A Step Toward Falling Page 14

  “That’s not true. I don’t ignore anybody,” I said. Then he asked me if I knew everyone’s names and he was right, I didn’t.

  “You think you’re better than everyone,” he said. “But you’re not.”

  I wanted to tell him I didn’t think I was better than everyone in our class but yeah, I was better than some of them. Didn’t he think that, too? There are people in our class who can hardly do anything including feed themselves or go to the bathroom alone.

  “I’m not better than anyone else,” Anthony said.

  “Yes, you are,” I said. “You can walk and talk and eat!”

  That’s when I looked up and saw Eugene, a boy in our room who uses a motorized wheelchair and a talking computer. He has very bad cerebral palsy but he’s also pretty smart, maybe, because he can play computer games like chess and Minecraft.

  I don’t like thinking about Eugene or even looking at him because he confuses me. Maybe he is smart on the inside and can’t show it. Maybe he is nice and smiles at everyone or maybe his face is stuck in a smile. He never talks in class; he just sits there and smiles and drools a little. That’s when it got bad. I didn’t want Eugene to think I was talking about him so I got nervous and said, really loud, “I am better than you at a lot of things, Anthony!”

  Anthony got mad and said he didn’t want to marry me anymore. He also said that most people in our class don’t like me very much and he tries to defend me but he wasn’t going to do that anymore. “Then you’ll have no friends,” he said. “You try and see how it feels.”

  After that, I started crying so hard even Eugene rolled over and breathed near me for a while to see if I was okay. I cried and cried because I was pretty sure Anthony was right, everyone hated me. That’s when I started thinking about Ron again and other people who had been nice to me at the Best Buddies dance last spring. It’s okay, I thought. I’ll be friends with regular kids. The nice ones who are friendly, not the mean ones on the bus who steal my food.

  The next day at school I found Ron in the cafeteria and I sat down next to him. I sat down with him again in the hallway before school. I went over to him every time I saw him the next few days at school. Usually I couldn’t think of anything to say so I said hello and then I just sat there. Mostly it was okay but sometimes I felt uncomfortable. Like maybe his friends were laughing at me. But I never heard them say my name so maybe they weren’t laughing at me. Maybe they just laughed a lot. Ron always said hi but he didn’t say anything more. He wasn’t like Anthony who was always borrowing my pencils and asking me questions and touching my shoulder.

  With Ron, I just sat quietly while he talked to other people. I didn’t ask him if he wanted to come over to my house and watch Pride and Prejudice anymore because I knew he probably couldn’t do something like that during football season. He’d already told me how busy he was and I understood. He hardly had enough time to eat and sleep. Which is why, when I overheard a girl saying she would see him later after the game, I said to her, “He can’t. He doesn’t have time for things like that. He has to eat and sleep.”

  She looked at me for a long time and then she laughed, really loud. It was a mean laugh, I could tell. It made me think, Good. Now Ron will see that she’s mean and he shouldn’t be friends with her. The more she laughed at me, the more I smiled, until Ron really surprised me. He took one of her hands and said, “Come on, Janelle. Let’s just go.”

  While he pulled her away, she said to me, “You should probably leave Ron alone. You know that, right?”

  Maybe he’s pulling her away to tell her he can’t be friends with her anymore, I thought. But then he put his arm around her and she put his arm around him and did that thing I don’t understand where she slid her hand into the back pocket of his jeans.

  I don’t understand that.

  EMILY

  I DON’T KNOW WHICH IS worse: the news itself or how I hear. How I hear is pretty bad. I’m standing in the cafeteria line behind Lucas’s girlfriend, Debbie, and a group of her friends. Up close, Debbie is even more beautiful than she is from far away, which is hard to believe but it’s true. How are her pores so small and her skin so perfect? I don’t get it.

  For a while, I don’t listen to what they’re talking about, but then I hear: “I don’t even know if they’re really making him do it. I think he’s just doing it because ever since his mom died, he’s looking for reasons to get out of the house and away from his dad.”

  I know she’s talking about Lucas by the way she rolls her eyes like this is one of many things she has to put up with from her boyfriend. Neither Debbie nor any of her friends has looked my direction. She seems so unaware of my presence six inches from their conversation that she must have no idea who I am, which stumps me. I’ve been driving Lucas to class for two weeks now, but apparently she has never asked him to point me out to her. I can’t imagine being so oblivious, but there are a lot of things I can’t imagine. Like this horrible fact, made clear by the rest of their conversation: “How did his mom die again?” her friend asks.

  “Cancer.”

  “When was it?”

  “Like two years ago, I think.”

  His mother died of cancer two years ago? I think about my boneheaded questions in the car with Lucas and feel so bad, I step out of line, because I can’t even remember what I was going to buy and I’m not hungry anymore. I slink back to my table and sit down across from Richard.

  “Everything okay?” he says. Richard and I seem to be in a competition these days to see how long we can go without either one of us mentioning his or her love life. I tried to ask once and he said, “It’s kind of private, actually,” which made me so mad I decided not to bring it up again. Presumably everything’s fine with Hugh, we’re just not talking about it, which means everything we say is a little awkward.

  Maybe he doesn’t see it this way. Maybe his life hasn’t changed that radically. He still eats with us every day (Hugh has only made a one-time appearance at our table). He still makes the same jokes. He can still do this—tell I’m upset, even when I say nothing.

  “I feel like a jerk,” I say softly.

  I tell him the whole story and he stares at me. “You didn’t know that Lucas’s mom died?”

  I can’t tell if he’s kidding. “You did?”

  “Yeah. I mean—she died of cancer in tenth grade. He was out of school for two weeks.”

  How does Richard know this? “You knew him in tenth grade?”

  “No—I just—” He shrugs. “I don’t know. I noticed things like that.”

  “Big jocks with problems?”

  He blushes. “Yeah.”

  “Does everyone know this except me?”

  Everyone nods. “Sure,” Weilin says. “It was really sad. I knew his mom a little—she used to volunteer in the library where I went after school in elementary school.”

  Now I feel even worse. In elementary school, the library had one of the only after-school options for kids whose parents worked. I went three days a week up until fourth grade. “His mom was one of the library ladies?”

  “Yeah—her name was Linda. You remember, the one with red hair who did the make-your-own-book projects?”

  I feel awful. She was my favorite. She once told me she liked my books so much she was going to put them on the library shelves for a week and see if anyone checked them out. “They’re better than some of the other books we have here,” she whispered. And then we realized if she did, I might not be able to keep the book and show my parents, so we decided not to. “That was his mom?”

  Weilin and I must have been there at the same time, but we didn’t know each other. She was probably one of the studious kids who did her homework before project time started. Back then I spent most of my time trying to get invited to sleepovers with girls I wasn’t really friends with. I wish I could go back and be a different person back then, one who didn’t care about the popular-girl crowd, and would have noticed a better friend in the corner quietly doing her homew
ork. Something else occurs to me. “Does that mean Lucas was in that group?”

  “I think so,” Weilin says. “He wasn’t so big back then. Or so noticeable. Plus he was pretty shy. I think he mostly just stayed with his mother and helped her.”

  I try to remember him and I can’t. It’s like I noticed all the wrong things back then.

  I don’t work up the courage to say anything to Lucas until we’re back in the car again driving to class. As we pull away from his house, I turn to him. “I’m sorry about those stupid questions I asked you last week. I didn’t know about your mom. I felt terrible when I heard.”

  He’s looking away from me, out the window. “It’s okay. You’re right. My friends are jerks, pretty much.”

  “I was a bigger jerk. I knew your mom from the library—I had no idea she died and I had no idea she was your mom. I’m really sorry.”

  He turns and looks at me. “You knew her?”

  “She wouldn’t remember me, but I remember her. I loved this one project she did with make-your-own books. I kept wanting to make a different one every week and she always let me—she was really nice about it. I remember that.”

  He smiles a little, like he appreciates this. “She was really nice before she got sick. Then she got breast cancer and it was terrible. She got really moody, but it wasn’t really her fault.”

  “When did she get sick?”

  “The first time was when I was in eighth grade. Then it came back in tenth grade.”

  I wonder if his friends only knew her as the mom with cancer. Maybe none of them has the same picture of the woman that I recall. “I remember she had such a nice laugh.”

  He smiles now. A real smile. “Yeah.”

  “And she really laughed at the stupid things kids sometimes say. She liked kids a lot. I remember that.”

  He seems happy to hear this. And grateful. “Yeah, she did.”

  There isn’t much more to say after this. How is your family doing now? Or what’s it like losing a parent? Any option like that feels wrong. I accused his friends of never asking any questions, but the truth is I ask too many sometimes. I sometimes poke and I prod until my friends ask me to please just stop. I don’t want to ruin this moment doing that, so for the rest of the ride, we listen to music and say nothing.

  This week’s class is a potluck dinner party where everyone was supposed to bring a dish they’d cooked themselves or helped to make. At the end of class last week, Mary told Lucas and me not to bring any food. “We always have way too much. We need to do this so everyone can practice socializing around food, but every time, it’s the same. People come with three dishes plus a box of Ring Dings.” She shakes her head. “It’s the horn of plenty, I’m telling you.”

  It turns out she’s right. There’s a table groaning with food and everyone has taken the “favorite dish” suggestion literally. There’s very little in the way of entrées and no salads to speak of. Two people have brought slice-and-bake Christmas sugar cookies. Someone else has brought a large, expensive-looking tin of kettle corn. Mary points to it and asks, “Ken, did you make that popcorn?”

  “Is okay,” Ken says. “I make call to order popcorn. Mom said okay. For party okay. I pay myself.”

  Mary laughs. “Well, thank you, Ken. That was nice of you.”

  Before we eat, Mary reminds them of the rules around eating: don’t overload your plate, don’t take too much of one thing, don’t eat all dessert things. When everyone has gotten food and sat back down, Mary has another list of suggestions she’s written out ahead of time and taped to the front board:

  —Sit with someone while you eat.

  —In between bites, put down your fork and talk to them.

  —Use your napkin!

  —If you spill, clean it up!

  —If you stand up to get something, ask if someone else needs anything.

  We volunteers wait until everyone else has taken food before we start. I haven’t seen Chad in the two weeks since we went out to lunch, so I’m surprised when he comes up behind me at the food table and whispers over my shoulder, “So I guess we shouldn’t have waited. It looks like all the cotton candy’s gone.”

  I laugh and take a spoonful of something called taco casserole and then, just as I’m stepping away, Chad says, “I see a little spot in the corner where no one’s sitting. Should we sneak over there and eat by ourselves?”

  I look around the room. In spite of Mary’s instructions, about half the group is sitting by themselves. “I don’t think so, Chad. I’m pretty sure we’re meant to eat with the other students.” Do I really need to tell him this?

  I walk away and sit down with Simon, who has covered most of his plate with taco casserole. To eat, he bends down to shorten the trip between the plate and his mouth. One glance around the room and I realize Mary’s right: they all eat as if they’ve forgotten they’re in a room where other people can see them. Not that they’re all so messy; they just approach food passionately, with an embarrassing gusto. Ken sticks his tongue out to place a Dorito flat on it, then snaps his teeth over it and grins like he’s tricked the poor chip into getting eaten. Peter sits about six feet away from everyone else, eating one noodle at a time by lowering it into his mouth from a fork held high.

  Last week Peter surprised us all by saying there’s only one woman he’ll ever love, so it doesn’t make that much sense for him to learn about meeting other women or starting conversations. In all these weeks, it was the first time he’d ever mentioned a girlfriend. Mary looked just as surprised as the rest of us. “Who is it, Peter?” she said.

  “You don’t know her,” he said. “She used to teach me piano and I love her. That’s all. Her voice, her hair, her chest, everything. I love everything about her.”

  We were all stunned. This was the most Peter had ever said in class.

  “What’s her name?” Mary asked.

  “Mrs. McCarthy.”

  No one laughed or rolled their eyes at the idea that Peter had a great love of his life but didn’t know her first name. Nor did anyone point out that it sounded like Mrs. McCarthy probably had a Mr. McCarthy somewhere. Mary usually walks a fine line with these revelations. She doesn’t want to dismiss any feelings but she also doesn’t want to perpetuate fantasies. She regularly reminds Sheila that Justin Bieber is not a dating option for her and if she wants to go on dates or make more friends, she’ll need to look around closer to home. Over the last month and a half, I’ve learned that they all have some version of these passionate attachments. Daniel loves tae kwon do and his dojo master so much that Mary allows him to wear his outfit every other week and end class with a short demonstration of some new skill. Usually it involves a roundhouse kick and some chops and a “Heee-yah!” He always gets a round of applause and does a courtly bow at the end. It has nothing to do with the class material we’re covering, except maybe it does. Afterward Mary always says, “I love seeing how much you love tae kwon do, Daniel,” which is exactly how I feel listening to these folks talk about the things they love. It reminds me of my old self, the girl who loved book-making and acting in plays.

  These folks aren’t childish; they just haven’t lost the enthusiastic attachments I associate with children.

  I turn to Simon now. He’s nearing the end of his taco casserole, so it seems like a good time to ask him a question. “So where do you work, Simon?” They all talk about jobs vaguely. Cute girls at work. Bad bosses. I’ve never been sure where these jobs happen.

  “No place now,” Simon says, lifting his plate so he can tilt what’s left on it into his mouth. “I have worked, though. Just a long time ago.”

  “Oh!” I’m surprised. Simon is one of the class members who seems the most capable. He never misses a Jeopardy! question; his class comments are almost always appropriate. “Where would you like to work?”

  He pushes his glasses up his nose. “I like restaurants, but every time I try restaurants they let me work a month, then they say no way.”

  “Why
?” It’s hard to believe. Simon’s quirks—his thick glasses that don’t stay up, his enthusiastic fist bumps, his plaintive questions—are almost all endearing. How could he not find a restaurant who appreciates him?

  “Food service rules. If you touch your mouth or your nose, you have to wash hands. Every time. You forget, you break the law.” Without seeming to realize what he’s doing, he wipes the back of his nose with his sleeve pulled over his hand. “Sometimes I forget. I just do.” He throws up his hands in an exaggerated shrug. “What can you do? They say I break the law one more time, I have to go. That’s the way it is.”

  “So are you looking for a new job?”

  My mind scrambles to think of diners and out-of-the-way lunch counters where cleanliness maybe isn’t a top priority. “Have you tried Roosters?” I say. Roosters is a breakfast restaurant that high schoolers go to after a late-night party. I never have, but I hear people talk about it. And I’ve seen the help wanted sign almost permanently placed in the window. Apparently they have a hard time finding early-rising employees.

  “Roosters, no. They say no. No insurance to hire people like me.” He runs through a long list of people who say no for reasons like this: McDonald’s, no. Wendy’s, no. Stop and Shop, no. “Stop and Shop hires people with disabilities, but all full up for now. That’s all. No more.”

  I’m stunned at the number of places he’s tried and hasn’t succeeded in getting a job.

  At break, I ask Mary if she knows how many people in the class have actual jobs. “Not very many,” she says. “Most of them go to supervised workshops, or else they have jobs that give them maybe five or eight hours a week. We have about the same number of jobs available for folks with disabilities that we had twenty years ago. The only problem is we have about four times the number of disabled adults now.”

  I think about the way expectations have shaped us all. How Lucas feels like he has only one shot at college and my friends and I feel like we have no choice except college. But what if the world had no expectations for you? What if we were leaving school with no prospects at all?