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Do you know what Someday Angeline is?

No? No, of course, you don’t. That’s okay! I’ll tell you.

Someday Angeline is a book by Louis Sachar, author of Holes, Sideways Stories from Wayside School, and There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom. The book is about an eight-year-old girl who is extremely smart and just a little strange, named Angeline. She is obsessed with the ocean and idolizes her father (a garbage collector), and is currently in the sixth grade where she is misunderstood completely. 

(Before you misunderstand me, this is not just a children’s book. Give me a chance to explain.)

My favorite version of this book is one that we had in our elementary school library, and it had a pink cover with the title in bubble font and a little illustrated image of a fishbowl. (I was on a Louis Sachar reading kick for a couple of months in sixth grade, and that copy of it fascinated me). It was a very well-written book, the kind that you remember for a very long time but are never able to name so you have to look it up by typing what little you can recall of the plot into the search engine of your choice. Reading was akin to breathing to me when I was a child, so I don’t remember the names of all the obscure novels I devoured, but I do remember plots, and I’ve found a lot of these books through my incomprehensible searches — the Circle of Magic (Tamora Pierce), The Guardians of Time (Marianne Curley), Penny Dreadful (Laurel Snyder), and of course the ever-obscure Dear America books (like American Girl novels, but with so much more death and destruction).

But back to my point. Someday Angeline is a book about a girl trying (and failing) to fit into her surroundings, floundering under expectations and wanting to make her loved ones proud while also overcoming her own misery and frustration in the face of hardship. The book’s last act is Angeline running away from school and jumping into the ocean (all the better to look at the fish!) but immediately being rescued and told that her life will change for the better. Louis Sachar had this wonderful gift in writing where he could always make you look forward to the future with a sense of hope that things would get better. He’s done that in other books too — Holes ends with Zero and Stanley Yelnats discovering treasure and breaking the curse on the desert; Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom ends with the bully who has trouble making friends learning how to deal with things that upset him, and becoming a better person. And Someday Angeline is a book about how there is good in even the bad; how your parents can misunderstand you but still love you wholly, how sometimes things are totally out of your control but they get better anyway, and how salt water tastes so much better than fresh water (that last one isn’t a joke. I actually really like the taste of salt water.)

Thematically, it’s not surprising that this was one of those books that really stuck with sixth-grade me — or stuck with me more, considering I’m the world’s sappiest person and every book I read leaves me with some kind of weird attachment issue. But Someday Angeline is more than that.

I read this book somewhere around the end of sixth grade. You probably have some vague memory of the sixth grade; long division in math and smell of paint in the art classroom and the science fairs and bake sales and movie screenings in-class. We “graduated” that year; our school held a little ceremony for us moving from the sixth to the seventh grade – “primary” school to “secondary” school, and it made us feel on top of the world. Our sixth grade, if you can believe it, developed a mild flavor of senioritis that last May. The final two weeks of the semester were spent practicing marching up and down the highschool gymnasium where the ceremony would be held and rehearsing the surprise dance performance we had prepared for our parents in the audience. It was a fun, mellow couple of weeks, always being shuffled off to one room or another to make sure we knew all the moves to this truly bizarre mashup of 2010s pop songs that one of the sixth grade teachers had burned onto a USB. 

Why am I telling you this story, long winded and seemingly pointless?

It’s for context. You cannot understand the feeling that I am trying to describe unless you let me tell you how the library had had an extension built that year, and how the A/C in there smelled so much more crisp; unless you let me tell you how we promised our sixth-grade homeroom teacher that’s we’d come back and say hello even when we were off growing up in highschool; unless you let me tell you how the whole world was so much simpler, so much easier to navigate than it is now. 

So here is what Someday Angeline is, really:

• It is those very last summer days of school in June when your teachers just abandon the lesson plans and ask you for your help in taking down the board decorations and the laminated signs on the walls;

• It is reaching said posters and signs, because you’re all sixth graders, by climbing on the little desks, wobbling precariously — your teacher will say you have to give the Blu-Tac back, but you and your friends hang onto it anyway;

• It is when the weather gets too hot to hold grudges and all the girls in their various little cliques just give up and start sitting together at lunch and it’s the best thing you guys ever came up with and you find yourself wishing all of you had done this before everyone had to scatter for summer.

• It’s when computer class becomes computer club; the entire class, boys and girls alike, log onto Minecraft and play in the same LAN world because who cares if you’re girls and can’t play video games. It’s the end of the year. Nothing matters anymore.

• It is when the sky is bleach-blue. There are no clouds. It’s better like this.

• It is the music seemingly always playing in class. You and your friends are trading drawings and signing yearbooks and promising not to stop being friends when you get into…wait for it…highschool…

• (This promise does not last. But it’s the thought that counts.)

• It is when you and your friends have minor roles in a play even though you’re SIXTH graders. How come all the fifth graders got the main roles? Whatever. You still get to have the time of your life running around backstage and in the wings in the dark, and pretending like you know what you’re doing with your friend’s mom’s makeup kit. There is too much bronzer on your friend’s face. (She’ll only be onstage for three seconds. It doesn’t even matter, but you still try to do her cat-eye perfectly.)

• (There’s cheese pizza for all the kids who had to stay back to be a part of the play. It’s the best thing you ever tasted.)

• (When you go home that night, the sky is an especially sweet shade of purple, and they switched on the outdoor lights at your school. You will remember that streak of clouds forever.)

• It is when, In those last weeks, whenever you stay after school for whatever club you were a part of that year on Thursdays, you take the bus home. It’s half-empty and you get to sit in the back and you can see the clouds in the distance and feel the lazy heat of the late afternoon. It always makes you feel alive.

• It is the class party on the last day of school that year that simply can’t be beat. There is pizza, and there are chips, and there are no plates but there’s those roll-packs of Oreos so everyone gets one handed to them on a tissue, and you’re wearing your favorite red shirt that makes you feel like a princess, and your teacher is playing a movie on the projector, and you finally get to see the happy ending. The sun is shining through the window, and it’s a Thursday, and your friends are wearing the bracelets you made for them at the beginning of the year, and you think yeah, maybe I am terrified of what comes next, but maybe it won’t be so bad at all.

When you think back on that year, and that summer, it will all be one big cloudy, breezy haze. You watched Adventure Time and Steven Universe with your sisters that summer, and you swam in the pool and played Minecraft and nothing, nothing could have been better. The last day of sixth grade was the class party, an early dismissal, and then a splashy afternoon at the pool. The perfect end to what was essentially the perfect sixth grade. There’s a lot I’m not writing down, obviously. Sixth grade is a tumultuous time for everyone. But I remember that sixth grade was a genuinely, through-and-through, solidly wholesome time. The end of sixth grade marked the beginning of the end, or perhaps the end of the end. You grow up and you don’t get it back, and you’re never ready for things to change but you can always see the end coming. 

It’s not always obvious, as a sixth grader, what you’re losing. You don’t fully understand that the last few weeks of school become lax and languid because the teachers are getting sentimental about watching their kids grow up and lose their childlike wonder. You don’t fully get what a graduation means, or what it means for your friends to move away, whether to different schools, or cities or countries altogether; you never really clock what an End is until you’re already past it and you can’t go back. 

In all honesty, it’s not obvious as a college student either. Factually, you’re much more aware of what it means to graduate from high school, and so you make sure to rack up as many good memories with your high school friends as possible, to make the most of your time together because you know it will come to an end; but as a college student, stuck again in the loop of four years, you don’t realize how quickly the days go by when all you’re lamenting about is what feels like an eternity until the weekend. One day in the fall you’ve taken a fourteen-hour-flight from the safety and comfort of the town you’ve lived in all your life to set up your room with your new roommate, and the next it’s springtime and some centuries of life-changing events have happened over the course of sophomore year. 

You never fully realize what you’re losing as you lose it. I didn't realize then, but I can’t really conceptualize it now. All I know is that both times, every time, I looked up at the sky and saw that it was a pale blue, stretching endlessly over buildings, over sand dunes, over roads winding towards the horizon, chemtrails fading off into nothingness, yellow sunshine illuminating in the most honest, most lonely clarity a young woman in either her tweens or her twenties has ever felt. The sun shines, and I am in a Louis Sachar book again, learning once again how I have no control over how time ebbs and flows, how it moves on without my permission, and I just simply have to accept it. The sun shines, the cold breeze blows, and I am alone, walking down First Avenue on a sunny Saturday morning; I am hugging my best friends goodbye on the threshold of my sixth-grade classroom on a golden Thursday afternoon; I am both young and old, both of me still aching to stay in one precious salt-crystal of a moment, and knowing, instinctively, intuitively, that this is one wish that cannot be granted. 

Summertime is coming. The callery pears and cherry blossoms are blooming on the trees all across the city and I can feel the end of this year coming. I know the sun will be streaming through my dorm-room window against a bright blue sky when I have to take my posters down, my concert memorabilia and my photos of my friends, my fairy lights and the stars I have hanging over the doorway, when I have to pack up my books and my collectibles and my art supplies. It will be, yet again, an End I didn’t fully see coming, cannot fully conceptualize, and yet, I will be at the airport on my way home before I can form the syllables of the word “good-bye!”

Someday Angeline in essence, is about a little girl growing up and finding her place in a world that doesn’t seem particularly inclined to let her. It is about finding control in a world that does not offer stability, about making the best of a strange and unfamiliar situation. About being a fish out of water, one could say, and I think perhaps finally just understood the illustration on the front of the book now, as I was writing this paragraph. Someday Angeline is a book about moving on, and as I stand in the sunshine that early April brings, feeling the breeze, looking at the sky, endless and azure, feeling like the only girl in the world, I realize I know what Someday Angeline is. I realize that I know what it is to have to let go and to have to keep letting go. I understand what it means to grow up, although I may not want to, and I understand that although I may want to stay stuck in one singular perfect moment for all of eternity, I realize that I have to move on. And that it will be okay. It will all be okay. 

I hope that you, too, now, truly understand what this book is. It is not just a children’s book. Someday Angeline is the reason I look forward to the beach trips every year. It is the reason I hold onto the past so dearly. It is the reason I have learned to forgive life for leaving me in the lurch all the time. If you ever find a copy, battered and dog-eared, perhaps, at a local children’s library, sit down in a bean-bag chair. Open the book and smell that library-smell rise from its pages in the still, crisp air. Give it a read, and you will see what I mean. 

Even after all this, however, I remain unsure. I remain wary. Will any of this ever stop feeling so strange? Will I ever stop thinking about arbitrary moments from the past? Will I ever learn to move on? 

My subconscious replies, 

Someday, Angeline.

Zuha Tariq's personal essay won first prize in the 2024 Humanities & Sciences Undergraduate Writing Contest. Her poem "I Gave Rupi Kaur a Gun (So She Could Shoot Herself)" also won first prize. Zuha is a BFA Comics Junior at SVA. She is passionate about feminism, a specific shade of purple, and the earnestness of the human experience. Find her at @underthestarlitsky on Instagram, where she spends most of her time drawing superheroes and sunsets.