On the last Friday of every month, Mr. Home invited every kid who got a ten-out-of-ten on all of that month’s spelling tests to eat lunch in our classroom instead of the lunchroom. They played the radio, Angus told me, but I wouldn’t know about that because I have never gotten a ten-out-of-ten on even one spelling test. I told Mom I didn’t have “a mind for spelling,” but she looked mad and said that I should never say what my mind is not for.

At the beginning of that year, Mom bought these cards that we looked at together, with the rules of spelling on them, like When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking. That means when two vowels are right next to each other, you usually say them like the first vowel.

But after I spelled relief r-e-l-e-i-f and got another seven-out-of-ten, I told Mom to forget me ever looking at those cards again.

I thought Mr. Home should let everyone listen to the radio and eat lunch in the classroom on the last Friday of every month. I had written him a long letter about it, in the lunchroom, while everyone was having their first spelling party in September. But it had some bad words, and I didn’t give it to him.

—

After Sheila left, Dad and I watched Star Trek.

Then Angus called.

“Are you better now?” Angus hated it when I wasn’t in school. We’d been in the same class every year since kindergarten, and he had never missed a day.

“I’m probably better,” I said.

“Good.” He still sounded annoyed. I smiled.

“We just watched a really good Star Trek,” I told him. “Captain Picard gets hit by this light beam from a mysterious probe, and it magically transports him to a little planet. He gets totally stuck there. No one from his ship ever comes to get him, and there’s no way to get off the planet. After a while, he just has to deal with it. Luckily, it’s a really good planet to be on. Everyone is nice. He has this great life there. He’s married, and he has kids, and then he gets old and everything. And he learns to play the flute.”

“The flute?”

“Yeah. But in the end, Captain Picard finds out that he was never on that planet at all. The whole thing was happening in his mind. The light beam had some kind of brain virus inside it. The people on the planet made the probe and sent it into space because their world was about to explode, and they wanted someone in the universe to know who they were. The planet was already gone. But in his head, Captain Picard lived there for half his life. He had grandchildren!”