Chapter Twenty-Six

The treatment room was only quiet for a few seconds, but that silence was deafening. Ken struggled to control his emotions, but finally the sorrow broke free. It was different that time. I can't tell you how, but I imagine the why had something to do with the door that had been opened for him and allowed him to understand the difference between hate and fear and the way the two had always been enmeshed.

Damien kept his hand on Ken's arm. "I'd be afraid, too," he told Ken. "I don't know how you get past seeing that. The guilt has to be crushing, man."

"Damien," Dr. Crimm prompted.

There was no hesitation. The pill was on his tongue and down his throat.

Dr. Crimm prompted him to think back and the rest of us watched as he began his treatment.

The screen behind the boys flickered again. Could I watch anything else? Could I handle it? Could my heart?

Text began to fill the screen, rapidly moving from the bottom to the top and disappearing over the edge. I couldn't read it as fast as it moved, but I recognized the story. It was one of my favorites from when I was in second grade: Charlotte's Web. A tiny finger slid along the lines of text and when a voice called to Damien that it was past his bedtime, he tossed aside the book, revealing small feet poking out from beneath little-boy pajamas covered in superheroes. There was the sound of a door opening and a beautiful woman came into the boy's bedroom.

"Are you excited about tomorrow?" she asked.

"Yes!" he squealed.

"First day of kindergarten!" she said lovingly. She kissed him on his forehead and tucked him in under the covers. "Charlotte again?" She asked as she put his book on the nightstand. "You know, the new friends you're going to meet tomorrow aren't even going to know how to read yet."

"Why?"

"Well, reading isn't something a five-year-old is supposed to be good at. You just have a superpower." His mother smiled as she cupped his cheek in her hand. "We're lucky parents."

"Is autism a superpower?" Damien asked.

His mother's smile faltered. She looked away quickly and then back to him when her smile had found its home on her face again. "Yeah, baby. Autism is a superpower. Some of your new friends might get jealous about that." Her voice grew unsteady as she pulled the covers even higher up around his chin. The walls around him were crisp and clear, not like the dripping, sliding, wet backgrounds of the other hallucinations. Damien's were all right angles and perfectly detailed. I was having trouble focusing on the image of the woman when I could see each sharp spike of the dinosaur teeth from the graphic border along the wall where it met the ceiling above her.

"Jealous?"

She nodded. Her hand smoothed his hair and then stroked his cheek. "Sometimes. When people can't do what you can, they get jealous. When people don't understand things, they can get mean. I want you to remember that autism is a superpower, not a burden. If kids don't like it, it's because something is wrong with them—not you. Real friends are going to love you, because you're awesome." She touched her finger to the tip of his nose and made him giggle.

"Like you love Daddy?'

She smiled. "Exactly like I love Daddy."

Damien was rigid in his chair, which seemed odd to me because it was such a warm and beautiful moment. It certainly felt that way in contrast to what we had just seen with Ken and his father, but the memory seemed to cause Damien angst.

On the screen, the little boy's hand pulled the blankets up over his head, shutting out the bright light of the room and the intrusive sounds of his mother's retreat, the buzz of a television in another room, and the sound of a phone ringing in the distance. All of it was muffled as his world went black, but it was only then I realized my shoulders were tight, pulling closer to my ears to protect against the constant stimulation of sounds in Damien's world.

Damien's visions were different than the others. His world built itself in blocks and elaborate levels. Nothing dripped or smeared, but instead quickly rose from the ground in geometric shapes. The walls of his next location shot from the floor like lightning rising to the sky. Colorful papers were tacked to boards and a rainbow-block rug appeared beneath his worn sneakers.

"Why did you hit him?" a woman asked. We could hear her voice, but Damien wasn't looking at her. His gaze was on the thick black line that separated the different-colored squares of the rug underfoot. Red, orange, blue. Red, orange, blue. He was rocking, like we'd seen him do in our short time together.

"He stole the ball!" a little boy accused. Damien still didn't lift his eyes. The fan in the corner whirled an angry hiss each time it turned its face in his direction and the children chatted in their squeaking and creaking plastic chairs. Louder and louder the room grew as Damien watched the squares rock past his line of vision in tandem with the motion of his body.

"Damien?" the woman prompted.

"I'm not a stealer," Damien answered. Still, his eyes refrained from looking at his accuser, the woman I assumed to be his teacher.

"Yes you are!" the boy reiterated.

"That's enough, Jeremy." The teacher's voice was stern. "Damien, can you use your words, please? Tell me what happened at recess."

"It was my turn," Damien began. "I waited and then it was my turn."

"You can't just take the ball," the other boy interjected.

"But it was my turn," Damien replied.

"Jeremy, you need to go up to the office. I'm going to send you with Tawnya." The click of a woman's shoes could be heard against a tiled floor. The metal runner beneath the drawer of her desk whined as she pulled it open and the items inside clanked together so loudly I felt my own head start to hurt. Damien lifted his hands and covered his ears.

"You're such a weirdo! I hate you! No one likes you." Jeremy bit out angry words that were still audible over Damien's improvised earmuffs.

"It was my turn. I just wanted to play," Damien answered, the sound of his own breathing loud inside his head.

My anxiety was becoming unbearable. There was so much going on. I wanted to cover my own ears, but at the same time I was afraid I'd miss something important.

The teacher was back, her young face in his line of sight. "Damien, you're not in trouble. He shouldn't have hit you and there will be a consequence for that. At lunch I'll go with you to the handball court and we'll watch the other kids together, okay? Let's see what they do when it's their turn. Maybe they say something. We'll learn together."

Damien resumed his rocking, causing the colorful squares of the rug to move in a soothing pattern. Tears fell from his face and onto the bright carpet, beading on the surface before being absorbed into the fibers. The bright red at the tips of his shoes turned dark, then completely black before a new memory sprang up from where the tears had fallen.

"Why?" Damien asked, his voice sounding dejected and baffled.

The walls of his bedroom were different now, but still recognizable. They were painted the same shade, but the dinosaurs had been replaced by posters of planets and video games.

He looked down to his hands, his phone showing a call on the line and the tiny icon that let him know the caller was on speakerphone.

"I think we just need to hang out with other people. We can still be friends." The voice boomed through the room as Damien focused his attention on the image of Mars hanging over his desk.

"I don't understand." Damien sighed.

"I'm sorry, Damien. I want to hang out with Finley and he said they don't really want you to sit with us at nutrition or lunch. Maybe we could hang out outside of school sometime." The caller's voice lifted at the end as if he was doing Damien a favor, offering him a great deal.

My heart broke for him. Peer rejection was a universal human experience; I'd been there and chances were everyone else in the room had, too. My cheeks flamed with embarrassment for Damien. The knotting of my stomach prompted me to pull my legs up onto the chair. Kids could be such assholes sometimes.

"Did I do something wrong? I can try to do things different," Damien probed. He slid his finger along his screen and opened up his notes app. He clicked on a file titled "Shit I Don't Get."

"Um . . . it's just that you're into stuff we aren't into." It sounded like the caller was holding back. "Look, I don't think this is a good idea. I'm sure you can find some other kids to hang out with. You're . . . smart and, um . . ." A heavy sigh came across the line. It was almost painful to listen to.

"It's okay. Thanks for letting me know before school." Damien slid his finger and ended the call.

Damien stared down at his desk. He closed his eyes and before they even opened again the loud and overwhelming sounds of kids talking, laughing, and shrieking filled the room. I had to cover my ears. My head pounded with the intense cacophony. It ground on my nerves and seemed to run down my spine with the unpleasant zap of spent static electricity.

When his eyes opened, he was alone at a dirty cafeteria table. Clusters of junior-high kids were around him, but no one was giving him the time of day. He watched one boy in particular and when that boy turned and met his eyes for the briefest of seconds, Damien waved, but the boy ignored him. Some of the tables around him were so crowded the kids were barely able to move as they ate their lunches, and yet his table was wide open, as if he had a communicable disease they were all at risk of contracting.

"Such a nerd." A voice drifted across the lunchroom. "My mom says something is wrong with him."

"Obviously," another voice answered, and then both of them laughed.

Damien set down the sandwich in his hand that had no bites missing. How many lunches of mine had gone uneaten? Too many to count. Sometimes it's impossible to eat when you're constantly being served so much hate for yourself. Each careless thing your peers say sits in your gut, poisoning you against yourself until you begin to believe it must be true.

His lunch crumbled beneath his hands and then he stood up and threw it into a trash can, the loud clamor of his uneaten apple hitting the bottom bringing another wave of unwanted attention. He looked up long enough to see the student body staring at him, as if he were the attraction in a zoo and they were a group of curious children on a field trip. His hands flew up to the sides of his head and he tapped a soothing rhythm that helped drown out some of the disquiet around him.

Damien turned quickly and the world went white. This time it rebuilt in pixels from left to right, the color filling in slightly slower than the outline. I let my hands fall from my ears again and sat and watched the screen in wonder. Damien's mind was incredible. He was looking at another trash can, different than the one in the lunchroom. This one had feet sticking out of the top. They were kicking, and a voice inside was calling for help.

"Again?" Damien asked. He was a few years older now, and he jogged over and pulled a wiggling little boy from the can.

"I hate them!" The boy shouted. His face was streaked with tears and red from crying. His jacket was dirty and wet where it must have been soaking up the disgusting leftover waste at the bottom of the receptacle.

Damien knelt down so he was eye level with the kid. Big brown eyes stared back at him through smudged glasses. He took them off and used his shirt to clean them for the boy. "One day they won't be able to do that to you anymore." Damien slipped the glasses back onto the little boy's nose.

"They will never . . . never . . . like me." The boy's voice jumped as he cried. "I didn't even do anything to them. Why don't they like me?"

"It must be because of our superpower." Damien held his fist out for the boy to bump with his own.

"Sometimes autism doesn't feel like a superpower. Sometimes I hate it! I never have any friends." The boy stomped his foot and his untied shoelaces whipped around. Damien nodded and began tying the laces. "Kevin said I must eat ass burgers for breakfast. I told him that's not true. I don't even like burgers."

Damien chuckled slightly as he finished up the bow. "Asperger's." He looked up to the boy. "He was probably saying 'Asperger's,' or at least that's what he was making fun of." He pulled a piece of old food out of the boy's hair and tossed it to the ground.

"What's that?"

"Back when they were starting to learn about autism, they used to say people like us who were on the higher-functioning end of the autism spectrum had Asperger's Syndrome. After a while they stopped calling it that and included everyone by calling it all autism." Damien stood up and pulled the books I hadn't even noticed from the bottom of the trash can. He handed them back to the boy.

"So we have Asperger's?" the boy asked in a tone that sounded disappointed.

"Maybe," Damien answered with a shrug, "but I'd rather have the syndrome than be like Kevin and just be an ass."

The boy laughed and nodded his head. "Me too."

"Come on, Jimar, it's getting late," Damien instructed. "You know it's not true about you not having any friends, right?" Damien didn't wait for him to answer. "As long as I'm here I promise I'll be your friend."

As the boys walked along, the pixels all around them turned the sky from day to night.