Anything but Typical

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  Then she turns to me, and I see her face change. The wrinkles all bunched up in her forehead smooth out. Her mouth drops, but she isn’t frowning like she is mad or sad. If I hadn’t seen this expression before, I would have no idea what it meant.

  “Jason, your belt,” my mother says, so softly. She has asked me this so many times. “Can you just loosen it a notch or two? Just for today?”

  I can’t.

  I’ve tried, but it feels awful. I can feel the material of my pants sliding on my waist, moving and rubbing. I hate it. I know it looks funny. I know kids in school say things about my pants and my belt, how tight it is. How it bunches up in the back. One boy asked me if I was expecting a flood, and I had to ask Aaron Miller what that meant.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him, Jay-Man,” Aaron told me, but I wanted to know, and I made him it explain it to me.

  “Oh,” I said. I looked down at my ankles and saw that my pants were pulled so tightly that my socks did show.

  I like my shirt tucked in. I don’t like how it feels when it’s loose.

  My mother takes one of the chairs from the dining room table and sits down so she is right next to where I am standing. I am standing, ready to go to Uncle Bobby’s, waiting. I am waiting for everyone else to be ready.

  “It’s okay, Jason. I’m sorry.” She doesn’t pull me toward her, but she rests her head on my shoulder. “It’s me. It’s just me. I just can’t stand hearing all about Seth anymore. And now, oh jeeze, Little Bobby. You’d think he’d won a Nobel Prize already.”

  My mother’s hair smells like Herbal Essence and Curls Rock.

  I remember when I was really little, when I was in nursery school, I refused to wear pants with zippers. I couldn’t stand the feeling of the waistband and the stiffness of the material. My mother bought me leggings from this special catalog. They came in all different colors, and they were made of one hundred percent cotton. And she never made me wear pants.

  I could run and lie down and nap in her arms when I was tired.

  Then, when I got to kindergarten, one of the kids asked me if I was a ballet dancer.

  “No,” I said.

  Then another boy asked me the same thing, even though he already knew, because he was there when I answered the first time.

  This time I was more sure. “No,” I said.

  Then the last time one of the kids in my class asked me if I was a ballerina, my mother happened to be there listening.

  And she took away all of my leggings.

  “Isn’t it funny, Jason?” my mother is saying. “Isn’t it funny that when you were really little you wouldn’t wear a belt at all? Isn’t that funny?”

  I love my mother so much.

  “Remember, Jason?” she is saying. “Remember those leggings?”

  We are both remembering the same thing.

  “Those leggings?” I repeat what she has said, so she will know this.

  “No?” my mother is saying. “You don’t? It’s okay. It was a long time ago. Well, let’s go, shall we?”

  Uncle Bobby is a big man as men go. He owns his own construction company. So even though he didn’t go to school nearly as long as my dad, he makes three times as much money.

  Yeah, and his wife has had more work done than any one of Uncle Bobby’s biggest clients.

  “But don’t ever repeat that,” my mother tells us in the car.

  I don’t even know what she means.

  Aunt Carol has food out when we get there, big bowls and little bowls. Uncle Bobby asks everyone what they want to drink, except me.

  “What can I get Jason?” Uncle Bobby asks my father.

  “You can ask him yourself, Bob,” my dad answers.

  “How about a Coke then, son?” I can watch Uncle Bobby’s big feet and his big shoes head off into the kitchen.

  My mother said I could bring my PlayStation Portable, and she lets me take it out. I also have a book. Jeremy and Little Bobby like to play with action figures, so that’s what they are doing.

  “You better run, Batman,” my brother is saying. He is bouncing his little toy up and down in his hand.

  “No, never, Mr. Freeze. This will be the end of you once and for all.” Little Bobby is also bouncing his action figure. They bang the two toys into each other and make noises.

  This makes Jeremy happy, and I don’t understand at all what he is doing, because those little plastic figures don’t look anything like the real superheroes, not in the cartoons or the movie versions, but I am happy for him.

  “Seth, why don’t you show Jason your new computer?” Aunt Carol says.

  Seth has been sitting on the couch in the living room the whole time, eating from the different bowls of food. Aunt Carol has been telling us all about Seth, even though he is sitting right there. I hear that Seth is on the math team and that he volunteers to tutor kids in the elementary school on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I hear that Seth is in advanced language arts and that he made the travel soccer team.

  My mother looks over to me from time to time and tries to catch my eye, and then she arches her back and lifts her chin way up in the air. This is her way of telling me to sit up straight.

  I sit up and I forget and then back down.

  My mother looks tired of doing this.

  Seth has also been asked to model for a local department store.

  “Oh, Seth. A new computer. Jason loves computers. Don’t you, Jason?” my mother says. “He’s so good at computers. I don’t know a thing.”

  The word that came into my head this morning while we were getting ready to visit our cousins was halogen. That’s what I try to think about now.

  “I can’t even turn the darn thing on by myself.” My mother’s laugh doesn’t sound right. “Jason has to help me with everything, don’t you?”

  “So why don’t you show your cousin your new computer, Seth?” Aunt Carol says. “And Aunt Liz and I can get dinner ready.”

  This is what I notice:

  NTs will lie.

  And it’s not that I can’t.

  I could.

  If I wanted to.

  But even when everyone who is listening knows it’s a lie, they can pretend it’s not, and then everybody is lying. The listeners and the tellers.

  And it’s hard for me to tell what is real and what is not.

  Seth tells his mother his computer isn’t working.

  He says the hard drive needs to be rebooted and he has to call technical assistance because there is some special override code.

  And he says he’d be happy to do all that, but that once he starts the process he can’t stop, and it might take an hour or more. He says he doesn’t want it to interfere with dinner. And Aunt Carol and my mother both say they don’t want that to happen.

  Then we get into Seth’s room, because his mother makes him take me anyway, he sits right down at his computer, which seems to be working just fine, and starts playing Halo.

  “Don’t touch anything,” he tells me.

  I can look at his back while he sits in his chair. I can hear the banging of his fingers on the keyboard. I already knew I wouldn’t get to check my website until I got home tonight, but I am not upset about that.

  I sit down on the rug in the middle of the room.

  I can see the green leaves of a tree outside Seth’s bedroom window that move with the wind, and even though I can’t hear it, it makes a kind of music. A silent dance, swaying in a rhythm I know is there. All over the tree, branches lift and drop, and the light falls from one leaf to the one below, and one tiny shadow on the bark is like the youngest child, walking behind his family, lost in his own world and perfectly content.

  “What’s wrong with you, man?” Seth has spun around in his chair. “Your brother is talking to you,” Seth is telling me.

  Jeremy puts his hand on my face, small and warm and sweaty. He came into the dark room when the sun moved behind a cloud, and now the only light is the glow from Seth’s computer. I can hear the chimes of
his IMs, sending and receiving. Tiny bells.

  “Jason?” Jeremy is saying. When I look away from the window, he takes his hand from my face. “Can you reach something for us? For me and Bobby.”

  His breath smells like Starbursts.

  “What are you asking him for?” Seth is saying.

  Jeremy always asks me to do things for him. He asks me to zip his jacket. He asks me to check his spelling. To carry things that are too heavy for him. To push him on the swings. Before he agrees to taste something he’s never eaten before, Jeremy asks me if he’ll like it.

  “Can you, Jason?” Jeremy says to me again.

  He must want me to reach something that is too high for him to reach. Of course I will.

  “If it’s up that high, you’re not supposed to have it. Did you ever think of that?” Seth says. I know he is talking to me and Jeremy, but I can’t look up. I don’t know what I will see. There is his voice and his presence in the room, and the darkness of the sun behind the clouds, the chiming of his computer. There is the creaking of his chair, and the scent of his clothing as he walks toward us. It all sounds too loud and too angry.

  Even the fan whirling on the ceiling of the room is yelling at me in a mechanical voice that has no words. Seth should just stop.

  Being.

  This is when you are supposed to leave a situation.

  Walk away.

  Breathe.

  “Yeah, good. Why don’t you and your defective brother get out of my room already,” Seth says. “You’re smelling the place up.”

  The rest happens very fast.

  Then Seth is yelling and then he falls over his swivel chair. The swivel chair spins out from under Seth’s weight and careens into his stack of CDs, which then tumble onto the rug. Then there is the cracking, crackling noise of CD covers being stepped on and snapping into two. Or maybe three.

  Or more.

  Jeremy’s hand, I know it’s Jeremy’s, pulling me.

  And then outside Seth’s bedroom door there is air again.

  “Good shot, Jason,” my brother is saying to me.

  He is happy, but I know our parents will not be, for some reason.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell you kicked Seth,” Jeremy says to me.

  I look up quickly at Jeremy’s face. It is bursting with a smile, and then it is bursting with laughter. Me too.

  I see the light coming in the skylight above the hall, freed from behind the clouds, and the laughter. I feel them both, in my head and my hands and my eyes.

  Chapter Twelve

  This night I am writing a new story to post on Storyboard. The whole idea came to me on the car ride home from Uncle Bobby’s. It is about a dwarf—not a midget, because dwarfs do not like to be called midgets, even though there was a time when “dwarf” was the bad word and “midget” was better.

  But now it’s the complete opposite.

  Titles. Names. More words, the same twenty-six letters strung together that sometimes hurt someone and sometimes don’t.

  My dwarf in my story is named Bennu. He is one of those disproportional dwarfs, so his arms and legs are very short in proportion to his body, and it makes his head look big. But basically he is pretty comfortable with his height and his looks, and lots of other normal people of normal height like him. But being a dwarf is a handicap. He is not just different, but defective.

  He has his family, who are all normal height. That is the way it happens. He could even have normal-sized kids, if he got a girlfriend and then got married. If that ever happened.

  I put Bennu in a made-up world, so I got to make up all the names and all the different kinds of people who live there. Life is definitely harder for Bennu, not only because people stare at him and sometimes laugh when he goes out (which is bad enough), but for other real reasons. Like he can’t reach things other people his age can, like door handles or the top shelf of the fridge where the milk is.

  There are many doors he can’t open by himself.

  And some things about his genetic condition are painful. His back hurts because his spine is compressed, and his legs sometimes ache.

  Sometimes just being Bennu is very hard to be.

  Names are very important when writing a story.

  I think a long time when I am giving a character a name. I have to know everything about them before I know what they will be called. You have to take several things into consideration when you give a character a name. Who they are, where they are from, in what time period your story is set. And sometimes names can have symbolic meanings, like in the famous book To Kill a Mockingbird. I haven’t read it yet, but you can search online and learn everything about famous books. I guess you could even pretend you have read a book and pretty much get away with it just by reading one of those websites.

  Some people, like teachers and librarians and other adults, like to say that names are not important.

  Like sticks and stones.

  But they are wrong.

  Every word you choose means something you think it means, and more.

  Like if a person is different, that is a good thing.

  But if they have a defect, that is not.

  Words.

  Names.

  Letters.

  I post this first installment of my story at 9:13 p.m.

  I think, it’s late, but I am wondering if PhoenixBird will read it tonight.

  And I wonder if she will notice. Will she figure it out?

  I wonder if she will get it.

  Bennu is the Egyptian name for the mythical bird who rose from its own ashes. A bird whose song was so beautiful that everyone who heard it had to stop to listen and whose tears were known to heal the wounded. Bennu is the Egyptian word for phoenix. For phoenix bird.

  Chapter Thirteen

  My dad comes into my room to tell me to turn off my computer and get ready for bed.

  It’s easier to be around my dad, because he talks less. That doesn’t mean I don’t love my mom, but a lot of the time she makes me feel like she wants something from me. It pulls me, like a drain draining water after a bath, that sucking noise it makes at the very end. Not many people wait around long enough to hear that sound, but I do.

  Anyway, I know my dad wants to talk to me about what happened at Uncle Bobby’s. He’s waited all evening to talk to me.

  But I knew it was coming. For a long while my dad doesn’t say anything. He just looks up at our ceiling.

  “Are things okay, Jason?” he asks me. He keeps his eyes away from me.

  I nod. I know he can see me from the side.

  “Is there anything bothering you that you want to talk about?” he asks.

  A couple of years ago I figured out that my dad’s arms around me don’t really make the darkness, the anger, the sadness go away. They just postpone it for a while. This doesn’t stop me, though, from wondering what my dad can help me with and what he can’t. And what will happen when he’s not around anymore.

  Who will take care of me?

  My dad is sitting at the end of my bed.

  “It’s okay to be sad, Jason. It’s okay to be afraid,” my dad is saying. “It’s even okay to be angry, Jason.”

  I want to believe him.

  “It’s not okay to hurt someone else.”

  Now it’s hard to breathe.

  “Calm down, Jason. And don’t pull your hair,” my father says. He takes my hands and puts them at my sides. My hands are feeling like flying. My hair is itching, maybe burning. Maybe this is what it feels like to be on fire.

  “Jason.” My father’s voice is louder, stronger. “You’re not in trouble and I am not mad at you.”

  Mad.

  Sad.

  Dad.

  That is a word family. Like cat, hat, bat.

  I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry you are so sad about me.

  All you have to do is change one letter, and the whole word is different. Like people. I wish I could change one letter and make everything better.

 
But I can’t, Daddy.

  After I kicked Seth, and he fell, and then somebody stepped on a lot of his CDs, Aunt Carol came running up the stairs. My mother was right behind her. Seth was yelling so much, so loud. The cracking of the CD covers. The thumping of the footsteps on the stairs. Heels clicking on the wooden floor, coming closer. Harsh snapping of hard plastic.

  “Jason, what did you do? Jason!” Aunt Carol started shouting.

  “What happened?” my mother said, but she wasn’t really asking that.

  And Jeremy got really mad. He was saying things, fast words. Talking about me, his brother, how I needed to help him, about Seth, about reaching something in Little Bobby’s closet. I could hear his fear, and his anger.

  “We were allowed to have it,” Jeremy was saying. He said it again.

  It was all too much. Seth was moaning and holding his leg. His mother was screaming for Uncle Bobby to get some ice.

  “For God’s sake, Bobby, hurry. Ice.”

  When Uncle Bobby, my mother, Aunt Carol, Seth still on the floor, Jeremy, Little Bobby, and then my dad were all in the room, I felt the ceiling explode over my head. It was my head. My head exploded.

  There was no way to stop all the molecules that started penetrating my skin.

  My hands flew off my body.

  My body flew into a million little pieces.

  I could smell the fresh coffee that Aunt Carol and my mother had put up for dessert as we hurried out the front door. I could smell the pastries she would have put out, and I wanted one.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I tell Aaron Miller I have a girlfriend.

  “Hey, that’s great,” he says to me.

  We are in the cafeteria: loud voices, bright lights, strong food smells, and garbage. Jane used to sit with me every day. Now I have to find someone on my own. I am grateful I see Aaron sometimes.