Little Panic
Page 1
Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed, some events have been reordered or combined, and some individuals are composites.
Copyright © 2018 by Amanda Stern
Reading Group Guide copyright © 2018 by Amanda Stern and Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963706
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-1192-7 (hardcover); 978-1-5387-1191-0 (ebook)
E3-20180510-NF-DA
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note on Sources
I Am Not a Clock
Intelligence Test: Number Concepts
Not the Right Kind of Human
June 1981: Language and Learning Evaluation: Developmental History
Maybe I Am Not a Person
June 1981: Language and Learning Evaluation: Presenting Problem
How to Say What’s Wrong
Intelligence Test: Picture Completion
The System of the World
June 1981: General Observation and Behavior
Countdown to Karen Silkwood
Psychological Test: Thematic Apperception
The Underside of Perfect
June 1981: Summary of Test Results
My Real Family
June 1981: Summary of Test Results
Not-Melissa
Intelligence Test: Comprehension
Someone Kicked the Earth
June 1981: Summary of Test Results
If Time Were a Dog
Intelligence Test: Maze Tracing
Oh How We Glowed
Intelligence Test: Detecting Absurdities
Scapegoat
Frankie Bird
June 1981: Summary of Test Results
Jinx
June 1981: Summary of Test Results
Yes, No, Maybe, I Don’t Know
Listen Carefully and Say Exactly What I Say
Normal-Sized
A Beautiful, Gorgeous Life
A Stay-Behind Kid
June 1981: Summary of Test Results
The Bright Side
June 1981: Summary of Test Results
The Drainpipe Man
A Word Never Means Only One Thing
June 1981: Conclusion
A Sense of Rightness
Hunky Dory
June 1983: Summary of Test Impressions
My Life Stained the World
1984: Dr. Parker Prentice
I’m the Test to Solve
1984: Dr. Parker Prentice
Everywhere I Look, Families
1985: Dr. Nancy Weinreb
Anarchy
1984: Dr. Parker Prentice
When I Turn Eighteen
1984: Dr. Parker Prentice
What If I Give Birth to Myself?
Who Doesn’t Want to Be in a Play?
1984: Dr. Parker Prentice
One Right Way to Be a Person
1986: Dr. Wallace
Homeless
I Am a Pinball Machine
The System Is the Problem
The Dread, the Relief
Waiting to Move On
The Body
Waited My Whole Life to Be Normal
Forever Mama
Take Care of the Animals
Certainty
To Be the Same
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Amanda Stern
Reading Group Guide
Newsletters
For my parents, Eve and Eddie,
and for every little panicker and their loved ones.
Author’s Note on Sources
The images and IQ test questions that run throughout this book came from a variety of sources. The first is, believe it or not, my memory. When you take as many IQ tests as I have, they stick to your anxiety and never let go. Where I drew blanks, I turned to the actual tests and their guidebooks. They include: WAIS Object Assembly (The Psychological Corporation, 1955); Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence by Lewis M. Terman and Maud A. Merrill (Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 102 (Form L / 4); WAIS Manual, Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale by David Wechsler (The Psychological Corporation, 1955); WAIS Object Assembly H (The Psychological Corporation, 1955). The images that appear are renditions inspired by Stanford-Binet and WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) picture-completion and design cards.
Other books I read to refresh my memory and accurately portray the sequence of testing include: Capturing the Essence: How Herman Hall Interpreted Standardized Test Scores by James Shapiro (Joukowsky Family Foundation, 2004); A Method of Measuring the Development of the Intelligence of Young Children by Alfred Binet and Th. Simon (Chicago Medical Book Co., 1915); Emotional Disorders of Children: A Case Book of Child Psychiatry by Gerald H. J. Pearson, MD (Hayne Press, 2011); Diagnostic Psychological Testing by David Rapaport, Merton M. Gill, and Roy Schafer (International Universities Press, 1968); Foundations of Psychological Testing: A Practical Approach by Leslie A. Miller and Robert L. Lovler (SAGE, 2015). Since 1977 I have kept journals, and I also used those as reference.
I Am Not a Clock
Time sticks numbers on the world and marks spaces I can’t see. My teacher says the hands do this, and clocks are how we know when to come and go, but I am not a clock, and I always know when I have to leave my mom.
I don’t have a watch. My best friend, Melissa, does. When I learn to read time on a clock, I can get one, too.
“See? The small hand is on the two. The big hand is on the three,” Melissa says. “And if you cover it, you can see it glow.”
I nod. We are standing next to the bright light of the baby chick’s cage, across the room from the fluffy red reading rug, and I’m hot. Does time glow when you hold your hand over its numbers, or only watches? I don’t ask in case I’m supposed to already know the answer. I sneak a quick glance at our classmates, who are playing a clock game I don’t understand. Our teacher, Allegra, asked Melissa to help me, but I know I’m being left behind.
Melissa’s fingers are gummed with orange juice from recess. I duck my eyes down to the trapped neon, green under our cupped hands. The raised black plastic surrounds the clock glass like a medieval fortress, but the numbers are just horses standing in a circle—they mean nothing to me. I like the
watch’s buckled bigness and I want one around my wrist for the comfort, the extra weight when my body turns into a leaf and floats away. Maybe Melissa will let me try hers on.
When I look back, Melissa’s face is bigger than before. She’s pushed in close to me, warming the air with her nearness, making energy out of the nothing between us. The sudden change reminds me of the truth about time only I seem to know: It can’t be trusted. To me, time feels good or bad, but to everyone else, time isn’t a feeling, it’s something outside their bodies they can see; it doesn’t hurt them. If time is visible to others, why won’t anyone catch it and make it stop, so I never have to leave my mom? Maybe the meaning of time is taking people away from each other.
“So…what time is it?” Melissa’s nose is an urgent inch away. Her eyebrows are impatient. I feel the dread before school every day; I feel the dread leading up to weekend visits with my father. I know something is wrong with me. I feel the dread all the time.
Our classmates are running clockwise on the reading rug, calling out minutes and hours from the center of the room. Their clapped vibrations catch in the middle of my body; their carefree jumps pass from the floor into my feet and knees.
Allegra claps twice, and everyone freezes. In the corner of my eye, I watch Naomi whispering to Kyra, eyes locked on me. Melissa asks again, but I still don’t know the answer. Once I understand what they do, we can join the game, but until then, I’m keeping Melissa stuck. My lungs feel tight. What if she’s worried I’ll never let her go?
“You can play with them if you want,” I tell Melissa. “You don’t have to stay with me.” I don’t mean it. The instant I say it, I am homesick for her.
“I can’t,” Melissa says, frustrated. “Not until you know the time.” She lifts her wrist to my face and lumps out my view. “How ’bout now? What time is it now?” She’s not even looking at me. Outside of my mother, my sister, and my brother, Melissa is my favorite person. Her hair is always a little tangled, and her dresses are always the wrong size, so she looks messy, like me. We have lots in common. When I don’t understand something, she waits for me. When I accidentally suck my fingers at school, she knocks them out of my mouth or signals from across the room—a tug on her hair; but now something sounds gone. She’s not being motherly, and her voice rings the emergency feeling in my body telling me to hurry up, hurry up. This makes the world speed up and everything goes double.
“Is it a.m. or p.m.?” Melissa thinks she’s helping, but she’s not.
I look at the board where a chalk sun rises over a.m., and the moon sinks down to p.m.
“It’s a.m.,” I say. There is too much going on around me. I am in nineteen different places at once.
“No, it’s p.m.”
“But the sun is out,” I say, pointing.
“At twelve things turn p.m.,” she explains.
“Then what turns everything a.m.?”
“Twelve,” she says. “There are two twelves. One turns everything p.m., and the other turns everything a.m.”
I look back at the clock. Melissa steps in and out of her clogs.
“Where’s the other twelve?” I ask.
“The one twelve is two twelves,” she says. “All the numbers happen twice.”
“When?” How can one number mean two things? This makes no sense to me.
Melissa pushes her lips together, frustrated. “When the clock says.”
Does everything mean two things? When Allegra writes things on the calendar, like “Class Picnic” or “Field Trip,” they become true. Before she wrote them, they didn’t exist. Before I was born, I didn’t exist either, and after I die I won’t exist again. What else of the world can’t I see?
I look back at the watch on Melissa’s dark-haired wrist. Two hands stand perfectly still while a third skips past in a race by itself. How is 2 p.m. different from 1 p.m.? They both feel exactly the same, and they both happen over and over, day in and day out. Maybe they even happen at the same time. Time changes, hands move, but the same things don’t always happen at the same time. If someone fell down every Tuesday at 2 p.m. in front of me, then I’d always know, Oh, today is Tuesday, and it’s 2 p.m.!
If I never understand, will I become a stay-behind kid who stops growing older? No one says it’s possible to just not-learn something, which means it doesn’t happen to regular people, only people like me. None of my friends have to watch their mom all the time to make sure she doesn’t die or disappear.
My mom tells me over and over that nothing bad will happen to me, or to her, or to my big sister, Kara, or to my brother, Eddie, or to anyone when I leave home. She says, “Trust me.” I do, but I also know with my body that bad things happen. If I turn away for just one second, the world might swallow my mom, or me, and I will never find her again. I worry that I’m the only person who knows about this, and I am in charge of this knowing, which is not a job I want.
Melissa starts playing with her necklace. A bright yellow M. “It’s really not that hard. I promise,” she says. A spicy-cool peppermint rises sad from my belly and closes hot and tight in my throat. I want to cry. This means she agrees with Allegra, who acts like there is only one type of world, one way to feel and be and think, and even one way of knowing. I am beginning to worry all people think this way.
“Can’t you just tell me?” I ask.
“I’m not allowed,” she says. “You’re supposed to learn it by yourself.”
If my mom were here, she’d tell me. At home she always tells me the time so I don’t have to do it myself. Is Melissa changing her mind about me? Is she ashamed to be my friend?
“The game’s almost over,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.” I can’t hear my voice.
“It’s okay,” she tells me and then leans down. “It’s twenty after two,” she hot-whispers.
“But…I don’t even see a twenty,” I say.
Melissa sucks in an inside-out breath and sighs. “The four is twenty. And the three is fifteen, and the two is ten and like that.”
Why isn’t the two just two and the four just four? If everything really does mean two things, why can’t I ever understand the second thing?
The sound in the classroom has quieted. My classmates have stopped running; they’re staring. Everyone is waiting for me to get it: Melissa, my family, my teacher, the class, the street, the Village, the entire city; everyone in the world is waiting, but I will never get it. Something is wrong with me, and no one is helping me fix it.
My body feels drained, like I’ve just finished ten back-to-back relay races, and my head is crowded with cloudy chatter whose words don’t make sense. I want to go home, where I’m safe, and get back into bed with my mom. Everyone is ahead of me; I’m always trying to catch up, but I never do. I’m always the littlest and the last to understand. I picture their brains with long legs racing down the block, but my brain has little-kid legs, too short to keep up. Melissa understands things on the first try, but not me. The space between us is growing; I can feel her pulling away, and I’m afraid she’ll stop being my friend. A burning glows in my throat when people leave. The only way to keep my family close, to keep my friends, is to try to make my brain keep up.
“You get it now?” Melissa asks, eager for me to say yes.
The edges of the room smudge with black fog, and a slow suction pulls me away from her, from all of them. Soon my classmates will be far ahead of me. I’ll watch them move without me to the grade above, and the grade after that, and they’ll go to college and get married and have babies and families and jobs and houses, and I’ll be right here, still trying to tell time, still trying to understand the secret second thing, stuck and alone and six forever. Maybe like the number twelve, there are two worlds. They’re in one together, while I’m in mine alone.
Everyone wants me to learn how to read time, but no one understands that I don’t want more ways that say good-bye.
Intelligence Test: Number Concepts
This is
a clock that is missing some numbers. You have to figure out which numbers are missing. Can you see which number is missing? No, eleven is right there, see it? What number should be here? Yes, good, twelve. Now, can you point to the minute hand? Are you sure that’s the minute hand? Right, good, yes…Can you put the hands at nine fifteen? No, no…Three is fifteen, remember? If it’s nine fifteen, can you tell me what time it was a half hour ago? Do you want to say your words out loud, or would you rather keep nodding? Nodding, okay. Look at this clock. You have to draw the numbers and the hands. Can you draw noon? Can you show me where twelve is? Can you put your pencil on twelve? Good. Now draw a little line. Now where do you draw the minute hand?…Are you okay? Dizzy? Do you want some water? Do you need a snack? What will help with your dizziness? You want to go visit your mom? Okay. Okay, let’s stop for now. Let’s take a little break.
Not the Right Kind of Human
I’ve been tested for ambidexterity, amblyopia, astigmatism, auditory processing disorder, focal dystonia, and essential blepharospasm (eye twitching). I’ve been evaluated in language, learning, speech, and motor skills; tested for visual and hearing disabilities; rated on intelligence, cognition, aptitude, personality, development, and functioning. I’ve undergone Wepman’s Auditory Discrimination Test and Auditory Memory Battery, the Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration, the Beery Tests of Oral Comprehension, the Draw-a-Person Test, the Denckla rapid automatized naming test, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the Detroit Test of Learning Aptitude, the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, the Spache Diagnostic Reading Scales tests, the McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities test, the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children test, Frostig’s Developmental Test of Visual Perception, the Gray Oral Reading Tests, Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test, and neuropsychological batteries including the Wide Range Achievement Test, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales test, four times each.
I’ve pointed to pictures of shapes, cartoons, numbers, and letters, hoping my final answer matched what belonged in the empty grid. I’ve told them what was wrong with that picture, what was silly about it. I’ve drawn pictures and written stories. I’ve recited number sequences backward and forward. I’ve reconstructed cube patterns in the allotted time. After a while, all the patterns began to look the same.