Trout and Me (2 page)

“The tests show that you reverse your letters and you seem to have a problem with visual memory and a few other things, which we’ll talk about. Nothing important.”

“Then I don’t need to talk about it,” I said.

My father had come into the living room by then. He sat down next to me and put his hand on my knee in one
of those fatherly ways and said that this kind of thing happened all the time.

“What kind of thing?” I asked.

“As far as I can tell, most normal boys in the United States have learning disabilities. I’m sure I have them too, but when I went to school, who knew a learning disability from a football.”

My father talks like that sometimes. He’s not a very patient man. Besides, as I told you, he cares more about “character” than grades, probably because he had trouble in school too. He told me that himself.

“So what’s going to happen?” I asked my mother.

“You’re going to have your own teacher to work with on reading for an hour every day.”

“I don’t want my own teacher,” I said.

My mother didn’t argue. She’s smart that way. She doesn’t argue with me, never even disagrees with me, but she always gets things her own way.

Which is what happened. I had a reading teacher and a speech therapist and by the time I was in the second grade, I had become what Mr. O’Dell called a
problem
, child.

Since the teddy bear, everyone expected trouble from me. So that’s what they got.

I live on Park Avenue, across the street from the pharmacy where my mother works making prescriptions and next door to the hardware store that my father owns. There aren’t a lot of houses on Park Avenue, mostly businesses, but we live on the third floor of a three-floor apartment building instead of in a house in a residential area so my parents can walk to work. Sometimes I wish there were more kids in the neighborhood, since I only have my sister, Meg, who started high school this year and is my best friend in spite of her new boyfriend, Max, who I hate. But there’re no kids I could be friends with in the apartment building, except Belinda on the second floor and Megan on the first, and “that’s that for this,” as my father would say. So it’s been me and Meg since the beginning, which was the year I was born and she was five.

I would have left Stockton Elementary for someplace like Nova Scotia before the end of first grade if it weren’t for Meg. Her real name is Margaret, but she’s always changing it depending on how she feels. She does the same thing with her hair. Sometimes it’s long with one braid or two or short and curly or dyed red or striped yellow with fringed bangs. Every week or two, she changes it. But for names, she’s Meg since she met Max. Meg and Max—she likes that. Before Max she was Maggie and before that she was M.C. for Margaret Carter and before that she was Margaret, which was the name she had when I was in first grade and she was in sixth. As Margaret, she was first in her class and winner of the citizenship award and best athlete award and best student award. She wore her dark brown hair in one long braid laced with ribbons, and short skirts with tights and black high-tops. Most of the boys I knew thought she was “foxy,” which was the word for
sexy
then. So I liked to walk out of the first-grade classroom when the bell for dismissal rang and up the stairs to the upper classrooms and meet Meg. We’d leave school together, sometimes with her friends, sometimes just the two of us, running down the front steps, stopping at my mother’s drugstore for candy, and then lying around the living room until my parents came home with supper.

“So how’s school today?” Meg would ask me once we were back in the apartment, after her friends had left.

“I hate it,” I’d say.

That was nothing new. After Mary Sue Briggs and my “diagnosis,” as Ms. Percival called the learning disabilities and my speech therapist and my special reading teacher, there was nothing during the day to like except lunch. I missed recess for speech tutoring and twice a week I missed gym for reading and by the end of first grade someone had decided that I had “eye-hand coordination” problems as well.

“Of course he has eye-hand coordination problems. He’s a boy,” my father said one night at dinner. “No six-year-old boy wants to sit at a desk for eight hours a day bored to death. He ought to be playing baseball.”

“Roger.”

The way my mother said “Roger,” which is my father’s name, sounded like trouble to me. As if she’s saying “Don’t ever speak like that in front of Ben.” Or “Set a good example. You’re the father, after all.”

My father can’t help himself. He says exactly what he thinks and that drives my mother crazy. She’s a good and patient person. She tries very hard not to be upset with me, but the fact is, she doesn’t like problems and a problem is what I am.

“So why do you hate school today?” Meg would ask.

It became a daily ritual with us. I’d be lying on the couch, probably eating oatmeal cookies, feeding half a
cookie to Jetty and half to me, and Meg’d be lying on her stomach on the rug with her CD player on low.

I’d turn on my side, pull Jetty up on the couch with me, snug under my arm.

“So today the speech therapist came in her rabbit ears and whiskers and said ‘Benny, say thweetheart,’” I’d begin. Meg loves it when I make up stories about my stupid tutors.

“And so what did you say?” Meg would ask.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve stopped talking.”

“That’ll help your lisp.”

“Since I stopped talking, it’s gone away. No lithp.”

“And can you read now?” Meg would ask.

“Try me.”

She’d open her book bag and take out the library book she was reading, maybe eighth-grade level, maybe grownup, open it to the first page, push it across the rug. “So read to me.”

I’d put the book on my stomach and pretend to read, making up a story instead.

“Once upon a time there was a girl called Babycakes who came to school in her sister’s flowered bikini underwear and that is all she wore, even in the winter,” I’d pretend to read. “And Babycakes was
fat
, so you could hardly see the underwear when she walked into Ms. Percival’s first-grade classroom and sat down at her desk and took
out her pencils and her reading book and her chocolate bar, took the paper off the chocolate bar, and ate it completely before the bell rang for first period.”

“Oh, Benjamin Carter. You’re such a genius,” Meg would laugh. “You read perfectly.”

“I know I do. I’m brilliant. A giant brain. One of a kind. Everybody says so.”

“And I’m so proud you’re my one and only brother,” Meg would say.

But the truth was, I had a fluttery feeling in my stomach every day I walked up the front steps of the school.

By the second grade, my report cards used to read like a prison record. They were full of U’s for Unsatisfactory and D’s for Disrespectful, Disturbing, Difficult, Disorganized, Dumb, Dreadful, Disgusting. There were long paragraphs of recommendations for my improvement and the suggestion that I might be happier in a Montessori school.

“Honestly, Ben. You’ve got to pull yourself together or we’ll be visiting you at the juvenile detention home,” my father said. By the time I was in the fourth grade, even he had lost patience with what the teachers referred to as my Deplorable Behavior.

According to the teachers at Stockton, my Deplorable Behavior included stuff like falling over backwards in my chair during reading class or dropping Billy Blister’s
sunglasses, which he wears to show off, in the trash or letting the pregnant mother hamster out of her cage during recess so her babies were born on a stack of yellow construction paper in the back of the supply closet. That sort of thing. Nothing bad enough to go to jail, but I couldn’t help myself. School made me crazy.

“It’s not that you’re
bad
, Benjamin,” my mother would tell me. “In fact, your reading is so much better and your eye-hand coordination is improving and even your lisp.” My mother sounds out the word “lisp” every time she says it as if it’s a word with three syllables:
li—ssss—ppp
.

It drives me wild.

“Every teacher is mad at me before she even meets me,” I would say.

“You just have a bad reputation, which started with the teddy bear, and now you can’t control yourself,” my mother replied. “The teachers expect you’ll be a problem, so it’s up to you to change their minds.”

It wasn’t entirely because of the teddy bear, although I hold Mary Sue Briggs responsible for every bad thing in my life, including the viral pneumonia I caught from her last year. But my bad reputation has followed me like a tail getting longer every year.

Every September, I go to a new grade and have a new teacher, new school clothes, new books and pencils and erasers, and think to myself that this year everything will
be different. The teacher will
like
me and she’ll tell the other teachers what a terrific kid I am in spite of my old reputation. She’ll even tell Mr. O’Dell. But
no.
On the first day of school in September, the teacher stands at the front of the room and reads the roll and asks us to raise our hands when our name is called so she can identify us. And when she comes to my name, “Benjamin A. Carter”—A for Anthony, a name I hate—she stops and looks around the room and shakes her head as if a black X is spilled over my name. Somehow like magic, as if I give off a certain bad cheesy smell, things fall apart when I walk into a room at school. Only at school. Everyplace else, like home and my grandparents’ and birthday parties and after-school soccer when I don’t have some stupid special tutor trying to fix my learning disabilities, I’m fine. I mean, almost fine. I’m not exactly a perfect child, but I’m not a criminal either.

But at school I’m a disaster. I walk into a room, like, say, Mr. Eager’s third grade, and a bookcase falls over; Billy Bass tips his chair backwards, hits his head on the floor, and gets a concussion; Patricia Dale trips over my foot in music class and knocks out her front tooth and tells
everyone
I did it on purpose.

People just expect things to go wrong when I’m around. And they do.

“I think you’re uncomfortable at school,” Meg said to me one afternoon last year.

“How come?”

“Because you’re just a little different, not entirely a middle-of-the-road, regular ten-year-old boy.”

“Because of the lisp?”

“I think it
started
with the lisp,” Meg said. “Everybody at home thought you were funny and adorable saying things like ‘thweetheart,’ and then you went to school and you weren’t funny any longer. You were
wrong.
Other kids didn’t talk like you did.”

“Well, Daniel Forest had a lisp.”

“And then he moved to New York.”

“My teachers say I try to call attention to myself by bad behavior. They say my lisp is just an excuse and sometimes I do it on purpose just to call attention to myself.”

Meg shrugged. “The thing is, if people expect you to be trouble, then you’ll be trouble. People expect me to be good, so I’m good. It’s the way people are.”

“Stupid.”

“Right. Stupid,” Meg said.

Which is just one of the reasons Meg is my best friend.

That night when I went to bed, I thought about what Meg had said, because she’s smart in school but she’s especially smart about kids. I thought about the word “uncomfortable” and just thinking about it, I felt a little sick. When
I’m at school, it’s as if my skin is squishing me like too-tight jeans. I have this funny feeling in my stomach and I can’t sit still at my desk, and sometimes I think kids are looking at me like I’m weird.

Every day since the Halloween when Mary Sue Briggs made fun of me, I’ve gone up the front steps of Stockton Elementary with that same feeling in my stomach. Because of my lisp, like Meg says. Because of my
special
teachers and my learning disabilities. Because everyone— first the teachers and then the kids—is looking at me waiting to see what will happen next.

And then the week after Easter break, fifth grade, section number three, Mr. Baker’s class, Trout arrived. He walked into the classroom wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with his name on the front in black letters and carrying a book bag.

“I’m Trout,” he said to Mr. Baker.

“I know,” Mr. Baker said. “Welcome to the fifth grade. I’ve kept a desk for you right here in the front row.”

But Trout wasn’t paying attention to Mr. Baker. He took one look around the classroom, considering the possibilities for a friend, and decided on me.

And that was that. When the bell rang for the end of homeroom, he jumped up from his chair, rushed over three rows to where I was sitting, and attached himself like Velcro to my side.