them. It’s one of the pillars of Montessori education: you can pretty much teach a kid anything anytime; once he picks up a new skill, he tends to keep doing it until he gets really good.
The problem is that I didn’t go to a Montessori school. Here’s what happens when you show up for first grade at a Catholic parish school reading way beyond your grade level:
When it came time for first grade reading, Miss Streibel would stop everything and call out into the hallway for a massive teacher-in-training named Gary, who would take my hand in his sweaty palm and lead me to the priests’ lounge just off the gymnasium for one-on-one reading time. (I know where your mind is going. Relax.)
First grade reading coincided with sixth grade PE, and if there’s anything sixth-graders for sure do not like, it’s a younger child who can do something they can’t. So when Gary and I entered the gym for the long walk to the priests’ lounge, we would immediately be pelted with whatever the sixth-graders were playing with: dodgeballs, basketballs, or, if they were just running sprints, their actual shoes. The gym teacher would blow her whistle, but it would be in vain; the people had spoken. This went on for weeks.
Like Markie Post in a Lifetime Original Movie, I kept my abuse to myself. I swore Gary to secrecy about the whole thing, and I made eye contact with the gym teacher as if to say: It’s fine, I’m asking for it. But the principal got wind of our problem and came up with a solution only a Catholic educator could love: for the rest of the school year, when Gary and I would enter the gym, the sixth-graders were forced to stop what they were doing—right in the middle of whatever game they were playing—and sit on the floor in silence with their hands folded in their laps as we walked the endless perimeter to the priests’ lounge. I can say this with a certainty that is hard-won: silent glares sting the face worse than dodgeballs.
But then I’d go home, and I’d read something for my parents, and I’d see how proud it made them, and I’d feel right in the world again. Being an early reader alienated me at school, but at home, I was safe.
I was different, and I liked it.
My folks pulled me out of St. Gerard’s after first grade, and during that between-schools summer, I did a lot of thinking about my former classmates. A lot of them I’d be seeing around the neighborhood or at Mass, but there was one whom I wasn’t sure I’d ever see again—and I was surprised by how sad the thought of it made me. His name was Donny, and he was an athletic, confident kid who seemed to just move correctly: chest out, shoulders back, stride confident. He was the first picked at soccer, always. When we were at recess and trying to decide what to play, everyone naturally glanced over at him for guidance. He was a real boy. I wanted to be him, or be near him, or just have him put his arm around me. I didn’t know. I didn’t care.
I just thought: We need to get that kid over here.
And so one June morning, as my family gathered around the kitchen table for bacon and eggs, I asked my mom to call his mom and see if he’d want to come over. “It would be fun to hang around,” I told her. “I want to keep in touch with him.”
“Huh,” Mom said. “I didn’t know you and Donny were such good friends.”
“Oh, we’re not,” I told her. “I just think he’s cute.”
And the pause button was hit on the entire world.
Everyone and everything froze. I had stopped time. If this had happened in a movie trailer, we all would have heard a record scratch and our dog would have covered his eyes.
In that moment, I knew that I had done something that was a special kind of wrong. I hadn’t hurt anyone, I hadn’t lied, I hadn’t sworn or littered or taken Are Lard’s name in vain, I had done something worse. I knew it because I couldn’t even figure out what it was. I knew it because nobody knew how to react. We were all in new territory.
My mother spoke first: “So, when you say that you think Donny is cute”—she wasn’t angry, she was dazed, as if from a punch to