Chapter Twenty-Nine

"Damien, are you ready to talk about your experience?" Dr. Crimm asked the boy who had once seemed disengaged and uninterested, but was now as much a part of this group as any of us.

"Yes." Damien wiped his palms down his thighs and blew out a breath. His eyes stayed trained on the floor near his feet and now that we'd seen the world from his point of view it seemed so inconsequential. "I told you before how hard it was for me to make friends. That first day of kindergarten was brutal. I got off to a bad start and I never could get it together from that point on. Maybe I'd find a friend here or there, but at some point, they would decide they wanted to hang out with someone else.

"At first I didn't think it was about me. My parents had done a great job building up my self-esteem. They always spoke honestly about my autism. I was diagnosed early at two years and had services right away and often. I'm considered very high-functioning so most people don't even recognize I'm on the spectrum, but they know something is different about me, and that something different isn't a good thing. It took losing multiple friends for me to start realizing that I was the common variable in every equation."

"I don't get it," Shima interjected. "I think you're easy to talk to. We have a few kids at our school who are autistic and they're mainstreamed, not ostracized like you were."

"That might have been the case if it weren't for a few specific kids." Damien replied. "Some friendships I didn't want because kids didn't play the games I wanted to play, but some friendships were sabotaged. There's a kid who's had it in for me for a while. We've been enemies since about the second grade. It's been bad enough my parents considered switching schools for me." Damien adjusted his glasses and looked up to Shima for a brief second. "He'd say mean things to me and get the other kids to do it, too. He made it uncool for people to be my friends, in essence making me the plague of our grade. No one wanted to touch me for fear of becoming outcasts themselves."

"So why not move schools?" Dr. Crimm asked.

"My dad thought that would be letting the bully win. My parents argued about it all the time. My mom wanted to move me and my dad wanted me to stay and fight it out. He's a professor at the university and believed if he let me run from this I'd spend my whole life running from things." Damien shrugged. "Maybe he's right. My mom argued that some battles weren't worth the cost of the war. She convinced me to mentor younger kids on the spectrum in an effort to build my self-esteem." He smiled as if the thought of her made his lips move on their own. "She's a kindergarten teacher at a private school. Both educators, but that's about all they have in common."

"Tell us about Jimar," Marco said. "He doesn't seem to care what anyone else thinks or says about you."

"Jimar is my buddy," Damien said through a smile. "He reminds me of myself. He was paired with me through the regional center. I met him and agreed to be his Big Buddy. I was afraid at first that he might not like me or that he would find out I wasn't cool, and then he wouldn't want to be my Little Buddy, but we clicked." His smile fell. "Watching him go through what I went through was depressing. I put on a smile when I told him it was his superpower just like my parents had told me, but now I know why my mom had to try not to cry when she told me that.

"I want to protect him. I want to make sure he isn't hurt the way I was. I want to make sure he never feels lonely the way I've felt lonely, because sometimes I thought that loneliness could kill me. I just wanted someone to talk to. I'd see a movie by myself and wish I had a friend I could talk to about it. I'd see everyone else doing things with each other on social media and not one of them ever thought to invite me. Nothing is as lonely as being right in front of people and not being visible. Nothing is as isolating as listening to every word that rolls off a tongue and not knowing when it's the right time to share one from your own.

"Your brain is a wonder of cells created to relay information and reflect emotion, and it's as if someone crawled inside my head and covered those mirroring cells with tiny veils so nothing can be reflected back properly. And Jimar—his mirrors are covered, too. But instead of being kicked under the school desk like I was, he's shoved into trash cans. The bullying might look different, but it all feels the same inside."

After a second, she asked Damien, "Who was there for you when you were being bullied?"

"No one." Damien responded. "It wasn't safe because I wasn't safe. And by the time we were old enough to outgrow the kicking, the overt turned to covert and there were times I'd give anything to have the physical rejection over the emotional. It was so much easier to understand. If you kicked me I knew where I stood with you. I didn't need to guess if you were mad or if we were still talking. But if you didn't answer my texts, or if there was suddenly not enough room at the lunch table, I wasn't sure if it was my own insecurities or if I'd done it again—said something wrong or made a social misstep that put me outside the group once more."

"Each time you pull Jimar out of the trash can, you're telling him he's worthy of your time. You show him that he means something to you." Dr. Crimm spoke with authority. "We teach parents the best tool for changing behavior in their children is the manipulation of parental attention. If you want to reward a child, you give them your attention. If you want to give a child a negative consequence, you deprive them of your attention. Even if you did nothing more than take the time to pull his body from that trash can, you've made a difference."

Damien looked up at her. "He watched me give up. He watched me almost die."

"We can't change what we've done," Dr. Crimm told him. She took a second to look around to each of us. "You'll need to find a way to forgive yourselves for that choice. There might be people who won't be able to forgive you for it, and you'll need to be okay with that, too. Everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone recovers from them. Be someone who recovers, Damien." She pushed her sleeves up and let her arms rest on her thighs so that her own scars could be seen. "Lead by example." I couldn't help staring at her healed wounds, the evidence that maybe she'd once felt something similar to what we had. "Show him that bad days pass no matter how many of them are strung together, and good friends exist, even if you have to work harder to make them."

"I don't have the answers you do," Damien told her.

"I don't always have them, either," she admitted. "And I certainly didn't have them at seventeen. But people like us in this room have a few more answers than others out there." She looked up to the windows high above our chairs. "We know it's possible to laugh again after the darkest day of our lives. We know it's possible to make a new friend, reach out to comfort them, feel empathy for their pain and root for their recovery, in spite of our own suffering. We know that time doesn't stand still, and while that used to be a bad thing—something that made us feel like we were worlds behind everyone else—now it allows our mistakes to get further behind us."

We all sat quietly, Dr. Crimm's wrists on display and her heart out in the open in the center of the circle with the rest of ours. She didn't have to share with us. She didn't have to let us into her world—I knew that much. For that alone she had my respect and the attention of every member of the group. She didn't seem ashamed of her past and that made her real and relatable in a way that the adults around me had failed to, no matter what tactic they had tried to employ. Raw, open honesty went a long way with us.

"Who was the girl?" Ken asked. "She told Jimar she believed in you. That sounds pretty serious."

Damien's cheeks flushed and he ran his hands down his thighs again, the way he always did when he got nervous. Once they'd made one pass, he tucked them beneath his arms and started to slowly rock forward and back. "She's Jimar's sister, Keisha. We have a few AP classes together."

Marco's brow creased and he shot a look to Ken before darting his gaze to Damien. "How long has she liked you?"

Damien was already shaking his head. "She doesn't like me. She just comes with us sometimes when Jimar and I grab tacos after doing homework."

Shima bumped his shoulder with hers. "Tell us about her."

"She's really smart, loves reading but hates non-fiction. She has two cats but is allergic so she has to take medication daily just to breathe around them." He laughed as he talked about her and the sound was light and airy as it flowed from his mouth. "She's addicted to video games but plays under a masculine name and male avatar so that boys don't harass her online."

"Brilliant," Aideen chimed in.

"She is. She's only sixteen since she skipped a grade, and she will most likely get accepted to her first choice of colleges." He looked at Dr. Crimm as he told us, "She has taught herself everything there is to know about autism because of her brother. She told me once that she thinks it's actually proof of further evolution. Her theory is that we will one day be so dependent on technology that speaking to other humans won't be as necessary, so our brains are showing signs of evolving from organs that used to help us communicate with each other to more efficient communicators with technology." Damien looked proud of her for that.

"Possibly," Dr. Crimm agreed. "Does it surprise you that she believes in you?"

Damien stopped rocking. "I had no idea she felt that way."

"Finish this thought for me," Dr. Crimm instructed Damien. "If Keisha believes in me, I am . . ."

Damien took his time. He held himself, his arms still wrapped around his chest as he contemplated his answer. I hadn't known him very long, but already a list of possible answers went through my mind. Damien was smart, friendly, caring, empathetic, and wonderful. So many words could fit at the end of that sentence and we were all waiting for him to come up with the answer he believed in.

He looked up at Dr. Crimm when he was ready to give her the answer. "If Keisha believes in me, I am worthy."