3
AN ASIDE. So much depends on chance. The coincidence of our having last names that began with the same letter of the alphabet, or at least with letters that were close in the alphabet, meant that certain of us would remain in each other’s company throughout most of every day for the next couple of years. The population of Babbington continued to grow rapidly during that time, and school building could not keep pace with the growth, so Mr. Simone continued to shuffle the students’ schedules to try to squeeze us into what space was available. Each group of twenty-five or so of us would sit in the same classrooms together throughout fifth and sixth grades; we would go to gym at the same time, go to lunch together, go to recess together, write at the same time, draw pictures at the same time, grow anxious about tests and book reports and science projects at the same time and then, when we reached junior high school, during the most overcrowded period for Babbington’s schools, we would arrive at school and leave school at a time unique to our group, since Mr. Simone developed a bafflingly complex system for moving students through the school in groups, a system that became more complicated as the schools became more crowded.
The lives of the boys and girls in one of Mr. Simone’s groups were aligned so precisely after a while that we became closer than most siblings. My age, since I had skipped most of the third grade, should have made me feel a person apart from my classmates, most of whom were a year and a half older than I, some of whom were more than two years older. However, the bond that Mr. Simone created seemed so strong that I decided the difference in our ages didn’t matter; I felt as if I had been aged by being one of them. On that score, I was, as I mentioned above, wrong.
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🎧 162: An aside.