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From the pages of Please Stop Laughing at Us ...
Though a few students request one-on-ones with me after my first
talk, I can’t help thinking that I blew it, that this audience
didn’t respond the way previous ones have. A large group of kids
were whispering to each other and passing notes throughout the
entire presentation and didn’t appear to be paying attention.
Despite my repeated attempts to engage their interest, I couldn’t
get them to come around. As I’m beating myself up, wondering where I
went wrong, a student approaches me and introduces herself as one of
the “preps,” the most popular clique at school. She says her name is
Brittany and asks if she and her friends can talk with me privately.
Surprised, I tell her that I’ll be in the all-purpose room with the
principal, who’s really on the ball in this district, arranged for
me to use in anticipation of one-on-ones. Moments later, Brittany
walks in, accompanied by at least thirty other students, the same
ones who I could have sworn weren’t hearing a word I was saying.
Impeccably dressed, they look like they just jumped off the pages of
a J. Crew catalog.
“Your speech really hit home,” one of them says.
“For me, too,” several others respond in unison.
“I didn’t think you guys were listening,” I remark, stunned.
“You had us totally freaked.”
“Why?” I ask.
“You know how you said you’re damaged because of what happened to
you?” Brittany says.
I nod my head.
“There’s this kid, Eric, and we’ve been treating him the way you
were treated in school, and we feel bad about it,” she says. Then,
glancing around the room at her friends for support, she adds, “We
want him to know how sorry we are.”
I call Eileen, who’s in the main office returning e-mails and ask
her to find Eric. Moments later, I’m standing with him in the
hallway outside the all-purpose room. Tall and gangly, with a hint
of facial hair, he is painfully self-conscious, as if the body he
inhabits doesn’t fit right. I’ve never met anyone like him before.
He exudes sadness and sweetness, and I ache to protect him, but
there’s also a dissonance that makes being around him like listening
to beautiful music being played on a piano that’s out of tune. When
I explain to Eric that some of his classmates want to apologize for
bullying him, he looks at me with the guarded reserve of a
precocious child and then starts listing what they’ve done to him
since fifth grade. Each sentence rolls into the other, punctuated by
an occasional flurry of tics, that he tries to control, but they
seem to have a will of their own.
When we enter the room, we’re greeted by a flutter of uneasy smiles.
Eric swallows hard and looks back toward the door, as if he’s
calculating how long it will take him to reach it should he need to
escape.
“Can I say something first?” he whispers.
“Go ahead,” I encourage him.
He turns and faces his classmates.
“I would give anything for you to like me, but I don’t blame you for
thinking I’m weird,” he says. “I have a disorder called Asperger’s
Syndrome and sometimes I can’t help the way it makes me act. But
it’s not the only reason I’ll never be normal.” He bites down hard
on his lower lip to prevent himself from crying.
Brittany and her friends are glancing at each other guiltily, their
remorse palpable.
“I used to get on my dad’s nerves a lot because of my Asperger’s,
and he and my mom would fight about it all the time. One day, while
she was out shopping, he came into my room with this look on his
face that I’d never seen before and said he just couldn’t take me
anymore. Then my dad went downstairs and killed himself.”
There’s a collective gasp, and then I hear a choir of voices
murmuring, “Oh, my God,” in hushed tones. No one seems to know what
to say to Eric, who is equally uncomfortable. Suddenly, Brittany
walks over to him. She gently wraps her arms around him, telling him
how sorry she is for what he’s had to go through, and how terrible
she and everyone else feels that they made things worse by being so
cruel to him all these years. Then she and her friends ask for his
forgiveness and his friendship. I’ll never forget the look on Eric’s
face in that moment. It was as if someone turned a light on inside
him. He will become one of the kids who continue to stay in touch
with me through letters and e-mails. His progress will inspire me on
days when I need it most.
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