His pediatrician, a middle-aged guy Robert had seen since he was a baby, prescribed him extended-release Adderall after Robert’s flaming disaster of a first-quarter report card and Barry’s dismal findings. While Robert’s IQ was well above average—“in the gifted range,” Barry had reported—his reading comprehension level was equivalent to a fourth grader’s. His math computation skills were two years below grade level.
“Gaps,” Barry had told Robert, “that seem to represent a lack of attention, not a lack of ability.”
These results, coupled with his teachers’ evaluations, compiling Robert’s every fidget, every blown assignment, every detention, had Dr. Rishni reaching for the prescription pad within minutes.
They were supposed to schedule a follow-up appointment with a child psychiatrist, who could monitor Robert’s symptoms and medication dosage. The business card disappeared in the depths of Deb’s purse.
The pills were round and baby blue, and they slid easily down his throat. He gulped them down without water, though his mother covered her eyes and told him not to. His knees ceased their hyperactive jig. He could sit still, could read for fifteen minutes at a time. He remembered more of what people said. He passed eighth grade, and at home his digital aviation abilities improved dramatically. His takeoffs smoothed out and his landings steadied, and he thought about the fighter pilots who’d jetted over Iraq. With his newfound concentration, could Robert make it in the air force?
His surfboard stayed in Deb’s car.
First Deb started taking away the bottle on the weekends, once ninth grade started and Robert returned to school as pale as the digital clouds he’d spent all summer navigating through. “You’re a kid. It’s not natural for you to be on pills all the time.” She tapped the bottle against her palm. “Go outside, for Christ’s sake.”
So he would ricochet around on the weekends, chasing Hulk, not doing his chores or his homework, and his mother would yell at him like always.
When Christmas break rolled around, Deb decided he wouldn’t take them that whole week either. He ate a dozen candy canes in one sitting, crunching them between his teeth while his mother cringed. He woke up with tight hamstrings, and eventually realized the soreness was the result of his knees’ constant tremor.
For his fourteenth Christmas, Robert’s mother bought him a computer joystick and a startlingly realistic flight simulator with graphics much sharper than those in the free program he’d downloaded; the scenarios took torque and slipstream into account. The controls mirrored a commercial jet’s. The program was his only gift, but it was a good one. For his mom, Robert had smoothed out his beach watercolor from art class, finished it up with some muddled but usable Crayola paints, puddled and forgotten in a drawer, and signed his name with a flourish.
Robert played his new simulator standing up, letting the room grow dark around him as day faded to night. He soared past the pyramids, looped around the Leaning Tower of Pisa, zoomed over Niagara Falls.
“You want to go to the stables?” Deb asked once. Her thick, high boots clomped across the trailer. In three days he’d return to school, for the long slog until spring break. “There’s a horse you can try out.”
Robert barely looked up. He pulled up on the throttle and the digital runway narrowed. “Nah.”
She never asked again.
The vacation ended and he still didn’t resume taking the Adderall. His mother rumpled his hair and kissed the top of his head. “That’s not you on that medicine. I want my son.”
Really, Robert hadn’t minded the way the pills made him feel. He didn’t feel woozy or slow, like when he had to take Benadryl. Before long, he was a walking crash site again, spreading a debris field of lost assignments, tattered textbooks, and unsigned detention slips.
“I think Robert’s off his medication,” said Mira Wohl, a red-haired girl in his homeroom, one day in January. He’d been at the front of the room while the teacher was in the hall talking to the principal, showing off his break-dancing skills. He had, in fact, been trying to impress Mira, and knowing next to nothing about girls, assumed her eye roll meant she was properly awed.
“Didn’t work on me,” he said, and winked.