Excerpt from Counting by 7s

Mrs. King had just plowed her way through a popular picture book. It featured the hallmarks of most pre-school literature: repetition, some kind of annoying rhyming, and bold-faced scientific lies.

I remember Mrs. King asking the class: “How does this book make you feel?”

The appropriate answer as far as she was concerned was “tired,” because the overly cheery instructor forced us to lie down on sticky rubber mats for twenty minutes after “lunchtime picture book.”

. . . while my classmates dozed off, I obsessively worried about the hygiene of the linoleum floor.

. . . I recall looking around at my fellow inmates, thinking: Would someone, anyone, just shout out the word tired?

. . . after days of hearing more lies from an adult than I’d been exposed to in my whole lifetime—everything from how fairies cleaned up the classroom at night to insane explanations for earthquake preparedness kits—I was at some kind of breaking point.

So when the teacher specifically said: “Willow, how does this book make you feel?” I had to tell the truth:

“It makes me feel really bad. The moon can’t hear someone say good night; it is two hundred thirty-five thousand miles away. And bunnies don’t live in houses. Also, I don’t think the artwork is very interesting.”

“But really, hearing you read the book makes me feel bad mostly because I know it means you are going to make us all lie down on the floor—and germs there could make us sick. There’s a thing called salmonella and it is very dangerous. Especially to kids.”

That afternoon, I learned the word "weirdo" because that’s what I was called by the other kids.

Try this in the next 5 minutes

• Write out anything this excerpt brings to mind for you.
• Describe a time you felt compelled to tell the truth—about a book or anything else.
• In your history as a reader, what does this particular excerpt bring to mind in your own experience?
• In what ways has any book you’ve read been a disappointment?