The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt

Author:Gary D. Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-04-25T21:00:00+00:00

February is a can't-decide-what-it-wants-to-be month on Long Island. What's left of any snow has melted into brown slush and runs in dirty ridges alongside the street gutters. The grass is dank and dark. Everything is damp, as if the whole island had been dipped under dark water and is only starting to dry out. Mornings are always gray and cold.

That's what it was like between Meryl Lee and me the next day at school. Slushy, damp, dirty, dark, gray, and cold. We didn't look at each other. At lunch, we ate about as far away from each other as we could, and she went outside early—even though Meryl Lee hardly ever went outside. She didn't come to Chorus, so I sang the soprano part for Miss Violet of the Very Spiky Heels alone at our stand. When Mrs. Baker asked if I'd like to partner with Meryl Lee on the sentence diagramming exercise in the afternoon, I told her I'd rather do it with Doug Swieteck.

On Friday, things were still slushy, damp, dirty, dark, and cold. Meryl Lee wore sunglasses to school, even though it was gray like always. When Mrs. Baker asked her to remove them for class, she said that her doctor had asked her to keep them on. That she was supposed to keep them on for, maybe, the rest of the school year.

I was the only one in class who didn't laugh at that.

I looked out the window.

For the next Wednesday, I wrote an essay for Mrs. Baker about what Shakespeare wanted to express about being a human being in Romeo and Juliet. Here is the first sentence in my essay:

What Shakespeare wanted to express about being a human being in Romeo and Juliet is that you better be careful who you trust.

Here is the last sentence:

If Romeo had never met Juliet, he would have been all right. But because he was star-crossed, he did meet her, and because she came up with all sorts of plans that she didn't bother telling him about, he ended up taking poison and dying, which is an important lesson for us to learn in life.

I had Meryl Lee to thank for this, you know. If she hadn't done what she did, I never would have figured out what Shakespeare was trying to express in Romeo and Juliet about what it means to be a human being.

When I handed the essay in, Mrs. Baker read it through. Twice. "So," she said slowly, "do you think Juliet was right to stab herself at the end of the play?"

"Yes," I said.

"I see," she said, and she put the essay in a manila folder and left it on top of her desk.

But unlike Juliet, Meryl Lee didn't stab herself. In fact, that afternoon she was waiting for me outside the gates of Camillo Junior High, standing beside a ridge of crusted snow that she had stamped down flat.

"It wasn't my fault," she said.

"Aren't you supposed to be at Saint Adelbert's?"

"I just showed him your drawing, because it was so good.

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