Welcome back maple mehta.., p.1
Welcome Back, Maple Mehta-Cohen, page 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Normally, I’m not a morning person.
On normal mornings, Dad has to wake me for school. “Maaaaaple. Rise and shine,” he says in a whisper at first. Then, when I barely stir, he says it again, louder.
“Miss Maple, rise and shine! Places to go, people to see!”
Mom says I was always like this, even as a baby, even though most babies are awake and screaming at five a.m. “We used to have to wake you for day care,” she says, shrugging. “You were a sleeper.”
Not today, though. Today, my nerves are buzzing like an alarm clock. My eyelids don’t even feel heavy.
From one of my bedroom windows, I have a beautiful view of a garage wall. It belongs to the next-door neighbors, who don’t even have a car anyway. They just use it to store things—air conditioners and bicycles they don’t ride, boxes of old books, toys their son has long outgrown. There’s nothing very useful about that view.
From my other window, though, I can see sky. Just a sliver, because that’s what you get when you live on the first floor in a city, surrounded by other houses and garages and a few scraggly trees. But it’s enough sky to tell me things about the day ahead.
Today, the sky is the darkest blue a sky can ever be, the color that only appears in the short time between night and day. When it’s no longer yesterday but it’s barely today. It’s just right now. I wish it could stay right now forever, so I wouldn’t have to live through the rest of today.
Because today is the first day of fifth grade. Again.
“We’re holding Maple back.”
Those were the four little words that ruined my life.
It was last April. Ms. Littleton-Chan called a meeting with my parents and me. She said it was “quite important,” and my mouth was already dry when we sat down in front of her desk. I’d never had a “quite important” meeting with my parents and a teacher before.
Look, under normal circumstances, I love Ms. Littleton-Chan. Last year was her first year teaching at the Barton, and she was different from all the other teachers I’d ever had. I loved her right away, from the first day of fifth grade. It wasn’t just because she also has a bicultural last name, although I appreciate that. It matches my Indian-Jewish hyphenated situation (Hin-Jew, my parents call me). More than that, it was that she seemed so interested in all the things she taught us. Like when we did a unit on ocean ecosystems, she could barely contain herself telling us about how the blue whale eats up to 40 million krill per day. Those are like little shrimp. Forty million shrimp! I’m telling you, she was practically levitating with enthusiasm. Ms. Littleton-Chan cares about things, about us, in a way that felt new. She notices things.
Which, in retrospect, might be why she was the first person to notice the real me. The me I’d been hiding in big and small ways, every day, since I don’t remember when.
I can’t read.
Or, I mean, I can’t really read. Not well. Not easily. Here’s what it feels like to look at a page in a book, if you’re me: Some of the letters look sideways or upside down. Sometimes the letters flip around. Or they swim around on the page and won’t stay still long enough for me to grab them with my brain. There might be a picture of a dog and I know the word should say dog, but I’m looking at it and it says odg. So I can read it, kind of, but it’s confusing. And if the word odg is next to a picture of, like, a cat or a rainbow, then I’m extra confused. And on their own, the words look less like sentences and more like a puzzle. A whole page is like an ocean. When I look at it, I feel like I’m drowning. I can swim really, really slowly. But it hurts my brain to try.
When I hear a story out loud, I understand everything. But when I have to read to myself, it all goes out of whack. I can sound words out, sure. But it takes me a long time. Too long. So long that by the time I get to the end of a sentence, I’ve practically forgotten what happened at the beginning. It’s hard to put it all together. It’s frustrating to spend that much time on what seems so easy to everyone else. I usually just give up.
Up until Ms. Littleton-Chan came along, I kept it a secret. We almost always work in groups at my school, and I’m really good at looking at other people’s papers without looking like I’m looking. Or when we talk about the book we’re reading, I’ll listen for a while, and then add an idea that builds on someone else’s.
But Ms. Littleton-Chan watched us carefully. She saw us. And with those four words—“We’re holding Maple back”—my love for her exploded like sodium when it hits water. (Which, by the way, I learned about in fourth grade from Mr. Nolan. I don’t need Ms. Littleton-Chan for everything.)
“We’re holding Maple back.”
To my left, Mom shifted in her chair. “Sorry, what do you mean?”
Ms. Littleton-Chan looked uncomfortable. She observed both my parents, and then her eyes landed on me. “Maple, have you told your parents what happens when you look at a book?”
My parents’ heads swiveled in my direction. I shrugged.
“Maple, what’s going on?” Dad looked concerned. He’d been up late working; I could tell from the way his face was all dark shadows and deep creases. Besides, when I got up to pee, I saw the light on in the kitchen. He always works in the kitchen at night, hunched over his sketch pad or pounding on his laptop keys, crunching numbers and keeping his business running. My parents are both artists. They work really hard at it. My dad has his own company, putting his custom designs on T-shirts and baseball caps and phone cases and basically anything you can imagine. My mom designs jewelry. She’s kind of famous. The mayor once wore one of Mom’s necklaces at a building dedication.
“You can tell us, kid,” Dad said. “Anything.”
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t explain why I wasn’t able to make sense of the words on a page in front of me, because I didn’t even understand it myself. The thing is, I love books. I love books when Dad reads aloud to me in bed, even though eleven is maybe too old to be reading in bed with your father. I love the way books look on my shelves, and the way they feel in my hands. I love the way the pages smell.
Most of all, I love stories. I’m constantly telling them in my head. I’ll get an idea for a story, and it’ll be running through my brain, no matter what else I’m doing. I’ll even tell myself stories out loud sometimes. For my tenth birthday, my parents gave me a digital voice recorder. It’s a little machine I can keep in my pocket and use to document my stories, anywhere, anytime. I’ll pop it out of my pocket, hit record, and just start talking.
Which is convenient, because actually writing my stories down on paper . . . That part is harder for me than anyone knows. My parents included.
“I don’t know,” I said finally. That was the truth. More or less.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Mom said. She sounded frantic.
“Honey.” Dad reached over me and put a hand on Mom’s knee. “We’ll figure this out.”
Ms. Littleton-Chan cleared her throat. “Maple, listen. You’re an exceptionally smart girl. You’re curious and persistent. You’re creative. You’re kind to your classmates.”
I started feeling a little indignant at that point. (Have I mentioned that I know a lot of long words? Dad is always explaining the long words to me when we listen to the radio, and I never forget what they mean. Indignant means feeling or showing annoyance at what is perceived as unfair treatment. Which sounds about right at the moment.) I am curious and persistent and kind. I was ready for sixth grade!
Technically, fifth grade is our last year of elementary school. Even though they’re in the same building, the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades are considered the middle school. And two other elementary schools also send their kids to the Barton Middle School, so the middle-school grades are bigger. They even switch classes for math and English, and go on an overnight trip to New York in the spring. It’s major. I had plans for all this with Marigold Harris and Aislinn McIntyre, my best friends since day care and first grade, respectively.
“We need to make sure your reading skills are ready before we send you on to the next grade.” Ms. Littleton-Chan turned back to my parents. “The longer we let Maple go without addressing her reading fluency, the more learning she’s going to miss. And it’s not just English class she’ll miss out on—it’s math and science and history. I don’t want that. Do you, Maple?”
It felt like a trick question. Of course I didn’t want to miss those things, did I? But wasn’t this kind of, like, the school’s fault? They’re the ones who let me down, and now I was getting punished for it. I bit my lip and kept quiet.
“It wouldn’t be responsible of me to send Maple to sixth grade right now,” Ms. Littleton-Chan continued. Apparently, there was still more to say. “Her reading skills aren’t ready for middle school yet
Panic was rising in my throat. It tasted sour and made my stomach churn. Next to me, Mom sighed deeply. “Why is this just coming to light now? I mean, she reads all the time at home. All the time.”
I listened to books. I looked at books. I turned the pages. I sounded out word by word, so slowly that the story would get lost. But my mother didn’t know what was going on in my head.
Ms. Littleton-Chan seemed kind of sad all of a sudden. She tucked a strand of long hair behind one ear. “I’m truly sorry this wasn’t addressed earlier. It seems that there was some . . . Well, frankly, in her previous classrooms . . .” She trailed off. It sounded like she wanted to say something bad about my other teachers, but then stopped herself. “Maple has always been very engaged in class.”
The truth was, we’d never had very much homework before this year. And I usually worked with Marigold and Aislinn on our assignments. In class, we were always in small groups. No one ever seemed to notice that I never wanted to be the one to read the instructions out loud. Plus, I had plenty of tricks. I’d use the pictures to figure out what the story meant. I recognized a lot of words just from memorizing them, especially the common ones. That helped, too. I asked to go to the bathroom at just the right moment. Mostly, I just pretended.
“Don’t you have to screen kids for these kind of things?” Mom demanded to know. “What about all the testing I’m always hearing about?”
Ms. Littleton-Chan squirmed in her seat. “Well, yes, actually, the Department of Education has recently started recommending that all children be screened for reading disabilities, but . . . well, we aren’t quite there yet in terms of getting it done. And, you’ll recall, most of the children do take standardized assessments to help us measure their progress. But you’ve withheld Maple from those tests.”
This was true. My parents didn’t believe in what they referred to as “bubble tests.” They’d kept me home on those days. While the other kids marched into school with their sharp number two pencils, Mom made pancakes. On one occasion, I remember her saying, “You are more than a test score!” as she drenched the pancakes in real maple syrup.
Ms. Littleton-Chan went on: “So, unfortunately, we missed some opportunities to build a full picture of Maple’s foundational reading skills—things like phonemic awareness and so on.”
Mom and Dad exchanged looks. “Well,” said Mom, “we knew Maple was a bit of a slower reader.”
This was news to me. They’d never said anything. Never asked me if I was worried. Never seemed worried themselves.
“But, you know, children learn at their own pace,” Mom continued. “We don’t want to assume there’s something quote-unquote wrong with Maple or put a label on her. When it might be a mistake.”
“It’s not a mistake,” I said.
I said it quietly, with my eyes locked on the ground. The classroom floor, speckled linoleum, looked suddenly very dirty.
“What, lovey?” I could feel Mom’s eyes on me, even while I stared at my feet. My shoes, someone else’s used Toms in red canvas, came from the two-dollar bin at the thrift store, but the price didn’t matter. I loved those shoes.
“It’s not a mistake,” I said, louder. I dragged my eyes up to meet Mom’s. “I can’t read. I mean, not well. I can’t read well.”
They all got very quiet. I could hear Mom’s breath, in and out, next to me.
Finally, Dad spoke up. “Why didn’t you say something?”
I shrugged. Why didn’t I say something? When I started to notice that the other kids could read a lot faster than I could, I just figured it would fix itself eventually. I mean, everyone is a good reader by the time they’re a grown-up, right?
But that wasn’t all. Every time I looked across the classroom and saw another kid tearing through a chapter book, it hurt. Back in second grade, when Marigold and Aislinn were reading the latest Junie B. Jones by themselves, I had to pretend I’d read it on my own, too—even though my dad was really reading it aloud to me before bed. It was the same with Wonder in third grade. Aru Shah and the End of Time last year. The Harry Potter books still. (We just finished The Order of the Phoenix.) I’d take books out of the school library and tote them around with me, flipping the pages at what seemed like appropriate intervals during independent reading hour. Then I’d return them the day before their due dates and give the librarian a big thumbs-up.
It all hurt. It hurt too much to say out loud. Plus, if I said it out loud, it would become real.
I chewed my lip. Then I took a breath. “I didn’t want to disappoint you.”
No one said anything. Mom kneaded one hand with the other, massaging her palm so hard it looked like she might break the skin. After a long, quiet moment, Dad put an arm around me.
“It’s okay, kid. You couldn’t disappoint us if you tried.”
Looking at Mom, though, I wasn’t so sure that was true.
After that meeting with Ms. Littleton-Chan, the school arranged a bunch of screening tests for me. I sat in a room with Ms. Fine, the reading intervention teacher, for what felt like hours. In the end, all those tests told us what I already knew: Listening skills? Excellent. Speaking skills? Hello. Reading skills? Less than great. Ms. Fine said this would give us a “baseline,” so they could track my progress. It also gave me a word to put on the thing that made reading hard for me: dyslexia.
Well, “characteristics of dyslexia.” That’s what they said I had.
“So she’s not dyslexic,” I heard Mom say to Dad the night after Ms. Fine called them to explain my results. They were talking in their bedroom after they thought I was asleep. They always think I’m asleep for the important conversations.
“Lou,” Dad said. He sounded tired. “That’s pretty much what this means.”
“I hate putting that label on her.”
“It’s not a label, babe. It’s a . . .” He paused or said something I couldn’t hear. “If it will help them help her . . .” He said something else too muffled to make out.
Mom cleared her throat. “I just don’t want it to define her. She’s so much more than this diagnosis.”
My heart swelled to hear Mom say it, but then it shrank again. I was more. But what difference did that make? I was still going to be stuck in fifth grade again, and everyone would know why. My life as I knew it was over.
I waited all summer to tell Aislinn and Marigold that I wasn’t moving on to sixth grade with them. It wasn’t hard to keep it a secret. It was just one more thing to hide. When they pulled out the sixth-grade school supplies list, I pretended I’d left it at home. I scanned Marigold’s and felt a pang of jealousy that I would have no need for a daily planner, which is only required for middle schoolers. I could ask Mom to get me one anyway; she probably would. But it would be a waste of money.
When they gushed about the annual spring trip to New York City, I pretended to be really excited, too. I’ve always wanted to see a Broadway musical, so that part wasn’t a lie.
And when they chattered away about getting to sit at the best spots in the cafeteria—the tables by the windows, which are unofficially reserved for the middle schoolers—I just nodded. Yup. That’ll be super cool. Can’t wait.
In spite of the fact that I was keeping a kind of major secret from them—which we were not supposed to do, per our Lifelong Best Friends Contract (signed by the three of us back in fourth grade)—summer felt almost normal. We went to the pool, or the library when it rained. Marigold’s mother, who has a cousin up on the North Shore, took us to the beach twice on the commuter rail.
But as the start of the school year was barreling toward us, I started having weird dreams: One night, I got chased by a huge dog with razor-sharp teeth and drool-encrusted jowls. I woke up in a pool of cold sweat. Another night, I was in a play, but right before I went onstage, I realized I’d never been to a rehearsal. I had no idea where I was supposed to stand or what I was supposed to say.
I knew what the dreams were about, of course. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to know an anxiety dream when you have one. I was scared. I wanted to keep living in this in-between space, where I was still going on to sixth grade with my friends, for as long as possible. It was like that old saying: If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? If I was getting held back but no one knew about it . . . was I really getting held back?
