A Story

A girl, age 18, tells a story. “Once,” she begins, very matter-of-factly, “I was leaving class to go to the resource room and a boy in my class asked, ‘Why does she have to leave?’ The teacher looks straight at him and says, ‘Because she’s retarded.’ That’s one of the things that made me want to go into special ed, because I want to tell all the kids who heard that and overheard that all their lives that they aren’t. They can do what they want to do.”

 Let me just pause and let that sink in. She is, in the year 2014, eighteen years old. This story happened when she was in elementary school. I thought we were past this. I thought teachers knew the power of words, and how sensitive kids are. (Apparently not.) And then too—she is bright and beautiful, attractive and talented, a published writer, and yet the cliques at her middle school had no place for her. Maybe that was related to her hereditary brain imbalance, that makes it harder for her to pay attention in school, but she had to move halfway across the country to find friends. Like Charlotte, too different, ostracized, for something that is none of her fault. I thought we were past this.