Free Mostly Monty by Johanna Hurwitz

This is what Montgomery Gerald Morris had:
    A nickname: Monty.
    A birthday on August 15. This year he had turned six.
    Asthma, which sometimes made it difficult for him to breathe.
    An inhaler. It was made of plastic and contained medicine. He carried it in his pocket wherever he went. If he felt that an asthma attack was coming on, he pulled it out real fast and put it in his mouth.
    This is what Monty didn’t have:
    A brother or a sister.
    A pet.
    Monty also didn’t have a best friend.
    He didn’t have any real friends at all.
    It was no wonder. Because of his asthma, he wasn’t permitted to go running around outdoors like other kids. He couldn’t join the Little League team. He couldn’t plan to go to sleepaway camp when he got older. Who would want to be friends with a boy like him?

    Monty’s parents were very protective of their son. They worried about his health. Twice in the past, he’d wakened in the night unable to breathe. Both times, he had been rushed to the hospital. It sounds exciting to ride off in an ambulance with a siren and blinking lights. For Monty, it hadn’t been exciting at all. It was scary. Monty didn’t complain about his limitations, but he didn’t like them either. Why did he have to have asthma anyhow?
    Now Monty was in first grade. Before school started, he had been very nervous. Staying at school all day seemed like a long time to be away from home. Even having his own packed lunch with a sandwich and drink, a piece of fruit, and a treat wasn’t enough to make Monty glad to be in first grade. He was used to eating lunch at the kitchen table in his own house. So on the first day of first grade, he felt scared. He sat quietly in his seat while many of his classmates chattered together. He recognized a few faces from kindergarten, but there were many new faces too. He put his hand in his pants pocket to feel for his inhaler. It was good to know that it was handy if he had an asthma attack.

    On that first morning, the teacher clapped her hands for attention. “My name is Mrs. Meaney,” she announced to the students.
    Monty shuddered.
Mrs. Meaney.
That sounded as if she would be a mean teacher. He glanced around to see if the other boys and girls in his class were worried about that too. Everyone sat at attention looking at the teacher, so it was hard to tell.
    For the rest of the day and the days that followed, Monty sat quietly in his first-grade classroom, answering questions only when he had to. Usually he just watched everyone else. Even at lunchtime, he sat quietly chewing his sandwich and watching the other students. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be Gregory Lawson, who could run faster than anyone in the whole grade. He wondered what it felt like to be Joey Thomas, who lived down his street and owned not one but two dogs, which he walked every day after school. And he tried to imagine being his classmate Ilene Kelly, who had a twin sister named Arlene in a different section of first grade. The Kelly sisters lived down the street from Monty too.

    It seemed to Monty that it would be more fun and more interesting to be someone else. He didn’t enjoy being Monty at all.
    There was one good thing, however. It turned out that Mrs. Meaney wasn’t mean at all. She smiled a lot. She didn’t scold when the students talked with one another when they should have been doing their work. And she didn’t shout — even when she saw Paul Freeman drawing on his arm with a blue marker.
    “What are you doing?” she asked Paul.
    “I’m making a tattoo,” Paul responded.
    “A tattoo? What in the world do you need a tattoo for?” she asked him.
    Monty looked at his classmate in amazement. No one should write on their skin. They should write on paper. Somehow, Paul hadn’t learned that in kindergarten. Monty would never do anything as silly as that.
    On Friday of the first week of first grade, Monty began to have trouble breathing. He dropped his pencil and grabbed his