At first, my teachers thought I was autistic. Then it was ADHD and bipolar disorder, depression, post-traumatic stress, and so on and so forth.
At nine years old, I was placed in the school’s special education program. My increasingly disruptive behavior had convinced the staff that I required both extra help and supervision. It wasn’t a punishment, they said. It was an opportunity to get the help I needed to succeed.
The first day, I walked into the special ed classroom (which they called the “resource room”) like an inmate arriving on death row. I kept my head down, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone. I noticed one boy slumped down in a motorized chair and another who held his pencil in his fist like it was a banana.
Is this where I belong?
That question kept nagging at me. Each year I was re-evaluated by the school psychiatrist and each year he put me back in special ed. By ninth grade, I started to wonder if they would ever figure out what was wrong with me. That was the year I started smoking cigarettes, for all the reasons people start smoking: to look cool and to have something to do with my hands. I indulged at school, where the brazen would light up in the bathroom like that Brownsville Station song and others would sneak between the brick columns of the bus stop. I smoked out back, behind the auto shop, with the kids who had grease under their nails and who had already not graduated on time. That’s where I first met Ricky Truman.
Ricky was a senior. He had a Danny Bonaduce level of freckles and a red mullet that he spiked up in the front. Ricky smoked Marlboro Reds and he would bum me a couple and I would listen to him talk. And boy, could he talk. Ricky was a redneck philosopher. He would pontificate at length on any number of subjects. A lot of people found him grating but I liked him. One afternoon, over a couple of smokes, Ricky asked me if I would do him a favor.
He was in love with Kristen Clark, a nu-metal girl who wore ultra-wide mall kid pants and had an enormous wallet chain. The problem was that Kristen had a best friend, Abbey, and they were inseparable. They did everything together so Ricky and Kristen were almost never alone. And therein lay the favor. Ricky wanted me to go on a double date with him, Kristen, and Abbey to the movies. Both girls were in special ed with me so I knew them a little bit, but just to say hello. I agreed to go with the understanding that it was a favor, not a date.
**
Abbey Harding looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid that had been left out in the rain. She wore baggy Slipknot tees and jean shorts, which made her look like Anthony Jr. from the early seasons of The Sopranos. Scars from being attacked by wild dogs crisscrossed her face, which was lily white and framed by a bob of red hair.
The girls chose the movie, Chicken Run. If you haven’t seen it, it’s The Great Escape with Claymation chickens instead of Steve McQueen. I think it won a bunch of Oscars (don’t fact-check that). Abbey and I didn’t hold hands or anything. But after the movie, she gave me her phone number, and I couldn’t tell you why but that night I called her. We made plans to see each other in town the next day.
We met by the payphones in front of the post office and walked together around the main drag of town, through the late April slush. We talked about metal bands and Adult Swim cartoons. In the alleyway by the cheese shop, we stopped walking and turned around to face each other. Neither one of us said anything for a few seconds. I looked into her eyes, which were the color of wet moss, and for a moment felt that I was not altogether averse to her, nor she to me. We closed our eyes and we kissed and it felt nice to kiss somebody. So, despite a tepid chemistry, we began dating.
**
We mostly hung around with Ricky and Kristen. Kristen’s house had a big outdoor trampoline in the backyard and the four of us would sit on it and smoke. Sometimes it seemed like Ricky and I were there to keep each other company. On some nights the girls would speak only to each other. Sometimes they acted like sisters and other times they were more like girlfriends. I didn’t know whether to be jealous or not.
Abbey and I had no physical chemistry. I’d put my arms around her and think what a strange shape she had, an amorphous blob, lacking the definition of a human body, like a single-celled organism or a cloud of gas.
When we kissed, our tongues wriggled limply around each other like fat, pink snails. She told me that I wasn’t doing it right.
“You’re supposed to hug my tongue with your tongue,” she said.
What does that mean? It’s one of the most poetic and disgusting things I’ve ever heard. It haunts me to this day.
We wanted to like each other but we didn’t. We were forcing it because neither of us had had much luck dating and being together seemed like it was better than being alone.
But gradually, our dynamic turned from mutually apathetic to openly hostile. We brought out the worst in each other. She could be childish; I could be mean. We were both jealous and petty. One Saturday Abbey invited me to go with her to Six Flags. But when I got to her house, she had already left with Kristen instead. I spent all day leaving increasingly agitated messages on her home phone from the GNC where Ricky worked, culminating in a complete screaming meltdown while an elderly Nordic-looking gentleman tried to purchase a bottle of horny goat weed. It’s incredible how possessive you can be over someone you don’t even like.
**
One week later, I was sitting in the special ed room with a stack of overdue algebra worksheets piled up on the desk in front of me. Kathy Chicerillo, the special ed teacher, was buzzing around looking over everyone’s shoulders to see if they needed help. She looked like Carol Kane from Taxi, and she and her husband owned a llama farm.
Sitting next to me was Marc Lawrence, quiet and polite. He looked like an albino lake fish with his big rubbery lips and tiny black eyes. He was nice enough and he never bothered anybody. But I hated him. I had grown to hate him, sitting there with him for all those years in special ed, watching him smile like a big happy cow. I resented him for being seemingly unbothered by our mutual plight.
I was afraid that if I were Marc Lawrence, nobody would tell me, that my friends and family might pretend I was just “artistic” and “quirky,” to spare my feelings or to keep me from being upset. I became fixated on this idea, which led to a secondary fear that I wouldn’t be able to tell if Abbey was Marc Lawrence either. I started to look at her differently, with suspicion.
In all fairness, today, Marc is a bag boy at a grocery store in our hometown. He probably likes his life and has people who care about him. He’s probably not mining his embarrassing adolescence for material or cracking a beer at 3 pm, wondering if he has a soul.
Nobody talked about “the spectrum” back then. I had not yet heard anybody refer to themselves as “neurodivergent,” and as far as I knew, there was no scale to quantify individual disability. But if there were, where would I be on it? Or Abbey? Or Marc Lawrence?
I replayed moments of my relationship with Abbey, hoping to glean some sort of meaning from them but could not. Were there clues that I hadn’t noticed? There always are.
I considered that maybe at that very same moment, Abbey was somewhere thinking of me, wondering if I was mentally retarded.
**
Our relationship didn’t end so much as it gradually became too unpleasant for either one of us to stomach. There was no clear moment of dissolution, no goodbyes. One day, the phone just stopped ringing and I suppose I was relieved.
The last time that I saw Abbey Harding outside of the special ed room was a few weeks after we had stopped speaking. Every day after school, I would go downtown to the Brooks drugstore and shoplift. I would stuff my pockets with beef jerky and Rice Krispies Treats and walk down a path that wound behind the store parallel to the river. On one such day, I was about to tear into an ill-gotten Slim Jim when a loud crash startled me. Suddenly the air was full of white dust and there were smashed shards of porcelain on the ground. I couldn’t see where they had come from but then a few seconds later: BAM! Another explosion, this one unmistakably from above.
I craned my neck to try and get a better look; that’s when I saw them. Standing above the path, looking down, were Kristen and Abbey, their shadows cast long and menacingly by the late afternoon sun. The store had recently remodeled their bathroom and had left the old fixtures leaning against the dumpster by the back door. When Abbey saw me and saw the pile of broken porcelain, it was apparently too good an opportunity to pass up. She grabbed several pieces of a toilet bowl and hurled them down at me with surprising force and accuracy. There were a few ricochets but no direct hits. Then Abbey was holding something… a soap dispenser? It was hard to see; the sun was in my eyes. By the time I realized it was the bathroom mirror, it was sailing down toward me and there was no time to do anything but cover my face. It hit the ground like a plane crash, sending glass flying in every direction. When the dust and debris had settled, I opened my eyes and the girls were gone. I looked down and saw my own wincing, twisted-up expression reflected back at me in dozens of pieces of scattered glass. I looked upset.
It was kind of the perfect ending, a ridiculous, exhausting, embarrassing mess that I suspect neither one of us learned anything from. I have never harbored any ill will toward Abbey for that or anything else that happened between us. We never spoke again, but we would always have the special ed room.
Shirin Abedinirad, Dilemma, 2022, Land art, Tehran, Iran. Drawing on Rumi’s luminous line — “Beyond right and wrong, there is a field. I will meet you there” — the work transforms a staircase of mirrors into a threshold between earth and sky, light and shadow, illusion and revelation. Half-buried and half-ascending, the mirrored steps invite viewers into a meditation on duality, transcendence, and the soul’s quiet dialogue with the infinite. Artwork courtesy of featured artist Shirin Abedinirad.
