In her graduation gown and mortarboard, Helen Keller looks down at me from her portrait on the wall. I am standing in front of my locker, No. 106, and turning the dial of my lock—to 7 and then to 25 and then to 34. Around me, I hear the laughter and cries of my fellow students. Their voices say or shout or sing such things as “Can I borrow your lip gloss?” and “Up your nose with a rubber hose!” and “Shake your body down to the ground!” and “Go, Trojans, go!” and “Miss Stephens got herself a Dorothy Hamill do!”

I swing open my locker. Taped to the inside of its door are two magazine pictures, one of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and one of primatologist Jane Goodall. My classmates have mocked me for putting up pictures of my “parents” in my locker.

Also on the inside of my locker door is a copy of the periodic table. I have concocted a game whereby I must try to recite the elements in chronological order whenever I open my locker. I am trying to memorize all 106 of them.

I mumble the elements under my breath. Beside me, Jermaine Tucker fishes a textbook out of the holy mess that is his own locker. I am at No. 78, platinum (Pt), when he cuffs me hard on the back of the head. He is an athletic boy several inches taller than I, so his cuff hurts, but I remind myself I have a high threshold for pain.

“What the hell you doing, Boo?” he says. I ignore his question and continue with my mumbling. I find it best not to make eye contact when a classmate begins harassing me because sometimes a lack of response causes the person to lose interest. My tactic works, and Jermaine Tucker wanders off.

The noises around me, the shouts and guffaws, fade away as I fall back into the world of elements. For the first time, I do reach No. 106, seaborgium (Sg), without needing to steal a peek at the periodic table. My second parents, Richard and Jane, are thoroughly pleased and smile from their photographs as though to congratulate me on my feat. I smile back at them.

“Good-bye,” I whisper to them, just as I always do before heading off to class. Then I reach for something inside my locker.

Blackness. Silence.

I am now as blind and deaf as Helen Keller herself. I suppose there is nothing more to see or hear in this world. I suppose I am dead. I wait to be reborn.

But these few moments are simply missing frames in my film reel, because an instant later light seeps in, sounds erupt, and I can see again.

What I see is horrific. I am on the floor and a boy is lying within arm’s reach. His eyelids flutter, his eyes look without seeing, his face contorts, and his blood seeps from the side of his head and drenches his long brown hair.

Then the darkness swallows me again. But not the silence. A scream fills my head. A scream so bloodcurdling, so nightmarish, it wakes me from my trance.