What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthdays you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.
　　 Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lapbecause you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up you will need to cry like you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she says and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.
　　 Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside another, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.
　　 You don’t feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes months before you say eleven when they ask you. And you don’t feel smart eleven, not until you’re almost twelve. That’s the way it is.
　　 Only today I wish I didn’t have only eleven years rattlinginside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box. Today I wish I was one hundred and two instead of eleven because if I was one hundred and two I’d have known what to say when Mrs. Price put the red sweater on my desk. I would’ve known how to tell her it wasn’t mine instead of just sitting there with that look on my face and nothing coming out of my mouth.