What to Say Next(40)

“How bad is it, Miney? Tell me. How bad?” I am hoping there’s something I’m missing here. Maybe it’s not so strange. Maybe other people do this same thing. Keep a notebook about their classmates. Or maybe it will be helpful, after all, just like my physics notes would have been.

Nope. Justin and Gabriel titled the page “The Retard’s Guide to Mapleview.” Don’t they realize you aren’t supposed to use that word? That it’s offensive even to those who actually have Down syndrome? Unless they meant the adjective form of the word, i.e., retarded, as in slow or limited, rather than the noun they’ve used. Not sure if that’s a fair or politically correct usage, but this sort of thing—this abject humiliation—doesn’t seem to happen to the neurotypical.

I picture Kit running away from me. Not even slowing down as she slipped on the snow. I picture Kit reading my notebook. Relieved she got away from me just in time.

“This is bad. Like very, very, very bad,” Miney says. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m going to go see the principal. She’ll make those animals take it down,” my mother says as she comes running into our living room from the kitchen, her car keys already in her hand. She’s heading toward the front door. “We could take legal action. That violates your constitutional right to privacy!”

“You saw it too?” I ask. My eyes are closed now. The darkness helps. Too many sounds. Too many thoughts. Too much of everything. I need darkness and quiet.

“We’ll fix this,” my mom says. Her voice breaks, like a thirteen-year-old boy’s. I’m glad I can’t see her face. I don’t want to know what I’d see there. I consider sticking my fingers in my ears, but that would be going too far, even for me. “I promise.”

“Mom. You can’t go to school,” Miney says. “You’ll just make it worse.”

“They can’t get away with this. They just can’t….”

Miney and my mother go on like this for a few minutes, arguing about what they should do next. Just from their tone, I can tell this is so much worse than the Locker Room Incident, when Justin stuffed me in a locker in seventh grade right after convincing me to join him in a bathroom stall because he said he had something cool to show me. That was a lie. Instead, he grabbed my neck and gave me a swirly in a dirty toilet. And that was bad. I know because my mom cried when she came to pick me up from school that time and spent the whole next day in bed. I know because my dad’s self-defense training started soon thereafter. I know because the next week my sister bought me a notebook and started making me write down rules and telling me who I could and could not trust. I know because I couldn’t shake the smell for weeks. I know because some of the kids still call me shithead.

I know because later, when I really allowed myself to think about it and what I had allowed to happen to me, that day cracked me wide open.

I stop listening. No, this isn’t fixable. I see that now. Reading my notebook is like opening up my brain and exposing to the uncaring world all the parts that don’t make sense. The parts that make me a freak or a moron or a loser or whatever words people like to throw at me.

The parts to them that make me other.

The parts to me that make me me.

Miney is right. This is very, very, very bad.

Your outsides match your insides better now, Kit said earlier, but she was wrong. No, now my real insides are all on the outside for everyone to pick apart and laugh at. I’m like roadkill. I’ll be looked at, examined, but I won’t even be eaten. I’m not worth that much.

Kit was right about one thing: I am disgusting.

I don’t say anything to Miney or my mother. I don’t really care what they decide to do. Doesn’t matter at all.

Notebook or not, I’ll still be me.

Someone who disgusts.

So instead I go up to my bedroom and close the door.





“The Retard’s Guide to Mapleview”—which is horribly offensive—reads like a compilation of strange online dating profiles. I’ve made it back to school and to my car and even through the terrible drive home without throwing up. I open the link because I need distraction.

I’m tired of the constant hole in my stomach, that slow burn of loss. I will never see my father again. Nothing I will ever do can change that. I wonder if one day soon I will forget the sound of his voice. I can’t imagine a world where I can’t conjure up its deep bass. Where I can’t conjure up the planes of his face or the feeling of his hand on my forehead. That’s not a world I want to live in.

At first glance, the guide just looks like a bunch of scanned pages from a handwritten notebook. Alphabetical entries about different people in our class. A list of rules, the first three of which say, “Do not engage with anyone on the DNT list.” What does DNT mean? Annie, who speaks acronym, would probably know.

There’s a long list of people’s names with random descriptions and observations that are equal parts poetic and bizarre. Violet is described as “cinched” because of her predilection for pointed collars and belts; Jessica’s blond hair is called “offensively fluorescent,” Abby’s perfume “the olfactory equivalent of dying of asphyxiation by an old lady’s farts,” which is, come to think of it, remarkably accurate. A list of Notable Encounters for almost every person in our class and elaborate charts about different friend groups.