… was from my 7th grade teacher, Mr. Olsen, after he caught me handing off a note to my friend Nikki. He told me to go wait for him outside. Not in the hall where the nuns made you stand, so everyone could cast a shaming look – tsk, tsk – but outside, in the fresh air. He started talking in that strange adult tone that signaled a monologue brewing, what my older sisters called a “lecture.” The defense to this was to pretend you weren’t listening, to stare out into space the way cats do when you try to get their attention.

At first I was confused. He talked about how creative the note was, how it took high intelligence and patience to encrypt it the way I did. Wait. Was I in trouble? Did he just give my contraband a passing grade? Then, without warning, he used a word I didn’t know. I was a straight A student. No, a straight A+ student, who started writing poetry at 11, who won the school spelling bee in the 5th grade. I had four older siblings. I was pretty sure I knew most of the words.

But stagnate was a new one. The closest I could come was the root word: stagnant – except people used that to describe a small body of water. Was he calling me pond scum? In such a caring tone of voice?

Stagnant was an adjective, but stagnate was a verb, as if he was saying I had made a choice to be like pond scum. That somehow this was my responsibility. No adult had ever implied that I had any say in the matter of how my life unfolded.

Finally he stopped talking and I thought we were done, but that night, I heard my mother on the phone with him. Then she called my father into their room at the end of the hall.

What the?

I could hear them murmuring for quite a while. First her high-pitched murmur, rising and falling with emotion, followed by my father’s low retort. It was like Morse code and my ears strained to pick up every intonation. Suddenly, the murmuring turned to footsteps, and my mother appeared right in front of me.

“We want to talk to you,” she said. Never a good sign.

My father shut the door behind me. Holy Shit! For being stagnant? Why hadn’t anyone warned me about this?

It was Thanksgiving weekend. Mr. Olsen was recommending that I skip seventh grade and move into Sister O’Dea’s eighth-grade class.

I was a sharp one, but I have to say, I didn’t see that coming. I had never even heard of such a thing. I had known a few kids who were “held back” – to be avoided, for sure, but this – this was a conundrum. At 12, the idea of getting out of school a whole year early had appeal. What I hadn’t considered was the difficulty of navigating the social structure of eighth grade already in progress. In white water rafting, they call it a level five. In retrospect, it might have been easier to stagnate in the scummy seventh-grade pond under the watchful eye of Mr. Olsen, than to plunge into the rapids without a paddle, guided by Sister O’Dea, who didn’t seem to have a paddle either.

Still, if I hadn’t moved to the eighth grade the Monday after Thanksgiving, I never would have made friends with Patti and Nikki’s eighth-grade sisters, Kathy and Staci. They never would have given me a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull to read. And I probably wouldn’t have run away.

excerpt from Chapter 1, The Bumbling Mystic’s Obituary