Ms. Bixby's Last Day

“She cleared her throat to get everyone’s attention and thanked me for sharing. Then she said, ‘To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.’ And she looked right at me and smiled, and I smiled back, because I like her quotes. I have most of them memorized too.”

After Steve shares with the sixth-grade class the news of his honorable mention medal in a talent contest, to the scorn of a fellow student, Maggie offers this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. This passage is indicative of how the teacher responds to conversations and student interactions with proverbs from historical figures. 

“I didn’t pick Ms. Bixby, either. Just dumb luck, I guess. Or maybe she picked me, though I doubt it. […] I’m pretty sure that the teachers don’t gather around a list of names like dodgeball captains and take turns drafting whichever students they want. If they did, I would probably be one of the last ones picked. […] I don’t stand out. Maybe you could say it was fate, but I don’t think so. You start believing that things were supposed to happen a certain way, you start to ask questions that nobody has answers for.”

While Topher lives in an ever-changing fantasy and Steve dwells in a world of hard facts and statistics, Brand, speaking here, is the tragically philosophical one of the three, often speaking despairingly of his life. He says he only has Topher and Steve as friends because they let him sit with them at lunch. He does not know how he lucked into having Maggie as his teacher, since all the rising sixth graders wanted in her class. On their quest, when all their intentions fail to materialize, he castigates himself and the others for believing they could succeed. 

“Neither of us has been to Brand’s house. Not because we wouldn’t go. Only because we’ve never been invited. He’s been to both of our houses tons of times in the past year (mostly mine—we aren’t allowed to run on Steve’s carpet because we might mess up the vacuum lines, so we don’t go there much, and my parents are usually too busy to care what we are up to). Brand says he can’t invite us over because his father doesn’t like guests. It seems like every group of friends has one kid whose house you never go to.”

This passage, narrated by Topher, yields insight into the dynamics of each of the boy’s households. Brand’s father, confined to a couch after a debilitating accident, does not want any intrusion of playful adolescents into his household, which Brand implies is bleak. Steve’s parents, portrayed as extremely observant and particular about Steve’s friends and behavior, are so restrictive that the narrators avoid their house. Topher and Steve describe Topher’s parents as too busy for concern about what he is up to, making his house the go-to spot for the three friends.

“‘This is it. We are officially skipping school,’ Steve says. Now he looks like he really might spew. I’m sure he’s thinking about what will happen if his parents find out. They can be a little hard core when it comes to school stuff. They won’t really kill him, but they will torture him. That I’m certain of.

‘Don’t worry, Agent,’ I tell him. ‘I promise I won’t let them take you alive.’”

Topher, for whom everything is a fantasy—often of superheroes or spies—enthusiastically and correctly proclaims that, for the first time, they are actually engaged in an adventure: skipping school. Steve feels caught in a bind: As Brand notes, he will follow Topher anywhere, though he is completely risk averse. Topher’s joking remark only intensifies Steve’s dread. They are at opposite ends of the spectrum, with Topher taking nothing seriously and Steve filled with anxiety about the many possible bad outcomes.

“They always look—for three seconds, every time, as if they were counting in their heads—but I’m never sure they really see what I want them to.

I guess it happens to everyone. You get pushed off to the side, or you just learn to blend in, stay out of the way, merge with the crowd. And you start to think that maybe you’re not the center of the universe anymore. Maybe you’re not as awesome or creative or talented or worthy of attention as you originally thought.”

Here Topher reflects on the diminished attention his parents pay him after the birth of his baby sister and due to their busy, divergent work schedules. Their lack of engagement, Anderson implies, corresponds with Topher’s deep immersion in fantasy and his lack of confidence in his real-world abilities. This foreshadows the occasion when Topher discovers that Maggie secretly keeps many of his discarded drawings, challenging his notion that they—and he—are unworthy.

“I look at the sign for Michelle’s in the window and try to imagine it saying Eduardo’s instead. Maybe he’s right. I know exactly what Ms. Bixby would say if she were here, though. She’d say when you are content to be simply yourself, everyone will respect you. It’s something she borrowed from Lao Tzu.

[…] I look back at Eduardo and consider telling him about Lao Tzu and suggest maybe he change the name of his bakery, but I’m guessing he probably wouldn’t take the advice of a 12-year-old Japanese kid named Steve.”

Steve here engages in an ironic internal conversation as a result of the narrators’ encounter with Eduardo, the Hispanic owner of a bakery he calls “Michelle’s” because he thinks patrons would likely not buy from a bakery named for him. As a matter of principle, Steve accepts the notion proposed by Maggie that a person should accept who they are and not conform to the dictates of others. He is aware, however, that his parents symbolically stepped away from their Japanese heritage in naming him and that they continue to excel in the cultural conformity they force upon their son, Steve, and daughter, Christina.

“Then, as we were walking out of the door to room 213, Ms. Bixby called my name. I turned and she stretched out her index finger, her look asking me to do the same. Our fingers touched lightly at the tips, her eyes brightened. ‘B. Good,’ she said.

It was a line from E.T. I know because Topher and I had seen that movie four times already. But I also knew she was making a joke. Thankfully my father didn’t get it, or maybe he just didn’t hear.”

This passage has multiple symbolic meanings. Steve’s father sought the parent-teacher conference because Maggie gave Steve a B, which his father refused to accept, despite the teacher’s expression that B signifies above average work. Thus, when she quotes E. T.’s admonition to little Gertie from the movie, Maggie symbolically tells Steve that a B is good. When Steve remarks that his father did not understand or did not hear, Anderson implies that Mr. Sakata, Steve’s dad, does not understand his son or the educational principles behind Maggie’s method of instruction, and that he does not hear either the teacher or the student. 

“Ms. Bixby, who once came to school wearing her bathrobe over her normal clothes because it was twenty degrees outside and she couldn’t find her coat. Ms. Bixby, who kept books scattered all around the room in the most unusual places—tucked in with the hand sanitizer, sitting on the windowsills, stacked on top of the python’s terrarium—because, as she put it, stories are everywhere, just waiting to be found.”

Steve’s description of Maggie’s unapologetically eccentric actions reveals a deeper sense of who she is and of what her students recognize in her. His examples show Maggie to be a free spirit, unconcerned about the opinions others might hold of her. As an instructor, she maintains a seemingly disorganized, cluttered classroom that is actually a stealthy treasure chest, holding lessons and examples in all corners.

“The whole story is this: my father fell and he doesn’t have the heart to stand back up.

There are days he just comes out and says it. That 30 feet wasn’t far enough. That it would have been better if he had fallen farther. 30,000 feet. A million feet. Clear off the face of the earth. He says it would have been better for both of us. I never know what to say when he says that. […] Later he always says he’s sorry and that he didn’t mean it. He was just feeling down.

I never know what to say to that either. So instead I just tell him I’m going to make us dinner.”

Anderson uses this passage to show the roots of Brand’s despair. His father, whom he characterizes as having been a fun-loving prankster, has—as Brand characterizes it—fallen twice: once physically in an industrial accident that leaves him unable to return to work and once in spirit as he abandons his efforts at rehabilitation. The despair he expresses results in Brand’s feelings of uncertainty and hopelessness.

“Surrounded on both sides by pristine pages is a portrait of a woman. But not just any woman. Even in black and white, you can tell exactly who it is. It’s the hair—the one lightly shaded stripe that strikes down across her bangs. The slightly snub nose and shallow cheeks. The inquisitive eyes. She looks sad in the picture. It’s actually beautiful, the way he’s captured her. All the details, the silhouette. He must have spent a lot of time on this drawing. A lot of time.”

While waiting for a city bus to take them closer to Maggie’s hospital room, Brand spies Topher’s concealed pencil portrait of their teacher. When Topher sees Brand looking at the drawing, the two struggle over the sketchbook, tearing the book apart. Anderson presents the portrait as a symbol of Maggie, with Topher and Brand jealously fighting over her. Brand tells Topher to “take her,” as if the drawing is a person. Afterward, Topher, unbidden, tells Steve that he does not have a crush on Maggie.

“Promise me that you will never, ever, e-ver let me get married.

I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not. With Topher it was always a toss up. ‘Okay,’ I said. Either way, it seemed like an easy enough promise to make. We were only twelve.

He let go of my shoulders and put out his hand. In the past he used to spit in his palm, until I confessed to him that I thought was a little gross, but we still shook on our promises.

[…] And for half a second on the banks of a tadpole-less pond in early spring, Topher and I held hands.”

This passage is part of Steve’s remembrance of an occasion when he and Topher are at a pond and Topher expounds on marriages as being universally problematic. He uses a litany of fictional characters to argue there are no happily married heroes. Because the state of his parents’ relationship is chaotic, this quote symbolically describes Topher’s pessimism about romantic male-female relationships. Steve receives this as welcome news in that he often expresses anxiety about losing Topher as his best and only friend. The passage is ironic in that Steve has just learned that Topher has a crush on Maggie.

“‘Alright,’ Topher says. ‘That’s not at all true, what I just said about my mom. It’s not for her. We really need the bottle of wine for our teacher, who is sick in the hospital battling pancreatic cancer. She’s leaving tomorrow for Boston, and we’ve skipped school just to go see her because they cancelled the school party we were supposed to have and we didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.’ He says it all in one breath, as if he was afraid he’d never get it all out otherwise.”

Among the offerings the narrators intend to bring to Maggie is a bottle of wine. Topher assures Steve and Brand that he has a plan to procure one, eventually revealing that his plan entails finding an unknown adult to purchase the wine on their behalf and give them the bottle. The passage is unique in that Topher abandons all pretense and fantasy and shares the absolute truth of their mission with a total stranger.

“‘There is no such thing as magic,’ he said without even being called on.

At this Ms. Bixby frowned. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Or maybe I should have tried harder. The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.’

Ms. B. smiled at the class then, though I had a feeling the smile was meant mostly for Brand. Sometimes when Ms. Bixby smiled at you, you had the feeling she’d been saving it just for you, that the smile actually had your name on it, that she could read your mind and knew you needed that smile more than anyone else in the room.”

The class here discusses the moral to Maggie’s autobiographical tale of failing as a 10-year-old magician, to the mocking laughter of her family. When Brand offers that the lesson means there is no magic, Maggie responds that perhaps she merely gave up too soon. As Topher relates in his description, the moral Maggie proposes is specifically for Brand. Maggie’s life parallels Brand’s in that he has given up on his father recovering any physical ability or emotional pleasure. Perhaps, she suggests, he has given up on his father too soon.

“I knew as soon as I told them my idea that Topher would go for it. It was an adventure, and even if it wasn’t, he would turn it into one. And if he was in, Steve was in, because if I had learned anything about the two of them, it was that Steve worshipped Topher the way Topher worshipped every comic book hero he had ever met. Besides, I knew Ms. Bixby meant something to them too, though it wasn’t the same.”

Brand reveals his thought process behind organizing the excursion to see Maggie. He knows his friends quite well and understands how to entice them into skipping school to visit their hospitalized teacher. When their intentions systematically seem to fail, Brand wishes he had made the trip by himself, so that no one would know if he simply gave up. Quitting once they have started, he laments, means failing the group of friends as well.

“‘You’re telling me that you really believe you will find one person out of seven billion who’s the exact right person you’re supposed to be with?’

Ms. Bixby didn’t even stop to think about it. ‘I’m not saying I will, necessarily. But I think people do, yes. The man and woman in this poem were soul mates. They were destined to be with each other that’s what the poems about.’”

In a class discussion apparently sparked by the study of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline, Steve voices grave skepticism about the possibility of soul mates. Maggie counters with the notion that destiny may supersede statistics, bringing together those fated to be together. She quotes Einstein’s dictum that “gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love,” (185) implying that destiny is a force beyond nature.

“‘Well, about three seconds ago, I was getting some awesome up-close video of you punching my friend. Except it’s not called punching, not when you’re doing it to a twelve-year-old kid unprovoked. What’s that called again?’ Topher asks.

‘Assault and battery,’ Brand says stepping over to help me up. […]

‘Right. Video of you assaulting and battering my friend. And now I’m calling the police’, Topher says smugly.”

After virtually all their intentions leading up to visiting Maggie falter and Brand announces he will abandon the hospital trip altogether, the narrators experience another moment of serendipity. They encounter and manage to trick the adult who stole the money they intended to use to purchase a bottle of wine for Maggie. Each time their plans fail, an unexpected event offers them the opportunity to continue their quest to see Maggie. 

“There may not always be a plausible scientific explanation for why humans do what they do. Not everything can be plugged into an equation or reduced to the lowest common denominator. Not everything can be summed up by a letter grade on report card or checking a box. Not everything has a formula, and sometimes things just happen for no reason at all, good or bad, logical or illogical. Ms. Bixby would probably say there actually is a reason—we just don’t understand it at the time.”

This passage reflects Steve’s thoughts on Maggie’s challenge to him to think beyond statistical data. As a person who acknowledges he always makes decisions to avoid conflict and who wishes to stay out of the spotlight, this new awareness challenges Steve’s priorities. As a result of his new insight, he faces down his bossy sister publicly for the first time and decides he will honestly tell his parents that he skipped school, even knowing he will face consequences.

“We all have moments when we think nobody really sees us. When we feel like we have to act out or be somebody just to get noticed. But somebody notices, Topher. Somebody sees. Somebody out there probably thinks you’re the greatest thing in the whole world. Don’t ever think you’re not good enough.”

Having lamented several times that his parents seem no longer aware of him, that he has faded into the unremarkable background of life, Topher encounters a miraculous moment when he sees Maggie rescuing his latest drawing from the trash. She goes on to reveal a full awareness of his situation and feelings. He feels empowered by her encouragement. The ultimate result of this exchange is the elaborate pencil portrait Topher draws, intending to give it to Maggie. 

“You can’t always pinpoint the moment everything changes. Most of the time it’s gradual, like grass growing or fog settling or your armpits starting to smell by midafternoon. And even when it does come down to one moment, it’s not always what you expect. It’s not some big announcement from the heavens telling you that you’re the chosen one. It’s not some magnificent charge through enemy lines with the orchestra swelling behind you. Instead it’s something smaller. Like standing up to your sister at the McDonald’s. Or facing off against some flopsucker in an alley behind the Walgreens.”

Here, Topher expresses the underlying irony of the narrators’ decision to see their teacher. They want to find Maggie to express their thanks for all she has meant to them. The trip to see her in the hospital, however, has revealed the depth and truth of many of the lessons she imparted to these students, allowing them to incorporate her insights into their principles and actions.

“Carnations get a bad rap, she said, because they are cheaper than roses, but she liked them better because they fight harder. Roses are quitters—they give up and die before you can even get used to them being around.”

During one of their weekly grocery shopping excursions, Maggie remarks to Brand that she prefers carnations to roses. The underlying implication is that things appearing to be of lesser value may be worthier than those things that are highly touted and more expensive. Brand extends the metaphor when, in their last moment together, he presents Maggie with a broken carnation, implying that she, though battling pancreatic cancer, is quite worthy and capable of survival.

“‘Do you know why I would always show up at that corner every Friday afternoon?’

[…] Because I knew you’d be there waiting for me. Not because you were counting on me, but because your dad was counting on you.

[…] She bent down so that our foreheads were almost touching. You don’t give up, Brand Walker. That’s what makes you special. You need to show him that. Show him what it means to be strong. Teach him how not to give up.”

Maggie speaks these words to Brand just before he goes to see his hospitalized father. Her intent is to help Brand see that he possesses those qualities his father needs to continue his recovery from the accident that ended his career. Brand remembers this and intuitively grasps that this lesson is why Maggie has temporarily come into his life. He finds it ironic that Maggie is a patient in the same hospital where his father received treatment.

“Ms. Bixby has light-brown hair with the stripe of pink in her bangs like strawberry syrup. Ms. Bixby has bright green eyes that make you think she is half cat. Ms. Bixby wears bright sweaters and boots that reach up to her knees and dangly earrings that look like she made them herself. The woman in the bed has no hair. The woman in the bed, just staring at us with her mouth hanging open, sallow cheeked and pale, is not Ms. Bixby. […] But then the woman props herself up on her elbows and gives me an inquisitive smile, a don’t-I-know-you-from-somewhere smile.”

This passage highlights the reality of the changes Maggie’s illness and resulting treatment bring about in her appearance. For the narrators, this is a moment of awakening. For Maggie, it is an affirmation: Three students who responded to her instruction have broken the rules to see her before she leaves the city for treatment. Anderson uses this as a transition point in the narrative. This is a different Maggie, as the boys discover. She looks, sounds, and even smells different, though when they take their secret hilltop picnic, the teacher they have loved emerges. Anderson implies that this gives added poignancy and importance to all she taught them.

“She stands and we stand, facing her, like we’re back in the classroom. Then she gives Topher a giant hug. And me too, though she doesn’t smell at all like she usually does and she squeezes harder than usual and makes it difficult to breathe. She doesn’t hug Brand, which I think is strange, but the two of them stand face-to-face, Ms. Bixby standing just below him on the hill so he can look at her level.”

When Maggie’s nurse finds them picnicking on the hilltop, Maggie must return to the hospital for treatment. Anderson implies that the moments of farewell are unique to each of the narrators. That Maggie stands a bit lower on the hill so that she and Brand are eye-to-eye symbolically implies that they shared a relationship in which she met him on his level. At the bottom of the hill, Maggie turns to wave at the narrators, another thing they had agreed not to do, implying this will be the last time they see her.