I’VE DECIDED THERE’S THREE MAIN REASONS that school is going okay. One reason is that a few days after we went to Mr. Norris’s apartment, I came to school and found a footprint with my name on it in Mr. Norris’s handwriting:
Benny Barrows read my son’s favorite book aloud and helped him calm down. Thank you, Benny.
After I told my mom the whole story about going to Mr. Norris’s apartment, she told me that Mr. Norris and his wife might have had a hard time staying married with the stress of taking care of Aaron, too. “That’s not so uncommon. It didn’t happen to us, thank heavens, but it happens a lot. Mr. Norris probably feels isolated. It sounds like they haven’t gotten to know many other families with autistic kids.”
I wonder if we’ll become friends with Mr. Norris.
“Not yet,” my mother says when I ask. “We shouldn’t try to be friends with him until after this year is over. When you’re not in his class, maybe we can invite him and Aaron over.”
I nod and feel a little goose-bumpy at the thought. And then I remember one detail I haven’t told her. “You want to hear something weird? Aaron likes Santa, too. And he’s memorized The Night Before Christmas just like George. Isn’t that funny?”
“That is funny,” Mom says.
“Why do you think autistic kids like Santa so much?” I ask.
She thinks about it. “I don’t think they all do. It’s probably just a coincidence. Or else they like him because he’s a friendly man who does one very predictable, nice thing a year and doesn’t talk too much about it in the process.”
It’s true that George doesn’t like people who talk too much. His favorite people at school—the nurse, the janitor—hardly talk at all. Their friendships are all high fives and whistles and little phrases like “Go for the gold!” which George said a lot during the Winter Olympics. He liked the sound of it, I guess, the same way he likes Santa. Not because of the presents, which George doesn’t care about that much. He likes him because he laughs at nothing, which is sort of like George. They both don’t make too much sense, but that’s okay.
Another reason school is okay now is that a few days after George and I went to Mr. Norris’s apartment, Jeremy came up to me and asked if it was true. “Did you really go inside his apartment?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“So what’s it like? Weird, I bet, right?”
I didn’t know what he was hoping I’d say. I definitely wasn’t going to tell him about Aaron. “No. It was a pretty normal apartment.”
“Weren’t you scared though?”
“Not really, why?”
“Because you’re not allowed inside a teacher’s house. It’s against the law.”
It is?
“That’s what my mom and dad said. They said you could get in big trouble for that.”
Then I had a very strange thought: Jeremy’s jealous of me. He’s mad that I know things about Mr. Norris he doesn’t know. It made me think about next year when we can invite Mr. Norris and Aaron over to our house and be (sort of) family friends.
Then spelling tests won’t matter. Neither will progress reports or footprints. Mr. Norris will like my parents and maybe he’ll even say it’s nice bringing Aaron someplace where he doesn’t have to explain everything he does. Mom always says one of the best parts about having George in our family is that no one expects us to be perfect anymore so we don’t have to bother pretending. “You can’t imagine what a relief that is,” she once told me. Maybe, when Martin was her only baby, she tried to be perfect. I don’t know. It’s hard to picture. Maybe Jeremy’s parents are still trying for that.
There’s one last big reason I feel better, though I’d never in a million years tell Jeremy this one. A few days after George and I were in Mr. Norris’s apartment, I got a card in the mail with his handwriting on the envelope. It was addressed to me and had flowers on the front. Inside he said,
Dear Benny,
Just found this poem. I think it’s a lovely one but I don’t think I’ll share it with the whole class. It might be a little hard for them to understand. Still, I thought you should have it. It’s by a woman named Naomi Shihab Nye. This is only part of the poem:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.
At the bottom, he signed it Sincerely, Mr. Norris.
I showed it to Mom because I didn’t understand it and I wanted her to help me. She read it out loud and started to cry, which made me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have showed it to her. Then she explained: “It’s about how hard times make you appreciate kindness and also make you a kinder person, I think.”
Oh, I thought. Okay.
And that made me feel better, too.