Tommy Orange: Reopening

up short stories inspired by the news. Tonight, as cases rise, parents are sounding the alarm over reopening schools. The approved reopening plan to send students back to school in Osceola County ignited outrage during the school board meeting. The fact that you all are even opening schools is disgraceful. It's sociopathic that you're willing to sacrifice our children. But in Massachusetts, a rally for reopening with few cases across the stage,

the governor says most students should be in school. While adults argue about how to safely reopen schools, what about the children? What are they thinking for kids? The political realm is really abstract. Tommy Orange is the author of the best selling novel They're There, which won the Pinhemmingway Award and was named one of New York Times ten Best Books twenty eighteen. For this week's chronicle, he imagines what it's like for a nine year old boy to go back to school this year. It's a lot of

kids that we're putting her risk. It's a gamble with their lives. The boy watches his reflection in the car door while he waits for his mom to unlaw kid, which feels like forever, watching his fat body stretch along the curvy contours of their Subaru, to the point that he feels a flash of heat in his cheeks. About seeing kids, about kids seeing him again after all this time. He knows he's gained some weight. He can feel it

in his cheeks. He knows he's not fat, not fat fat, But when he sits down in the car as the engine starts up, he can feel his stomach jiggle in a way it never had before. It's because he's been inside so much. He couldn't run or tag or throw, or push or pull or play against his friends, has not even really talked to any of them in what felt like two or three bad summers in a row, and what kept more and more feeling like the life before. His mom had told him plenty not to worry about

his weight, but this she didn't get. Telling him not to worry about his weight was her saying there might be something to worry about on this dreaded morning. They're in the driveway. Their bodies had moved slow, out of the door and into the car, hesitant his fall. As the summer keeps on longer and longer every year, the boy had a better sense of what it meant that the world was on fire. They're over or underthinking all of what the disease could mean, which means they're late.

His first day back, they lagged like the boys. Video games lagged when the internet was slow, dragging their feet about the boy going back to school, about her taking him to possible what his death, his mild sickness, his asymptomatic isolation in his room, getting food brought to his door, and endless allowances of movies and apps and screen access. Nothing had been real these months, or it had all been too real. The boy saw it all as a good time to see better. That's how he told his

mom about what it could mean. It's clear what matters when all seems lost. He wouldn't have even been going back. It's that the school is reopening and the other kids are going, some of them as friends, some of them he misses wants to see, plus is required by law, which for some things he knew. His mom thought. Who cares? Most of all that his mom doesn't have any options. She needs him to be in school while she works vance. Her manager openly hated children. She'd asked if she could

bring the boy in. The sitter had backed out suddenly, and her backup had at first said yes, then backed out herself last minute. The restaurant she worked at was upscale, served only brunch and lunch with the kind of upscale elderly clientele who didn't even eat dinner. But supper Vans had said he couldn't risk having a kid burst out from the back like a wild animal. These people had heart conditions. She told the boy, this is why he

had to stay home alone that first time. He had to stay home alone, that first time she left him there that whole shift. Why does it feel like reopening schools is like when I which I know you hate pick off a scab and the thing opens back up again, and I have to start all over again, the boy said, looking out the window from the backseat, deciphering what he

could of the news. His mom never stopped listening to the news voice always with them in the car and at home, and every hour of every day, new news, always mostly just new and bad news, always just bad and good news. If ever, then never for long. If staying home alone and not going to school, us finding a homeschool for you, if that feels like an option for you weekend. I don't want to stay at home and homeschool. That sounds terrible, they say, you know that.

They don't think kids can really, she said about the virus, but didn't finish the sentence. That's how they really feel, the boy said, what's that? That's how they really feel about us. Us who if some of us have to die, so be it. I saw fourteen thousand on TikTok. You saw fourteen thousand. If a certain percentage die from it, and we're all exposed, a certain percent of us will die,

that's like data, Like that's just information. We know, honey, we won't get it, she said, we won't that's the point. Everyone thinks they won't get it and are willing to gamble with their kids' lives. But even if it's a small percentage, it's one that adds up to a lot of kids whose parents don't think they'll get it. People love their kids, she said, way too enthusiastically. Then a pigeon flew by, swooped across their view. She hit the brakes too hard. Both of their heads went forward from

the pole, almost like they were bowing. Then she sped up, as if to compensate. People hate their kids, the boy said. And then it was as if some other thing had just then swooped in front of him, some blinding light,

the truth of which they couldn't then see through. Not then, not how they were before, the countless seasons of sickness ahead of them, much later, had those spare moments between when memory creeps up, the boy would return to right there in the car with the pigeon, then the brakes, the hating or loving of kids, and the approach to the abyss that was his reentry, as they accidentally bowed to Gravity's pole in the car, just waiting for the pole to obey, the reentry into the reopening all felt

like some backward kind of wound. A backward wound is, for some reason not healing. This whole memory would end up meaning something more and more each time as it came to the boy, as he became less a boy, the memory more and more meaningful, as less and less

explanation seemed. The point is said, there are seeings, moments in our lives we can't not keep remembering, and some of them tell us something about ourselves, and some more than we'd like to admit, tell us how much we not only don't but can't know at all, a lot of investment we are in you, we're actually going on in term of the number of The boy walked away from the car without looking back. He wanted his mom

to feel bad. This was new for him. They'd been so good to one another over these most recent years, Remembering how it had been when the boy's dad was still around. It bonded them to be rid of him, to be out on their own, away from his moodiness and abuse, from his drinking and wrath. The thing the boy was mad about was this impossible thing, this new life. He didn't want to stay home or go to school. He didn't want life to return to what had been before.

But it couldn't stay like it was. That wasn't living, that was waiting. He knew he shouldn't have blamed his mom. It was that she'd use the words he'd heard use by those gross old white men in the news, taking advantage of vulnerability, as gross old white men were always want to do. He'd heard it called rhetoric. His mom used that word for what other people did when they repeated the news people. But here she'd used it herself, the rhetoric against her son. But he didn't get sick

that day. One student did in his grade, in his class, and they sent everyone home, so he ended up home alone. Anyway. He watched a lot of YouTube those first days home alone, and he played with his toys in the backyard, the game he loved to play, and his mom's raised beds, where she kept meaning to start a garden. He'd have his guys rise up from the ground like zombies. Usually he had the guys he liked most, his toy mutants, one half alligator human named Reginald and a half tiger

half human named beast Bob. Normally they'd defeat the dirt clod freshly risen zombies, but one of those first afternoons where he ended up home alone during his mom's shift at work. He had all the zombies be people who died from the virus in that time. They got their revenge on the living. They killed Reginald and beast Bob and made a new life for themselves, one without dying or disease, resurrected lives. And sure they were zombies, and sure they had died when they didn't have to, but

they were back. They were here, they were alive, and that felt as close as he could get to a resolve, something to answer the question this new impossible life imposed when freshly nine, the virus came and took everything he'd known, it all to me. But here he was. He was still here, and his mom was alive and school. Be damned was her attitude about what to do about all of it. He could do what he wanted at home alone.

Let them come, his mom had told him, as if the authorities had the capacity to worry about their little family. And it's what he had Reginald and beast Bob say before the zombies rose out of the ground. His good guy Zombies post coronavirus post life. Let them come, his favorite toys had said to the zombies before letting them kill them. They said to the rising zombies his least favorite toys, Reginald and beast Bob said to them, let them come. Let them come back that forest. Good luck

reading Reopening by Tommy Orange. Hi Tommy, Hi, We're in the midst of the weirdest back to school season ever. I've never seen anything like it. I don't think any of us ever have. According to media reports, it's hell own parents, it's hell own teachers, but we're not really hearing about how kids are experiencing it. Is that why you wrote this story from the boy's perspective? Yeah, the story a little bit goes into this internal feeling the boy has that the adults don't really care about kids

as much as they pretend to. And I just I like the idea of getting on the inside of young people's minds. I think it's as explored as I think it should be. I think the consciousness of kids is sometimes not respected as worthy of our attention. The mother in your story says people love their children, and the

voices people hate their kids. Who's right? Well, I think there are a lot of people going around, not only the administration, and obviously pretending to have family values is one thing, but I've seen a lot of parents who say they love their kids, but they can't wait to get back to work, or they can't wait to drop their kids off, or you know, there's all this kind of gross language around, this hidden detesting of their children, and I think the kid sees it and wants to

be able to say it. And you know, the kid probably doesn't feel that all the way, but it can feel that way for kids, and parents can show that without knowing it. In the story, the government has completely failed this mother and this boy and put them in this predicament of having to go back to school when it obviously might not be safe. But the boy's not mad at the government. He's mad at his mom. Why do you think we often attack those closest to us

instead of the perpetrator of our pain. I think for a lot of kids, the parents are to blame. Even if he sort of understands it's outside of his mom's control. What he's really bothered by her using the rhetoric that she's talked about as a bad thing of these girl I think I called him gross old white men in the news. I think for kids, they don't know that same outrage. Once you understand systems and the systemic damage that comes from decisions from politicians, from the way history

has set people up. All of that when you're a kid is just sort of parent talk, like come on, mom, do something. Can't you do something? It's more of the feeling. You're right about the boy he didn't want life to return to what had been before, but it couldn't stay like it was. That wasn't living, that was waiting. And he's not wrong, right like we all seem right now to be waiting for things. To do something, go back,

go forward, just do something. But why do you think so many people are so desperate to return to a sense of normal, even when normal is not very good. Well, I think there's a lot of people who were who were very comfortable in their lives, and they want to go back to the comfort because it's uncomfortable to be

in purgatory. But I think that people who are seeing the social changes and addressing old wounds, I think we don't want to go back because this whole thing has shaken our country up and revealed things that some of us knew were already there. So the sense of going back to normal, I think can be really tone deaf for others of us who know it wasn't right before, and they's kind of opened our eyes to a lot. We do want something different, but we don't want to

go back to the way it was. Yeah. Well, Tommy Orange, thank you so much for your story and thank you for coming on the Chronicles of Now. It's been really great talking with you. Thank you so much for having me. That was Tommy Orange. You can read my full interview with him on our website Chronicles dot Fm, where you can also read the story you just heard and other short fiction torn from today's headlines. Our sound designer and composer is Bart Warshaw, our producer is Curtis Fox, and

our associate producer is Emily Rostick. Tyler Cabott is the executive producer and founder of Chronicles of Now for Pushkin Industries. Our executive producer is Letalla Mallad. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Carle Migliori, Heather Faine, and Eric Sandler for the Chronicles of Now podcast. I'm Ashley Ford. Thank you so much for listening,