We mostly hadn’t read anything yet, except for the stuff we’d written. Mrs. T. called this “freewriting.” We “freewrote” every day in class. Although it wasn’t exactly free; Mrs. T. would tell us what to write. She called this a “prompt.” The “prompt” was always just one word. Mrs. T. would say, “Mountain.” Or “Family.” Or “Rope.” Then she’d look at her watch and say, “Begin.” And then we’d “freewrite” for fifteen minutes, whatever we wanted as long as it related in some way to the “prompt.” Then Mrs. T. would look at her watch and say, “One minute remains.” One minute later, she’d say, “Stop.” And then one by one we’d read our responses aloud, until the second bell rang. That was advanced reading.
I got there just as the first bell rang. I sat in my assigned seat, next to J., with the zipper scar on her right cheek, who sat next to R., who did not want to be called B., who sat next to L., who began each sentence with the word “so,” who sat next to P., who was black. And so on. They were all at least five years older than me, everyone in the class, including Harold, whose assigned seat was at the far end of the room. He waved to me like a lunatic when I came in. But I didn’t wave back. Harold was my only friend. It makes me sad to say that. But I was Harold’s only friend, too. That made it even sadder for him. Because he was five years older than me; he’d had five extra years to make another friend and hadn’t. But besides Harold, no one else paid much attention to me. I knew from Exley’s book that he hadn’t fit in as a teacher. I wondered if he hadn’t fit in as a student, either. I wondered if he was like me, if he’d felt like a nine-year-old in a class with a bunch of fourteen-year-olds. I wondered if his classmates had treated him like they treated me, like a pet that had one trick: I could read anything, and fast. But that was my only trick. When the older kids realized that, they got bored and ignored me. I wondered if Exley was like that when he was a kid. I wondered if he was still like that.
Mrs. T. watched me climb into my desk chair, pull out my pencil and a piece of paper, and basically get ready to start “freewriting.” But then I was ready and Mrs. T. was still looking at me. “Miller, use your mine-duh,” she finally said. I must have looked at her in a way that told her I thought I was already using it. “Did you forget what we’re doing today?” she asked. When she said that, I looked around and saw that everyone had books on their desks, in addition to their pencils and pieces of paper. Then I remembered. This was the week when everyone in school discussed this year’s America on the Same Page book. Like last year’s, this year’s book was about a war (I guessed that every America on the Same Page book would be about a war until America stopped being in one), except this year the book was about an old war, where people rode horses instead of planes and helicopters and tanks, and fired pistols instead of automatic rifles. I say “people,” but it was really about a boy who was too young to fight in the war but joined the army anyway because his father had fought and died in the war and the boy loved his father and he also loved his father’s horse and gun, which were now the boy’s, since his father had died, and which the boy took into battle, which he couldn’t stop talking about: he couldn’t stop talking about the bodies and the bullets and the blood, the blood, and it was clear that the boy, or the author, or both, loved the battles and the bodies and the bullets and the blood, too, even though he, or they, kept saying how really terrible it all was.
“I remember now,” I said. I reached into my desk and pulled out my copy of the book. I’d read the book the Friday before, in the nine five-minute periods between when one class ended and the next began.
“Good,” Mrs. T. said. Then she looked at us with big, hopeful eyes. We were probably looking at her the same way. None of us knew what we were supposed to do next. I think America on the Same Page’s idea was that after reading the book, we wouldn’t be able to look at the world in the same way, and if that were the case, then we wouldn’t be able to talk about it in the same way, either. But how were we supposed to see it? How were we supposed to talk about it? I think we expected Mrs. T. to tell us; I think she expected us to tell her. But we weren’t going to tell her anything. You could see Mrs. T. realized this, too. It was scary, a little, to watch Mrs. T. become less hopeful and more resentful as she realized that maybe America was on the same page, but we definitely were not. Her eyes got smaller and smaller as she tried to figure out what to do. Finally, she opened to page — of the book and told us to do the same. We did. Then Mrs. T. put on her glasses (they’d been hanging on a black string around her neck) and read this passage:
It was finally morning. It had stopped raining and the sun had begun to shine and there was a rainbow arcing yellow and blue and bloodred over the battlefield and the steaming bodies of the men and their horses. The ones that were still alive were moaning in the newdawn; the ones that were dead were dead. The boy realized how awful it was to be dead, because once you were dead, that was all there was to be said about you anymore. “My father is dead,” the boy said. It felt terrible to say that. “But I am alive,” the boy said, and that felt wonderful. And then the boy realized why there had been wars and why there would always be wars: because it was better to be alive than to be dead. The boy shouldered his father’s rifle and whispered, “Go,” in his father’s horse’s ear. And they went.
When Mrs. T. was done reading, she took off her glasses, looked at us, and asked hopefully, “Well, what do you think?”
No one said anything at first. The only sound was Harold tapping his pencil against his forehead. This was how he thought. Everyone else was quietly looking down at their desks, waiting for Harold to say something first. Because Harold was always the one who said something first.
“I didn’t like the part about the rainbow,” Harold finally said.
“You didn’t,” Mrs. T. said. It wasn’t a question. Her voice was so flat you could have slept on it.
“Because you don’t even need rain,” Harold said. “I went to Niagara Falls this summer. There was a rainbow, but no rain. Only water. It should be called a waterbow. That’s what I feel.”
“So whatever,” L. said. “I thought it was pretty great. Especially during the battle and the nasty hand-to-hand stuff.” L. was talking about the part before the part Mrs. T. had read, when some of the soldiers ran out of ammunition and so had to try to stab one another with their bayonets. L. was a brown belt and loved anything to do with hand-to-hand combat. He turned back a page and read: “‘The boy raised his bayonet, and for a moment it glistened in the silvermoonlight like some message from God, and then the boy thrust it through the chest of a boy not much older than he and then withdrew the bayonet, which made a terrible sucking sound as it left the other boy’s body, and then the other boy fell to the ground and did not move and would never move.’ Awesome,” L. said.