A Step Toward Falling Read online

  Because they have ideas to choose from, the exercise goes faster. I help Annabel write Good lasagna maker and I remind Francine of what she said so perfectly last week because it’s not one of the choices on the board. “Remember what you told me last time? How you’re a people person and you’re good at helping others?” A moment earlier she’d been squinting at the board. At this, her whole face brightens. “That’s right!” she says. “I am!”

  When we move on to the next part of the exercise, Mary asks Lucas and me to take a piece of paper and do the exercise along with everyone else so they can use ours as examples. As she explains what we’re doing, I write my name at the top and try to think quickly of two good qualities about myself. I wish I could use Francine’s but I can’t, so I look up at the board and grab the first two that make sense. Hard worker and Nice friend.

  The next part of the exercise surprises me. The papers are meant to get passed around the room so each person can write their favorite quality about the person whose name is at the top. It’s hard because some students have known one another for years and others have only just met. Mary reassures them, “It’s okay to write, ‘I like the bright colors you wear.’ Or, ‘I liked a comment you made last week in class.’ If you’re really stuck, you can pass the paper along without writing anything.”

  Now I know why she included Lucas and me in this exercise. This way, presumably everyone will get at least two comments on their sheet.

  It’s not easy, though. There are some people in the class who have never spoken, meaning it’s impossible to comment on anything except their appearance, which doesn’t seem right. Luckily, I start with my old pal, Harrison. For him, I write: “You are very smart, plus you have a very cool way of memorizing the Billboard chart.” In the second week of class, he told me his secret—that everyone in this group was born within a few years of one another, meaning he hasn’t memorized sixty years of Billboard chart toppers, only five years’ worth.

  “Still,” I told him, “that’s a lot.”

  “I suppose,” he said. “But five years is a lot less than sixty.”

  After I finish mine, I lean over to Sheila’s desk and see that she has written nothing on hers. “What’s your favorite thing about Peter?” I whisper.

  “I don’t know,” she moans. “This is hard.”

  It is hard with Peter, who is one of the quiet ones. It’s hard to know how much of class Peter follows because he always looks as if he’s staring off into space.

  “I guess I like his taste in music.”

  “Good—write that!” I say. “Have you talked about it?”

  “I can hear what’s playing in his earphones. I like most of it. Not all of it.”

  I’ve heard about autistic people having special skills, but can Sheila hear music playing in another person’s earbuds this well? I push the paper to my desk and check to see if Peter needs help. He doesn’t. He might not talk much, but he has the smallest, neatest handwriting I’ve ever seen from a boy. He’s also grasped the basic idea of assignment. Amelia is nice with red hair, he’s written.

  “Great job, Peter!” I say and touch his shoulder, which makes him flinch in surprise.

  As the papers keep moving around the circle, I help Sheila write something for Amelia (“Her hair is really thick”) and for Simon (“I use to be in love with Simon but I’m not anymore”). I write my own notes and eventually, with much cajoling and assistance, every paper makes its way around the circle.

  After break, Mary tells us that we’re not quite done yet—there’s one last step to this exercise. She wants everyone to read over his or her list and make different marks beside the comments that 1) surprised them the most, 2) they agree with the most, 3) they want to work on doing more. A few protests ripple through the crowd. Thomas slumps onto his desk and says he’s too tired for anything like this. Simon says he can’t read anyone’s handwriting.

  Mary waits for the talking to stop. “Let me tell you the reason we’re doing this. You already know the first thing people notice about you is that you look and act a little different than other people. You can’t control that. What you can control is the second thing they notice about you. You can make sure it’s something you like about yourself and something other people like about you, too.”

  Mary’s right about this much: they do look different in one way or another. Simon wears bright, Day-Glo-colored T-shirts, elastic-waistband pants, and Velcro strap shoes. Francine carries a fuzzy panda-bear backpack. Ken wears a variation of the same outfit every week—a motorcycle decal shirt with sweat pants. Whenever he gets nervous about standing up in front of the class or doing a role-play, he stretches the waistband of his pants out and tucks his T-shirt in. Mary’s also right about her second point. Now that we’ve been coming here for more than a month, that’s not the first thing I notice anymore. I know these people well enough now to say that Sheila, with her J. Crew wardrobe, might look the most normal, but is actually the most challenging to have a decent conversation with. And Simon, who looks the strangest, is probably the easiest. Or at least the one most likely to understand a joke and make a funny one himself.

  Now I suddenly like this exercise a lot. I look down and reread my own sheets. I have a few surprising ones:

  I really like your purse.

  You’re the funniest person I have ever met.

  You should be on TV.

  You make me laff.

  It occurs to me that before coming to this group, I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly funny person. Funny is reserved for Richard and Barry, who quote long stretches of dialogue from The Simpsons or Anchorman. Funny people work hard for their title. I wonder if it is a measure of the relatively easy audience this group is that someone has called me “the funniest person I have ever met.”

  Pretty soon there’s no time to think about it because everyone needs help with this assignment. I bend down beside Simon’s desk while Lucas pulls a chair over and sits beside Francine. I hear him explain softly to her, “Which one says how you’d like people to see you?”

  The question is too abstract. Lucas thinks for a second. “How about this? Which one do you like the most?” She points to something. “Really?” Lucas says. “Your favorite thing about yourself is your pink socks and your barrettes? I think you’ve got better things on there.”

  They both read her sheet. She points to a different one and looks at him. He reads it and nods. “Exactly. That’s the one I would have picked, too. Now draw a star next to that.”

  As we move around the room, I can’t help imitating the way Lucas helped Francine. Thoughtfully, respectfully. As I circle around the room, I stop by his empty desk and read his list when no one is looking:

  You have nice jean pants

  You are very big.

  Your leg is hurt.

  I lik you but I’m also Scared of you. Thats why we ar not friends.

  Lucas looks like a football player. Everything about him is big—his chest, his neck, his hands. If you don’t know him at all, he is scary to imagine becoming friends with. If you know him a little, in the context of our school, where football is an obsession and the players all celebrities, it’s even scarier. It occurs to me, though—none of these comments say anything about Lucas personally. They’re all about his size, his looks, or his injury. If he had to pick his favorite, what could he choose? There’s nothing here.

  Because we were helping other people, I didn’t bother to write anything on his list. Now I pull out my pen to scribble quickly: You have good instincts and you’re a nicer person than I ever expected you’d be.

  I reread it and consider crossing the whole thing out. I don’t know if I’ve said too much or too little because I’m not sure what, exactly, I want to say. I think I want to say: You’ve surprised me, in the same way some of our classmates have surprised me. The way Belinda surprised me all those years ago by being so good at theater. I hope I haven’t embarrassed myself or, worse, said something inadvertently
unkind: You don’t seem like a nice guy; I’m surprised that you are.

  Once we’re back in our seats, I watch Lucas read the new item on his sheet, but he doesn’t look at me or around the room to figure out who wrote it. It’s pretty obvious. Chad isn’t here and Mary hasn’t moved from her desk for this exercise. It has to be me, but he doesn’t seem to register that.

  Even when we walk out of class, he doesn’t mention it. Instead we stand in the waiting room for a minute because the class that meets after ours—ballroom dancing—is gathering in front of the main door, creating a blockade. It’s a surprisingly big group, twice the size of our class, with about forty participants, an equal mix of men and women. They’re required to wear jackets and skirts, though some of them show up in work uniforms they change out of in the bathroom. Lucas and I stand in the lobby and watch the spectacle of them all greeting one another. There are lots of hugs in this crowd. A few of the women are wearing corsages that get pressed and flattened. Because we are standing in the hallway near the bathroom, a man wearing a McDonald’s uniform, carrying a brown grocery bag, rushes up and points to our jeans. “Have you two changed yet? Class is about to start.”

  Lucas holds up a hand. “We’re not in this class. The bathroom’s all yours.”

  “Great! Thanks.” He hugs his bag and carries it into the bathroom.

  As the class starts, we peek into the open door of the gym, where the dancers are already partnering up. “Heads up!” the teacher commands. “Arms raised!”

  It isn’t a graceful sight. Their raised arms do more colliding than settling onto each other’s shoulders. Even the teacher closes her eyes. When she opens them, though, it’s happened: they’re all in dance position, poised to begin. “Very good,” she says softly.

  We wait just long enough to see the man we spoke with earlier emerge from the bathroom, still wearing his McDonald’s pants, but now he has on a wrinkled button-down shirt and a large, clip-on bow tie.

  Lucas flashes him a thumbs-up with a smile. “You look awesome, man.”

  “Thanks.” The man nods seriously and adjusts his tie. “You don’t, but that’s okay. You’re not in the class.”

  We wait until he’s gone to laugh at what he’s said. “You don’t look awesome either,” Lucas says because I’m laughing a little too hard. As I hold the door open for him, he keeps going. “Seriously, where’s your tiara? Every week, you show up without it.”

  In the car, Lucas still doesn’t mention my note on his sheet. Apparently we both can’t stop thinking about this group we just watched, because after a little silence, he asks: “Do you ever think about what these people do the rest of the time, when they’re not at the center?”

  I do, actually. I wonder about that a lot. From what I can tell, most of them still live with their parents, though not all: a few talk about group homes, and rules about what chores they must do. No one drives a car, which means they must not see one another much outside of class.

  Lucas keeps going. “I know some of them work, but what do they do the rest of the time? Watch TV with their parents?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “Probably.”

  “It’s just kind of sad, isn’t it?”

  Maybe I’m annoyed because he still hasn’t mentioned the note I wrote on his sheet, or maybe I’m irritated because he says this with more emotion than I usually hear from him. “Why is that sad? Why is staying home with parents on a weekend night so tragic?”

  “It’s not tragic, it’s just—I don’t know—don’t you think it’s sad?”

  “Not going to parties or being part of the popular crowd isn’t sad, Lucas. People can have very nice, happy lives even if they stay home.” I realize, as the girl who doesn’t go out a lot on weekends, I sound overly defensive saying this, but I want to make the point: happiness looks different to different people.

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “What are you saying?”

  He stares at me like I’m much weirder than he thought. “I’m not sure. Forget it.”

  I stew over this exchange long after I’ve dropped Lucas off. What would he think of my life, I wonder, if he knew that most of my social life revolves around going to movies with Richard? I suspect he’d pity me in the same way he pities all our classmates. It’s an awful feeling. I don’t want his pity. My life is fine.

  Even as I think this, though, I wonder if I like doing this class because I feel connected to these people by some intangible loneliness that we all share. Back at home, I pull out my affirmation page to study the handwriting and try to figure out who thinks I’m the funniest person they’ll ever meet. Is it Harrison, my first friend, who laughs at my improvs even when I’m not trying to be funny? Or Simon, with whom I now have a few ongoing jokes? It’s impossible to tell. All the handwriting is messy and hard to read. Then I notice a little note at the bottom, something I’m certain wasn’t there earlier tonight. It’s written in red ink—the same color pen Lucas was using to help people star their favorite qualities. It says:

  Emily thinks a lot about doing the right thing. It makes me think about it, too.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BELINDA

  IN SCHOOL, WE HAVE to fill out Transition Plans every year where we say what we want our future to look like. Some people write different things every year, like Douglas says he wants to be a farmer one year and professional soccer player the next. This just shows that he is not realistic. He’s scared of tractors and lawnmowers but he thinks he can be a farmer.

  I always write the same thing: I want to be an actress and get married someday. I try to read magazine articles about being married because in my family no one is married. Any time I see an article with the word marriage in it, I save it so I can learn more things about what to expect. Sometimes that means I have to read about sex which I don’t like doing at all. I don’t mind thinking about kissing and holding hands, but I don’t like thinking about sex. In class whenever Douglas calls a girl a “hot sexy mama” I have to yoga breathe and ask him to please not say things like that.

  Once Anthony said, “You’re hot and sexy, too, Beminda,” but that just made it worse.

  That was one thing I said during our big, terrible fight. You shouldn’t copy Douglas because everyone hates Douglas. It was an awful thing to say. Plus it’s not true. I just hate when Douglas calls girls hot and sexy, but I don’t really hate him.

  I don’t like thinking about that fight with Anthony so I don’t usually.

  I’ll just say this: if we hadn’t had that fight a few days before the football game, I never would have begged my neighbor Annemarie to give me a ride to the game. I never would have gone to the game at all which makes everything that happened at the game kind of their fault.

  I don’t think they know this.

  That’s why I told Nan that I can’t look at Anthony or Douglas or sit in the same room with them anymore.

  The fight started because Anthony kept saying we should get married someday.

  “That’s stupid,” I said, but we aren’t allowed to use that word in class about someone else. If we do, we lose a star toward free choice so I lost a star. That made me mad. I’m always losing stars when Anthony sits next to me. Teachers don’t see the way he lets his pencils touch mine and then his leg. Not a lot of touching, just a little, like his leg hairs if he’s wearing shorts.

  It makes me mad because sometimes I like Anthony. I think he’s funny and nice and then I try to imagine waltz dancing with him and I can’t. He is not at all a graceful person or a good dancer. Once, at a Best Buddies party, he lay down on the floor and did a dance called the bug that I wish I’d never seen. Just thinking about that makes me mad at Anthony. He looked like he was trying to eat the floor and throw up at the same time.

  Another thing about Anthony I don’t like is that he’ll do things regular kids tell him to do because he thinks everyone will be his friend afterward. It’s called being gullible which is a word we learned after he pulled the
fire alarm because a bunch of boys told him to. They said they’d buy him pizza in the cafeteria afterward, but they never did because it was a fire alarm and everyone had to leave the building. It turns out they were just trying to get out of a math test. He believed them about the pizza which makes him gullible.

  After we learned that word, everyone started calling everyone else gullible no matter what they did. If Douglas talked too loud in the hall, Anthony told him to stop being gullible which goes to show that Anthony doesn’t understand the real meaning of a lot of words he uses.

  That’s one reason I called him stupid for talking about “getting married someday.” Anthony probably thinks “get married” means have a big party with bowls of M&Ms (his favorite food) where you kiss in the middle of it. He doesn’t understand that it means you have to waltz dance together at the party and afterward you live together.

  Anthony says he wants to get married but he also says he wants to live with his mother for the rest of his life. I told him you can’t do that unless you marry your mom and he said, “Fine, then I’ll marry my mom.”

  The day we had our fight, he asked me to marry him again and I said, “Don’t be stupid, what about your mom?”

  He said he asked about it and he’s not allowed to marry his mom.

  “That’s why you want to marry me?” I said.

  He smiled like I was joking which I was not. “Yes,” he said. “Plus I don’t want to marry anyone else. I want a girlfriend named Beminda.”

  Do you see why he upsets me? “I can’t be your girlfriend and your wife!” I screamed. “Just forget it, Anthony.”

  That’s when he got very mad at me. He said I didn’t listen to him and then he called me gullible. He said that I should stop talking about movies like Pride and Prejudice and I should look around and live in the real world like this class which was full of nice people who I ignore.