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.