The Paper Boy

The Paper Boy

Jasper went from kindergarten through 8th grade with his classmates, but never had a friend.

Not one.

Do you know how difficult that is?  

And it wasn’t because kids didn’t try. 

He just had a hard time socially. 

He would avoid friendly people in the hallway when he saw them coming.  Duck behind lockers.  Turn suddenly down hallways he didn’t need to take.  He knew they’d want to say hi and that was just too much.  Many kids go to great lengths to avoid bullies; Jasper would often be racing and almost tardy to class to avoid friendlies. 

In groups at a worktable, he would often stand his notebook or worksheets up and hide behind them…even if the papers were small scraps—hunkering down behind a postage stamp.

Textbook ASD.

ASD?  

Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Sounds simple.  People with it have a hard time with social interaction, communication, and repetitive behaviors.  They may have any number of behaviors that make human contact difficult: little or no eye contact; tending not to look at or listen to people; failing to or being slow to respond to someone calling their name, or to other verbal attempts to gain attention; having difficulties with the back and forth of conversation.  And that is only a fraction of the list.

Try overcoming that.

For many it’s just a label.  A sticker.  Placed right on the middle of the forehead.  We often categorize people with diagnoses.  Pigeon-hole them.  Simplify them or discard them.  Ignore them.  Especially if they are “difficult”.

That kind of mindset ought to have a diagnosis as well.  “Mean” has too many other facets to be accurate, but it will do for now.

If you ever did engage him in conversation, Jasper would go on and on about dinosaurs or Native American tribes or enumerate state capitals—ALL of them.  Puerto Rico and Guam included.  

However, when he began his freshman year at JFK, Jasper promised himself that high school was going to be different.

“Different how?” his mother asked, not looking up from her knitting.

“I want people to like me.”

“They like you.”

Jasper shook his head.  “They find me uncomfortable.  Irritating.  Frustrating.  Confounding.  Annoying.  Maddening—”

“Not the whole thesaurus, please.”

He stopped talking and picked up a Rubik’s Cube.  He stared at it a moment.  Then he began flipping and twisting it.  Mom noticed.  He played with it whenever he was thinking big thoughts.  She knew the notebook would be coming out eventually.  “I’m always saying the wrong thing.”

He twisted and turned the cube to solve it.  “By graduation I want to have one friend.  Just one I can sit with during commencement.  I always say the wrong things to people, then they hate me.  So, for the rest of high school,” he flipped and twisted, and twisted and flipped, “I’m not going to talk to anyone.”

Mom stopped her knitting.  She’d lost count anyway.  “Not talk?  You can’t not talk to people every day for four years.”

Not even looking up from his Cube which he kept solving and jumbling and solving and jumbling, he said, “It’s a vow of silence.  Many religions have it.”

Mom expected him to begin citing a list of them.

Nothing.  Just flipping, twisting, solving.

She hated the idea of him not speaking, of being even more socially isolated, but once he set his mind to something, it was hard to change course.  She tried a different approach to see if he might change his mind.  “If you don’t talk, how will you make a friend?”

“Monks have friends.”

She wanted to say “yeah, other silent monks”, but knew it was a dead end.  She watched him.  She saw the little boy for a moment.  The one she couldn’t hug.  The one who would never understand a reason to say “I love you” much less feel it.  The one who forced her to play by different rules.  She smiled.  “I always enjoy your company.”

Continuing to solve, Jasper said, “You’re my mom.  You have to like me.  It’s an unwritten law of the universe.”

She laughed, “I don’t have to.”

“Even murderers and evil politicians had mothers who loved them.”

“You’re not a murderer or evil politician.”

“Not yet.”

She laughed.  Though she knew he did not mean it as a joke.  He was just being factual.  Jasper didn’t get humor.  He understood the concept.  Could define it.  Could identify it.

He just couldn’t do it.

For years in school, teachers trying to help Jasper would often assign him a seat near the nicest kids in class.  These nice kids would try very hard to include Jasper and work with him.  It left a trail of disappointment, frustrations, hurt feelings, and vexation.  They simply could not penetrate his defenses. 

If you told Jasper of this, he’d only try to define ‘disappointment, frustrations, and vexation’, oblivious to the feelings in their wake.

Oblivious.

O! Blivious.

O-BLIV-ious.

Obliv-EEEEEEEE-us.

Oblivi-UUUUUUUUUUUs.

 He couldn’t help himself.  And even though others knew this, it made it no easier to work with him.  They were kids. 

Exjasperation.

Jasper even made it difficult for adults.

Mr. Krzysztofczyk—Mr. K to his students—had taught middle school history for many years, but this year he moved up to the high school with Jasper and his classmates to teach Government. 

Mr. K had been a runner for many years.  He had run a fall and a spring marathon every year for nearly a decade.  He always invited students to watch him run.

None came.  Don’t be sad.  Middle schoolers are at a difficult age and kids in his school didn’t have much means to make a long drive on a Sunday morning.  Besides, he had Jasper.

Somehow Jasper found Mr. K’s running fascinating and attended all his races.  He was his personal statistician.  Jasper kept detailed stats.  Tracked his splits—every one—calculating his pace each mile.  Created charts, maps, and tables to break down the races. 

But he was never impressed by Mr. K’s running.  He just liked the numbers.

Mr. K ran well.  He even won his age-group occasionally.  Jasper just kept saying he was a DNF (Did Not Finish).  Wouldn’t even high-five Mr. K.  Mr. K was a little sad about that.  Of all the things that Jasper did or didn’t do, that was the one that hurt a little bit.  High-fiving was one thing Jasper did that communicated with others easily, without effort.  But he would not high five Mr. K.

Last Friday, Mr. K’s class was prepping for their presentations.  Jasper’s group had to come up with an alternative to using horse-drawn carts at the city’s Winter Festival.  Horse-carts had been used for 80 years, but last year, Spaghetti-O, the beloved draft horse that had pulled the cart for nearly a decade, suffered coronary failure--while pulling a cartload of families with little children.  The poor fella collapsed, got up and collapsed, never to rise again.  As far as the horrified kids could tell, he died twice.  The city officials did NOT want that to happen again!  But the horse vs. tractor debate had nearly divided the residents. 

Jasper wasn’t speaking and his groupmates didn’t know if he would speak during the presentation.  They had tried without success to get him to open up.  They were presenting the next day but all he had done was his own research on horses. 

Extensive research. 

Mitch, the group leader, was hoping to have Jasper’s poster ready to display.  He looked at Jasper’s 15-page report and asked, “How are we going to use this in our presentation tomorrow?”  He tried in vain to keep the frustration and desperation out of his voice.  They had tried various things to keep Jasper in the mix.

Nothing worked.  In his vow of silence, he had refused to communicate with the group the whole year so far—five weeks.  He wasn’t annoying others, but he wasn’t reaching out to them either.  He had simply reached an emotional cease-fire.  He had a map, but the mines were still out there.  Hidden to him. 

Mitch sighed.  This close to the due date, he had to resort to teacher intervention.

“Mr. K wants to see you, Jasper.”  Mitch was a rock-star student, but he couldn’t be counselor, advocate, mediator, and so many others on this project anymore.  He called Jasper’s name four more times with no response.  Katie gently reached over to touch Jasper’s arm to get his attention.

Jasper quickly pulled his arm away as though her touch was poison.

“It’s ok, Jasper.  Mr. K wants to talk to you.”

Jasper looked up.  His eyes welling up with frustration already.  Mr. K was indeed motioning him over.

Jasper got up and the other kids sighed in quiet relief. 

Guilty, quiet relief.

He stood in front of Mr. K in silence.  Feeling alone.  Fragile.  Thin and vulnerable.  As though he was made of paper and would crumple up and blow away.

“I’ll take your report for full credit, Jasper.”  The boy nodded and turned to leave.  “Hang on, kid.”  Jasper stopped and turned back.  “Perhaps you could at least contribute something to the presentation, though.  The group will now be missing your portion.”

Contribute what?  Jasper didn’t know.  Despite the complete lack of emotional expression on his face, Jasper was growing agitated.  Mr. K knew him well enough to know that.  He offered a suggestion.

“Since they do not have your poster, why not make some kind of decoration for their poster?”

Jasper just looked down and shook his head.  

“Well...go look up horse decorations and see what you could make.”  Mr. K handled Jasper as gently as he could, but his view of special needs students was relatively unforgiving.  There are no supports outside of school for these kids, he reasoned, so they need to be self-diagnosing.  Self-advocates.  Self-sufficient.  A frail and solitary Jasper returning to his seat, isolated in a crowd of students tested Mr. K’s belief in that philosophy.

Jasper organized himself enough to go online and quickly found an origami site.  He had never seen anything like origami before.  He watched a short video and saw dozens of designs. He found a horse he could fold.

Step-by-step directions were his forte.  He had the process memorized in a moment and found brown paper and returned to the group.  They watched him sit, not speak to them, and begin folding paper.  His hands danced around the paper and he quickly propped his paper horse on the table.

“That’s really cool, Jasper.”

Not taking his eyes off the horse, without even thinking, he said, “Thanks.” Very gently.  The word escaped his mouth like an inmate—free for the very first time.  It didn’t even register with him that his vow had suddenly ended.  But it was the most normal exchange Mitch could ever remember having with Jasper. 

Since he met him in second grade.

Jasper looked at the horse for a moment—redesigning it in his mind.

“We could put that on our poster,” Katie reached over for it.

Jasper quietly put up a finger to stop her.  The kids looked at each other.  They’d never seen him so…regular.  Every exchange with Jasper was difficult.  Nobody seemed to be able to get past his walls.

He would never try to be mean, but he always kept them at a distance.  The kids resigned themselves to this fact ages ago.  Since they were little, he hardly spoke, but when he did, he’d always say the wrong things.

Which is different from never saying the right things.  That’s a disorder with no name.  Suffered by undiagnosed millions. 

He unfolded and refolded his paper horse.

They let him work while they discussed their final plans. 

He would even interject while folding—offering helpful info: “The mayor has no authority over that…Manure is recyclable and beneficial…it has to do with liability…”  Never looking up from his folding.  When he was done, he held the horse up to Taylor.  Very gently, he said, “Pull the tail,” …

To read the remainder of this short story look for my short story collection available here on Amazon.