Anything but Typical

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  “He could get hurt out there,” the other dad was saying. “He doesn’t pay attention. A fly ball could hit your son right in the head if you’re not careful.”

  I thought about that.

  And I stood in the grass. I didn’t really like grass, but my dad asked me to stand there. The balls rolled past the kids in gray T-shirts who stood in the dirt. A ball couldn’t fly, could it?

  No ball came out here in the grass with me.

  I didn’t hit the ball. I didn’t like to step on the hard dirty base. I didn’t run right. I didn’t stand right. I didn’t like the socks. But the pants were soft and had an elastic waist; they were okay.

  Sometimes we sat in the dugout.

  I sat there a lot.

  On a bench. Kids stuck their empty paper water cups in the fence and they stayed there like pimples. One boy kicked the dirt around on home plate, making a cloud around his feet. My dad and his assistant were getting the equipment out of the shed.

  My dad left the key in his car.

  “Wait here, Jason,” he told me.

  The dugout was shady. It smelled like bubble gum and fake leather and mud.

  “Wanna dead leg?” The voice was a boy’s. He was next to me, but his face was turned in the opposite way. Toward the boy on his other side, the one with the long blond hair. I thought that boy was a girl. He had long hair, and girls have long hair.

  But it turned out he was a boy.

  The boy/girl answered, “No, why don’t you give him one instead?” He moved his body farther down the bench.

  A dead leg?

  “Yeah, why not?”

  I heard the thud first. On my body. My eyes flew up to the ceiling. Inside-out shingles. Dark, it was dark, but I could see there were nails sticking into the air. They were bent toward the wood but sticking out, so if you jumped really high you could touch the pointy ends. Then the pain in my leg, so that muscle went hard like a fist hitting me from the inside. Pain.

  I had to get away.

  I had already learned that if you don’t get away, it happens again.

  I stood.

  But I couldn’t. I had only one leg left.

  I had a dead leg.

  Then there was dirt on my face. And feet. Black shoes. I was looking at the side of the dugout, a blank wall.

  “Hey, look, I gave Jason a dead leg. He’s dead.”

  I’m dead?

  I felt another thud on my back. I kept staring at the wall.

  And another, like hammer on nails. There were more voices and more hammers. Until I was crying. And until I heard my dad.

  I heard my dad.

  And I heard the other man.

  And they were shouting, but I was inside that wall.

  Where it was safe.

  Loud. Shouting. Crying. Fear. Sadness. Loudness. Fear. Shouting.

  Shouting fear.

  My leg didn’t hurt at all anymore.

  “Liz, boys . . . they are just little boys.”

  “Boys? Those are monsters. If those are boys—”

  “I’m not saying it’s right. But boys do that kind of stuff to each other. It could have been anyone.”

  “Not to anyone! Not to anyone! My God, he has bruises.”

  But my back didn’t hurt anymore either.

  “Liz, Jason is fine. He’ll be fine. Unfortunately, this is the world we live in.”

  I was only eleven, but I already knew my dad was wrong. There are many, many different worlds to live in. And sometimes there is no connection from one to another.

  It’s like places where bridges used to be but they got washed away.

  Where kids once played baseball but now they don’t.

  Because they are sorry they blew out the candles when it was someone else’s birthday cake. And now they don’t get invited to birthday parties anymore.

  And sorry they pushed over the potter’s wheel.

  So they tried to write stories so someone would hear them.

  But now they don’t.

  They don’t write anymore either.

  So when we get back from the buffet, my mother says it’s time to get ready to go to the Turning Fact into Fiction Writer’s Workshop. I stop moving my feet. I look at the wall in the hallway of our hotel, where I am not home. I grow into the floor and the floor into me.

  Rebecca has finally seen me and suddenly not seen me at all. What’s the point of going to the workshop when I am never going to write again?

  Or play baseball.

  I am growing a list, in my feet in the floor, of things I will never do again. Be invited to my cousin Seth’s bedroom. Or a birthday party for someone who isn’t forced to invite me, like my cousin Seth.

  I never liked baseball.

  Or my cousin Seth.

  I may never use a potter’s wheel again in my whole life. But so what? Clay smells really bad. And I will never write another story, so why should I go to the writer’s workshop?

  And then my mother tells me I don’t have to go if I don’t want to. And I start to walk again.

  “I don’t want to go.” I repeat what she has just said.

  “No, Jason. I understand. We can just watch TV the rest of this morning, if you want. I understand.”

  “Understand.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Maybe I never really did before.”

  We are heading back to our room so my mom can use the bathroom.

  “I’m not going to make you go to the workshop, Jason,” my mom is saying. “If you really don’t want to.”

  She is feeding the room card into the metal slot in our door. The light blinks red. She flips the card over, but the light is still red. She does it again. Red. She jiggles the door anyway, but it will not open. It is still locked.

  “Here,” I say. It is so easy.

  When I slip the card in the right way, the light turns green and my mother can open the door. I made my mother happy because I knew how to open the door.

  So I say, “I’ll go.”

  She is heading right for the bathroom, but she looks at me and smiles. “Are you sure, Jason? I mean . . .”

  “Sure,” I tell her. It’s so easy. To make her smile.

  And besides, I don’t have to write anything. I can just sit there.

  I’m good at that.

  It is in the Corral Room on the second-floor mezzanine.

  I count to ten and press my hands against the sides of the doorway, but there are only five people in the room, and they seem to be sitting as far apart from each other as they can. The room is set up with round tables and chairs. No two people are at the same table.

  “This is Turning Fact into Fiction, isn’t it?” someone is asking.

  “That’s what the flyers say up at the desk.”

  “Flyers? There are flyers?”

  My mother says, “Here, Jason. Take a seat and I’ll get one of the flyers.”

  I don’t like this room. It is tight, like a room that’s been cut in half. The air conditioner blows from the ceiling in one direction, right into the middle of the room. Nobody is sitting at that table.

  I don’t want to sit there either.

  “What’s wrong, Jason?”

  I am not going to write anymore. I don’t want to turn any facts into fiction any more than I want to go and visit Uncle Bobby again anytime soon. Stories and dreams.

  But real is worse.

  Real is me.

  I think when I get home I will delete Storyboard completely from my hard drive. I will throw away all my story files.

  “Jason, just sit here. I’ll be right back,” my mother is saying. “Is it your father? Would it be better if your father were here? He’d know what to do.”

  She is talking like she always does, sort of to no one, because I know she is not expecting me to answer. “I wonder what time it is. What time is this supposed to start?”

  “The instructor is an author,” someone at the next table is saying.

  “I never heard of him,” someone answers.<
br />
  “He’s not so famous, but I heard he’s a good teacher. Maybe they’re just signing autographs.”

  My mom comes back with the flyer. But I don’t look at it. But I do sit down, in each chair at the table, one, two, three, four, and my mother follows me until we stop at after the fifth move. On this side the air doesn’t touch me.

  I am facing the wall.

  “All good now, Jason?” my mother asks me. “Good.”

  Nobody in the whole room is talking, and you can hear the buzzing from the overhead lights. And the air conditioner sucking up all my stories, every word and every letter. I wonder if there is a buffet for lunch, too.

  “Sorry, so sorry.” The voice comes from behind me. If I turn I will see, but I face the wall, letting all stories leave my head, the way my therapist told me to control the noise. Grab each one and let it go.

  Grab each one and let it go.

  The man in the protective suit.

  The girl in a world where no one needs anyone.

  Bennu.

  Rebecca.

  PhoenixBird.

  Let them go.

  The voice of the instructor makes its way to the front of the room. “Well, it’s a small group. So what do you say we all move forward? Maybe we can even fit at one table.”

  I will not move.

  The stories come apart like in a movie that is run backward. The characters crumble, first their heads, their hands and arms and feet, and the bodies. The paragraphs melt. The sentences fall apart. And then each word floats alone without any connection. And finally the letters, each letter that without another beside it is completely meaningless.

  And I am facing a blank wall.

  Coincidences in stories aren’t a good idea unless the coincidence sets the plot in motion in the first place or makes things worse for the main character. But at some point in your story things are supposed to get better or be over in some way. The main character is supposed to get what he wants or needs or not.

  And then that’s the resolution.

  But your readers will feel tricked if you just drop something in your story to tie things up, like if all of a sudden the hero finds a pair of magic glasses, or magic candy, or if the long-lost brother they never knew they had shows up and saves the day.

  Believability is the key to a good story.

  “Come on, people,” the instructor is calling. I see hands waving out of the corner of my eye, but something is not right. The hands are not where they should be.

  And so I look.

  I turn my head, I shift my body, and I raise my eyes, and the instructor is there, standing at the front of the room. He is talking and telling everyone to move their seats.

  He is friendly and he lets me breathe.

  And then I see. Like a little tiny bridge.

  I see that the instructor is a Little Person.

  He is a dwarf.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Our dwarf instructor from Turning Facts into Fiction is named Hamilton.

  “What is the most important part of a writer’s body?” he asks the class, which I think is kind of interesting coming from a dwarf. He wrote his name on the dry-erase board that stands beside him.

  Hamilton. I don’t know if that is his first or last name.

  But that’s all he wrote.

  Maybe it’s both. Hamilton Hamilton.

  By this time four more people have come into the room. None of them is Rebecca, but now another woman is sitting at the table with me and my mom.

  She is the first one to answer. She raises her hand, but she just starts talking at the same time anyway.

  “Their heart,” she says.

  “Good answer,” Hamilton says. “But not the one I am looking for. Not the most essential. There are lots of writers with no heart at all.”

  Some people laugh, but I don’t, because that is true.

  I am listening.

  What is the most important part of a writer’s body?

  Someone else says, “Hands.”

  Someone else says, “Your brain.”

  Then fingers, eyes, ears.

  I think about all these things. I know my brain is different from most people, from NTs. I know my hands sometimes fly around the room like they have something to say all on their own. I hear things differently. My eyes are different. I see things and I don’t see things.

  But I can write. I know I can.

  So I jump out of my seat. I stand up. And all those things are loose inside me, like letters of the alphabet that have no meaning until they are all put together.

  In one particular way that no one else can do.

  In one moment. In one voice. That is mine.

  “My bottom!” I say out loud.

  And it gets very quiet in the room. Everyone stops calling out answers, and they are all looking at me the way they do in school sometimes, just before everyone starts to laugh. Like in art class, and in gym class. Not the nice kind of laugh.

  My mother is looking at me too. She looks like she will punch anyone who laughs.

  But Hamilton, the dwarf teacher, says, “Exactly!”

  He points right at me. “You’ve got to sit down on your bottom and write. Writing is all we have,” he says.

  I don’t look away. I look right at him.

  “All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell,” he says, and he is talking as if he is talking only to me. “Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you.”

  Nobody.

  We see Rebecca Stone one more time before we leave Dallas, Texas. It is at the party, that same night, for all the Storyboard conventioneers.

  My mom had packed me a blue jacket, white shirt, and khaki pants. I like how I look but I am not very comfortable.

  My mom doesn’t even tell me to loosen my belt.

  I have already thought that Rebecca is probably going to be there too.

  “Almost ready?” my mom calls into the bathroom. I stand in front of the mirror looking at myself.

  I try to make my face as still as possible.

  I try to look at who I am.

  But a mirror is not a true representation of a person. It is not. It is reflection. It is the reverse, a pure opposite. They say if a person really saw their own face, they wouldn’t recognize themselves. Even a photograph is not a true representation. It is only two-dimensional, while human beings are three-dimensional.

  We never really ever see ourselves the way other people see us.

  I will just do the best I can.

  Rebecca walks right up to us at the party.

  She doesn’t put out her hand, but she says, “Hi, Jason.”

  She has a nice voice. I say hi back.

  “Did you go to any of the workshops? I did. It was great. I just . . . I wanted to tell you something.”

  And my mother says, “I can go get some . . . thing. From over there. I’ll be back. I’ll be over there.”

  And my mother leaves.

  I want to tell Rebecca about Hamilton and about the workshop and the flyers, and about my bottom. I want to ask her to be my girlfriend. I want to tell her that she smells like strawberries and baby powder, and I can’t say anything.

  I think I know what she will say anyway.

  She will say no.

  “I like your stories, Jason. When you get back home, I hope you still write me sometimes. I hope I can still send you my stories. You really help me. Did I tell you I got an A on that story you helped me with? Oh, gotta go. There’s my mom.”

  And Rebecca walks away from me.

  And that’s my story.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  On the plane ride home my mom says I am wrong.

  She says the instructor was not a dwarf at all.

  “He’s just short, Jason.” My mother tells me. “Not all men are tall like yo
ur daddy.”

  “Mr. Shupack.”

  “He wasn’t a dwarf, Jason. I’m telling you. He was just short.”

  “Dr. T. is.”

  “He was just short, believe me.”

  “Uncle Bobby is,” I tell her.

  “Oh, fart on Uncle Bobby,” my mother says. “Hamilton is not a dwarf, I promise you. He’s just a little short.”

  The flight attendant says they don’t have Dr Pepper.

  My mom knows what to ask for next. I am already having trouble enough in this little seat because the man next to me is so close. He smells like BO or cheese. I have to turn off my smell button just so I can breathe.

  “Sprite?”

  “Why yes, ma’am. We do.”

  The snap of the can. The scoop of ice.

  “Oh, no ice, please,” my mother says. “Sorry.”

  “No problem, ma’am. Here you go, young man.”

  I like this lady and I like that my mom takes care of me and that I can take care of her. I think I can breathe very well now.

  Just before the plane is going to land I can feel it tugging at the inside of my body. I can feel it pulling me down. I can feel the pressure inside my head and my stomach. The pilot tells us we are at a lower altitude and that we will be on the ground in twenty minutes. My mother told me my dad and Jeremy will be waiting at the airport.

  I am excited.

  I would like another Sprite, but the flight attendant is not here anymore.

  “Jason?” my mother says to me. “I want to you know, this trip has been one of the best things I’ve ever done.”

  I hear her.

  It’s easy to listen with the wild drone of the airplane. It is like a giant vacuum that sucks up all the other noise. Nobody even hears when you pass gas out loud on a plane.

  “All this time I thought I was supposed to be teaching you,” my mother is saying to me. “I was wrong.”

  She takes a tissue out of her pocketbook.

  “I thought you were supposed to learn how to get along without me.” I know my mother is crying again. That kind of cry when she watches TV. It’s not really sad. It won’t last too long.