A Long Chain of Hidden Things Danielle Evans (bio) When I was growing up, my mother liked to tell people the story of my fifth birthday party. It was both unsettling and triumphant, the kind of story that could be made to sound hilarious even though it wasn’t really. Weeks before the party, after I presented her with a list of names that she had assumed were the other children in my class, my mother had sent me to school with carefully labeled invitations. My November birthday meant I’d had to be specially tested to be allowed even to register for kindergarten, and I remember that process being very formal — we had to go to the office of some kind of certified specialist, and I had to perform a series of tasks while she took notes — but I had subsequently been promoted from kindergarten to first grade in a far less official meeting, held in the principal’s office, where I read aloud all of the material with which I was presented, starting with a Bob’s Big Boy children’s menu. It was dinosaur-themed, and I stumbled over the word pterodactyl, but still, my audition was a success. That September, I had entered first grade a few months before I turned five. When the guests for [End Page 785] my party arrived, and child after child towered over me, my mother was confused. These were not first graders. They were friendly and polite and ate their cake, they collected their goody bags and had a good time, but they were clearly too old to be there. My mother asked some questions. The party guests reported that they were third graders. They’d been invited because I sat at their lunch table every day. I told my mother that I had been sitting with the third graders because there was a boy in my first-grade class, Tony P., who was seven and bigger than the other kids, and he had told everyone Black kids couldn’t sit at our lunch table. The first graders were afraid of him, but no one in the third grade cared about Tony P., and some of them knew me from the bus stop at our apartment complex. Hence, my new friends. Horrified, my mother called the school on Monday. They told her that couldn’t possibly be true, that the cafeteria was monitored, and no one would let a child be bullied away from their own class’s table, nor would a first grader be permitted to sit with third graders every day. On Tuesday, my mother took an early lunch hour and drove in from DC wearing a suit and a string of faux pearls. She walked into the cafeteria at lunchtime and found me, just as we’d all reported, sitting at the third-grade table. After noting this to the teachers and cafeteria staff, she walked me to my own lunch table and sat with me while we ate lunch. She asked some more questions. She made it clear that if anyone gave me a hard time about sitting at the lunch table, she would come every day and eat lunch with us for as long as was necessary. I’m not sure whether this was meant to be a threat — in my recollection, the first graders were mostly enamored with her. In any case, she didn’t have to return. When my mother first started telling this story to people, she got to the part with Tony P. and said, “and this monster was telling my child she couldn’t sit at her own lunch table.” Once, when I [End Page 786] overheard her tell the story that way, I said, “He’s not a monster; he’s just a little boy,” and that became part of my mother’s telling of the story, a coda in which her desire to call him a monster met my own youthful empathy and was gently corrected. It’s possible I meant my interjection exactly the way she heard it, that I meant to provide a moral reframing and remind my mother not to write off a child...