Reality Boy

“Yeah,” I say. “Shut up.”

Deirdre aims her electric wheelchair toward me and then reaches over and squeezes my arm. “Soon you’ll be too hot for us retards,” she says, and laughs. Sometimes when Deirdre laughs, she spits a little. None of us laugh at her, because we’re a family—which is something the school guidance counselor can’t understand when I tell him this.

“If you had a chance to get out of the special education program, you wouldn’t take it?” he asked me during our monthly meeting last month.

“No way. I love those guys.”

“But it’s not about them. It’s about you. You don’t need to be in the class, do you?”

“I don’t know. Depends what you mean by need,” I said.

I need to not be on my guard all the time. I need to not have people call me names. I need a place where I don’t need war paint to survive. And that’s the SPED room. The war paint I wear just to get from my car to the SPED room. It’s for lunch. For the mainstream gym class I have to take. It’s for just being here and not somewhere else where no one knows who I am… like South America.

Fletcher says, “Okay. Get your math books out. You’re all going to be calculating linear equations before Friday or I’ll get fired and have to live on the streets.”

I knew how to calculate linear equations three years ago, but I open my book and follow instructions. I’m not playing stupid. I’m just safer here. Or everyone else is safer because I’m here. Or something.

They put that Tom kid in my lunch period. Which was their mistake, because all he’s wanted to do since I ate a hole through his face in eighth grade is kill me. He sends me looks from FS all the time. I stamp them with RETURN TO SENDER and eat my food. But one day, the kid’s gonna break. I can see it. Before I graduate, he’s going to sneak up on me and whale on me hard and I’m going to have to defend myself and I’ll be the one who ends up incarcerated.

Which I refuse to do. Which is why this war paint is so good. Because I know it will allow me to lie down and take it.

Even if he bites my face off.

Even if he kills me.

I can take it.

I’ll just skip off into Gersday in my moccasins and feathers and I’ll make my wild calls and dance my wild dances and eat Indian ice cream until I’m finally free. I almost wish he’d just f**king do it already. I’m pretty sure everyone would be happier.

No one talks to me here outside of SPED kids. No teachers. Not even the lunch ladies. I told Roger once that they all think I’m about to hop up on the table and do a shit.

“I doubt it,” he said. “You haven’t done that since you were little, right?”

“Yeah. But I can see it. They want me to.”

“Huh,” he said.

I’m right. They all want me to. And I want to entertain them again, just like when I was a kid. It would give them something to talk about. Something to text each other about. LOL! ROTFLMAO! WTF? GTFO!

The guidance counselor used to say that the only reason I didn’t have friends was because I had a wall up. First, he’s a moron. Second, who the f**k wouldn’t have a wall up if they were me? My wall has war paint on it, too. It’s a picture of a fearsome beast inside the outline of a television.

11

EPISODE 1, SCENES 20–29

I’D GRADUATED FROM behavior charts to chore charts—step two of the 1-2-3 program. Real Nanny kept smiling at me from the sidelines, but Fake Nanny was stricter. My crapping really put her off. Which is why I did it. But hey—I hadn’t punched a wall in a month, so she’d solved that problem, right?

“Gerald, here’s your chore chart,” Nanny said. “If you do what Mum and Dad say and get a sticker on this chart for every day, you’ll get to go to your circus.”

Lisi and I had been begging Mom and Dad to take us to the circus since the signs went up around town.

I looked at the chart—a small grid with pictures of the three things I had to do every day in order to go to the circus. The tasks were easy. A picture of a bed and a toy box. I had to make my bed and clean up my toy box in the playroom. The third chore was weird, though.

“What’s that?” I asked.

It was a picture of our kitchen table with place settings on it. I’d never been made to set the table before and, in my mind, I shouldn’t have to do it, because I was a boy. I know how sexist this sounds now, but I was five. Cut me a break.

“It’s a new chore, but we think it will help you be part of this family and make it the best team it can be. Those other two chores are for you and only you, but this means you can participate in a whole new way because you’re such a big boy.”

I squinted at the picture. “You want me to set the table?”

“Very good! Yes! For dinn-ah only.”

“I don’t even know where the stuff is,” I said.

“That’s all right. We’ll help you for the first few days,” she answered.

And they did. They showed me where the plates were and Mom said be careful about a hundred times, but I didn’t break anything. By midweek, I’d make my bed in the morning right after I got up and I’d arrive at four on the nose to set the table… before anyone else was even in the kitchen. Because that way it was easier to coat Tasha’s plate in dirty toilet water. I did this every day for two weeks. Made my bed. Cleaned up my toys. Set the table. Toilet water.

The film crews left us alone those two weeks while Nanny went and meddled in some other family’s life, and then she came back to find all those perfect stickers on my chart and the news that I hadn’t crapped anywhere but the toilet.

She high-fived me. “I knew you could do it. What a good boy.” I saw Real Nanny giving her a thumbs-up when she did this. She still had all that weird actress drama—demanded a certain type of apple in her lunch salads and only drank her tea at certain temperatures—but she was turning into a real nanny. Or, at least, she was nailing the role.

She went to Lisi’s chart then and saw that she’d missed a few days of room cleaning and doing dishes. Nanny said, “Lisi, you can do better than that.”

Lisi just nodded because the director told her to nod.

Tasha’s chores were more complicated because she was the oldest. She was supposed to clean the bathrooms on Saturdays and clean her own room and the upstairs hallway. She hadn’t done any of it. Not even once. Nanny asked if she’d just forgotten to put the stickers on her chart, but Tasha shook her head no and smirked.