First period this year is World History. Mrs. Shriver is our history teacher—this year and every year—but she does not believe in doing history in order. In ninth grade, American History, we did the Civil Rights Movement then colonial Boston then the Civil War then Ponce de León then the Pilgrims. The day we left Plymouth Rock for the Great Depression, I finally raised my hand to ask why.
She cocked her head like it was a smart but difficult question that had never occurred to her.
“Well, you don’t do English class in order,” she said. “You jump all around. Jazz Age poetry then Shakespeare then some god-awful Victorian novel then a short story that ran in the New Yorker last year.”
“Or math,” Rock Ramundi put in. Rock’s is always the first hand up, whether he knows the answer or not.
“Math?” Mrs. Shriver said.
“We don’t do math in the order it was discovered in.”
“Right.” Mrs. Shriver clapped her hands together. “Exactly.”
“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.”