Anything but Typical

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  The Storyboard home page rolls on to the screen, bit by bit, from the top down. I had to get special permission to go to this website. My mother had to write a letter and even the principal, Dr. T., had to approve. And then the librarian, who was not Miss Leno, but the one before her, unblocked the site for me. The school had to validate that all Storyboard users are under seventeen and that the site is monitored. There is a Storyboard site for adults. But that one is completely separate.

  Now all I need to do is type in my screen name and password. But Miss Leno has not walked away the way she should. She is still standing nearby. Usually she walks around the library asking kids if they need help, or she sits behind her desk and checks out books. Or goes into the back room and I don’t know what they do back there, but I wish she would go now.

  I will focus on my Storyboard screen name and password. There are only twenty-two minutes left in this period, and I need to see if I got a response to my last posting. Miss Leno makes a scratchy sound from her throat while the final graphics for my website start to load on the screen. She has still not walked away.

  I am trying to remember my list of the things a person could want but doesn’t tell you what it is. Sometimes they just want to say something, and they are waiting for you to look at them before they will say it. That is often the case. But Miss Leno was already doing a lot of talking without me looking at her, so that’s probably not it.

  Sometimes people stand around when they are waiting for you to do or say something. Something they think you should do or say. So they just wait, like that’s going to help you understand what it is they want you to say or do.

  It doesn’t.

  “And I am sure Jason wants to say thank you, don’t you, Jason?” Miss Leno finally gets it out.

  I want so badly to check my story posting.

  I am very grateful that Aaron helped me to get on my computer, but now I just really want to view my website, and I don’t understand what Miss Leno wants me to do. I can’t say thank you to Aaron; he is not here anymore. I can hear his voice. He is all the way across the room by the card catalog now, and if I get up, I could lose my computer all over again. Does she want me to say thank you to Maggie? Maggie doesn’t want me to talk to her. Even Miss Leno must know that. Besides, she didn’t want to get up and give me the computer. She just didn’t want Aaron not to like her.

  All I need to do is log on and scroll down to my entry. If someone has written to me, there will be a number next to my name. All I can do is keep my eyes on the screen.

  “Well, Mr. Blake. Showing a little appreciation would go a long way with your fellow classmates,” Miss Leno says. Her voice is angry, but she is walking away.

  Showing?

  How do you show appreciation? Appreciation is an emotion. It’s a feeling. You can’t draw a picture of it. Why do people want everyone to act just like they do? Talk like they do. Look like they do. Act like they do.

  And if you don’t—

  If you don’t, people make the assumption that you do not feel what they feel.

  And then they make the assumption—

  That you must not feel anything at all.

  Chapter Three

  Every morning I get up, a word pops into my head, usually just before breakfast.

  Just before breakfast and right after I brush my teeth. Or just as I am brushing my teeth. Sometimes I know what the word means, and sometimes I don’t.

  I say it out loud.

  It could be a hard word or it could be an easy one.

  This morning it is “confluence.” I watch myself in the mirror, and I hear the word “confluence.” I am not sure what “confluence” means. I have an idea, but I am not sure. I think it has something to do with coming together. A confluence of ideas. I think I have heard that expression.

  I say it out loud.

  “Confluence.”

  I am looking in the mirror and I am thinking that if I didn’t talk and I didn’t move, if I held my hands at my sides and stood very straight, I’d look like any other twelve-year-old boy. My hair is short and dark. My eyes are nicely formed and light brown in color. My mouth is normal. My lips, an even shape. My skin is good. My teeth are white. My ears don’t stick out, and I know they are clean, even though I can’t see them. I clean them every day.

  Confluence, like two rivers coming together.

  I am like a leaf on a river, riding along the top of the water, not quite floating, not quite drowning. So I can’t stop, and I can’t control the direction I am going. I can feel the water, but I never know which way I am heading.

  But I might feel lucky this day and avoid the sticks and branches scratching and pulling at me.

  My dad tells me there is no such thing as luck, good or bad.

  My dad is the guy who puts the words up on the television while you are watching a basketball game, or a football game, or sometimes baseball. He sits in a trailer outside the arena or the stadium or the field and watches everything on a screen while he types into a computer. He puts up the score, the names, the stats, and interesting facts that his producer tells him to. So he watches a lot of sports.

  And he says there is no such thing as luck.

  Life is what you make of it, my dad says.

  My mother is a different story. That is an expression, since she herself is not really a story. Being able to understand abstract expressions like that is a sign of intelligence. IQ tests are filled with them. Like “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” or “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Part of the scoring on the test depends on how well you can understand and interpret those sayings.

  Lots of neurotypicals don’t even understand them. But I do.

  My mother wants to help me. She wants me to be happy. And I think my mother wants to fix me. She wants me to be more like her, even though she doesn’t seem so happy a lot of the time.

  And if she can’t fix me, at least she wants to explain how I got like this.

  So she is looking for a reason. A reason to explain me.

  It could be:

  The mercury in the DPT vaccines

  A wayward chromosome

  A mutated gene

  Too much peanut butter eaten during the first trimester

  Not enough oxygen during delivery

  Not enough peanut butter (is there such a thing?)

  Smoking during pregnancy (but my mother didn’t smoke)

  Maybe it’s the air pollution, or the fertilizers in the vegetables, or hormones in the milk, acid rain, global warming. Maybe it’s rays coming out of the television. Or the microwave.

  Or maybe it is just me.

  One of the two responses to my story is from someone who calls themselves Nique79, which I think might be like Nick or even Nickie, but people like to spell things differently online. Because maybe your real name, the way you spell it, is already taken.

  My story is about a man, the story I posted on the Storyboard website under the category Miscellaneous, which is where you post anything that is not true fan fiction. All my stories are original.

  The majority of the fan fiction postings are continuations or retellings of someone else’s story, or even movies or television shows, like Harry Potter. Or Star Wars. Or CSI. Or Pirates of the Caribbean. And The Gilmore Girls.

  But my stories are all original, so they don’t get as many hits.

  My story is about a man.

  I wrote a story about a man who can’t talk because he has a giant tumor growing in his throat. He was born with it, but nobody knows that, so they just think he’s really stupid and that he doesn’t have anything to say. So he lives alone at the edge of his village, where he carves fantastic figures out of wood, like little bears juggling and fish jumping up out of the water, sailing through the air, a tiny hummingbird drinking from a flower, and then he carves a little boy for himself to have as a friend. Even though, of course, the wooden boy can’t talk either.

  I know I borrowed a little from the Pinocchio
idea, and I hope nobody will notice that. But they don’t have a Pinocchio category anyway. I click to open the first comment on my story.

  Nique79 writes, Great story. Keep writing.

  The second comment is from PhoenixBird, but I decide to wait until I get home from school to open it. It is like saving the last piece of candy from your Halloween bag, which you shouldn’t do, because it gets hard and sticks to the wrapper, and even if you can pick all the paper off the slimy candy when you try to eat it, it hurts and gets caught in your teeth for a really long time.

  But that’s probably not what I really mean, since eating old Halloween candy doesn’t sound good at all.

  Chapter Four

  There is no explanation for my little brother, Jeremy.

  There doesn’t seem to be a word or label or reason for what he is.

  He simply is.

  He is a typical neurotypical, which means he’s never had an aide in school, and when he wants something or doesn’t want something, nobody seems to have a problem understanding what it is. And even though he is only nine years old, he is better than me at figuring out what other people want from him. On the other hand he is afraid of bananas, and from when he was two and a half until about last year, Jeremy refused to wear sandals. He would kick and scream until his toes were safe inside a clean pair of socks and solid shoes. But nobody thought too much about that. Some of the weird things he does my mother says are “modeled behavior,” which is just another way of saying he learned them from me.

  Like his temper.

  And some of the things Jeremy does that have nothing to do with me get blamed on me anyhow.

  Like how he won’t eat any food on his plate that has touched any other food on his plate. So my mother bought these dishes with separate compartments and said they were for me. But it was always Jeremy who couldn’t take a forkful of his potatoes without getting them all over his meat.

  Not me.

  He does do a lot of talking, but that doesn’t mean anything. Because even though it is harder for me to talk than to listen, and even though it is also hard for me to listen, I think it is much harder for NTs to listen than it is to talk. This is something I have observed over the years.

  When Jeremy was born, everyone was afraid I would hurt him. My mother would carry him down to the basement with her when she did the laundry, and she carried him in his little baby seat into the bathroom with her when she took a shower. Maybe she thought I didn’t notice.

  But I did.

  And whenever they did let me hold him, someone was always right next to me. My grandmother, whose hands shake more than mine, would keep her arm right under the baby, even when I was sitting down and they put him on my lap.

  My grandmother always shouts at me when she talks, like she thinks I am hard of hearing, which is completely the opposite. I hear very, very well. My grandmother smells like chemicals and fake flowers. I know my grandmother when I smell her. I don’t like to look at her face. But I can tell it’s her, every time. I don’t like her very much.

  “You are so good with your new little brother. I can tell you love him very much,” my grandmother said that day. She said each word very slowly and very loudly.

  That was the first time I really understood what a lie was.

  I barely knew my new little brother. He didn’t do anything. I didn’t love him. He pooped in his diaper and then he smelled. And he cried, so I’d have to put my hands over my ears as tight as I could.

  I knew what love was.

  It was how I felt it sometimes when I was with my mother. The way I would sometimes feel just my head or sometimes just my toes and they’d feel warm. And I felt safe with my mother. I could breathe easily. I knew I didn’t love my new little brother.

  But my daddy told me I would.

  Soon, he told me. Soon Jeremy would be my best friend. He would want to play with me more than anyone else in the world. He would let me share all his toys, and he would laugh when I made a joke. My dad was teaching me some good jokes to tell.

  “Soon” meant I had to wait another month until Jeremy could even smile and another ten months at least until he would be able to walk. And then he would probably follow me around the house and want to do everything I was doing.

  But not yet.

  All Jeremy did then was cry and poop and take up space in my mother’s arms and make it hard for me to breathe.

  I was looking at the skin at the top of Jeremy’s head that you could see because he didn’t have any hair. There was a tiny round hole in his skull that moved in and out. I wondered how he could do that. My mother said it’s called a fontanelle and that all babies have one. But I wasn’t sure about that.

  He moved it up and down, in and out, in a perfect rhythm.

  Maybe he was going to be really amazing. I just had to wait.

  “Don’t you, Jason?” Now my grandmother was talking even louder, which I already knew people would do when they thought I wasn’t listening. But I was always listening, I just didn’t have anything to say. “Don’t you just love this little baby boy?”

  My mother had told me I needed to answer when that happened. She had a little sign she’d make with her hands. I needed to say something, no matter how hard it was. If someone asks you a question, you are supposed to say something, especially if they ask it twice. Even though you’d think they’d get the hint the first time. I had already learned that if I concentrated on my mouth long enough, I could get the right words to come out. At least one right word. But most people don’t wait long enough for the right words, so I opened my mouth.

  “No,” I said.

  “You don’t mean that. Of course you love your little brother,” my grandmother said.

  I said it again. “No.”

  That’s when she took my baby brother off my lap.

  Chapter Five

  “Are you going to read your e-mails now?” Jeremy is asking me.

  The best thing about Jeremy is that I don’t ever have to answer him, not with words anyway. And I don’t ever have to look him in the face. He doesn’t even want me to. He likes to talk to me while he is watching TV or reading one of his comic books or biting his nails, which is what he is doing right now. He is very serious about biting his nails. My mom is always telling him to stop, so Jeremy doesn’t ever do it when she can see him. That is one thing I really admire about my little brother. He is very tricky about biting his nails.

  I want him to be a little more quiet about it, though. The clicking noise his teeth make on his fingernails bothers me.

  My hands fly around my head.

  I don’t really think about doing this. It is more like my hands know what to do all by themselves. They know it makes my mind feel better.

  “Oh, sorry,” Jeremy says. And he stops. Or he tries to be more quiet about it, I am not sure which, because I keep my eyes on the screen. I am waiting for my Web pages to appear. It won’t take long now that I am home. My computer is faster than the one in the library.

  “So now, are you going to go on the Internet now?”

  But the Internet is not really a place you can go.

  It is not really a net at all, but it is the biggest, most complex place in the whole world. It hosts hundreds of languages, millions of words, billions and billions of bytes of information every single second. And similar to what goes into my brain and what comes out of my mouth, it is very hard to explain.

  But I will try, because I love Jeremy. I tell him about my story on Storyboard.

  “You are the best writer in the whole world, Jason.” Jeremy is still talking. “I bet a hundred million people read your story and you are going to be a famous writer when you grow up.”

  Jeremy knows, because I told him, that probably very few people have viewed my story since I posted it last week and that only two people have written comments. But that is how Jeremy is. He doesn’t think very much about the meaning of the words that come out of his mouth. It took me a long time and more careful observa
tion to figure this out.

  People don’t mean everything they say, my mother has told me. So has my physical therapist.

  Then why do they say it?

  Why do people say things they don’t really mean?

  So far no one has given me a very good answer to that.

  I click on my second response, the one from PhoenixBird, the one I was saving until I got home.

  Now I am home.

  I feel I could have written your story. It is so beautiful. I have to go to cheerleading practice but I can’t wait for your next story.

  I read it again. Sometimes the same words and letters can have different meanings, so you have to be careful.

  “Why are you so quiet, Jason?”

  Jeremy doesn’t mean quiet. I am always quiet. He means still. I can feel my body sitting in this chair. I can feel my feet (inside my shoes, touching the floor) and my legs (flat on the edge of the seat), my head and my arms, my fingers (resting on the keyboard but not pressing down), all at the same time, which I usually can’t do. And none of them is moving.

  I am still.

  I am completely still and I know it.

  I read the comment one more time.

  Because something tells me—

  That this note is from a girl. There are some boy cheerleaders, but I don’t think a boy would admit that.

  So I think PhoenixBird is a girl.

  So I think a girl has just said something nice to me.

  Chapter Six

  Last year for our summer vacation we went to New Jersey.

  Jeremy really wanted to go to Disneyland, but we went to New Jersey. We stayed in a house on the beach. One afternoon Dad and Jeremy drove to Six Flags Great Adventure, because Dad said it was just like Disneyland. I didn’t want to go. I don’t like rides. I don’t like bright lights. And I really don’t like crowds and loud noise.

  Six Flags really isn’t anything like Disneyland, even Jeremy knew that.