Studies, we read some cool books, like The Phantom Tollbooth, Across Five Aprils about the Civil War, and The Light in the Forest, about this young white boy raised by an Indian tribe who then is forced to return to live with white people again, but doesn’t want to.

And in Band, learning to really read music and the different notes, keys, and how musical pieces had different parts, including ones that sometimes repeated. Then there was taking the stuff on the sheet and turning it into real music, where all the different instruments played different stuff that all fit together to create something as a team.

And I made a cool new friend Craig, who didn’t go to Burns Park but had moved to the neighborhood this year. He was in my Art classes and into Avalon Hill wargames like I was, but none of my other school friends were. But then Mike, who had kind of been my best friend for a while, was changing and we didn’t seem so much like friends anymore. And my other school friends from Burns Park were okay, I guess. I’d at least play Little League again with most of them.

And there were girls now. Well, Rose could have been a new friend maybe, even though I only danced with her and never really talked with her anywhere else. But what happened at the end of the Spring Dance made it weird, and she didn’t even live near Burns Park. And maybe even MYRNA, of all people, could be a friend, if we could be secret friends like Abby and me somehow.

When I finally got to Cal and Craig’s houses, then to Granger, and then into the park—when I was finally in places that were part of my life before Tappan—my whole body just kind of relaxed, like maybe I could at least pretend that Tappan never happened. I walked by the tennis courts where some grownups were playing. I could see younger kids in groups around the park—some boys around the backstop of one of the baseball diamonds, a bunch of girls around the swings—talking loud and laughing and waving their hands around. It was their last day of school, too, and I remembered how great it felt last year to be done with sixth grade.

I don’t know that it felt GREAT now, too, to be done with seventh grade. It certainly was a RELIEF to be done, and to have two and a half months ahead with no school. But I felt like this past ten months at Tappan had done things to me, bad things. It made me feel like I wasn’t really a big kid after all, and maybe I didn’t even WANT to be one. But I really didn’t have any choice, did I?

***

The Maple tree in our front yard waved and whooshed in the wind, and it still smelled like rain was coming, and now there was a wall of gray clouds in the sky to the west of our house. That was actually kind of cool; a nice thunderstorm might help me change my mood.

As I walked in the front door, I immediately smelled the oil paints, and Mom was there in the living room with her big white painting jacket on and a paintbrush in her right hand, and that palette thing, with shiny dabs of different-colored paint on it. Below where she was standing, the low coffee table was covered in newspapers and a big canvas resting on it, still mostly white, but with curved lines of red and blue paint on it. She looked at me as I walked into the room with one hand carrying my saxophone and the other with my notebook and the paper bag full of gym clothes and other stuff.

“You’re done,” she said, not doing a smile like she usually did when she first talked to somebody. I did my little kid nod but didn’t have anything I could just say.

“Put down your stuff,” she said, still not smiling. “I’ve got some important news.”

Though she didn’t say “bad news,” the way she said it didn’t sound good, so I just nodded again and put my saxophone down on the floor and the bag and notebook on the round dining room table. I all of a sudden felt really tired, so I plopped down in the overstuffed rocking chair in the corner of the room, my favorite place to sit, puffed my cheeks and blew air out of my mouth. It was usually in the wood rocking chair up in her room next to the TV where I sat when she told me stuff.

“So I just got a letter from your father in the mail today,” she said. “He’s been offered a full-time position as an English professor at a university in Southern Ohio and he wants to take the position and is looking to move down there in August.” Then she gave me a look like how are WE going to deal with this. I didn’t say anything and just looked at her.

“What am I going to say to him?” she asked. “No? Don’t take this position that’s your dream job and more money because you need to stay here to help with the kids? I’d owe him bigtime. I can’t put myself in that position!”

I didn’t really know what to think about all that. Mom was telling me stuff like this more and more these days, usually when she had me come into her room and sit in the wood rocking chair while she had all the bills laid out on her bed and tried to figure out how to pay them. She’d ask me those kinds of questions and I wouldn’t know what to say, wouldn’t have an answer. But at least she wouldn’t get mad at me or anything if I didn’t.

All the questions suddenly filled my mind. If Dad moved to Southern Ohio, would we ever see him? Did he still care about us? Already Mom would say to me, “I can’t live like this,” and now if Dad left town, would it be even worse?

She looked at me now, sadder and less fierce, and said, “I’m sorry. This is a lot to share with you right now. I’m a human being and I can only deal with so much. I tried to call Maryjane, but she wasn’t home.”

She closed her eyes, took a slow, deep breath, and then blew the air out of her mouth. Then she opened her eyes, looked at me again, slowly nodded, and said, “We’ll figure this out… because we have to.”

I nodded, too. I mean, I didn’t want to just stare at her like some stupid little kid. She said “we” instead of “I,” so she was figuring I had to help her.

“So what are we going to tell your brother?” she asked. “Is he going to feel like his father is abandoning him?” I didn’t know what to say, so I just shook my head. Some help I was!

She closed her eyes again, took another slow, deep breath, and blew it out, opening her eyes back up and sticking her paintbrush in a glass jar with turpentine in it. The liquid, which was tinted red, turned a purple color. She looked at me again.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “This is not how I planned to be today, but I just can’t suck it up and hold things inside like your father did. Now that I’ve shared it with somebody, I feel a little better. Thanks!” She tried to smile.

I nodded. Again, what could I say? “It’ll be okay, Mom,” like I knew that somehow?

“So today was your last day of school,” she said. “Congratulations! I know it’s been a rough year for you, and I’ve been caught up in all my own stuff, so I haven’t been much help. So how are you feeling about the year and being done?” The question felt like one she would ask one of her grownup friends. Well, she certainly wasn’t treating me like a little kid. That’s what I wanted, wasn’t it?

I thought about the words to say carefully, since I never wanted her or Dad to think that I didn’t want to go to school. So I said, “I’m glad I’m done. I need a break. I’m glad it’s finally summer.”

There was a bright flash of light in the living room windows, followed in a couple of seconds by a loud crack of thunder. A cool, rain-smelling wind blew in through the open windows.

“I’ll close the windows down here,” she said, “if you’ll run up and close them upstairs.” I nodded and left my saxophone there on the floor, but grabbed my bag with all my other stuff in it and ran up the stairs. I always liked thunderstorms. They were like Mother Nature saying, “I’m in charge here, humans. Let’s start fresh!’”