Everyday Hero (2 page)

So I ran.

I ran down the slick, grassy slope beside the school. I ran across the spongy wood-chip
track and through the squelching sodden grass of the school field.

I stopped only when I hit the prickly leaves of the evergreen bushes at the field’s
outer perimeter. Sweat soaked my T-shirt. I could smell it. Desperately I tugged
off my backpack, throwing it to the ground. I yanked off my jacket. I pulled off
my hoodie and flung myself onto the grass. It felt cool and wet against my skin.
The air smelled of damp cedar chips mixed with moss.

I breathed, filling my belly with air. I squeezed my eyelids shut. I counted the
thundering thumps of my heart. And breathed again.

***

When I opened my eyes, the sky was a black blanket patterned with stars. At first
I liked lying in the darkness and counting stars, but after a while my teeth started
to chatter.

I sat up and put on my hoodie and jacket. I wondered what I should do next. If I
am lost, I am supposed to phone my father on my cell phone. I am only supposed to
do this in an emergency, and on this occasion I wasn’t really lost. I knew I was
sitting at the north end of the Mount Elizabeth Middle School track.

Then I remembered that
lost
also means
unable to find one’s way home
, and in this
sense I was lost, because I did not know my way home. So I phoned Dad.

He came, although it was the middle of his shift. At least, he said it was the middle,
but this was not strictly accurate. His day shift goes from 8:00
AM
to 8:00
PM
. According
to my watch, it was 6:00
PM
.
Therefore, he was technically five-sixths of the way
through his shift.

Dad drives a 1995 blue two-door Ford Explorer with a gearshift and squeaky suspension.
I heard the vehicle coming even before I saw the headlights’ twin glare.

It stopped, and I opened the door and got in. The interior smelled of the aluminum
smelter where Dad works, a mix of chemicals, heat, dirt and sweat.

“Here.” Dad flipped open the glove box with one hand and pulled out a paper mask,
the kind doctors and nurses wear. I pushed it against my face. It tickled but blocked
out the other smells so that I could detect only the slight dusty smell of paper.

“I can’t blow too many shifts, so for goodness’ sake, don’t let this happen again,”
Dad said, accelerating and shifting gears.

Blow
means
send forth a strong current of air
.

“You understand?” he asked.

“
Blow
means
send forth a strong current of air
,” I said.

Dad muttered, “It also means when I leave in the middle of my shift.”

I explained that 6:00
PM
wasn’t the middle of his shift. Dad’s cheek twitched visibly
as we passed under the light of the sixth streetlamp.

“Just catch the bus,” he said.

At home, Dad asked me why my jacket was wet and covered in mud. I said I’d rolled
in the field.

“Why?” he asked.

I shrugged. It was too hard to explain, too hard to find the words, too hard—

I felt my body sway, rocking backward and forward.

“Jeez, it’s okay. Forget I asked. I’ll wash your clothes.”

Dad showered downstairs, because I do not like the smelter smell of heat and chemicals.
Then he made dinner. Dad says it is hard to cook for me because most foods involve
smells, and I do not like smells. I cannot eat fish or onions or eggs or cauliflower
or bacon. He made plain macaroni. I like plain macaroni.

After dinner I went into my room, which measures ten feet by twelve feet. I opened
the music box I got for my fifth birthday. The outside is white and painted with
pink and blue flowers. Inside, it is lined with pink velvet and has three tiny ballerinas.
When I wind it up, it plays “Für Elise,” which was composed by Beethoven. Beethoven
might have had Asperger’s.

The ballerinas go around and around and around. Sometimes I count them.

After looking at them for twelve minutes, I emailed Mom on Dad’s computer. (I don’t
have my own computer or email address.) I explained about the bus. I told her that
I never knew a bus could change its name and that it had made me feel like I’d felt
in Hawaii when the sea had tugged the sand from under my feet, and I’d screamed that
the earth was disappearing.

Like I said, I write
a lot
better than I talk.

Mom emailed right back. She asked why I’d had a detention. I wrote back to explain
that I’d missed gym because of the smells and the clanging of the metal lockers.

Mom asked a second question. She asked if Dad had told the school that I had Asperger
Syndrome yet.

I wrote that I did not know.

Later Mom phoned Dad. I knew it was Mom on the phone because he called her Lisa,
which is her name. Then Dad started to shout. When people
shout, it means they’re
mad or there is an emergency or they are watching a hockey game.

There wasn’t an emergency or a hockey game.

“No!” Dad’s voice was so loud I could hear it through my bedroom wall. “No, Lisa!
We’ve gone through this already. You look after your parents. Let me look after Alice
for a change. And let me do it my way. Give her a chance to be a normal kid!”

I sat on my bed. Then I got out my
Webster’s New World Dictionary
with the red leather
cover. I looked up the definition for
normal
in my dictionary. (I had to look it
up because it came after
mineralize
.)

Normal—the average in type, appearance, achievement, function and development
.

I wondered why Dad wanted me to be average in type, appearance, achievement, function
and development.

Average—the result obtained by adding several quantities together and then dividing
this total by the number of quantities
.

This didn’t make sense to me. Things that don’t make sense make me want to bang my
head and rock.

So I opened my music box and watched my three ballerinas twirl around and around
and around—like numbers that never stopped.

Two

Lying frightens me.

I’ve tried to do it, but it’s like looking at a tree and trying to see a house or
a boat or a monkey. Besides, once I tell myself that the tree isn’t a tree, the possibilities
are limitless. The tree could be anything—a whale, a lion, a hot-air balloon, an
army tank, a soldier with a machine gun…

I stared at page sixty-five of
The Outsiders
and wondered if I could lie about gym.
Perhaps I could say I was sick, like Emma, a girl in my old school who had hated
gym.

Something touched me. I jumped, jerking my gaze from page sixty-five of
The Outsiders
.

I do not like to be touched.

I turned. The guy across the aisle was leaning over, holding a piece of paper. He
jerked his head toward the girl behind me like he had a neck spasm.

He was chewing gum—spearmint—and his mouth made a rhythmic squelching sound. I took
the paper. It had a name scrawled on it:
TARA
.

“Alice, are you writing notes?” Ms. Burgess asked.

Ms. Burgess is the English teacher. She never allows talking on phones in her class.
She walked down the row to me. She smiled. A smile can mean that a person is happy
or glad or even excited. I wondered if she was happy, glad or excited.

“Answer me! Are you writing notes?” Ms. Burgess tapped her fingernail on my desk
(five times). I shook my head.

“Then who is?”

“Him,” I said.

The boy drew his eyebrows together and made a gesture I will not describe, as it
is against the rules. He also said a swearword, which I will not write because it
is also against the rules.

Ms. Burgess went red, not a solid color but mottled with white patches near her mouth
and spattered across her cheeks and neck.

“I will not have that language in my class!” Her voice was high.

Then she told the boy to come with her to the principal’s office. They left together.
Ms. Burgess’s heels
click-clacked
into the distance, followed by the heavy, slower
clump of the boy’s boots.

“What a rat!” The girl behind me stood, pushing her desk into mine with a clunk.

I looked at the floor. I am not afraid of rodents, as they do not bite humans unless
rabid, although I don’t own any myself because their cages smell.

Someone laughed. “She’s, like, looking for a rat. What a moron.”

Then I realized that the girl was using an idiom and meant that I was the rat.
Rat
can mean
an individual who tells someone in a position of authority about someone
else’s misdeeds
.

I do not like idioms.

The girl stood in front of my desk. She put both hands on it and leaned over. She
smelled of hair spray and perfume.

“Do you get off on getting other people in trouble?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Which was true, because I did not know what
get off
meant. My heart was pounding.
I looked down at my desk and counted the lines in the grain of the fake wood.

This didn’t work because the lines were wavy and merged into each other. My face
felt hot and sticky. My breath came quickly, as though to keep pace with the
thump-thump-thump
of my heart. My stomach squeezed into a tight, hard ball. I felt myself start to
sway, to rock.

I knew that if I rocked or banged my head, they would laugh more.

I squeezed my hands together, pressing them against my thighs. I tried to count.

“You talking to yourself? You mental or what?” the girl asked. She spoke loudly,
even though she was standing close to me.

Megan said, “Leave her alone, Tara.”

I hadn’t even realized Megan was in the classroom.

For a second the others grew silent.

“Why? She’s a nasty little snitch,” Tara said.

“Just leave her alone.” Megan cracked her knuckles, one at a time.

The silence seemed to grow.

“You gonna make me?” Tara asked.

“If I have to,” Megan said.

I think she stood. I heard the scrape of chair legs, the jingle of her belt and the
clunk of her boots. I looked up. She was coming down the aisle toward Tara, who had
straightened, lifting her hands from my desk.

“Catfight!” someone yelled. (I think this is another idiom, as there were no cats
about. I do not think the principal allows cats or dogs inside the school building.)

The bell rang, but no one moved.

“Well?” Megan asked.

“Whatever. I’m out of here.” Tara grabbed her backpack, swinging it around so that
I felt the air stir. Her runners squeaked as she walked between the desks and into
the hall. The door banged shut.

People laughed. I didn’t know why. People laugh at jokes or clowns or funny movies,
but this wasn’t any of those things.

Then everybody moved and talked at once. Feet shuffled. Books banged. Chairs scraped.
I didn’t move. The rule is to stay until the teacher dismisses us, and Ms. Burgess
hadn’t come back.

Besides, I didn’t want to move. I didn’t even know if I
could
move. My legs and arms
felt floppy. My heart still beat too fast, and my armpits were sticky.

At last the room became silent except for slow footsteps. I looked up. Megan was
walking toward me.

“She could have rearranged your face, you know,” she said.

From the hall outside, I could hear the muted noise of walking and talking and the
clanging of lockers. Someone had carved
JKR
into the fake wood of my desk.

“Tara could have rearranged your face,” Megan repeated.

How did someone rearrange a face? I stared at the
J
. It was carved with sharp angles,
no curves. I rubbed my fingers over it, feeling the roughness of the groove.

“You could say thank you,” Megan said.

I said nothing.

“Or not.”

The classroom door opened. I knew this without looking up because I felt a breeze
and the noise from the hallway suddenly amplified.

“Hey, what are you kids still doing here? School’s out.” It was Principal Harris.

“Outta here,” Megan said.

I looked down, watching her boots leave and counting her footsteps. Then I heard
the squeak of Mr. Harris’s shoes as he crossed the linoleum floor toward me. I stared
at the
J
.

“You too.” He’d reached my desk. He leaned forward, putting his hands over the
JKR
.
He had stubby fingers with short nails and dark hairs at the knuckles. Coffee laced
his breath.

“Hey? Are you okay?” His hand lifted, touching my shoulder, and then everything—the
touch, the coffee breath, the squelching spearmint gum, idioms, rats, Ms. Burgess,
Ms. Lawrence, Tara, Megan, Kitimat, Mom being a sandwich, buses that changed names
and Dad wanting me to be average in type, appearance, achievement, function and
development—became too much.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t even see properly. The chairs,
the desks, the
windows and even Mr. Harris jumped and swirled in a jerky, panicked
dance.

I got up. I must have hit my thigh. I found a bruise the next morning, big and blue
and purple.

Then I ran. Past the principal, the desks, through the door and into the hall.

But the hall was worse. It smelled of molten metal from industrial ed, burned food
from cooking class, sweat, socks, perfume and hair spray. Lockers clanged. The intercom
crackled. People laughed and shouted.

I couldn’t get through. Their bodies were made huge by backpacks, and thick winter
coats clogged the hallway.

Like a wall. Of bodies. Of flesh.

I couldn’t stop running. I had to get out. I had to get away. I pushed through them,
still running, weaving through the blur of faces, not stopping until I’d burst into
the cold outside air.

And still I ran. I ran across the entry to the parking lot, down the grassy hill,
across the spongy wood-chip track, stopping only at the edge of the empty field.