This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

Author:Laurie Frankel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

Annus Mirabilis

Penn found himself thinking a lot about John Dryden. Dryden was one of those poets you read in graduate school but not in life. No one’s email signature was a Dryden quote. Anyone whose email signature was a Dryden quote hadn’t read the rest of the long, dry verse it came from. But Dryden had a poem: “Annus Mirabilis.” The year of wonders. It was a poem about England in 1666. England in 1666 was decidedly not having a year of wonders. England in 1666 had war, plague, and a three-day fire that destroyed most of London, plus Isaac Newton invented calculus, thereby making the lives of mathematically ungifted students immeasurably worse forever. But Dryden’s poem was about what a great year it was because it could have been worse. They lived to see 1667 after all. At least, everyone who read the poem did.

Penn was trying to convince himself Roo was having an Annus Mirabilis. He was trying to value it because, though it was bad, it could have been worse. So far as Penn knew, Roo hadn’t set fire to anything, but otherwise, his seventeenth year had much in common with England 1666. He was at war (with his parents and siblings). He was with plague (lethargy, listlessness, an oppressive weariness with everyone and everything in the world). He wasn’t doing all that great in calculus.

And the main problem Roo was having was indeed historical. His AP history teacher had tasked her students with “making a video presentation on a current issue currently impacting America.” Had Roo argued he shouldn’t have to do such a vague and poorly worded assignment, had he come to his father to allege that, by definition, current events weren’t history, at least not yet, Penn might have been sympathetic. But Roo did the assignment.

Then he got an F.

Then he refused to redo it.

Then he forged his mother’s signature on the notice advising her of her son’s malfeasance.

When they got the report card for the quarter, Penn and Rosie could not help noticing that Roo was failing history.

Roo swore it had to be a typo. Roo admitted he had missed a quiz because he’d been at the dentist but that he’d made it up after school, and Mrs. Birkus probably just hadn’t graded it yet. Roo said he was doing well in everything else, except maybe calculus, so didn’t he deserve the benefit of the doubt? Roo said given that he was getting As and Bs in his other subjects, what were the odds he was getting an F in history?

They turned out to be pretty high.

When Rosie and Penn went in to meet with the teacher, Mrs. Birkus explained that Roo’s video was about the problems with allowing LGBT soldiers to serve openly in the armed forces.

“Impossible,” Penn said confidently.

“Alas, I’m afraid not.” Mrs. Birkus was used to disabusing parents of shiny impressions of their children.

“You don’t understand. Roo’s not antigay. He can’t be because … Well, we know that he …

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