Real by Carol Cujec (snow like ashes .txt) 📕

passed around like a radioactive potato to special education classrooms at four different schools. Most teachers made up their mind about me the second I stumbled through the door. Only one teacher believed I could learn—Miss Amira in first grade.

Because she loved nature, Miss Amira took us on field trips to the park, the forest, and the beach. We sniffed wild sage, observed ground squirrels, learned about bird calls, and searched for roly-poly bugs under rocks. She helped us grow a vegetable garden in the school courtyard and taught us how to make a blade of grass sing by blowing on it through our fingers—well, she taught other students that. I still cannot blow out my birthday candles. She even hung picture books from the trees outside our classroom to create what she called our “reading forest.” Most important, Miss Amira looked at me with possibilities instead of limitations. When she saw I liked animal books, she sat with me to read, and then asked, “What do you want to do when you grow up, Charity? Maybe you’d enjoy working with a vet . . . or in a zoo? Maybe even a vet in a zoo.” She grinned wide, and I smiled inside thinking about how to take an elephant’s pulse or diagnose a sick skunk without getting sprayed.

After first grade, school became more and more frustrating. I needed extra help, but the schools would not let Mom come with me. With no voice, no handwriting, and fidgety fingers that would not point to the answers my brain chose, I would think to myself diagnosis: doomed. If I colored outside the lines, I would grab an eraser, but couldn’t stop my hands from rubbing a big hole into my paper . . . which would make me crumple the paper and throw it on the floor, howling. That’s when I learned about “time-out.” But the time-out jittered me even more, so one time-out led to another. And another.

By third grade, I was considered too special for public school. That’s when the Thinkers pressured my parents to send me to a private institution.

Define institution: a place where people are separated from the world instead of included. Separate can never be equal.

Borden Academy was not a real school. Schools are places for learning. Borden was a prison camp for disabled kids, complete with an escape-proof, eight-foot-high chain-link fence. Even the staff called it “Boredom Academy.”

When Miss Marcia pulled the three dollars from my pants, she left the inside of my pocket sticking out. I get flustered by things not in their place.

Great. That is going to bug me all day.

Miss Marcia was the teacher’s aide for our class for three years straight. What grade were we in? What did it matter? Nothing ever changed from one wasted year to the next.

Miss Marcia led me through the front gate. This day, as on many days, my feet refused to move any farther. My hopeless body plopped onto the blacktop about twenty-five yards from the classroom.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Miss Marcia yelped.

My body rocked back and forth, back and forth. I knew what was coming.

“Charity, get up. Charity, get up. CHARITY, GET UP!”

I wanted to scream at her.

I cannot do it, and your yelling does not help me!

Back and forth, back and forth.

…

The Thinkers say I “lack gross motor coordination.” I call it motor madness. Sometimes I am a broken robot stuck on repeat, doing the same thing over and over and over and over. I tap-tap the table, squint-squint my eyes, rock back and forth back and forth, or flush flush flush the toilet. Other times, it’s like someone hits the off switch. And. I. Freeze.

This happened at least once a week in the car when Mom pulled into our driveway. I knew I was supposed to get out, but my body became a marble statue. She tried to pull or push me in the right direction. Probability of my moving: zero.

Finally, she made the best of it and stashed a few books in the front seat so she could sit and read to me until the oh-so-sweet moment my on switch worked again, and . . . hooray . . . I could control my movement. She did not get mad. She seemed to understand I could not help it.

Miss Marcia, on the other hand, squawked like a peahen—that’s a female peacock—when my body froze. Her approach was to control me, not help me learn to move independently.

“For the last time, GET UP!”

Page 211: A group of peahens is called a party.

A group of Miss Marcias? That’s no party.

“Just sit there then,” she said. “I could give a rat’s rump.”

She dragged her worn-out loafers into the classroom (which was actually a trailer) and left me sitting in the middle of the playground—the playground where no kids ever played. A couple times, she glanced out the window to see if I had “decided” to cooperate. Or maybe she wanted to make sure there were no visitors who might be walking through the courtyard.

Another set of eyes peeked outside when Miss Marcia left—Isabella, my one and only friend in this place. Her small, round face was topped with a mop of red curls. She knocked on the window and waved for me to come inside. She kept waving until someone pulled her away.

Sad to say, my legs still refused.

And so I sat.

And sat.

Page 4: The albatross sits on its egg up to 80 days before the egg hatches.

If Mom did not coat me with SPF 70 sunscreen every day, I would resemble a cooked lobster.

Page 159: Lobsters turn red when cooked, but in nature, they can be many colors, even blue.

A sharp pebble poked my bottom, but my butt was glued to the ground.

Move, legs, move!

I squinted my eyes from the bright sunlight until the world became blurry, and I imagined myself as a peaceful protester, like one of the brave people who fought for justice with Martin Luther King Jr. They sat down and refused to get up until they