People like Dustin Pierce don’t ignore new students.
I’ve heard him and his cronies come up with nicknames starting with almost every letter of the alphabet. They work harder on those mean nicknames than on homework, it seems.
They ignore me, usually.
But he didn’t use to ignore me.
See, there’s another thing that sometimes comes with Turner syndrome, and that’s these little brown moles that I have on my arms and legs and even some on my face. Lots of people have brown moles—Marilyn Monroe had a beautiful brown mole on her lip—but sometimes when you have Turner syndrome you get a bit more spotted than other people.
I used to have one on my chin that the doctors were worried about. So I went to the doctor and he took it off. Want to know how weird and neat it is when the doctor takes a mole off? They did a tiny shot on my chin to make it numb, then he took a sharp scalpel and scraped it right off. They had to go deeper on this one to make sure they got it all because they were worried it might turn into a sun cancer mole one day when I was older, and I even had to get stitches.
Remember how I have a scar around my chest?
Well, I have another very small scar from those stitches.
Dustin had a nickname for me that started with F.
He called me FrankenChin.
Dustin and his friends don’t call me that as much as they used to, which is good. Because it’s not new anymore, and they mostly like finding new people and new nicknames to use.
Sometimes I wonder if other people call me that name, too, but because I don’t hear so perfectly I just don’t hear them. Maybe if I don’t hear them it doesn’t matter, right?
After school I went to my locker to pack up my backpack. I kept the paper from Ms. Trepky tucked neatly inside the cover of Survey of Modern America.
Talia’s locker was two down from mine. Whenever she sat next to me in class I tried to remember to smile at her, but I hadn’t talked to her since the library. She always had her earbuds in. She didn’t look like she wanted to talk.
But other people were talking to her.
Talking at her, really.
Dustin Pierce and his two buddies walked past our lockers while Talia took out her earbuds and stuffed them into her pocket.
“Hey there, beach bum,” Dustin said. His buddies snorted and they walked quicker down the hall to their lockers, giggling.
Talia froze, but only for a few seconds. The way her shoulders arched made me think they’d been calling her that name all day long. She let her backpack drop to the ground with a thump, and put her shoulders back. She opened her locker.
Dozens and dozens of paper scraps tumbled out of her locker onto the floor, some flipping around in the air before they landed. Dustin and his crew must have stuffed them in through the thin slots at the top of the locker. Talia immediately bent to the floor and started scooping them up.
I knelt next to her to help, and that’s when I saw it. They weren’t just scraps of paper.
They were pictures.
Pictures of butts.
A hundred pictures of butts. Big butts, too. Gigantic butts with stretch marks and wrinkles.
Talia’s face was red, and her mouth a knife-sharp line.
What in the world are you supposed to say to someone when you’re kneeling in the hallway, scooping up butts?
We picked up every last picture and crumpled them and threw them in the trash. Talia’s face was still stretched tight and if I were Dustin Pierce I’d have been terrified of the way Talia’s hand was clenching in a fist.
Sometimes knowing the right thing to say would be really nice. But I didn’t know.
I remembered the Silent Questions this time. I thought all the things I wanted to say and ask and put them out into the universe. I wanted to tell Talia that I was on her team. That I was her friend. Was that something people usually said silently?
The Silent Questions helped in my own head. I knew I was at least trying to say the right thing, and my stomach didn’t feel as fluttery. I didn’t know how much the Silent Questions were helping Talia. Maybe someone can be too angry to hear the Silent Questions you and the universe are asking them, at least for a while. And I didn’t blame her. Not one bit.
Finally I said, “Do you think we should tell someone?”
Talia slammed her locker shut and picked up her backpack. “Don’t you dare say one word.”