That day, I went home and tried to hide under the covers of my bed. My mother came in and asked me what was wrong. I couldn’t possibly tell her. But I had to tell someone.
She eventually managed to get the story out of me. I told her everything—about Lisa, the blonde hair, the blue eyes, the attempts to accidentally bump into her, the staring contest and, finally, the evil locker slots and how they forced me to put that card with the poem inside.
She just looked at me and smiled. She smiled. She didn’t laugh; she didn’t cry. She didn’t pat me on the head and tell me everything was going to be okay. She didn’t try to turn the whole experience into some kind of lesson. She didn’t scold me, and she didn’t compliment me. She just smiled.
At first I thought maybe she was possessed, or maybe she had been cooking with wine again. But then she took my hand and asked me a question: “If you could go back and do it again, what would you have done differently?” I thought about it. I could have not stared at Lisa’s big, blonde head. I could have not tried to bump into her. I could have not put that card in her locker. Sure, I could have avoided the whole ugly mess, and people would still remember my first name.
“And so then where would you be?” my mom asked. I’d be a happy, anonymous ninth grader. “Is that how you think of yourself?” she asked. How did I think of myself? Right then, I didn’t think much of myself. I felt like a big loser. She must have known.
“You aren’t a loser. How do you think any boy ever got to meet any girl? By hiding in the corner? By letting boys like Tyler decide who you can like and who you can’t? In my opinion, this is Lisa’s big loss. I think your poem is sweet.”
She said all that because that’s what mothers are supposed to say. I knew that. And I still felt bad, but I started to see things from her point of view. How could I have not taken the chance? In that moment when I put the card in Lisa’s locker, I had felt brave and adventurous and strong. How dare they laugh at me? I had dared to take my shot.
That moment didn’t last very long because the next day I got my report card, and it turned out I failed U.S. History. So now I have to go to summer school. But it’s okay, because there’s this new girl, Carolyn, who just transferred in and she has to go to summer school, too, and you should see the back of her head. . . .
Tal Vigderson
Good-Bye My Angel Dear
My days draw long and weary
When you’re no longer near.
Confidence is filled with questions
Strength replaced with fear.
The assuredness that I awake with each day
Is nowhere to be found,
As though my dreams and aspirations
Were buried underground.
I hear your voice being carried by wind
Like your fingers through my hair.
I close my eyes and remember your kiss
And wish that you were there.
So with nothing left but one thing to say
To resolve my heartbreak here,
Good-bye my darling and my love
Good-bye my angel dear.
Tyler Phillips
Applying Myself
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which those who dream only by night may miss.
Edgar Allen Poe
At thirteen years old, I was like any other kid my age. I liked computer and Nintendo games. I complained about too much homework, and I hated when my little brother ate the last Fruit Roll-Up in the box. I guess I looked like any other kid my age, too. I wore baggy pants and oversize T-shirts—you know, the typical middle-school prison garb. However, inside I harbored a secret that made me feel different and weird.
You see, I was diagnosed with ADD. This is the hip term for attention deficit disorder. I couldn’t even get the cool-kid type where you’re hyper. I had to get the dreamier, “space-cadet” type. I can look straight into your eyes and not hear a word you’re saying. It’s sort of like in the Charlie Brown TV specials. All the adults’ voices in the cartoon sound like endless droning. “Mwop, mwop, mwop, mwop.” I appear to be listening while all the while my mind is somewhere miles away.
After extensive and boring tests, the doctor explained to my mom that I was what they called “dual exceptional.” It sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? No, it doesn’t mean that I have any special dueling abilities like the swordsmen in The Three Musketeers. It also doesn’t mean that I have a major psychiatric disorder like multiple personalities. That might be kind of cool in a weird sort of way. What “dual exceptional” means is that I am what they call “gifted.” This means I’m pretty bright, and yet I’m also learning disabled. This makes school challenging for me.
Yes, you can be gifted and learning disabled at the same time. The two words are not a contradiction in terms. I once heard a comedian refer to the words “jumbo shrimp” as one of these conflicted phrases.
I’ve learned to accept the fact that I’m an enigma to some. Still, it is a bummer to be misunderstood. The whole syndrome can sometimes make me feel like I am on the outside looking in. Everyone else seems to be getting it, and I’m not.
What really burns me up, though, is when teachers don’t get it. In middle school, I took Language Arts with Mrs. Smith. She had piercing brown eyes that made you feel like you had done something wrong. Her no-nonsense, rigid posture made her look as though she’d forgotten to take the wire coat hanger out of her dress. Her face was angular, stiff and white, like a freshly starched and laundered hanky. A smile rarely creased her well-powdered complexion. I could imagine only an intermittent smirk grazing those thin red lips as she X’d her way through someone’s failing test paper with her glorious red marker.
I was enrolled in Mrs. Smith’s gifted section. That first day, she not only set down the rules of her cellblock, but she handed out copies of them for us to memorize and be tested on the following day. I knew right away that I had better “advocate” for myself. This is just some big, fancy-shmancy term that means to stand up for yourself. In my case, trying to explain, for the umpteenth time, about my learning disabilities. Basically, I have lousy reading comprehension and my handwriting is the pits. So I told her that I have ADD and that I might need to take home some reading assignments because my concentration is better when I am in a quiet setting. I went on to explain to her about my “fine motor skill” problems, which make my handwriting look like chicken scratch. I asked her if I might be able to use my word processor at home to do written assignments.
As I explained all this to Mrs. Smith, she gave me a squinty-eyed look down her bespectacled nose and said, “You are no different from anyone else, young man. If I do for you, I have to do for all the others.” She snorted once and then added, “I will not give you an unfair advantage over your peers!” And with that, the bell rang and a herd of students swept me away to my next period.
The comprehension packets were rough. You had to read them, digest them and write an essay on them, all within the forty-five-minute allotted time. Not only couldn’t I finish the reading, I couldn’t write my essay fast enough or neatly enough to be legible. The result was that each paper came back decorated by Mrs. Smith’s flaming red pen. She was like the mad Zorro of red X’s.
One day, after she had handed me back my fifth X’dout paper of the term, I approached her desk for the second time.
“Would you mind very much if I completed the next packet at home, Mrs. Smith? I think I might do better where there is less distraction.” Then I backed away from her desk as though I were within firing range of her loaded mouth.
Mrs. Smith bit her thin red lips as her trademark smirk spread across them. “It’s against school policy, young man. No unfair advantages. I have treated all students the same in the thirty years I have taught here.” Then she flared her nose, clicked her heels and turned away from me, in more ways than one.
So I did what any other kid would do in my situation: I smuggled the packet out of the classroom. I felt like I was doing someth
ing illegal, and yet my motives were pure. I had to prove to her, or rather prove to myself, that I could do the work under the right conditions.
I secretly unfolded the contraband on my bed that night. The story, which had seemed so confusing in class, became quite clear to me in the still of my room. I not only got it, I could even relate to it. It was the true story of Louis Braille. He lived in the 1800s and was blinded by a childhood accident. During this time, society shut off the blind from having much of an education. Many were left with the bleak future of becoming homeless beggars. Despite much misunderstanding of his disability, Louis Braille “advocated” for himself. He developed a reading system of raised dots for the blind, which enabled him to read on a par with his peers. A world of books and knowledge opened up to him that he and others like him were literally blind to before. I was like Louis in my classroom setting. I was being made to learn like the other students who were sighted in a way I wasn’t.
That night I sat down at my word processor. My thoughts spilled out so fast that my fingers danced across the keyboard, straining to keep up. I explained myself in terms of Louis, in hopes that Mrs. Smith would finally understand me. Funny thing is, somewhere along the line I began to understand myself in a way I never had before.
I cited many other famous people who were in some way different in their learning styles and abilities throughout history. Hans Christian Andersen was said to have been learning disabled, and yet he wrote some of the best fairy tales of our time. I summed it all up by asking, “If I were a student with a vision impairment, would I be seated in the back of the room?” I questioned, “Would I have my glasses taken away from me so that I would not have an unfair advantage over other, glassless students?”
Mrs. Smith never looked at me as she handed my paper back facedown on my desk that day. She never even commented that my work was done on the word processor. As my eyes focused in on the white page, I found an A decorating the margin instead of her customary X. Underneath were her neatly red-penned words: “See what you can do when you apply yourself?”
I took the paper, tucked it away in my folder and shook my head. I guess some people will never get it!
C. S. Dweck
2
DRUGS &
ALCOHOL
Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself loses his misery.
Matthew Arnold
The Last Song for Christy
Matt never did drugs. He spent his afternoons and nights riding his skateboard through backstreets of the small town that raised him. His friends would experiment with the usual substances, but not Matt.
Christy was his sister; six years older. She and Matt were close. They both liked tattoos and metal guitar riffs. Christy would paint incredible portraits and abstract images, and Matt would jam on his guitar. They shared stories, and they always said “I love you” before bed.
When Matt and I started dating, the first family member I was introduced to was his sister, Christy.
“See this tattoo on my wrist. Christy has it, too. We got them together.” He lit up whenever he talked about her.
Matt was at the peak of his skateboarding career, and Christy was still painting. She was beautiful. They looked a lot alike—black hair, blue eyes. Christy was petite—her makeup dark and interesting—her lips, red and passionate. She looked the part she played—the artist, the once-rebel who survived hell and was now back, living life while revisiting the shadows of her past with each stroke of her paintbrush.
When Matt was in junior high, the police took Christy away. His parents wouldn’t tell him why, but he found out on his own. Heroin. She had been doing heroin, and they caught her. She was only eighteen. She spent the next several months in rehab while Matt waited, guitar riffs, skate tricks—waited.
When she finally did come home, things were different. Christy seemed distant and Matt didn’t know what to say. A few months later, they came again—the police. Matt was sleeping, and they knocked down the door. His sister was screaming as they dragged her away, this time to prison.
I asked Matt what it was like, how that affected him. I tried to imagine hearing her scream. I wondered how it was possible for Matt to sleep when he knew his sister was cold and alone in her cell somewhere.
“I couldn’t,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Did you visit her?” I asked.
Matt was silent.
“Did you ever talk to her about it, tell her how much it hurt you, tell her that you couldn’t sleep, tell her that you were afraid?”
There was a long silence. “She’s okay now. She’s been clean for eight years. She’s great. It’s over. The drugs, it’s all over.” Matt spoke to the wind when he spoke of Christy’s past. His voice would fade out into oblivion and then he’d change the subject.
When Christy was finally released from jail and then rehab, Matt’s family decided to move. They moved south, away from Christy’s reputation and the backstreets where Matt had conquered curbsides and half-pipes in the small town by the sea. Christy was clean and never again did Matt wake up to his sister’s arrests, or a cold sweat after the nightmares that plagued him while she was away. She had been clean for six months, and then two years, and then four. Matt went to high school and Christy moved back up north to go to school.
“Were you afraid?” I asked.
“Nope. She was going back to school. I was glad. She was going to pursue her art. She was so talented, you know,” Matt whispered.
I knew. I had seen her artwork. It hung in Matt’s room, in his kitchen and bathroom. She had even painted straight on the walls. Matt let her paint all over them.
Matt and I dated during my senior year. He was my first serious relationship. Christy came down to visit Matt and the family pretty often, and whenever she came down, Matt would rush to be with her. She was the woman in his life, more than I ever was. Christy and Matt were best friends. They were like nothing I had ever seen. Matt would light up when Christy entered a room. He was so proud of her. She was his angel, his big sister, and everything she said was amusing, brilliant or just cool.
I got the call a few months ago. Even though Matt and I had broken up over a year before, we were still close friends. The call wasn’t from him, though. It was from another friend.
“Becca, look . . . I thought I should tell you. Christy died. She overdosed. Heroin. I’m sorry.”
The air went numb, and the murmur of the TV in the other room muted. I dropped the phone and stared at the wall for what seemed like hours.
“But she was clean. Ten years now! She was clean . . .” I mumbled softly, my voice tainting the wind that blew on that rainy afternoon. I called Matt. He was with his family up north, where it happened.
Matt told me, “She wasn’t supposed to die. She was going to be married in a couple of months. They had the date and everything. We found this picture of her. She was wearing wings. You should see it; she looks like an angel.”
He wasn’t crying. I searched the blues of his eyes for a tear, but he was hypnotized. The shock. The impossibility of his earth angel lost somewhere in the universe. It was too much.
“The last time I saw her, she was so happy. I had my guitar and I was playing for her, and she was laughing. She was so beautiful and so happy. She was going to be a makeup artist. She would have been the best.” Matt was smiling, and I took his hand.
She didn’t have to die. She was clean for ten years, and then one day she started up again. Her body couldn’t take it. She passed out, and they couldn’t revive her. They couldn’t make her come back.
Matt spoke during the funeral. His words were soft and eloquent, and he looked out at Christy’s friends and family and told them how much he loved her, how much he will always love her. He showed his tattoo, the one that he and his sister got together. Some laughed. Some cried.
The picture that Matt had mentioned to me was perched behind the podium, between lilies and roses. Matt was right. She did look like an angel�
��red lips and blue eyes, wearing white and angel wings.
That night, after the funeral, Matt and I went down to the cove where he and Christy used to laugh. “How could she do this? Why? Why did she have to do this?” he asked.
He cried. I cried, too.
I talked to Matt the other day. I asked him how he was doing.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Most of the time. Sometimes I can’t sleep. I’m waiting for Christy to come home or for her to call. Sometimes I have these nightmares. I play the guitar a lot, even more than I used to. I have to practice. I’m in a band now, and we play gigs and stuff. The last song of the set is always the best. That’s the song I practice over and over again until it’s perfect. It has to be just perfect because I play it for Christy. The last song is always for Christy.”
Rebecca Woolf
The Final Act
Screeching tires, shattering glass,
Twisting metal, fiberglass.
The scene is set, it all goes black,
The curtain raised, the final act.
Sirens raging in the night,
Sounds of horror, gasps of fright.
Intense pain, the smell of blood,
Tearing eyes begin to flood.
They pull out bodies one by one.
What’s going on? We were only having fun!
My friend is missing. What did I do?
Her belongings everywhere,
In the road there lies her shoe.
A man is leaning over me and looks into my eyes,
“What were you thinking, son?
Did you really think that you could drive?”
He pulls up the sheet, still looking at me,
Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul on Tough Stuff Page 3