Monday's Not Coming

Michael takes Claudia home, where she tells her mother everything. Ma’s reaction is strange. She says she thought Claudia was getting better. 

“You’re right, Claudia,” her mother tells her. “You were right all along. We should have believed you the first time you brought it up” (374). She reveals that Monday died two years ago, but sometimes Claudia has episodes in which she thinks Monday hasn’t been found yet. 

Claudia’s bubble bursts completely. Her entire reality crashes around her. She realizes she’s actually 16 years old, not 14. She was pulled out of school after Monday was found and has been homeschooled by Mrs. Walker ever since. She’s only just started dance again, to try to integrate back into normal life. Michael has been by her side the entire way. 

Claudia admits that she knew Monday was dead all along. She’d just hoped that her body had been hidden away somewhere, rather than in plain sight. Because of the hypervisibility of Monday’s body—and subsequent invisibility—Monday’s color transitions from vivid red to the void of black. 

In her journal, Monday wrote of her mother beating August to death. April tried to save him, but Mrs. Charles made her put August’s body in the freezer. Monday almost told Claudia multiple times but was afraid of getting taken from her family once the authorities found out. 

Tip lamented that he had no idea what was going on, weeping on television during the press conference. Police estimated August was in the freezer for a year and a half, and Monday was there for 10 months. 

Monday’s and August’s joint funeral was a spectacle. Hundreds of people attended, but almost none actually knew Monday. The classmates who bullied and harassed Monday were there, grieving as if they were her best friends. Monday’s name was misspelled on the program and Claudia was cut out of all the pictures (as Ma was the only one with recent pictures of Monday). A photographer took a photo of Jacob Miller placing a rose on Monday’s casket. His tear-stained face made the cover of Time. Claudia stayed in the shadows and didn’t speak. 

After the funeral, Claudia fell into a deep depression. She found no satisfaction in being right about Monday. She watched television coverage of the incident and slept off and on all day. One news report revealed Monday’s body was being reexamined for sexual trauma after a witness reported instances of abuse outside of Monday’s home. At this, Claudia’s father ripped the TV off the wall.

A few weeks passed. Ma made dinner, and they brought the food over to Monday’s Aunt Doris’s house. Tuesday was in a mental hospital, confused about when she would get to see her mother and sisters again. April, who had moved in with Aunt Doris, asked about Claudia. News vans surrounded the house when they arrived.

Mrs. Charles tried to contact April, to Ma’s (and the court’s, if they had known) disapproval. The state worked to terminate both Mr. and Mrs. Charles’s parental rights. Tip was fighting for his children. According to Aunt Doris, “he really wanted to be around but was scared of Patti and what she’d do. Courts never been too kind to black fathers” (388-389). 

Ma gave Aunt Doris cash donations from her church, and Claudia joined April in the yard, where they stared off into nowhere. They finally started talking, commenting on how awful the funeral was. April remembered how hard it was to fit Monday in the freezer, since she was so tall. Claudia begged her to stop but April continued, telling her that she put Monday in the freezer of her own volition. She needed to buy more time to make up a plan so that she could keep living with Tuesday.

April had begged Mrs. Charles to take the parenting classes when Monday had “the flu.” With the eviction notices coming in, April feared that Monday would talk, and the siblings would be split up again. She worried the police would figure it out and convict her as an accomplice in Monday’s murder. She admitted she didn’t know whether Monday was dead yet when she put her in the freezer.

April hinted at extreme things she’d done to support her family—prostitution—and told Claudia she envied Monday because she didn’t have a friend like Claudia when she was growing up. She asked if Claudia would tell on her, but Claudia said she wouldn’t.