Affective Needs

by Rebecca Taylor

  All of these I had watched unfold with the quiet fascination of a spectator. Amazed and surprised, just like every other student who never did anything more disruptive than use the electric pencil sharpener during a test—grateful for the thrill of something different that invariably knocked the whole school day off its ever-predictable course.

  But something was different about this guy. Something about the way he struggled, the look on his face. He didn’t look crazed and out of control—he looked desperate.

  Now, for some stupid reason, I needed to know if he was okay—and this needing to know bothered me. Normally, I couldn’t care less about anyone else’s drama.

  Anyone except Eli, of course. Eli who had been playing the lead in his own real-life drama since the fifth grade—the year he figured out he was gay. Also it was the year everyone else in the fifth grade figured it out, because Eli tried to kiss Pete Reeves behind the mobiles during recess. Just about the whole class mass-exodused from Eli’s life after that.

  At first the teachers had assumed that, because Eli was black, the entire fifth grade had become racists. Even the other black kids. And for weeks they handled it with daily lessons on bullying, inappropriate racists comments, and the reading of To Kill a Mockingbird.

  So more white kids and black kids sat together at lunch—and they all kept excluding Eli.

  There were lots of times I had wondered: if Eli hadn’t tried kissing Pete that day, and if he hadn’t single-handedly lost every friend he had that day—would he and I be friends now? Would he have ended up just like Bella, Ashley, and every other asshat at our school without two independent thoughts of their own to rub together?

  Was he only my friend because of circumstances beyond his control?

  “Don’t be so desperate. It’s unattractive,” he told me when I asked him that very question at lunch the next day.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Believe me; so am I.”

  “Look around us,” I said, not bothering to lower my voice. “We are surrounded by jerks. All I’m saying is what if that weren’t the case? What if we could wave a magic wand and make everyone in this school intelligent, thought-provoking, highly functioning individuals who were actually coming to school to train their brains to figure out how to cure cancer instead of chase down the next vacuous trend?”

  “You mean what if everyone were more like you?” he asked before taking a bite of his limp chicken patty burger.

  I closed my eyes and gave him a single shoulder shrug. “I’m not saying exactly like me.”

  He laughed, and some of his partially chewed pressed chicken parts flew out of his mouth and onto the table in front of us. He covered his mouth, swallowed, then shook his head. “Do you ever listen to yourself?”

  “All the time,” I said feigning boredom.

  “Also, I don’t happen to think we are completely surrounded by jerks.”

  At this, I put down the questionable carrot stick I’d been considering and stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m completely serious.”

  “How can you even say that considering how half . . . no, probably more like a solid 65 percent of them treat you now? After how they have always treated you?” I could feel the look on my face, and it was the one that punctuated my thoughts with Are you kidding me?

  But, after so many years together, Eli was mostly immune to my glares and stares. He only shrugged and took another halfhearted bite from his chicken burger before letting the rest of the whole disgusting “sandwich” fall from his hands back onto his tray. I could tell he wanted to say something and was taking his time chewing to formulate the thought. Seconds passed, and my impatience with him must have shown on my face because he raised his finger—just a second—took a drink from his Coke and, only after wiping his mouth with his napkin, opened his mouth to answer my question. “Jordan said something really interesting at youth group the other day.”

  My shoulders sagged and I rolled my eyes, “You have got to be joking.”

  “I’m serious. Hear me out. In high school, we are not even fully formed people. Including you,” he added. “We are a collection of behaviors and opinions that are not much more than reactions to the labels and circumstances that we’ve been handed throughout our lives. For example”—he pointed with his spork at Hilary Revcheck—“if Hilary had not been born into a family of overachieving Ivy League graduates, would she really feel so compelled to run around campus championing every cause, fundraiser, and student council election that pops up?” His spork veered right. “And consider Trey. Would he have played football his whole life and eventually gotten himself a full ride to Texas A&M if his father had not played pro football for fifteen years?”

  “I fail to see how that has anything to do with people treating you like crap just because you’re gay.”

  “It has everything to do with it because, contrary to what you believe, not everyone does treat me like crap just because I’m gay. Some people treat me like crap because I’m your best friend and they assume I’m as big a bitch as you are. Our friendship makes me guilty by association.”

  “You are a big bitch.”

  “Maybe, but most of these people are not yet the people they will be. They are only the people their lives have taught them to be.” He looked up. “I don’t know, but sometimes I think we’re all trapped by our circumstances. I mean, who would any of us be if we could pull off every label slapped on us since birth? Who would we be if we could shed all the bullshit?”

  I shook my head. “We would be exactly the people we already are, because people get to choose. Most people just choose to be idiots, more concerned with the color of their hair than the substance of the gray matter contained inside their skulls.”

  “Ever the cynic.”

  “Maybe, but you’re giving people way too much credit.”

  “I happen to give you a lot of credit, as well you know.”

  I smiled and placed my hands on my head. “That’s because you’ve watched me solve calculus equations. You’ve seen firsthand the power pulsing between these lovely ears.”

  “Your ears stick out.”

  “Shut up.” I shoved him.

  He swayed away from me and then back, bumping into my body and knocking me over on the bench a few inches.

  “Don’t start,” I warned him, and pushed him back.

  Eli laughed, gave his lunch a dirty look, and pushed his tray away. It had always been like this—well, always since fifth grade. Eli was more than my best friend.

  He was my rock.

  CHAPTER THREE

  One week and a day after I watched the new guy get restrained and hauled out of the school by the police, he walked into the school library where I was working.

  I had been sitting in the corner near the rows of dusty aging desktops, with my own laptop open. The first page of my honors thesis stared back at me, failing to inspire me to action, when movement near the double doors gave me an excuse to look up.

  It was the Guy, the one from the AN class, and he was being escorted by one of the paraprofessionals I didn’t really know—Henry, I think. As they came in and made their way around and past the scatter of tables and chairs that seemed arranged more to keep people out of the library than invite them in to work, I realized he was coming over to work on one of the desktops behind me.

  With my eyes glued to my screen, I pretended to not notice him, his dirty jeans, or the limp way his black T-shirt hung off his body.

  I wondered as they passed behind me if he would recognize me from that day. The girl who had stood in the hall and watched the whole episode play out.

  But he didn’t say a word—not that he would—and ended up settling at the computer in the farthest corner of the very last row.

  Okay, so great. Now I knew he hadn’t gotten kicked out of school—not that it even mattered to me. Good for him, though, I supposed.

  I focused on the words that filled half the document page in front o
f me. My senior honors thesis was supposed to “encapsulate the skills and tools” I had acquired during my years in high school while “focusing on a topic or research of personal interest.” In the spring, those of us in the honors program were to submit our academic papers and produce a public exposition that demonstrated our “superior scholarship and capacity for field work.” The idea was that the honors program evidenced to our prospective colleges our ability to demonstrate initiative, discipline, creativity, and resourcefulness.

  Essentially, it was to prove that we were well prepared and groomed to leap through all the hoops that our future universities would place on the field for us—because look, we’ve already jumped through one that looks exactly the same.

  I had been discouraged, several times, by my academic advisor from looking at this project with that particular, some might say negative, vantage point, but it’s not like it mattered. Regardless of your preferred perspective—this was an academic tap dance that prepared us to audition.

  So to keep her from stressing her point that “this is an opportunity to really grow as an individual,” I picked a topic, mapped out the project, and decided to, for once in my life, keep my mouth shut.

  My academic advisor was welcome to draw whatever conclusions she needed to about my personal growth that allowed her sleep soundly every night.

  Meanwhile, I would keep jumping the hoops.

  The topic I had chosen was Karen—or “Caged Karen,” as the media had dubbed her. Her real name was not Karen and had been kept confidential to protect her identity because ever since Karen was born, she had been raised in solitary confinement.

  When she was found at the age of fourteen, she had lived almost her entire life in a single room. Deprived of practically all human interaction except when she was severely abused for making any sounds, Karen could not talk or understand language of any kind. When they found her, she still wore diapers and had difficulty walking. Researchers had estimated that, at the age of fourteen, Karen was functioning at roughly the same place as a typical one-year-old baby.

  The case of Caged Karen both fascinated and horrified me. That her parents were monsters that beat her and locked her away because she was cognitively disabled was tragic—but I had no idea how I was going to turn her case into my honors thesis. Thus the mostly blank page staring back at me.

  After five more minutes of staring and not writing a single word, I closed my laptop and packed up my things to go to my next class, calculus.

  The Guy was still in the last row behind me, his computer screen completely hidden from view. I wondered what he was working on.

  Unlike the elective classes I was forced to take with the Bellas and the Ashleys of the world, my calc class actually did have other kids in it with two thoughts to rub together.

  Consequently, when I entered, everyone in this class already had work out, and they were busy glancing between the whiteboard, their open calculus books, and their furiously moving pencils.

  It should be noted that no one in this class had pink hair, bragged about their weekends, or threw anything at other people.

  Of course, the fact that there were only five of us in the class and that each of us occupied an entire sector of a room designed to hold forty kids might have had something to do with the diligent silence of this class. But the reality was that really none of us actually had any weekend adventures to speak of.

  These people, while certainly more my speed in terms of intellectual capacity, were also not my friends. We were often thrown together in the name of a physics project, or gathered together to participate in those ever-dreaded extracurricular activities that everyone knew were important for college admission boards but no one really wanted to attend—like chess club. We were probably best described as coworkers.

  The region I had staked out on the first day of class was the northeast section, front row, closest to the windows that looked out over the school parking lot. Like my coworkers who had arrived before me, I entered the class, sat down, opened my bag, took out my notebook, calculus book, sharpened pencil, and began copying the equation from the board.

  The teacher wasn’t even in the room yet—but we were all well-trained hoop jumpers.

  I was in the middle of the equation when I heard the door open. Since Mr. Thyen was the only person still missing, I assumed it was him—until I looked up and into the eyes of the Guy.

  Inexplicably, my heart thundered in my chest and a rush of anxiety flooded through my body.

  I looked down.

  With my eyes staring at my paper but my brain not comprehending a single thing written there, I tried to look normal on the outside while inside my body a crazed circus erupted.

  He was in the wrong class—obviously. I waited for him to realize this and leave, but a second later he was heading down the aisle behind me, and I heard the scrape of first one chair across the floor and then a second as Henry, the paraprofessional with him, took a seat as well.

  Surely Henry realized they were in the wrong class?

  The feel of the room had changed, like a “shift in the force,” as Eli would say. I didn’t dare turn around to look but I did glance sideways and saw that Helen Nyugen, in the northwest sector, had stopped working and was also looking at me with an expression that asked, What the hell?

  I shrugged slightly and glanced back into the southwest section where Ryan Miller had also stopped working but instead of having the good grace to at least pretend like nothing was going on, had opted for the full body stare. Completely turned around in his seat, he sat gaping at the Guy. He even looked like he was maybe about to say something, but when Mr. Thyen finally walked in, he snapped his mouth shut.

  Normally we all kept working whenever Mr. T entered with his extra-large vanilla latte, but today all eyes were on him—watching, waiting to see how he handled the interloper and his special-education handler.

  He took one, two steps, then stopped. He looked around the room as if he were only now seeing us all for the first time this year, then smiled.

  “My, my, so much attention for me today?” His hand moved to his collar and rubbed the fabric between his thumb and index finger. “It’s my new shirt, yes?” He turned sideways so we could see the back of his ultra-plain light blue oxford. “You like it? It was on sale.”

  When we didn’t laugh, he smirked and proceeded to his desk. He lifted his bag and placed it and his latte on the top of his desk and looked out at us. “Not the shirt? Well maybe you’re all anxious to extend a warm Advanced Calc welcome to our newest student.” Mr. T gestured with his hand to the section of the room behind me where the Guy was sitting. This gesture gave us all the permission we needed—well, except Ryan Miller, who clearly had no issue blatantly staring—to turn and check the Guy out.

  “Porter Creed, meet Advanced Calculus. Advanced Calculus, meet Porter Creed.”

  “So what?” Eli asked me at lunch.

  “So . . . it’s weird. Like a mistake or something. Admission clerical error, records tampering, transfer screw-up.”

  We both looked at Porter Creed, sitting alone at a lunch table in the far corner of the cafeteria. He had finished every last scrap of the mostly inedible food on his tray and was now solving and unsolving a Rubik’s Cube over and over again—one-handed. Occasionally he switched hands.

  “I think he’s left-handed,” Eli said.

  “What?”

  “He solves it faster, every time, with his left hand.”

  I stared at Eli with my face-melting glare—he ignored it.

  “Isn’t he in special education?” he asked me.

  “Affective needs,” I said, releasing him from my laser eyes.

  Eli shook his head, “Not all of us have the school psychologist for a mother. What’s affective needs?”

  I looked back at Porter. “Emotional problems.”

  Eli snorted and took a drink from his Coke. “In that case, half the senior class should be affective needs.”

  As if b
ored with it, Porter put the cube down on table and slouched even farther down in his chair until his head hung over the back. He let his arms hang at his side, giving the impression that he had been shot and was now waiting for CSI to show up and investigate a murder.

  Henry, Porter’s adult handler, was sitting at a table nearby with two other paras. He glanced over, made sure Porter wasn’t about to freak out and kill someone, then returned to his conversation that apparently only required him to nod and smile.

  I got up from my seat.

  Only halfway through his lunch and not yet ready for our daily allotment of fresh air in the courtyard, Eli craned his neck up at me, “Where are you going?”

  Where was I going? “I’m going to say hi to him.”

  Eli made a face like I’d farted. “Why?”

  I looked back at Porter. “Because when I don’t understand something, I investigate it . . . that’s why.”

  Eli shook his head and took a bite from his pie-shaped, pizza-flavored cardboard. “Well if he stabs you, it’s your own fault. You’re not supposed to poke the bears through the cage, you know.”

  I ignored him.

  As I approached, Porter didn’t even stir, but I had the distinct impression that he absolutely knew I was coming.

  When I was only a few feet from his table, he opened one eye and used it like a laser to scan and identify me, before disinterestedly closing it again. “What do you want?” he barked.

  I stopped and involuntarily glanced at Henry, who was now watching us as he took bites from his sandwich. I really did feel like a small child reaching into the bear’s cage.

  I took a breath. “I wanted to say hello—is that okay with you?”

  At first, he didn’t say anything. He continued to lie there, like a broken hostage. Then, completely unexpectedly, a smirk played across his lips. He opened both eyes, and his foot reached out and kicked one of the chairs out a few inches—apparently his invitation for me to sit.

  “It’s your life,” he said. He sat up a little straighter, folded his hands across his stomach, and continued to watch me, to wait for me to do or say something.