Hurry Up and Wait
There are noises coming from the room next door, and the boy wonders.
This is a new place. There have been a lot of new places over the past few years. The boy doesn't like new places. The boy, actually, is incapable of liking new places. Change is an assault to a neurological system that craves, demands routine and order. Change is a challenge, one he sees and accepts and, for the most part, deals with fairly well, all things considered. He might go on a binge of eating only Kraft macaroni and cheese and drinking Dr. Pepper for days, his way of structuring what he can, but generally he does okay.
But the boy hears noises.
I talk to the teacher, plead with her in my calmest, most commanding voice. I watch the clock, waiting for 1 o'clock. 40 minutes. Less now. C'mon, time.
I can't help. I'm several miles away, home alone without a car. I can't go get him, which I need to do, so he waits and I wait.
Thirty minutes now, a little more.
They threatened us in the fifth grade, bullies from Special Services who didn't know and didn't really care. They threatened us with expulsion, talked of courts and judges, and so we fought back. We brought his psychologist and his psychiatrist and a professional children's advocate and they crumbled.
A spot opened up in a new school, a special school, not the best fit but better than letting him sleep under his desk.
My boy is pummeled every day, you know. He gets the snot kicked out of him by life, and I barely understand this and I know my boy. Still he smiles, and hugs, and listens to Celtic bagpipes in his room and reads "Lord of the Rings" for the fifth time, seeking more than he found the last time.
But in the interim, before the special school, he was placed in an intermediate location. A room, with other kids who were different. There was a gentle teacher, and some attempt at education, but it was a horror to him, a horror. He knows he's different but he doesn't like to believe it. Surrounded by others, most with other problems, most with bad homes and worse nightmares than his, he was in hell for a month or so. And he remembers. Oh yes.
Middle school didn't work out. "We told you so," my wife said, and she apologized for that but she didn't really mean it. We told them it wouldn't, not middle school, not the chaos that serves, I suppose, as a proving ground, a puberty rite, a test. He was guarded and monitored and aided and it still didn't work.
So they moved him two weeks ago. Left his one favorite class and then bused him, alone, to another place for some intensive tutoring. He loved this. Loved the teacher, loved the isolation, loved the grown-up desks.
But something was happening next door. He heard noises.
He misses things. He knows directions, has an eery feel for where he is, but the bus, of course, takes a different route than we used to, coming from another direction, and it's been three years since hell, after all, so he never paid attention.
But there was a new teacher today, and the noises were still there, and a brain that craves the comfort of familiar surroundings, searches for something to hold onto, that radiates scans that seek what he knows finally locks on its target.
The teacher talks to me on the phone about choices, bad choices and good choices. I want to scream. "There are no CHOICES!" I want to say. "There are only REACTIONS!" but I stay calm. I have no choice. So I tell her what I know.
The boy hears noises, and now he understands. You've got some 'splainin' to do, Lucy. The boy knows now that he is next door to hell.
There are 23 minutes. Maybe it'll be okay. I can fix this, I think, over the weekend, tackle that odd brain and comfort him and reward him and distract him, and maybe it'll be okay.
22.
21.
2:51:47 PM 
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