After Kit ran away from me, I spent another fifty-five minutes outside in the snow by myself, measuring velocity and rate of acceleration and doing calculations in my head and on my phone, since I didn’t have my notebook to write them down.
Now that I’m home, I need to readjust after all that time alone, after all those words and numbers tumbled and boomeranged in my brain. After watching Kit’s departing back, and wondering why she left me there without so much as a goodbye. I know that if I were someone else, I’d get that elusive subtext that everyone else seems to come preprogrammed with and understand why she suddenly, without warning, found me so disgusting. That’s the only word I can use to describe the look on her face: disgust. Did she know I wanted to kiss her?
I’m not ready for Miney, who greets me at the door as if she is going to hug me. The purple stripe in her hair is blaring. Like a trumpet. No, like car brakes screeching to a halt.
“It’s everywhere,” Miney says, and I notice she’s still in her odd-duck pajamas. Again, she hasn’t left the house. Her eyes are red-rimmed but not crusty. Not pink eye, then. If she had an infection, there would be secretions.
“What’s everywhere?” I ask, but I don’t really care. All I am thinking about is Kit’s hand in mine, how she makes me brave. How did she know I wanted to kiss her? I already know I’m a terrible liar, but it’s not like she asked me outright: Do you want to kiss me?
“Your notebook.”
I have no idea what Miney’s talking about. What does that mean, my notebook is everywhere? A notebook is a fixed object. The laws of physics don’t allow it to be in more than one place at a time. Unless we are talking about the multiverse, but Miney doesn’t understand the concept. I’ve tried explaining it lots of times.
“Someone put it on the Internet,” Miney says, and hands me her phone. Tumblr. The title: “The Retard’s Guide to Mapleview.” My body shakes, just once, as if absorbing a single blow.
“Oh,” I say.
“Oh? That’s it?”
“I thought they stole it for my physics notes. That they would give it right back when they realized it wasn’t going to be helpful. Why would they do this?” I’m not sure why I even bother to ask, because I should know by now I will never understand the answer. Why anyone ever does anything. “My notebook was supposed to be private.”
“Who did this?” she asks.
I don’t answer. It doesn’t matter. My notebook is no longer a tangible thing. It’s like a dead person’s consciousness. There but not there. Everywhere at once.
“Little D, who?” Miney grabs me by the shoulders, forces me to look her in the eye.
“Justin Cho and Gabriel Forsyth.”
“I’ll kill them,” Miney says, which is a nice offer, but I don’t want her to go to jail. Then I wouldn’t be able to talk to her whenever I wanted. We’d have to sit across from each other in a dirty vestibule, converse through bulletproof glass. Miney is a picky eater. She’d hate prison food.
“Maybe people will stop reading as soon as they realize that it’s private,” I say, hopeful. Still stupidly hopeful. I never learn.
“Not likely. Six of my friends sent it to me in the past few minutes.” I picture the word viral, a soiled word, and imagine my book as a pathogen. Multiplying exponentially. Replicating itself like a cancer cell.
I nod. I get it now. As usual, it just takes me a few extra beats. My body reacts first: My hands flap side to side, and my legs shake up and down. I look like a bird readying for flight. I haven’t flapped like this since the sixth grade, when Miney filmed me on her phone and explained that if I ever wanted to have any friends, I needed to stop. And to my amazement, next time I caught myself doing it, I was able to quit; I replaced the motion with silent counting, though by then the damage had already been done. Apparently no one wants to be friends with the kid who used to flap.
“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.