Run(6)

“Glad to have you, Bo,” she said. “There’s an extra textbook on the shelf in the back. You can take whatever seat you find.”

“Thanks.”

As Bo headed to the back of the room, Miss Bixley called after her. “Good luck, Bo. Thank you, Mrs. Hartman.”

The classroom door shut, and Mrs. Hartman cleared her throat again. She was a constant throat-clearer. She did it before almost every sentence. Sometimes loud, to get our attention. Sometimes not. But I always heard her.

“We’re reading Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ today,” she explained to Bo. “Page three thirteen. While Bo catches up with that, why don’t the rest of you take another look, too, so you’re ready to discuss in a few minutes.”

I didn’t have a book—the print was too small for me to read, and using a magnifier was slow and a little exhausting. Instead, I just had a couple of pages Mrs. Hartman had enlarged with the copy machine in the main office. A poem that took up less than a page in the book took up three sheets of paper for me. But at least I could follow along. Every once in a while Mrs. Hartman would just read out loud whatever it was we’d be discussing, but I liked this better. I could underline or circle things I liked. Not that I ever understood any of it. I liked fiction, but poetry usually went right over my head.

Which is why I didn’t raise my hand when Mrs. Hartman cleared her throat and asked, “So, what is this poem about?”

Christy raised her hand, though. She always raised her hand. Her arm brushed past mine as it shot into the air.

“Go ahead, Christy.”

“It’s about being an individual.” Christy had on her sweetest voice. The one she reserved for teachers and Brother Thomas. “It’s about doing the thing no one else has done and how that can change your future. ‘I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’ It’s a really lovely poem.”

“Nice job, Christy.”

“But that ain’t what it’s about.”

Everybody except me turned. This time, I recognized the voice. It was Bo.

“Yes, it is,” Christy snapped.

“Now, wait a second, Christy,” Mrs. Hartman said. “Let’s hear Bo out. That’s what this class is for, after all.”

I could tell by the crack in Christy’s voice that she might be close to tears. She didn’t handle correction real well. “Sorry, Mrs. Hartman.”

“Go on, Bo. What do you think it means?”

“It ain’t about individuality or any of that. The road wasn’t less traveled. He says it right there in the poem. ‘Though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same.’ They’d both been traveled just as much.”

I looked down at my own copy of the poem. She was right. It said it right there, in the second stanza.

“Then how do you interpret the last line?” Mrs. Hartman asked.

“You can’t just look at the last line. It’s that whole section there. He’s talking about how he’s gonna tell the story later—with a sigh and all that. When he tells it years from now, he’s gonna tell how the road he took was less traveled. It ain’t about being different—it’s about how we change our own histories.”

“Okay … How do you mean?”

“Sometimes we tell ourselves stuff we know ain’t true,” Bo said. “Just to make us seem better or to give meaning to stupid things, I dunno. He says he took the road less traveled even though he knows he didn’t. Just like some people tell everyone they’re good little Christian girls, even though they’re really gossiping, lying bitches.”

“Mrs. Hartman, are you going to let her talk to me like that?” Christy demanded.

“She wasn’t talking to you, Christy,” said Andrew, who was sitting on the other side of her.

“No. But I was talking about her,” Bo assured him.

The whole room began buzzing again, and I felt Christy start to stand up, but something yanked her back into her seat. Andrew, I figured. Although maybe I should’ve grabbed her, too.

“Enough,” Mrs. Hartman hollered. “Bo, that language will not be tolerated. Principal’s office. Now.”

A chair scraped against the tile, and a second later Bo trudged past our desks, toward the door.

“Can you believe her?” Christy asked, her mouth close and hot next to my ear. “Kicked out of class five minutes after she got here. Just what you’d expect from a Dickinson. And that was a stupid interpretation of the poem anyway.”

But the more I read the poem—and I read it several times that day and even again that afternoon when I got home—the more I thought she might be right. Maybe it was about the ways we rewrite our histories. And if that were true, how would I rewrite mine?





I wake up with a cold, wet nose in my face and two big paws on either side of my head.

It’s the same way I wake up every morning, and for a minute I forget where I’m at. I’m in my little twin bed back in Mursey. It’s Sunday, and I ain’t got nowhere to be.

“Not now, Utah.”

The words ain’t even left my mouth when I remember. The voices on the police scanner, running through the woods, Agnes, the stolen car— The goddamn alarm clock that was supposed to go off at seven.