* * *

The interruption of my “talk” before it even starts proves to be a total buzzkill to the crowd, and to me, and I can’t help feeling annoyed that what I assume is nothing more than a clogged toilet or maybe a mouse in one of the middle school classrooms couldn’t have waited until I finished. Rattled by the teacher’s dramatic entrance and Mr. Noah’s even more dramatic departure, I stand there for a few silent seconds with the stupid Peruvian bird hat on my head, staring out at all the children, who are looking at me expectantly. My presentation, if you can even call it that, lasts no more than five minutes—just long enough for me to explain that my book was essentially a “weirdness manifesto” about “embracing difference,” and that I’d written it because my mother always used to look at me like I was the strangest person on earth—“like I had a bird on my head.” When it’s clear they have no idea what I’m talking about, I try reading from a page tagged with an ancient Post-it note:

“Why are you wearing orange tights with a purple skirt?

Why not a girl’s blouse instead of a boy’s shirt?

Why don’t you color instead of playing with dirt?” my mother always said,

Looking at me like I had a bird on my head.

“There’s a bird on my head! A bird on my head! But I love my bird!” is what I said.

Crickets. I don’t understand the logic of having a parent or grandparent or beloved guardian speak to an audience having such a large spread of ages—how could you possibly appeal to everyone? What might be mildly interesting to thirteen-year-olds will be excruciatingly dull to eleven-year-olds and incomprehensible to six-year-olds. I might just as well be speaking in tongues.

Once I’m done, and once I open it up to questions—and get none, which surprises me, since all they ever told us when we started at the school was how curious and inquisitive Montessori kids are—I’m instantly overcome by a strange combination of humiliation and relief. Just the way I was when I did painfully underattended bookstore events for my second and third books—Stop Doing That! and Why Don’t You Like Me Anymore?—all I wanted to do was leave.

This morning I speed-walk with my arm under the sling through the school’s hallways, which are festooned with student artwork (Who I Am: A Self-Portrait Project is clearly the current unit, which I have mixed feelings about—isn’t this generation self-referential enough?) and fake-talk into my phone past the library to preemptively avoid real-talk with anyone who might try to engage me in conversation. I pass a TUITION DUE! sign on the window of the main office and ignore Grace, the combination business manager, Spanish teacher, and after-school program director, who’d summoned Mr. Noah and interrupted my presentation earlier and who is now practically falling over herself waving at me through the glass, trying to get my attention.