Anything but Typical

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  I sat down with Aaron and the two other boys he is sitting with.

  “What’s her name?” he asks.

  And this is when I realize I probably shouldn’t have said anything.

  Because I don’t know her name, not her real name.

  But one of the other boys at the table starts talking about something else. He is talking about the game last night, and that’s good. Besides, my mother wants me to buy lunch this year, so I have a tray in front of me, and now I have to figure out what everything is and what I can eat.

  There are only eighteen minutes left of lunch period. I have to concentrate.

  I barely finish, but I was lucky, because today was meat loaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, chilled peaches, dinner rolls, and ice cream cups, and I could eat it all.

  “Well, Jay-Man, guess you were hungry,” Aaron is saying to me. He is getting up from the table, scrunching his paper bag into a wrinkly brown ball. I know he will throw it into the trash can from here.

  He does.

  “So maybe someday we will get to meet this girl, huh?” he says to me. He rubs the top of my head, and he is gone.

  Meet this girl?

  That could never happen.

  I don’t even know her name.

  The rest of the day is without incident.

  Although it bothers me.

  Because up until that moment it hadn’t bothered me at all.

  And now it does all the rest of the day.

  What is PhoenixBird’s name?

  Then I start to imagine what she looks like, and that she must have hair and a face, hands and legs and feet with shoes. Well, I can’t really imagine what she looks like, but I have the thought that she must look like something that has a face and hair, maybe long.

  And girl shoes.

  A girl’s face. A girl’s voice.

  “What are you doing, Jason?”

  And before you know it, I have torn the first page of my math workbook into many, many small pieces that lie on the floor by my desk. When I look down, I see them. It looks like snow, and I know we learned that no two snowflakes are alike. Of the billions and hundreds of billions, no two are exactly the same. The staggering number of possibilities within the hundreds of configurations of each water molecule of vapor as it turns into a hexagonal form of ice. And even though it looks flat, it’s not. It is an amazingly complex structure, an amazingly beautiful thing. So even though teachers make you fold paper and cut out little triangles, spread it out and tape it to the window, snow is not really flat. It is not that simple.

  “Jason, this is unacceptable behavior.”

  That is my math teacher talking, and I have forgotten her name. She looks so much like the nurse at my pediatrician’s office. They both have very short red hair, and I can’t tell them apart. So I don’t try.

  The kids are starting to laugh again, which doesn’t bother me, but I know it will make the teacher very nervous. Teachers don’t like it when kids are laughing, unless it is because they have made a joke they think is funny, and then they get upset if the kids don’t laugh.

  “I’m sorry, Jason, but you are going to have to stay and clean this up while the rest of the class goes across the hall to watch Mrs. Santoro’s class’s geometry play.”

  It is a good thing for me that I don’t want to see that play at all.

  I don’t mind picking up all the little pieces of paper, and now it is quiet in the classroom. Only the math teacher sitting at her desk writing.

  She thinks she is holding me responsible for my actions.

  I am on the floor under my desk.

  The pieces of paper don’t look anything like snowflakes anymore. I can see the jagged, frayed edges of white where I tore it and tore it.

  I start to think of how many times in one day does something like this happen to me. And how I am so used to not getting what I want. How many times I am on the floor under my desk picking up pieces of paper, metaphorically speaking, that is.

  Every day, maybe twenty times a day. Maybe more.

  So PhoenixBird is my girlfriend.

  Inside my computer.

  I just need to remember not to talk about her anymore.

  So the rest of the day is without incident.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jeremy wants the plate with the dividers at dinner tonight.

  But our mom has taken them away.

  She says he has to get used to eating off a regular plate, because not everybody in the world will be able to accommodate him, but again I know she is really talking about me. In code.

  Jeremy starts to cry.

  Right at the table.

  Boys are not supposed to cry. I learned that about the same time I figured out that my mom and dad couldn’t make everything all right, even when they say, Don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right.

  It’s not.

  Boys are not supposed to cry. Because when they do, things get worse. Then suddenly you have two problems. You have whatever it was that made you cry in the first place, and then you also have the problem that you are a boy crying. And someone is bound to let you know this is worse. So now you have two problems.

  Better not to cry, Jeremy, I want to tell him.

  “Jeremy, what’s the matter?” my mother is saying.

  At first people will always act like crying is okay.

  “I want my plate. I want my plate with the little rooms in it.” He is crying.

  “But Jeremy, you can use this plate. It’s fine. None of your food is touching. Look,” she says. “And even if it does . . . it’s fine.”

  And then, after that, they try to tell you why you shouldn’t be crying.

  “It’s fine, Jeremy,” my dad says.

  “No, I can’t eat. I want my plate.” Tears are dropping off his face. His voice is clogged with wetness like mucus in his throat.

  It is like the snowflakes that fall to the ground, each one different from every other one. But no one can see that. All they see is white and flat. And it all looks the same. And that is the way they like it.

  The food is like that for Jeremy. He just doesn’t know it yet.

  “Sometime your food is going to have to touch,” I tell my brother.

  It gets really quiet at the table.

  “What?” my mother asks me. “What did you say, Jason?”

  I look down at my plate. The food is far enough apart, but it never bothered me. It was always Jeremy. Jeremy needed those plates. I don’t understand why he shouldn’t have one, but I know he can’t. I see now that even Jeremy has to learn what I have known all my life.

  You don’t always get what you need.

  So I say it again, even though I am sure my mother heard me.

  “Sometime your food is going to have to touch. It’s not so bad. You get used to it.”

  “There, see?” she says, but I have a feeling my mother has heard something else.

  “Don’t cry,” my dad tells him. “C’mon, Jeremy. Eat some dinner. It’s good.”

  “Don’t cry, sweetie,” my mother says. “Look, Jason lets his food touch.”

  Jeremy is still sniffling, but he picks up his fork.

  Then, finally, you figure out it’s better not to cry in the first place.

  Chapter Sixteen

  One day a very old and very wise scientist comes to the town where Bennu lives with his family. It is not by chance that this famous doctor has arrived. He is looking for Bennu, because the doctor believes he has found a cure for dwarfism. He has traveled many miles over treacherous land to find Bennu. He believes he has invented an operation that can make Bennu look pretty much like everyone else.

  Also, the doctor believes that with his cure he can make sure no one will be born with the same problem ever again.

  This installment ends just as the doctor delivers his message to Bennu and his family.

  It’s a good idea to leave your reader wanting more. It’s called a cliffhanger, like your character is hanging by his finge
rtips on the edge of a very steep cliff. I upload my chapter on the Storyboard website, but the only reader I really care about anymore is PhoenixBird. Maybe she lives in a different time zone. Two hours later. Maybe she will read it before she goes to school. Or two hours earlier, and maybe she will have already left for school and she’ll have read it before I get home. How can I find out what her real name is?

  Then before I have to leave for school, I send her a little note, just to let her know my story is posted on the website.

  And by the way, I write at the end of my message,my real name is Jason.

  Very tricky, if I must say so myself.

  Next to art class, physical education class is the worst. Most kids call it PE class. But I don’t like those letters together that way.

  Mostly it’s because of the noise, the way the noise races around the gym, hits the high ceiling, where it all gathers together between the metal light shades and gets louder before falling back down again.

  “So you have a girlfriend, Jason?”

  It is the boy from Aaron’s table, one of the boys who eat lunch with him sometimes. I ate lunch with them last week. I shouldn’t have.

  The boy is laughing, but I know this kind of laugh.

  “And you don’t even know her name,” the boy is saying. Laughing.

  There are lines on the floor of the gym, blue lines and yellow and white and red. One line is the farthest outside of all the others, never intersecting, not bending, never touching the others. Parallel lines that continue into infinity and never meet.

  The boy is talking to me but not talking to me. He is talking loudly, even though no one else is listening to him. His voice bounces off the blue cushioned walls.

  “I know what her name is,” he says.

  He does?

  Does he know her?

  Does this boy know PhoenixBird?

  I will not be able to breathe.

  He is laughing more. Louder.

  “You wanna know what her name is?” he is saying.

  If he knows PhoenixBird, she will have told him the truth. He will know she is not really my girlfriend. My hair hurts. My chest is tight.

  “I bet her name is Retardo Girl,” the boy says.

  No, I am thinking. Her name can’t be Retardo Girl.

  Can it?

  “And I bet she rides the little bus to school.”

  And then I figure it out. He is just being mean. When a dog gets mean and bites a person, it’s the law that they have to put that dog to sleep. This boy is just being mean. He is lying. He doesn’t really know PhoenixBird. I have nothing to worry about. For some reason my head is still shaking.

  But I can breathe.

  Mr. DeMateo comes out and starts throwing basketballs onto the floor. They all bounce up and down at different times, like drummers who can’t hear each other, and then roll until someone picks one up and shoots it at the hoop.

  And misses.

  “Lexicon” is the word that came to me this morning.

  Even before I got out of bed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Last year, I was eleven years old and Jeremy was just eight, our dog, Lester, got very sick, and we had to put him to sleep.

  Which is another one of those expressions when someone doesn’t want to say what they really mean.

  We had gotten Lester from the Humane Society in the next town over. I was four when I went with my mom to pick him out, but of course we didn’t know he would be a him when we went.

  They don’t let you put a dog “on hold.” You can go back as many times as you want and look till you find the dog you want, but once you see one, you have to decide right then and there.

  I was the one that wanted a dog.

  And getting Lester was a reward, but I don’t remember anymore for what.

  I wanted a dog so badly.

  So badly I let my mother lead me into the dark, wet, concrete hallway where they kept the dogs, even though the smell was so bad it burned my eyes and my tongue. Every single dog was barking, all at once, jumping up and putting their paws on the fronts of their cages. Jumping up and then running back, spinning around and then pouncing on the bars again as we passed.

  There were plastic bags hanging from each cage with a piece of white paper inside. My mother listened as I read the names out loud, because I could read every word.

  “That’s amazing,” the Humane Lady said as we made our way down the long, wet, concrete hall. “How old is he?”

  “Four,” my mother said. “He’s only just four.”

  Lester was the only dog that wasn’t barking. He wasn’t even jumping up on his cage. He was sitting straight up, looking right out at us, trembling, trembling. He was shaking so hard you could see the motion from the top of his head, back and forth to the end of his body.

  He was so scared.

  “Beagle mix,” I read. “Eleven months old. Lester.”

  I really didn’t talk much in those days, and I knew I wanted Lester, but what would happen to the other dogs if we didn’t pick them? I hated it in that place. It was cold and dark, that horrible smell and that horrible loneliness. I stopped walking and stood in front of Lester’s cage. My mother stopped too, and so did the Humane Lady.

  Lester shook even harder.

  “This one?” the lady asked me.

  But I was sad, so sad. Too sad. The other dogs were barking and standing up to be picked, to be taken out of this place. I wanted to say something. I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t find the words. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Every dog here finds a home,” the lady said. “We have a hundred percent adoption rate.”

  Lester. We took Lester home with us that day. He pooped and peed and threw up in our car, which made me cry and scream, too, but we both got home. My mother asked me if I wanted to give him a new name, but I didn’t.

  You can’t change what you are called. Good or bad, it’s your name.

  That night I wrote down all the names and breeds of every dog we saw, and Lester slept at the end of my bed.

  And then Lester got sick.

  So sick the doctor told us there was nothing he could do.

  Lester was only seven years old, and even in dog years that is pretty young.

  My dad tried to tell me and Jeremy at dinner one night that they were going to have to put Lester to sleep, to die.

  “The vet did everything he medically could,” our dad said.

  “We gave Lester a very good life,” my mother said.

  Jeremy was crying so hard his snot was running down his face. I was just listening.

  “Lester is very sick,” my mother said. “That’s how nature works sometimes. There is nothing we can do.”

  I knew my parents were telling the truth. We had taken Lester to the doctor every week for months, and he had ten bottles of medicine on the kitchen counter.

  “We have taken very good care of him. He’s had a good, good life,” our dad said. “You know, you have to remember Lester is a dog. And imagine, if Lester lived in the wild, he wouldn’t have lasted this long.”

  But Lester didn’t live in the wild.

  He lived with us.

  Rebecca.

  Her name is Rebecca.

  That’s definitely a girl’s name.

  There was a message from PhoenixBird when I got home from school. She had read my story. And my note.

  And she told me her real name.

  Rebecca.

  I really care about Bennu, she wrote. Your story is great. I felt like I could feel what he was feeling and thinking. Like I could really see and hear him. And there is so much symbolism in your story. How do you do that? Do you outline? Do you know what is going to happen in the end?

  There is a PS at the end of her message, which stands for postscript, meaning something you thought about after you’ve finished your whole letter, so you have to add it to the end.

  PS. you’ll never believe it.

  Today after school Blanche found
the lunch I didn’t eat. She ate a hole right through my backpack to get to it. Then she got sick on our living room carpet. I don’t which my mom is more mad about, the rug or my new knapsack. LOL.

  That’s the kind of stuff friends tell each other.

  And her name is Rebecca.

  I am thinking of what to write back to Rebecca, my friend.

  Who is a girl.

  Chapter Eighteen

  At first Bennu’s family seems overjoyed by the news the famous doctor brings to town. Right to their doorstep, in fact. Bennu stands back and listens. Of course, everything occurs a few feet over his head, because he is so short. But in a way this is an advantage for Bennu. He has learned to listen better.

  He hears what the doctor proposes.

  Your son won’t be short anymore, the doctor tells everyone.

  But we don’t want everyone to be the same, do we? Bennu’s father says.

  No, but if you agree to the operation, the doctor promises, no one will look at Bennu ever again and know anything is wrong.

  No, Rebecca, I write back, I don’t know how my story is going to end. I don’t even know what Bennu and his family are going to decide yet. That’s usually where I get all messed up. I try and let my characters tell me what they want to have happen.

  We are on an E schedule this week. So it’s library day again, and I get to check my Storyboard site, but then it turns out we aren’t having library. There are teacher meetings in the library and we can’t go in there. I have to wait until I get home, except I have an appointment with my talk therapist and I don’t get home until dinner. My talk therapist is different from my OT, my occupational therapist, because mostly with my TT we just sit there and do nothing. Sometimes she tries to get me to talk by showing me pictures. Lots of neurotypical people go to talk therapists too. Lots of NTs go to TTs.

  Even my mom does.

  My talk therapist told my mom I am being very patient and I am learning to delay gratification. I get a Hershey’s Kiss as a reward when I leave the office, which I give to Jeremy because I don’t like chocolate.