That afternoon my dad made my ceiling speak.
“Oh, my,” Suzy says. “How is it I never noticed that before?”
I can tell by the sound that Suzy’s neck must be bent all the way back, her voice bends with it. She is looking up too. She is not coming all the way into my room, but she is close. When I looked up, she looked up.
The letters of the alphabet don’t move, but if I stare at them, some will become blurry and others will move forward, some become darker and others lighter, shades of the blue and red and yellow. I try to spell words, holding on to the letters in my mind and imagining their meaning. Or I can just look at their shapes, as if they had no sound of their own. Just arcs and curves and straight, very straight lines that will never touch but continue forever into infinity.
Some of the letters look like they came from the same family, tall and thin, and their children, the lowercase letters, look exactly like they do. Like M, and N, and T. Others have children that are nothing like their parents. Like they came from a whole other strand of DNA. So you can put the mother and her child right next to each other and they look nothing alike. Like E, and A, and D.
The big D and the little D face in completely opposite directions. They don’t even look at each other. But they are related. They make the same sound.
They are a family.
Part of the whole family of the English alphabet—of letters that have resonance to make words that sound different in different mouths and have different meanings to different people. People even argue about words, and sentences, about speeches and books and letters.
People will say, I didn’t say that. Or, I didn’t mean that. And the other person will say, Yes, you did. I heard you.
You called me a name.
He told me he’d do that. Or this. But he didn’t.
Use your words. Use your words.
They have to be said out loud?
I told you never to do that again.
But I did. And now I am in trouble.
Because I said so.
And there they are, all the twenty-six letters but forty-four sounds called phonemes. If you look closely, there are diphthongs and schwa sounds. Vowels, long and short. And consonants hard and soft. Some people talk in accents, so you would spell the very same word a very different way, if you were to spell it as it sounds.
To you.
Or you.
There are digraphs where two letters make one totally new sound, like th and ch and sh.
As in Shush . . . Shush, I am looking at the letters on my ceiling.
“Get ready to shut down your computer, okay, Jason? And get some sleep,” Suzy says.
I rest my hands on my lap. They are tired. And when I lie down in my bed, I will stop rocking. It is late.
I want to tell Suzy good night. I want to tell her thank you for letting me breathe.
I want the letters to form words in my mouth, but they stay on the ceiling.
“I know, Jason,” she says. “It’s late, but I’m glad I got to see you.”
Then, just as I am about to sign off, PhoenixBird writes me back right away.
She must be sitting at her computer too. Right at this minute, somewhere. She could live in Alaska or right here in Connecticut. But either way she can’t see me.
She says her story is for a school assignment and she really needs to bring up her language arts grade.
Thanks for the help, she writes. I already fixed it up and it’s so much better. I hope I get a good grade. It is for a language arts assignment and I need to get a good grade. My parents are kind of on my case lately. So thanks!
PhoenixBird is worried about school.
Just like me.
By second grade most everyone had caught up to my alphabet and spelling abilities. I wasn’t such a genius anymore, and by third grade I was behind in almost everything else: verbal skills, social performance, physical aptitude, and age-appropriate behavior. (I wasn’t too good at controlling my temper either, but I am better now.)
The teachers started pressuring my mom to have me tested.
A year later the only letters anybody cared about were ASD, NLD, and maybe ADD or ADHD, which I think my mom would have liked better.
BLNT.
Better luck next time.
I just made that up.
Maybe next time was my brother, Jeremy.
Chapter Nine
I hate art class.
Because it is so noisy.
And because Aaron Miller is not in my art class, but Eric Doyle is. Eric Doyle doesn’t look anything like Matthew Iverson from second grade. Not his hair, or his eyeglasses, or his voice—because Eric Doyle can’t make an R sound—but for some reason I keep mixing the two of them up in my mind.
I also hate art class because I do not like Mrs. Hawthorne very much, because Mrs. Hawthorne does not like me. She started to not like me last week when I broke her potter’s wheel. But I don’t know if she liked me very much before that happened.
I didn’t break her potter’s wheel on purpose, but that doesn’t mean it was an accident, because I was angry when it happened. If I hadn’t been angry at Mrs. Hawthorne, I probably wouldn’t have pushed the potter’s wheel by accident. I wanted to push Mrs. Hawthorne, but I knew I couldn’t do that. I was controlling myself like my one-on-one aide, Jane, always told me, but Jane wasn’t with me anymore. And besides, I didn’t know the potter’s wheel would fall over.
“Why did you do that?” Mrs. Hawthorne said.
“Because I am angry at you,” I told her.
The potter’s wheel was attached to a chair, and you were supposed to sit in the chair and put your allotment of wet clay on the wheel, and then the teacher would push the power button and the wheel would spin around. There are some potter’s wheels that you have to spin with your own foot, but this one was electric.
Now it was in three pieces—the chair, the wheel that was still spinning, slowly, and the rest of the metal frame. There was also wet clay all over the floor of the art room and everyone was standing around looking.
I don’t think Mrs. Hawthorne was even that mad. I could hear her voice was loud, but her body was still. And I knew I wasn’t supposed to break things. If this meant I would have to have a one-on-one aide again, it would make my mother very sad.
I was sorry.
When I had broken things at home: the stained-glass hanging by the front door, the wicker laundry basket, the picture frame, the controller for my video game. When nobody could hear me. Nobody could understand. When there were no words in my head, then the thoughts built up inside me and had nowhere to go.
What had made me so angry with Mrs. Hawthorne in the first place? I couldn’t remember anymore.
The energy that left my body and spilled into something else had finally ended and stopped and broke. The noise shattered my ears like a very tight band that was taken off my brain, and it was over.
But it’s never really over.
Things stopped for a while. Everybody stopped, and it was quiet. Everybody was just looking at the mess.
There was the clay on the floor, landed in the shape of a dog, a sleeping dog. A big sleeping dog.
What sound does a dog make?
Did I really make a barking sound?
I don’t remember, but suddenly everyone started laughing, like an explosion in the room. All around me, and that was when Mrs. Hawthorne got mad.
Or sad.
I was sorry. I was really sorry, but everyone was laughing. Their faces stretched out wide. I could see their teeth, and I started laughing too. Nothing felt funny, but I was laughing.
Then Mrs. Hawthorne ran out of the room, and when she was gone, some of the boys threw the clay around the room. I hid behind my hands, but I could hear their voices. One piece landed on her computer. The plastic keys made a hollow sound. Another plop of it hit Marcie Ford and got stuck in her hair. She started crying.
Later some of the parents wanted me out of the classroom. Nobody
told me, but I knew it. The school called us all in for a meeting. I knew my parents went in to the school to talk to Dr. T.
I knew they were in battle mode.
This has nothing to do with having a one-on-one aide, my mother was saying. If another boy had accidentally knocked over a piece of equipment, we wouldn’t be having this meeting. And if the teacher had done her job, my father was saying. But I could have told him it was no use, they couldn’t hear his language either that day.
My dad just wasn’t used to that like I am. So he kept trying to talk.
All the grown-ups assumed I threw the clay, and none of the kids ever said any different, but I don’t think anyone asked them.
Certainly nobody asked me. Even right then at that meeting with my parents.
Later Lara Mok told me her mother said I was dangerous and shouldn’t be in school with the normal kids. That I was disruptive and holding everyone back. That it was only going to get worse.
She didn’t mean for me.
For the NTs, she meant.
For the ones that threw the clay around the room and let me take the blame.
All week Eric Doyle has made barking noises at me when I come into the art room and sit down at my seat.
I am used to it.
Mrs. Hawthorne is trying to be nicer to me.
But I still don’t like art class.
Mrs. Hawthorne shows us how to draw a face, with big eyes, black pupils, a capital letter L for the nose, and a half circle for the mouth all inside an oval circle that doesn’t connect. Mrs. Hawthorne has to draw mine for me. She also helps the girl at the far left table, too, who broke her arm at a gymnastics meet.
Then, when everyone has as close to exactly the same thing on our paper, we are allowed to decorate the face with color. The girls put on eyelashes and red lips. The boys blacken the teeth and put on baseball caps. We do this project a few times every year. At Christmastime we can make the face into an elf or a Santa. For Halloween it can turn into a witch or a cat. It is a leprechaun if we color it green and Mrs. Hawthorne makes the ears like triangles.
I am staring at the lines on the paper. I don’t see a face at all. I see straight black lines and white space. I see the distance from the top of the page to the arc and from the parallel lines to the end of my paper.
I see circles and half circles and the place where they intersect. I see the place where Mrs. Hawthorne lifted her marker and didn’t connect the two lines. There are white spots like bubbles on the surface of the bathtub.
But nothing that looks like a face.
Nothing like the shadows, and pores, the hairs, the curves, all the spots and wrinkles and blotches, the follicles, the wetness of the eye, saliva, teeth when it is laughing, all the planes and dimensions of a face.
And they say I can’t recognize a face.
But Mrs. Hawthorne is going to be mad again if I don’t start drawing.
“What are you doing, Jason?”
Mrs. Hawthorne’s voice is like sand, like her words are being rubbed over sand. It hurts my ears to hear her voice. There is not a nice person behind that voice. I know I am right about that.
“Jason, you’re not even trying.”
So I put my hands over my ears, even though I know I am not supposed to do that.
My mom and dad fought really hard so that I could stay in class like everybody else, but I miss Jane. Jane would have known what to do.
She would have colored in my picture for me, or she would have said something to Mrs. Hawthorne so her sandy voice wouldn’t burn my ears. She would take my hands down from my ears or my eyes and hold them in a way that wouldn’t make me mad. She was round and soft and smelled like Dove soap and cookies.
But I don’t need a one-on-one aide anymore.
That’s what my mother says. That’s what it says in my IEP, which is more letters. More initials that define who I am.
I’ll be on my own one day, my mother says. I need to start learning how to take care of myself.
But what I need now is to get Mrs. Hawthorne away from me.
Now I am sitting in the main office waiting for my dad to come and pick me up from school. That is also what it says in my IEP—that I get to go home from school whenever I feel like I can’t handle it anymore. Or one of my teachers thinks that.
But this time I am sure it was me who thought it.
Usually my head would be ticking. I couldn’t be breathing very well. The doors opening and closing down the hall echo, because the walls are all glass in here. The phone rings a funny ring. There is a two-way radio. The janitor must be walking by.
Usually I would hide behind my hands.
I know I should feel bad that I am going home from school, but all I can think of is one thing.
I am thinking that when I get home, I can check my website and maybe PhoenixBird has written to me again, and maybe I have one real friend. And that’s all anyone needs, one.
One.
Plus one.
Makes two.
And then I am not as scared.
The word that popped into my brain this morning was “regurgitate.”
Regurgitate.
But I can’t think of how that relates to anything right now.
Chapter Ten
I write pretty much all of my stories using a first-person narrator so that the reader can really get an idea of what is going on inside my character’s head. They can hear the story in that voice, and also so I can get inside my character’s life.
And I can feel what he feels.
You have to decide if you want it to be in past or present tense. And the setting. You have to know where you want your story to take place.
When I get home, I see that PhoenixBird did send me the ending of her story. One day, she wrote, in the village a new baby is born who is different from all the other children before. As this child grows, she wants to help other people. No matter how many times people tell her they don’t need her, she persists. She finds joy in helping people, “in the smallest ways. In the biggest ways.”
Those are her words.
I like them.
“We’re disappointed, Jason. That’s all,” my mother is saying.
“This hasn’t happened all week, Jay-Jay. What happened?” my dad is saying.
Even though I thought I wanted to leave school, even though I got to check my website and write to PhoenixBird, everything felt out of place when I got home from school. It is not a holiday or vacation or a three-day weekend. It’s a Friday, and I am having lunch at home. It is a Friday, and I am home but Jeremy is not. My dad is still here. He hasn’t left for work yet.
My dad is never home when I get home from school.
All these things make my skin itch.
The sun doesn’t look right coming into the kitchen.
I should not be here.
I should be in school.
I can feel my head, everything is in my head. My heart is beating inside my head. The sounds in my ears sound bigger and bigger. My breathing is tight coming in and out of my mouth.
I don’t know what my body is doing anymore.
I don’t want to let my parents down. I don’t want my mother to say she is disappointed. But I couldn’t think about that when Mrs. Hawthorne got too close to me.
I didn’t push her or yell or do anything.
I could have wanted to, but I didn’t.
I got under the table where I couldn’t see her anymore, but she wouldn’t stop her voice, and then the nurse had to come. And then I don’t remember what happened exactly. Whose idea was it for me to come home from school?
I feel my father’s arm all around me. I smell that cologne again, and the stubble of his face is rough, but I know it will not hurt me even though it feels like it could.
I let my dad hold me. He always leaves room for me to breathe. He never bends my back so I feel off balance. When my dad hugs me, I feel his feet holding us both up.
A narrator can be unreliable.
They can be telling the truth or just the truth as they see it. There is a famous book like that, where the narrator is lying. He judges everyone in the book except himself. And sometimes it’s hard to tell what is really going on. Hard to tell what is real and what’s not.
I didn’t do anything to Mrs. Hawthorne to make her send me home.
But lots of people really think The Catcher in the Rye is a great book.
Before I go to bed tonight, I check the Storyboard website and see if anyone else posted anything about my story. And to check if PhoenixBird wrote me back again.
She did.
But her message doesn’t have anything to do with her story or mine. She writes about her dog.
PhoenixBird has a dog named Blanche, who eats Cheerios and Chinese food, salad and even the tomatoes, but not the black olives and not the mushrooms. I would like to meet her dog one day, but I know that will never happen.
This is the kind of thing a friend would write to someone, to someone they wanted to have as a friend. I know I am right about this. I am pretty sure I am right.
Today, PhoenixBird wrote, was Diversity Day at my school.
She told me all about it, how great it was. I write her back, but I am not going to tell her about my day. Not about Mrs. Hawthorne. Not about hiding under the art table.
Something tells me that wouldn’t be a good idea.
Chapter Eleven
Saturday we are going to visit our cousins in Glen Rock. It is my mother’s brother, Uncle Bobby’s house and his wife, Aunt Carol, and their two boys, Seth and Little Bobby. Whenever we visit there, my mom gets very nervous. If Grandma is going to be there too, my mother can’t even find her pocketbook.
“Is everything in the car?”
“Yes, Liz,” my dad tells her. “We’re all set.”
“My pocketbook,” my mom is saying. “Where did I put my pocketbook?”
“It’s on your shoulder.” Jeremy laughs.
But Mom is not laughing. “Jeremy, your shirt. What did you get on your shirt? That was a clean shirt a minute ago. You haven’t even eaten anything. Go change your shirt. Carl,” she says to my dad, “go help Jeremy change his shirt.”
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