Colton has Asperger’s.
Asperger’s.
Say it a million times over.
It’s such a foreign word, right? And I’m sure there’s a hell of a lot of people that know about this stuff from the get-go, but I wasn’t one of them. It’s not like, at the age of fifteen and in the midst of my daily gossip sessions with Harper, we’d suddenly stop to wax philosophic over the different types of Autism and spectrum disorders in the world.
We were more into talking about Fashion Police and stuff.
Not Colton and his diagnosis.
I mean, clearly he was high functioning, and his art was ridiculously good. But I also kind of felt like Googling information about the subject would be a little like cheating in this case.
There have been a lot of words to describe me over the years: precocious, hard-headed . . . indestructible. But I’ve never been known as nosy. There was a pamphlet lying in my hand explaining the smallest bits of information I could possibly have, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to validate it. He’d been a regular little boy when we’d met. How was it possible that something was different about him?
I know better now. I’m not that naïve any more. But at the time, I didn’t want to. I just felt drawn to him and like I wanted to know him better. Unlock his mystery on my own.
I think sometimes we’re presented with the truth but we don’t want to believe it. We see things the way we want to see them. Sometimes, we choose to live in denial.
* * *
After the fair, I waited until my parents fell asleep, which was probably eight o’clock because, let’s face it, they’re old, and then snuck out of the garage. The entire way to his house on my bike, I wondered what I was going to do. I just needed to see him. Don’t ask me why. I just did. I remembered the way.
I crawled through the bushes around the side of his house until I was standing under the room I recalled was his.
It was the same room I’d taken the mattress from.
The lights were out and my heart kind of died right there inside my chest at the same time I had this horrible feeling of an over-full bladder that should have made me run away.
You know how hard it is to move when you have to pee that bad? Stupid nerves.
Instead, I moved around to the other side of the house and pressed my back against the far wall to see if the light was on in the room above the garage.
It was.
At fifteen years old, I was contemplating climbing the lattice that ran up the side of his house and swinging like a monkey over to the tree limb closest to his window. Just to get a glimpse of him. Just to be close enough to him to feel even a tenth of the kind of heart racing, blood-pumping excitement I’d felt in the less than ten minutes I’d been with him that day.
I wish now I would have done just that.
But I chickened out. Instead of being that badass girl I’d dreamt of being before I got hit by lightning, I turned around and went back home. To my room, where all my questions were still unanswered. Where my heart felt numb and empty all at once because I liked this boy and I knew nothing about his situation.
I just knew what it felt like when he’d said my name.
What it felt like to stand with him by the train tracks.
What it had felt like to have him walk away from me and leave me more confused than I’d ever been in my entire life.
That was the night I’d vowed to forget about Colton Neely because I was scared of what I might find out. My young brain came up with a million excuses as to why I was doing it, but I am honest enough with you now to say I was scared. It was within three months of that night that I met Joseph through his sister Tracy, and we started dating. Because he was interested and I thought he was cute.
He was my first real kiss and we had fun together, though nothing inside of me tingled or lit up like it had the day at the fair. In essence, I just went with the flow, ignoring any information about the artist I had known once upon a time, in another life. Here and there, I would hear he was opening an exhibit somewhere amazing. I would catch glimpses of his artwork as I turned the newspaper over to the comics to eat my cereal on Sundays.
That void . . . that damn hole in my heart . . . it never really closed. Even after starting high school and becoming a member of the Debate Team so I could decide if being a lawyer was what I wanted to do. Even after helping Harper plan the school dances. Babysitting as much as I could to make extra money. Even after all that, there was still something missing.
I focused on trying to become a better person than the mean little girl who told a talented artist to color inside the lines all those years ago. It was kind of like floating in the middle of a swimming pool on a raft. Complacent. Happy because it was routine. It was life.
Harper and I hung out.
Joseph and I made out.
Homework assignments were handed in.
I was just there.
But life isn’t really about just getting by. Right when you’ve lulled yourself into a false sense of security, it likes to throw in a plot twist. Keep you on your toes.
I had specifically not looked into Colton’s ‘condition’. And yes, I’m using finger quotes.
There was something inside me that didn’t want to know. Something that made me think if I knew exactly what it was he was experiencing, then it would change my memories of him or sway me to look at him differently. And I didn’t want that because the ones I did have of him, even when coupled with my near-death experiences, were pretty good. I felt good when I thought of him.
To have the knowledge of what was ‘wrong’ could have caused me to second-guess and analyze every last move he’d ever made. My interactions with him. His mother’s sanity.
I was really, really good at pretending and ignoring things.
Weren’t you?
Anyway. I’d had this misconception it meant he was handicapped. Obviously there would be a stigma attached to him, right? What I didn’t know at the time was there are so many people on the spectrum that we’re familiar with.
Like, celebrities.
You can look it up.
Would you ever know it? Probably not. But if you did, would it make you look at them differently? Would you scour their body language and everything to see if you can say, “Oh, yeah. That totally makes sense.”
This is why I didn’t want to know. I thought maybe I’d never see Colton again, and therefore, didn’t need to spoil any of my precious memories of him.
I was a moron who feared knowing the truth would make things different in a negative way instead of positive. That it would be more than I could handle. But something I forgot about myself is that I’m pretty stubborn and loyal. Tenacious to a fault, in fact.
Later on, I figured out very quickly I’d do anything for him.
Anything.
I know it to be fact, because as soon as I’d nearly forced myself to forget about him, Colton Neely stepped through the doors of my high school on the first day of my senior year.
With a locker just a foot away from mine.
And he was even more beautiful in real life than he’d been in the faded picture I’d kept of him in the back of my mind.