Chapter One: G’wan to School, Me Son CHAPTER ONE G’wan to School, Me Son
Mum always says I must be the only eleven-year-old b’y in the world who watches the weather network. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it is, how do all those other kids know when the rain’s coming? They just stick their heads out the window or what?

Mum also says I got to be the only eleven-year-old b’y living in a retirement home, and that’s probably true, because Mr. Tom agrees with her. When those two agree—trust me, it don’t happen much—you can go ahead and take it as fact.

What I do know is I’m the only b’y named Benny in this house, which is good, because someone’s always shouting my name.

“Benny!” Mum hollered, bodychecking my bedroom door open. “Whadda y’at?”

Her auburn hair was tied back in a ponytail and right shiny from the shower, and she was wearing joggers, her favorite hoodie that said “Oh, Me Nerves,” and ratty white house sneakers, which she always wore inside because she “walks six miles by supper on a slow day.”

Mum also had a stack of clean towels bundled in her right hand, while the left one was perched on her hip like she was playing at a tea kettle.

“You on holiday, me son?” she continued. “Today of all days?”

“Could I be?” I asked hopefully.

She stormed in and yanked my knit quilt right off. It was only the first week of September but it was already cool, and the morning air made my skin go bumpier than the old football half-deflated in the shed.

“You can go on holiday when you’re as old as Mr. Tom,” she grumbled, kissing me hard on the forehead before giving my left earlobe a shake. “Or older, since that fool won’t sit still. Now go get some breakfast. We don’t want you late on your first day in the regular class, curse them all to… well, none of that now. ‘Start the day with a curse and end up for the worse,’ me dear mum always said, bless her soul.”

I felt a twist in my guts at the words “regular class,” like some little plumber was down there having a go with a spud wrench. I’d been awake for three hours now, so nervous that I wasn’t sure if I had to pee or throw up.

I must have looked as rotten as I felt, because Mum studied me like I was one of them sudokus she did before bed.

“Are you okay, me duckie?” she asked, squeezing my clammy hands. “You’re white as these towels, and I just bleached the living daylights out of them.”

I hesitated. I knew Mum was worried about my first day too, maybe even more than I was, and I didn’t want to give her any more reason to fret. Her eyes were already puffy from lack of sleep or crying or both, and the hazel centers were glassy, like morning dew sitting on the lawn.

“I’m fine,” I lied. “Excited.”

Mum rolled her eyes. “Whatever else I’ve done wrong in this world, at least I raised a bad liar. G’wan and get your new outfit on. Simon’s cooked up something special for you.”

With that, she was gone again, bustling through our tiny owner’s apartment and down the narrow, rickety butler stairs into Starflower by the Sea proper, shouting good mornings to the melody of creaking hardwood floors.

I pulled on my alpaca socks, jeans, and a red-and-blue plaid flannel button-down that we’d bought just yesterday at Rossy up in town. I looked like a proper lumberjack, b’ys. I didn’t get to buy new clothes often, but today was special: my long-awaited reintegration day.

That’s what they called it at school, anyway. Mr. Tom said it sounded like they were letting a domesticated bear cub back into the woods and hoping the wild ones didn’t eat it. That wasn’t far off, really.

I guess I should start off by saying I have Down syndrome. Mosaic Down syndrome, to be specific, which sounds like a more artistic version but really just means I have an extra copy of one chromosome in some cells, but not in all the cells. What does that mean? B’ys, I still got no idea what the heck a chromosome is. But my doctor said every person was different anyway, so it was better to focus on what it meant for me.

In my case, I don’t have any of the health issues that sometimes come with Down syndrome. Some people have hearing issues, sleep problems, speech and cognitive difficulties, and even heart complications… and plenty of them don’t, like me. I also never needed speech therapy or had trouble communicating—just ask me poor mum—which can sometimes happen with Down syndrome.

But my mosaic Down syndrome does affect my physical features: my face is a little flatter than the other b’ys at school, especially the top of my freckly nose, and my eyes are almond shaped and slant up at the sides like they’re smiling. My neck is shorter and thicker than usual, and I got the tiniest pinky fingers of any kid my age. They also seem intent on hanging out with my thumb for some reason, because they both curve that way.

One thing you might not notice right away is my eyes: they’re dark blue like the bay, but they have these tiny white spots on them like jellyfish floating around. Mum doesn’t like the sea, of course, so she says I’ve got eyes like the sky at dusk, and those spots are the first stars peeking out.

The point is, it looks like I’ve got Down syndrome. And I do… just the rarer kind with the funny name, like I’m made up of little pieces of color that form some bigger shape called Benny.

So they put me in special classes when I was little because that’s what they always do when the b’ys have Down syndrome, and everyone was tickled pink with the arrangement.

Well, at first. That started to change the last few years.

Mr. Keane, who was my teacher since I was six years old, started saying I belonged in the main classroom since I was using the same curriculum and my grades were better than average. Mr. Keane was best kind, b’ys, but he was moving to the mainland with his wife and new baby this year, and he made it his mission to have me “reintegrated” before he left.

His first stop was a visit with Mum, but she hadn’t agreed at first. She was worried about bullying… and with good reason. But I wanted to switch. I was excited at the thought of being in the main classroom—I’d spent years watching the other b’ys run round at recess and laugh during lunch, wondering if I could do those things too if I had the chance. Mr. Keane was a great teacher, but even he couldn’t give me the one thing I was looking for: a friend my own age.

So, I told my mum I wanted to change, and Mr. Keane kept visiting her, and eventually she gave in and went to the principal. The school gladly approved the change, and just like that, ol’ Benny Brooks was rejoining the b’ys.

But now that the long-awaited day had arrived, I was questioning if I was really ready. What would the other kids do when I showed up in their class? Mark Neal would probably say, “Look, Benny the special kid is playing normal now. He’s trying out acting!” Everyone would laugh, and I’d go as red as a beefsteak tomato.

That Mark Neal was some mean, and big, and he’d been teasing me about the way I looked since the day he laid eyes on me in the first grade. He also told rude jokes and sometimes tooted in the hallways and didn’t even pretend it was someone else. He claimed the things! I’d never seen the like.

I could feel my stomach doing its best impersonation of a trash compactor again, so I tried to focus on what Mr. Keane had told me the day he left: “For every bully, there is a friend waiting to be found.” I wasn’t sure if that was a scientific fact or just Mr. Keane being an optimist, but it sounded nice, and I decided to believe it too. Taking a deep, shaky breath, I headed out into the apartment.

The apartment took up the smaller, steeply pitched third floor of our house, which was perched like a plump gannet on the edge of St. George’s Bay. Starflower by the Sea was some big: it had fourteen bedrooms and baths, all wrapped up in flaking white cedar shakes like it was wreathed in snow. It was also one hundred and six years old, and you could feel every one of the years when the wind picked up and the nails started singing.

Our apartment was made up of two small bedrooms and an open area with a kitchen, a round wooden dining table with four seats, and a yellow couch all ripped up from some cat I never met. The whole place was painted pale green, like the moss hanging off a seaside pine, and the walls were covered with framed pictures of flowers and gardens and even four different grans who were all gone to heaven now and probably wondering why they wasn’t being dusted.

That’s ’cause it was my job to dust, and I had a heck of a time remembering to do it. I’ve got some bad memory, though I don’t know if that’s a Down syndrome thing or a Benny one. Same difference, I always figured, so I stopped guessing.

There was another picture hanging over the kitchen table, bigger than the others. That one was my dad sitting on the couch with that vandal cat, grinning beneath a bushy brown mustache. I said hi to that picture every morning and good night every evening, even though he’d been gone for four years next spring.

“Well, I’m off to school, Pops,” I said, then added: “Wish you were here to see it.”

I touched the photo with the tips of my fingers like I always did, just enough to disturb the dust, and then hurried down to the second floor.

Mum had owned this retirement home for sixteen years this autumn, and lots of people lived here—every one of them over eighty. Starflower by the Sea, or just Starflower as we called it for short, was right famous in the retirement industry, since we’d won the award for Best Retirement Home in Western Newfoundland for a record eleven years running. It was partly because Starflower was right pretty and the food was great. But mostly, it was because our residents lived longer and more independently than anywhere else on the island.

Five of them were in their nineties, including Mrs. Price and Mr. Lawrence, and they were all right sprightly. Mr. Fields was ninety-nine and went for daily strolls with his walker, even in the deep January drifts when we tried to tell him not to. No one really knew why our residents lived so long, but everyone knew this place was special, and Starflower had a waiting list a mile long. Mr. Keane once asked me if it was hard living in a retirement home. Honestly, I had no idea what he meant. The residents played folk music on Fridays and bingo every Sunday, and we had the best people in the world living under this roof. This house was halfway to paradise.

“Good morning, Mrs. Hampton,” I said as I walked past her room.

“Morning, Benny,” she mumbled, busy applying lipstick in front of the mirror.

Mrs. Hampton wore cherry-colored lipstick every single day and dressed to the nines, wearing her beloved jewelry and colorful silk scarves and even fancy hats whenever we went outside for a picnic or to play horseshoes in the garden. She was only eighty-two—some young, really—and she was always laughing and telling fine stories about her late husband.

Two rooms down, Mrs. Price was tangled up in her bedsheets with one leg sticking out like a piece of gnarled, sun-bleached driftwood. Mum was already working away on demummifying her, and they were both having a laugh as they unwound her bedsheet bandages.

Mrs. Price wore a wig when visitors came, but otherwise she was as bald as a bowling ball, and her green eyes had a deep fog in them that got so cloudy some days, I wondered how she could see. She was from the far south of the island, and she had the accent to prove it.

“Morning, Mrs. Price,” I called. “Whadda y’at?”

“Mornin’!” Mrs. Price said. “Fitter than a fox in the coop ’fore Christmas!”

“Never mind your mornings, Benny,” Mum said, unwrapping another wrinkled leg. “Eat your breakfast! We leave in ten minutes. Now hold on, me honey…. We’ll get you freed.”

Of course, there was one more stop I had to make before breakfast. My best friend in the whole world lived in this house, and I don’t think a lot of b’ys get to say that.

Mr. Tom’s bedroom door was open, and I walked in to find him smoothing his plaid shirt out in front of the mirror. He was wearing his usual outfit: a grey flat cap pulled down to his wispy white eyebrows, black-and-brass suspenders, and brown corduroy pants hiked halfway up his shins.

He was eighty-six years old, but you’d only know it ’cause his face had more wrinkles than the bedsheets on laundry days. He had a big, bumpy nose—half a beak, he said—and even bigger ears, which he said could probably help him fly like Dumbo if he tried hard enough.

“Morning, Mr. Tom.”

“Morning, Benny,” he replied, turning to me with a deep frown. “You slept in, me son. You don’t want to be late for school on the big day.” He grabbed his leather toolbelt off the dresser and slung it around his waist—he had loads more tools in the shed, but he liked to keep the essentials on him. “You excited?”

“Sort of,” I murmured.

“You’ll be fine, me son,” Mr. Tom said.

I spotted that familiar envelope on his dresser. He left it out every once in a while, and I was sure he read it every night before bed. It was from Spencer Tom, his doctor son who lived out in Maine. It was dated seven years ago, and I’d never seen Mr. Tom get another one. No phone calls. No visits. When I’d asked him why, Mr. Tom only turned away, his face all scrunched up like he’d eaten spoiled lobster tomalley. Something bad had happened, I knew.

“You working on Maggie today?” I asked, following him into the hallway.

“Aye,” Mr. Tom said. “Don’t worry, I’ll leave plenty of work for you after school.”

He clomped down the wooden stairs—scuffed sandy beige from a thousand shuffling feet—to the first floor. We didn’t have an elevator, so the residents’ rooms were assigned based on whether they could use the stairs. Most of them could, but anyone who needed a wheelchair, a walker, or even a cane was down on the first floor.

“Got to get some new paint too,” Mr. Tom said. “We should spruce her hull up.”

“You’re going to check the weather before you paint, right?”

“Of course I’ll check the weather!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “I ain’t reckless, b’y.”

I laughed as we headed for the kitchen, and the floors creaked and groaned with every step. You could always tell when people were walking around in this house. Mum said the floorboards were put in when Jesus walked, which was strange, because I didn’t think he ever came to Newfoundland. But maybe he popped over quick a long time ago and blessed the b’ys.

Mr. Tom does say we’re a lucky bunch.

Our cook, Simon Day, was shrouded with steam and smoke when I walked into the kitchen, looking half a spectre. He shot me a smile as he flipped some sizzling bacon.

“First day today, huh?” Simon said. “Better tuck in.”

The food was laid out on the counter in silver buffet trays like we were at a fancy hotel. Simon had been a chef in Toronto once, but he had moved home to open a French restaurant in town. Unfortunately, Le Secret Du Chef had gone out of business in barely a year, putting Simon in a hard way, so Mum had scooped him up for the retirement home.

He was the best chef in town, she always said, though she couldn’t afford to pay him anywhere near what he deserved.

“Bacon, eggs, and toutons,” Simon said knowingly. “Made special for you.”

“Yes, b’y!” I said, hurrying to the last tray. “Thanks, Simon!”

I loved a good touton—a hunk of dough fried in pork fat with a heap of molasses over the top. Mr. Tom was piling up his plate, and we slid into arrow-back seats at the table as more residents started shuffling in: a now-liberated Mrs. Price, the mouse-quiet Mr. Fields, and quirky Mr. Lawrence, who came strutting into the kitchen with a purple housecoat like some wise old king.

“Well, well, me sonny b’y,” Mr. Lawrence said. “Today’s the day! You’re going to—”

He was interrupted by a scream, cutting through the air like a banshee’s wail.

Mr. Tom flew out of his seat in an instant, Simon Day yelped and spilled crispy bacon all over the stove, and ninety-two-year-old Mr. Lawrence spun into a karate pose.

“What in Pete’s name was that?” Mr. Tom demanded.

I looked at him, eyes wide. “It sounded like Mrs. Hampton!”

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