Attack of the black rect.., p.1
Attack of the Black Rectangles, page 1
For the truth tellers
IF YOU CAN’T BE DIRECT, WHY BE?
—Lily Tomlin
… TO BE AFRAID OF WHAT IS DIFFERENT OR UNFAMILIAR IS TO BE AFRAID OF LIFE.
—Theodore Roosevelt
A STRONG SPIRIT TRANSCENDS RULES.
—Prince
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
Prologue: The Adults Around Here
Last Year—BOT DUCK MAN
What Grace Is
Summer
Table Assignments
Lit Circle
Black Rectangle
Library
Tad’s Books
The Mug
Action Station
Things You Don’t Expect
The Plan
The B-Word
She
The Day We Have Off Because of Lies
The Sickness
Longest Day Ever
Aliens Don’t Like Feminism
Recess Inside My Head
Still Processing
The Truth
The Truth II
Bona Fide Human
The Crush
Chapter Eleven
Ice Cream
Not Fun
The School Board
Telling Denis
The City
BLT
Waiting … and Waiting … and Waiting
Author Mail
The Dance
Popcorn
Columbus Boy
Karmann Ghia Convertible
Lighter / Heavier / Lighter
Halloween
Surprise!
What Happens Next
Acknowledgments / Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright
“I am here to protect all of us from the ugly world.”
—Laura Samuel Sett
According to a lot of the adults in our town, everything here is perfect.
We don’t have accidents. We don’t have any crime at all. We don’t have Halloween anymore. Or junk food. We don’t have bad thoughts. We don’t use any bad words, like cancer or death or sex or donut.
A lot of people thank Ms. Laura Samuel Sett for this. She’s as famous as a person can get in our town, and probably the only reason the local newspaper is still in print. Everyone reads her letters there.
Ms. Sett is also a sixth-grade teacher, but the adults around here are her students as much as kids like me who pass through her classroom at Independence North Elementary School. Those adults join Ms. Sett in letter writing, sitting on the town council and committees, and making rule after rule after rule. They seem to believe that rules equal safety—by making more rules, they are keeping us all safe and keeping the town’s reputation spotless.
Ms. Sett thinks that if we even think about “bad things,” our whole town could fall right into the toilet of the world.
“Just like all those other towns,” she says.
The adults around here don’t just keep our town safe from unsavory words and thoughts. They keep our town safe from unsavory people, too. And if we believe what the adults around here say, then unsavory people are anyone who doesn’t go to church, anyone who doesn’t pledge the flag louder than the person next to them, and anyone who eats junk food.
Most of us have to go to the next town over to do our grocery shopping so we can buy Cheetos.
My family has ignored the town’s silly rules for as long as I can remember. We don’t go to church, I don’t pledge the flag overly loudly, and we eat a decent amount of junk food. My mom loves Oreos. I love Cheetos. And my grandad is a bona fide candy freak.
Ms. Sett wrote a letter to the paper one time about an elderly man who sits on Main Street, always eating candy. She asked for him to be removed for his bad example to children. She was talking about Grandad. Here’s what he did in response: He started bringing me with him.
Don’t get me wrong—we eat really good homemade food and a lot of fruits and vegetables, and I get a lot of calcium and vitamins and grains and protein and all the other stuff in the food pyramid.
There are much worse things in the world than junk food. Mom knows it because she works at a place that helps people grieve the death of their loved ones and helps people with cancer and other terminal illnesses. Grandad knows it because he fought in the Vietnam War. My dad sure knows it, because he’s always mad at something—like, every single day.
I just think Ms. Sett and the adults around here should mind their own business. I don’t think any town is perfect and I don’t think any town is in the toilet of the world. I think life is what life is and we just have to try our best.
Life is what life is and we just have to try our best. —Mac Delaney
For all I’m about to say here about her and for all her weird rules, Ms. Sett taught me to stand up for myself and I’m grateful to her for that.
You’re probably confused.
Yes, Ms. Sett is a pain and thinks we shouldn’t eat Cheetos. But also yes, she was nice to me when I needed it most.
No one is ever just one thing.
And not everyone is telling the truth.
That’s the closest anyone will ever get to perfect.
We were on the way to Philadelphia with the fifth-grade school trip when Denis and I made up the game BOT DUCK MAN. It stands for botfly, duck, and human.
Botfly on account of Denis’s uncle getting one in his arm the last time he went to Costa Rica. Duck because we live in a town with a lot of ducks, and ducks eat insects including, we figured, botflies. Human on account of the way Denis described the botfly coming out of his uncle’s arm—right by the elbow—and how bad his uncle said it hurt.
I am never going to Costa Rica.
Anyway, it’s just like ROCK PAPER SCISSORS and I highly recommend it as an alternative to listening to the tour guide at the Liberty Bell.
“Stop it.”
Those were the first two words I ever heard from Ms. Sett. She was a chaperone because the school always had sixth-grade teachers chaperone fifth-grade trips.
“Stop it,” she said again, and then she moved Denis to the other side of the Liberty Bell so we couldn’t finish our BOT DUCK MAN tournament. I was winning.
BOT beats MAN.
DUCK beats BOT.
MAN beats DUCK.
After the Liberty Bell, we went to Independence Hall, where the tour guide was way more boring than the Liberty Bell tour guide.
And no, I don’t have a bad attitude. I’ve seen the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall three other times and each time I wasn’t impressed. It’s not that I don’t respect the founding fathers, but I do have some problems with how they did stuff. Mostly how they bought and sold people. I definitely have a problem with that.
So when it was question time at the end of the tour, and we were standing right in the room where the founding fathers had signed the Declaration of Independence, I raised my hand and asked, “How many of the guys who signed the Declaration of Independence owned slaves?”
Ms. Sett moved quickly toward me with her hand out.
The tour guide said, “Forty-one out of fifty-six signers owned slaves. That’s a great question.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I’m white, so maybe this seems like a weird question. But just because I’m white doesn’t mean I can’t talk about what white people do wrong. We do a lot wrong. For starters, we don’t talk about how 73 percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves.
Ms. Sett stopped edging toward me once the tour guide answered. But she gave me a disapproving look while she listened to the next question. Marci Thompson asked something about why women weren’t invited to the whole signing party. Predictable. Marci was always talking about women and how they need more rights. I’d been stuck in the same class as her since first grade. The whole time, I thought she was okay … as long as you didn’t say anything to her.
Ms. Sett didn’t say anything to Marci then. Or me.
But I could tell she was taking notes in her head.
On the bus home from the Philadelphia trip, the teachers made us sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” like we were first graders. They made us do it in three different groups of singers so we could appreciate “the harmonies!” Denis and I were playing a best-out-of-twenty-one tournament of BOT DUCK MAN. He won both games during “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” because I can’t sing and think at the same time. Then I lost my place in the song and sang out of sync with everyone until I just stopped singing altogether.
Marci Thompson leaned around the seat in front of us and chided, “You two should really pay more attention.”
“Are you a teacher now?” Denis asked.
“Trying to be a good friend,” she said.
Denis looked like he was going to say something mean. So I said, “You’re a great friend, Marci, but you could probably be more chilled out.”
My mom taught me how to do that.
My mom knows a lot about grace. As I said, she works in hospice care, which is technically where people who know they’re going to die go so they can die in peace. Once people die, she then helps their loved ones through their grief, and if that isn’t the most graceful thing I’ve ever heard of, I don’t know what is.
Another reason Mom needs grace is her dad, my grandad. He lives in our basement in what he calls the “old fogey flat.” He says flat instead of apartment because he married Gram, who was from a place called C ornwall in England. He’s American, 100 percent, but he adopted words from her like flat instead of apartment, bin instead of trash can, and a lot of other ones I can’t remember unless he’s using them.
Grandad has his own kind of grace. It’s loud. Loud grace looks like attending protests and writing letters to the president about veterans’ benefits and civil rights. Sometimes he stands on the front porch and yells at anyone driving by our house at more than twenty-five miles per hour to “SLOW DOWN!”
An even bigger reason Mom needs grace is my dad. He hasn’t lived with us since I was eight, but he still comes around to work on Grandad’s old car with me on Saturdays. This was how he and Mom arranged it when he moved into a place where he can’t have me stay on weekends. He eats dinner with us on Saturday, too, which can get tricky sometimes because he’s hard to deal with, but Mom’s grace is unconditional—with mashed potatoes and gravy.
Dad likes to tell me he isn’t from Earth, originally. He isn’t even from our galaxy. And the car he’s working on in the garage isn’t really a car—it’s a spacecraft.
That’s our secret. It’s also one reason he can be so hard to deal with. It’s difficult to get someone to follow Earth rules when they think they don’t apply.
He first told me about it a long time ago, when I was too young to worry about why he was being so weird. He says he’s some kind of alien anthropologist—a sort of scientist who studies other cultures.
One time when I was seven, he yelled at all of us for not telling him that the neighbors got a rabbit hutch. Mom said to me after Dad stormed out to take a walk, “He’s just upset he didn’t know before us, that’s all.”
I went to my room and tried to figure out the real reason why he was so mad. About rabbits. I considered that on his planet, rabbits might be venomous. I couldn’t wait to ask him about it. But when he got home that night, he pretended that it never happened, so the rest of us pretended, too.
Being around people who pretend something didn’t happen when it did happen requires grace. Accepting that Dad doesn’t live with us anymore requires grace. Helping him work on Grandad’s car every Saturday while he barely talks to me requires grace. Acting like this is all normal requires grace.
Grace is a good thing to have.
It’s like jam. It sweetens things.
Our school doesn’t tell us who our teacher is until the week before school starts. It’s one of the old rules that people follow even though it doesn’t make any sense. Denis hates it because he has anxiety and he really should know who his teacher is so he can mentally prepare for it.
My job during the summer is to keep Denis so busy he doesn’t think about what teacher he might get. We play a lot of BOT DUCK MAN.
June is a good month to walk around town and go to the big park and feed the ducks. It isn’t too hot and the tourists are in full bloom. They usually stop here to eat and shop between Amish farm and buggy outings and tours of the pretzel house on Main Street—America’s first pretzel bakery. We are also home to the longest-running Fourth of July celebration and the oldest American boarding school for girls, founded in 1746. We have horse parking all over town, so I guess that’s “charming,” as Mom would say. Actual signs read: HORSE PARKING ONLY.
If I was a tourist, I’d come here just for those signs.
July is mostly video games in the air-conditioning and playing in the creek at the small park. For Fourth of July, my whole family stays overnight at a cabin way out in the Pennsylvania forest reserve so Grandad doesn’t have to hear fireworks. This year we decide to stay for five whole days.
In August, Denis goes to summer camp for two weeks and I play Ultimate Detective, my favorite mystery video game, for twelve days in a row. Grandad sits and watches me play, so it’s not like I’m by myself in a dark room. Plus, Grandad and I are walkers—Sunday walks, morning walks, holiday walks, and in summer, a lot of night walks.
Once Denis comes home from camp with all his cool walking sticks and stories about campfires and hikes, it’s time to find out what teacher we got.
Denis asks me on the phone, “Are you scared?”
I answer, “No.”
I never mind what teacher I get, so long as I can read books when I want to, keep my desk messy because I like it that way, and pick projects and write reports on things that interest me.
My motto is: If it’s not interesting, I don’t care.
No teacher I’ve ever met has been okay with my motto, but I keep hoping.
Denis and I both get Ms. Sett for sixth grade. So does Marci Thompson.
The thing I say to Denis on the phone that day, while he’s panicking because Ms. Sett has a reputation for caring about posture and Denis is a chronic sloucher, is “Whatever happens this year, you’re going to be fine.”
“She’s going to bug me every day about that piece of my hair that sticks up in the back,” Denis stresses.
“Cowlicks are not illegal.”
“Neither is slouching … and I heard she makes kids sit with a board behind their back,” he says.
“She probably doesn’t,” I assure him. “Let’s go run around. You’ll feel better if you get some energy out.”
“I can’t even get out of bed,” Denis says.
“You went back to bed?”
“Yes.”
“Because of this?”
“Yes.”
“What if you’d gotten either of the other two teachers?” I ask.
“I would still be in bed,” Denis answers. So I walk to his house and we play BOT DUCK MAN on his bed for two hours.
That night I dream of a plywood torture device, and Denis is strapped inside. He sits so straight, his spine is fusing in a perfect ninety-degree angle to his legs. I have to save him.
In the dream, the only things that can save him are Cheetos and soda.
Usually, on the first day of school, we get assigned to tables. Tables are five or six desks all smashed together with name tags stuck to the tops. That’s how it’s been since kindergarten.
But in Ms. Sett’s room, all the desks are lined up like soldiers, all facing front, and there aren’t any plants. That’s always a bad sign. No plants. Plus, it’s super hot because the day is way too warm for September and the school’s air-conditioning is broken.
Ms. Sett stands outside the door smiling and saying, “Welcome all! Welcome! How do you do?” like she’s from the twentieth century or something.
“Just find your desk and sit, and you may place those on my desk before you sit down,” she says. Denis has a three-pack of tissues, Marci has two big bottles of hand sanitizer. I came empty-handed. We’re all sweating a little bit—but the girls look really uncomfortable because they’re not allowed to wear shorts.
When everyone finds their seats, Ms. Sett moves to the front of the room. She’s wearing a dress with green triangles on it—different shades of green and different-sized triangles—and she wears a triangle bracelet that matches. Her hair is a little shorter than Mom’s, right to her shoulder, and she looks about thirty-five years old, if I was to guess, even though her letters in the paper read like she’s from a black-and-white movie.
She’s sweating, too, but seems to be fine with it, even as it drips down the side of her face.
She says, “I am so excited about this school year for all of you! Sixth grade! Your last here at Independence Elementary. So much to learn!” She claps her hands together excitedly.
“There are some things you need to know about this classroom, though, folks. It’s all about rules. We don’t tolerate any of the behaviors your age group usually indulges in, so you can forget about giggling, goofing off, or making funny noises with your armpits. If you take out your phone for any reason whatsoever, I will drop it in the tank of water at the back of the class, and you’ll get its useless skeleton back at the end of the day. Forget also about talking to each other, passing notes, and bad posture. Never forget posture, students! Sit up straight and smile!”
Denis winces.
“In this classroom, you will be treated like an adult. And if you behave in the way I’m asking you to behave, there will be numerous benefits. The first being very little homework.”
A joyful murmur moves through the classroom. It makes her smile.
