by Kim Hood
‘In which way?’
I thought of answering. Maybe it would help. But I didn’t know where to start, and if I did, would I know where to stop? Instead I just shook my head.
‘Right. Well, you’re in luck if lunch hour is what you want changed. Is it?’
‘Yes.’ Finally an easy question.
‘Someone needs your help. I’ll let him speak for himself, but I can arrange for the help he needs to be during lunch hour.’ She handed me a leaflet. ‘Take this. Think it over. If it appeals to you, apply with me as a reference. If it doesn’t, we can talk about it in a week when I see you next.’
I was far too curious to head back to class without reading what the doctor had handed me. The leaflet was handmade with pasted-on photos and bits of typing in between. The front simply said Hi, I’m Chris, and there was a picture of someone in a wheelchair. Not your politically-correct picture of the good-looking guy shooting a basket from a super-slick looking wheelchair either. Even though the boy in the picture was dressed in a suit that could only be for a wedding, and even though he was smiling, there was no disguising the fact that he was obviously not your average kid, only just in a wheelchair. Both his arms were out to the side and in the air and one of his hands was bent inward, with his wrist at an impossible angle and witch-like fingers held stiffly out. His mouth was distorted, despite the smile. But the telling thing was his hair. No self-respecting guy slicked his hair back like it was. Even I, as clueless as I was about fashion or anything cool, knew that.
I opened the pamphlet up. You might not know me, but I go to your school. I like art and listening to music. Then there was a photo of an abstract painting and a photo of the boy, with earphones on, same lopsided smile.
On the opposite page, I’d like to meet new friends who could help me do teenage stuff. Maybe you’d like to contribute something to your community. Maybe you would like some experience and a reference for pursuing a career in special education or social care. Whatever your reasons, any time spent with Chris is most welcome! This page just had a rainbow of different coloured hands clasped as illustration.
Then on the back:
The Special Ed Department is looking for:
Lunch hour assistants and monitors
‘Buddies’ to assist in integrated classes (must maintain a B average in assisted class)
In exchange, you get:
Valuable life experience
Getting to know new kids
An opportunity to share your interests/skills
If this interests you talk to Mr Jenkins – Special Education Resource Teacher
I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have any experience with special ed kids and I had enough of my own weirdness baggage to carry around, without giving everyone another reason to think I was odd. Still, it would give me a place to be every lunch and time to decide what to do about Sarah. What did I have to lose?
CHAPTER SIX
I was nervous walking into the special education wing. Somewhere here I was meeting Mr Jenkins. Was it the rec room? Or the break room? I wasn’t sure where exactly.
No one ever came into this wing – the kids here only ever came out. The kids from special education were kind of an entity that everyone tried to pretend they didn’t see. They were in the occasional class, sitting with their adult assistant in the corner. And whole groups of them came to assemblies, all right. That was when they were most visible. A few of the ignorant kids might mimic some of the special ed kids then, or someone would nervously giggle when a screech was heard in a quiet moment. Mostly though, they were politely ignored. Kind of like me – only they at least had each other and I’d always had to face that on my own.
I didn’t even know what Mr Jenkins looked like and how would he know what I looked like? I had only talked to him briefly this morning. I had gone to the office twenty minutes before class had started, clutching my now very creased pamphlet.
‘What can I do for you, dear?’ the secretary had asked.
‘I’d like to speak to Mr Jenkins, but I don’t know where I find him.’ I had handed the pamphlet to her as if it would explain everything.
‘I’ll see if he’s in his room now.’ The secretary had dialled the phone and then handed it to me.
‘My name is Jo, and I’m interested in the pamphlet – about Chris.’
‘Fantastic!’ His response had been almost too enthusiastic. ‘We’d hoped you’d join us. How ‘bout today? Chris isn’t in today, but I could give you a little orientation. If you came the class before lunch, and stayed through lunch, that would give us enough time.’
And that had been it. I had thought there must be some long application or something, checking references, interviews, but no, just – come on down. It had been relatively easy.
I looked into the first two rooms I came to, but didn’t see anyone. The rooms were small, with big mats and weird exercise equipment in one and a big mechanical thing with straps hanging down in another. Doubt started to creep in. Was I sure this was going to be any easier than just finding a quiet bathroom to hide out in every lunch hour until the end of the year? At least I was familiar with ridicule. In this unfamiliar territory I didn’t know what might happen. It occurred to me that these quiet hallways leading to rooms with who knows what in them were more like what I had expected in the hospital wing my mom was in.
I was just about to turn around and walk back out the heavy double doors to normality when a man strode toward me from the other end of the hall.
‘Jo!’ the man whom I assumed was Mr Jenkins said, sticking out his hand for a handshake. ‘Come with me. I’m rushing from one thing to another as usual. Sorry about that, meant to meet you at the door. That’s okay though, you found your way and now I’ll give you a bit of a tour.’
He talked quickly and seemed to move even faster. I had to speed walk to keep up with him as he led me back down the hall and around a corner.
‘So there are twelve students who make this wing their base,’ he explained as we walked. ‘The goal is to get them all out of here and in classes with the rest of you, but we don’t have the resources to make that happen as quickly as we’d like, so most of them are only in a few typical classes.’
I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about. There wasn’t time to think about it though because he was still speed walking, stopping briefly to pick up some papers from an office.
‘Notices to hand out,’ he said. ‘I’ll kill two birds with one stone while I show you around.’ And he was off again.
‘Most of our kids have some challenges that you don’t see in regular classes. It could be that they use sign language. It could be that they can’t understand everything other kids say. Or that they get overwhelmed by too much talking at all. The ways they cope may not always be – what you’d expect from your peers.’
I thought of the way I had run away from Sarah days before, how bizarre I’m sure it had looked. I think I understood what he meant.
‘You mean they might act a little strange sometimes when they don’t know what else to do?’
‘That’s exactly what I mean.’ He beamed like I had answered a quiz question correctly. ‘I just want you to know it’s okay to feel a little out of place here at first. But remember that all the kids you meet today are like you under it all. They want to have fun. They want people to like them. They want friends.’
I nodded, not quite as afraid as I had been.
‘Okay, let’s go meet some kids.’ He opened the door to one of the small rooms. This one looked pretty regular – a table, a whiteboard. A boy, who looked pretty ordinary, except maybe that he was a bit small, was sitting at the table with a teacher or assistant beside him.
‘This is Josh. He won’t say hello yet, but he’ll be asking John, who’s one of our aides, all about you when we leave.’ Josh had put his head in his hands, but the adult with him gave a wave and a smile. I smiled back and gave Josh a little wave when he took a peek at me as we left to go to the room next door.
‘This is Lilly.’ Lilly was the opposite of Josh. She was up, out of her seat and standing nose to nose with me in a second.
‘Who are you? How old are you?’ She asked me, staring into my eyes. She made me a little nervous, but Mr Jenkins stepped in to help me out.
‘Shall we give the poor girl a bit of space, Lilly?’ he said, taking her arm and then introducing me.
‘Show Jo the new app on your tablet,’ her aide prompted. I spent the next ten minutes having a lesson from Lilly about her app to show people how she was feeling. Her fingers flew over the screen as she explained how it worked.
‘It’s because I don’t always know how to say I’m mad,’ she said. ‘This helps me say it.’
‘That’s cool, Lilly,’ I said, thinking that I could use something similar most of the time.
I continued to follow Mr Jenkins through a maze of small rooms, where he introduced me to kids and teachers and assistants at each stop, giving me a story for each that we met. I felt like some kind of visiting VIP being shown around.
It wasn’t like school at all. There were still classes, but with only a few kids in each, or sometimes only one. Some of the rooms were for therapy, like learning to speak better, or exercises for the kids who had physical disabilities.
Despite meeting some pretty strange kids, I felt my muscles relaxing. Everyone had something they wanted to show me. Everyone seemed genuinely happy to see me. I was talking to more people here than I had talked to all year.
Then there was lunch, which was a little chaotic. Wheelchairs were jostled into places around two big tables. Some kids had hot lunches to be heated up. Things were spilled – and then cleaned up. Josh had to be led out when he started covering his ears and screaming. But there was lots of laughing too. I mostly just sat and watched it while I ate my sandwich. It was the first lunch hour I could remember when I didn’t feel like everyone was watching me.
In fact at the end of lunch it took me a couple of tries to get Mr Jenkins’s attention to lead me back through the maze to get out.
‘Sure, sure,’ he said, leaving a conversation he was having with someone, while also helping a student pack her lunch away.
Again I ran to catch up with him as we wound our way toward the entrance. Halfway there he stopped. This was the first time I had seen him stand still.
‘Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have Art in block H would you?’
‘No, that’s Science for me. Why?’ I asked, wondering what this had to do with anything.
‘Oh, nothing,’ he dismissed. ‘Just a crazy idea I had. Chris is in an art class that period and I’d love to get him some peer support instead of him having to drag his aide along with him all of the time.’
Thinking about Science, I remembered that between staying home on Friday and meeting Dr Sharon on Monday I had now missed two classes. Two classes of avoiding Sarah. All through the tour of the Special Education wing I had thought of her, though, wondering if she would find it as interesting as I did. Maybe I’d even tell her about it tomorrow. If it wasn’t too late, and she was still talking to me.
‘So, what do you think?’ Mr Jenkins interrupted my thoughts. ‘Are you up for meeting Chris still?’
‘Sure, I guess so.’
‘Great. We’ll start on Monday then.’
That left me with three more lunch hours to survive in the main school. But then, maybe there was a chance it wouldn’t be so bad. Even if it had to be only at school, maybe there was still hope for me to be friends with Sarah.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next day went badly from the start. Grandma woke me up ridiculously early.
‘Come now, Jo, up you get up for a proper breakfast.’ It was 6:30 am and I didn’t have to catch the school bus until 8:00 am. There was no arguing with Grandma though, no telling her that I never ate breakfast.
At least she was starting to let me take the school bus rather than driving me into town like she had the two days before, controlling my every second until school. Not that I loved the bus, filled as it was with kids I had gone to elementary school with, none of whom acknowledged that I was even alive. Still, I could ignore them too, pretending to be deeply involved in texting imaginary friends.
Today when I got on the bus, though, Lisa patted the seat beside her, inviting me to sit down.
‘Where’s Carmen?’ I asked suspiciously.
Carmen and Lisa had been in my class since kindergarten and once upon a time we had all been sort-of friends. At least friends in the way that six- or seven-year-old girls are – playing on the playground, sharing ‘secrets’ and above all taking turns excluding one of the trio. Eventually I had been the permanently excluded one. There was the obvious reason of course – Lisa had once said You’re not my best friend anymore because my mom won’t let a girl with a weird mom come to our house.
But also, I had just never seemed to understand the rules of girl friendships. Who do you gossip about? What things do you say to sound cool? How do you tell when a compliment is actually meant to be an insult? These things had baffled me.
So I didn’t think this invitation to sit with her could be good.
‘She’s sick I think,’ Lisa dismissed, flicking her hair back with confidence and smiling widely.
‘Oh,’ was all that I could think to say.
‘But anyway, how are you? I just don’t see much of you now that we’ve moved onto bigger and better things.’ We had seen each other most mornings for nearly a month since middle school started. We just hadn’t spoken.
‘Fine, I guess.’ Keep it vague. Defences up.
Lisa’s brow furrowed into a look of concern and she actually, the gall of her, smoothed my hair back with a mothering gesture.
‘You’re sure? My auntie saw an ambulance outside your house last week in the middle of the night. Nearly scared the pants off her. She knows we’re friends and she was hoping you were okay.’
I felt my face flush deep red. Lisa’s aunt lived two doors down from us. She had never, ever stepped foot in our house, invited us over to her house, or even so much as waved when she drove past us.
‘No, I’m ok,’ I managed.
The bus stopped, admitting another former classmate, Gorgeous George as he had secretly been called by the girls for the last couple of years. Lisa turned her sickly-sweet smile in his direction and used it to lure him into the seat behind us.
‘How was the first basketball practice? The new uniforms are so cool!’
‘Yup,’ Gorgeous George articulately answered.
‘Me and Carmen are going to go to every game – even the away ones. Our team is going to be the best with talent like you!’
I was never so glad to be so utterly ignored, as Lisa continued her hero-worship and George hung on her every word until they reached the school. As I got off the bus I put my hands into the pockets of my jacket. My left hand felt the pamphlet I had been handed on Monday. Hi, I’m Chris. The image of that boy floated from my pocket, juxtaposed with Ludicrous Lisa and Gorgeous George. There was nobody like them in the Special Education wing. It was hard to remember how good the day before had been though, when I had another day outside of it to face.
I spent all of first class worrying about seeing Sarah in science class second period. I couldn’t help but repeatedly clench my stomach muscles, as I did when I got worried about something, and so by the end of the class I was starting to feel sick.
Would she bring up our awkward meeting last Thursday? Would she ask where I had been during the classes I’d missed? I imagined answering truthfully, Well on Friday I stayed home because I was up all night when my mom had to go to the psychiatric ward. And then on Monday I missed class because I had to see a psychologist myself. I could only hope she didn’t ask.
I tried to make as late an entrance into science as I could without actually being late. I slipped into my seat just before the bell signalling the beginning of class. Unfortunately the teacher was still fiddling with his computer projecto
r, trying to get the right slide on the screen, leaving far too much freedom for chat between classmates.
‘Hi.’ Sarah flashed me a quick, sincere smile that I couldn’t help but return.
‘Did I miss much?’ I risked an idle comment.
‘Well, no more flying body parts and Mr K put me with a partner who didn’t have your surgery skills.’
I wished I didn’t like Sarah so much. She was funny and kind and everything I wanted in a friend.
‘Ah well, every operating theatre needs a few nurses too.’ I adopted a bad English accent and held out my hand with feigned dismissiveness. ‘Scalpel please, Nurse Sheep-for-Brains.’
Sarah laughed openly. I didn’t even know where that had come from. It had just fallen out of my brain. That is what happened when I talked to Sarah. So much for staying to myself.
When the end of class bell rang and I hurried to lose myself in the crowds spilling into the hallway, I found Sarah right behind me.
‘Come to my locker. I’ve got a scarf for you that I found in a charity shop this weekend. It matches your purple top perfectly – so I couldn’t resist.’
So I followed her. The image of Mom, arms bleeding, wailing, flashed through my mind and then disappeared.
Sarah was just opening her locker door when Lisa appeared.
‘Hi again,’ Lisa said.
I was about to respond when Sarah turned to Lisa with, ‘Ahoy, locker mate. Hey, Lisa, do you know my friend Jo?’ She turned to me.
Lisa gave me that sweet smile that promised every sort of underhanded nastiness. ‘Of course I do. We go way back. Lots of good memories from old Elm Elementary.’ I didn’t know what shared memories Lisa was remembering, unless her favourite memories were of torture.
‘Oh, good. Lisa and I are going to find out about the auditions for the play they’re putting on in the spring. There’s a meeting at lunch in the drama room for anyone interested. Want to go, Jo?’