Read Is This Tomorrow: A Novel for Free Online Page A

saw the stacks of books, he felt a little better. He traced his fingers along the spines of the novels (his favorite section), and pulled out The Great Gatsby . Maybe it would be good. He turned right and then left until he was in biographies. The titles winked out at him. He was supposed to find a biography of a famous person to do a report for sixth-grade finals, but none of these names spoke to him. Benjamin Franklin was boring and fat and greasy looking, Clara Barton had a mean face, and no way was he going to do Davy Crockett like every other kid in school because they all thought it might be a good excuse to buy those stupid furry hats.
    He wished he didn’t have to go to school. Every grade was more boring than the last. He could read already in kindergarten because Ava had taught him, making a big deal of getting him a library card as soon as he could scribble his name. “If you want to be someone, you have to be educated,” she told him. Every Friday, she took him to the library, letting him sprawl in the kids’ room for hours, choosing as many books as he could carry to take home. Before his father had left, he had bought him the absolute best birthday present in the world, a set of Collier’s Encyclopedia. “Everything you want to know is in there,” his dad told him. Whenever Lewis could tell his dad a new fact, Brian would ruffle his hair and hug him. The week his father left, Lewis began systematically reading them, starting at A. He kept imagining how proud his father would be when he came back and Lewis could tell him all about the atomic bomb or how fire was produced. Every time he was given any toy, from plastic dinosaurs to a deck of cards, he looked it up in his Collier’s to find out everything he could about it.
    But school was different. Knowing more than the other kids meant he had to sit around listening to everyone struggling to figure out colors, and later, to sound out “Run, Sally, run,” in their Dick and Jane books. But it wasn’t just reading that was easy for him. Math was pretty simple. He often completed his work early, and then there was nothing else to do but sit around waiting for the rest of the class to finish. Even if he asked, his teacher never gave him anything extra to do.
    It didn’t take him long to realize that he knew more than some of the teachers did and that, to his shock, they didn’t like him for it. Every new grade, he started out thinking it might be different, but as soon as he began to ask questions, his teachers would say, “Let’s have somebody else speak up for a change.” When they were studying civil rights, Lewis remembered the Milks, a Negro family that was supposed to move onto their block, but all the neighbors had started up a petition to stop them. Only his mother had refused to sign. In the end, the house sold to another white family. “How come there are no Negro kids in our school?” he asked and the teacher said, “They go to other schools,” and when Lewis asked what those schools were, his teacher told him not to be so smart. When they were studying American Indians in fifth grade, his teacher brought in pictures of teepees. Lewis raised his hand and she sighed. “Yes, Lewis?” she said, and he told her that the Indians didn’t just live in teepees, that they actually had many kinds of houses depending on where they were. “Where it was warm, they had grass houses,” he said. “They had wood and adobe, too.”
    “Yes, but the teepee was the most prominent,” she said.
    “Just for the Plains Indians,” Lewis added.
    “Let’s move on,” his teacher said, dismissing him with a frown.
    Sixth grade with Miss Calisi was no better. She talked a lot to the class about how she square-danced and why rock and roll was responsible for juvenile delinquency, and she smelled like old socks. Lewis had felt a spark of hope when he started her grade and she had announced, “I’m a really tough teacher. You’re all going to work really