“Yes, honey,” Mom says. “I know.”
Maybe Erin can’t pick up on subtle tones all the time, but she’s pretty sure Mom’s voice means exasperated. Erin feels a wrenching in the place in her chest where pain always starts, the place from which anxiety radiates into the rest of her body. Right now, the pain place is saying Mom should be proud of Erin for the success of her lists, not annoyed and ashamed that she needs them.
Spot paws at Erin’s leg because he can tell she’s feeling agitated. Mom got him cheap because he failed out of helper dog school, but he’s still very talented.
“There’s a new family in my Tuesday night support group,” Mom says, even though she knows Erin hates talking while she eats.
“That’s nice,” Erin says. What she wants to do is say nothing, but that is unfortunately not how conversations work.
“They have a ten-year-old daughter who was just diagnosed. She’s very high functioning, like you. Very intelligent.”
High-functioning, low-functioning. As if it’s that simple. As if those two designations mean anything real.
Erin doesn’t say anything. Her excuse is that she’s chewing celery.
“I thought it might be nice if you two could have a playdate sometime.”
“Mom, I’m sixteen years old. I do not have playdates.”
“I know she’d really like to meet you.”
“I don’t care.”
“Erin, look at me,” she says. Erin does, but she aims her sight just below Mom’s eyes, a special trick she developed to make people think she’s looking them in the eye when really she’s not. “Remember how we talked about empathy? Try to imagine how this girl feels, and how reassuring it would be to meet someone older with Asperger’s who’s doing well.”
Erin rubs her hands together to help calm her anxiety, to help her think straight. She thinks about empathy, how people mistakenly believe Aspies don’t have it, that it’s something people like Erin need to be taught. But Erin has empathy, lots of it, so much it hurts sometimes, so much that other people’s pain turns into her own pain and makes her completely incapable of doing anything useful for anyone. That’s why it’s easier to avoid it than to engage. It’s easier to try to ignore it than try to comfort whoever’s hurting, because usually that backfires and makes things worse. What Erin wants to do with pain is fix it, make it go away, and sometimes that’s not what other people want. And that makes absolutely no sense to Erin at all.
What makes sense is logic. When in doubt, Erin asks herself, “What would Data do?” She does her best to think like an android. She uses her excellent logic skills to deduce if meeting would be a beneficial situation for the ten-year-old.
“But, Mom,” Erin finally says, having reached her conclusion, “I’m not doing well.” Despite her lists, despite her adapting, every day is a struggle that leaves Erin exhausted in a way Mom will never understand.
Erin knows what Mom’s face means. It is what people call a face “dropping,” though it hasn’t actually gone anywhere. It means very sad and disappointed. In the case of Erin’s mom, it also means you just said something that’s obvious but that she’s working very hard to pretend isn’t true.
“Why do you say that? You get great grades, your IQ is off the charts, you’re thriving in a mainstream high school.”
Erin thinks about that. “I have one friend. Everyone else calls me a freak. Even she calls me a freak sometimes. And my one attempt at having a boyfriend made us have to move to another state.”
“Erin, we’ve talked about this. That’s not why we moved. Your dad got offered a job here.”
But Erin doesn’t have to be a genius (even though she is) to know the real reason they moved. Whether or not her parents admit it, she knows no one willingly moves from a tenured position at the University of Washington to the University of Oregon for a job that pays less money.
“Mom,” Erin says, “you need a better hobby.”
She recognizes the look on Mom’s face. It’s like the face dropping from before, but worse.
“Empathy, Erin,” Mom says softly. Her eyes are wet.
Erin feels something grab and twist the pain place in her chest. That means she is supposed to say she’s sorry.
“I need some space,” Erin says instead. “I’ll be in my room.” Her mother exhausts her more than almost anyone else. It’s not necessarily being around people that drains Erin’s batteries, it’s being around people who want her to act like someone she’s not.
“Come on, Spot,” Erin says. The dog follows Erin out of the kitchen, loyal even when Erin says things that make Mom sad. Erin never knows if Mom moves from her place at the island counter while she’s gone, because every time she comes back, Mom’s still there.
GRACE.
Grace keeps her head down as she navigates through the various groups crowding Prescott High School’s front steps. Through her bangs, she sees fragments of faces and hairstyles and clothes, and her mind races to catalog those she should try to avoid. Maybe a different kind of person would be looking for people to actively befriend, but her strategy for finding friends is through the process of elimination. She has thought long and hard about her plan, which is to scratch out first-tier popular (and who is she kidding? Probably second-tier popular, too), last-tier losers, druggies, superjocks, any conspicuous outliers, and then she’ll take whoever’s left. At her old school, Grace’s friends defaulted to being the kids of the superdevout parents at Mom’s church, the kids she grew up with through years of Sunday school and youth group. She put all her eggs in the wrong basket. She lost everyone she had when they unanimously decided to defriend her when their parents decided her mother was, more or less, possessed by Satan. She cannot let that happen again.
Grace takes a deep breath when she locates the main office. She has accomplished her first task. She has made it through the front door. Now to acquire her class schedule. If she breaks the day down into small parts, it won’t seem so scary.
Please God, she prays silently. Give me strength. Guide me through this torment.
She stands at the front desk for what seems like a very long time. An androgynous-looking girl with a shaved head sits on the other side, eyes glued to the screen of an ancient computer. Grace knows the girl can see her, even though she’s acting like she doesn’t.
“Um, hello?” Grace says.
The girl looks at her for a moment, then back at the computer screen. “I’m not supposed to be at the front desk,” the girl says flatly. “The computer I’m supposed to use is in the back of the office, but it’s broken.”
“Oh, okay?” Grace says. The bald girl shifts from side to side, looking nervous, saying nothing. “Um,” Grace continues. “I’m here to pick up my class schedule?”
“You were supposed to get it in the mail two weeks ago.”
“Um, I just moved here? So I didn’t really have an address two weeks ago? So they told me to come to the office to get it.”