A Single Ovation - Chapter One

Cacophony 1

I didn’t say anything when she was born. 2

I didn’t say anything when she died.3

I’m certainly not going to cheapen this moment with words, kneeling in the soggy dirt with water and catastrophe soaking through the knees of my khakis and the sun shining a stunning, solitary ray on my lap.4

My lap, where the body of a silken kitten lies still and silent, its matted fur dark with motor oil, its expression permanently one of consternation.5

Rigor mortis had already set in when I found the cardboard box on my bed, with a single post-it – get rid of this, it read – and my mother’s garden trowel. 6

This box now lay in the bottom of a shallow grave – shallow for a human, the foot of cold earth would be more than enough to conceal a kitten’s broken body – and the nearly weightless creature seemed to stare into the hole with sightless eyes.7

It was a month old, the last of an abandoned litter I had rescued from the back corner of the garage.8

I don’t know how it died, and won’t ask – the sunbeam, shimmering through the pine tree in my backyard, seems a sufficient summary of the plethora of questions such events tend to prompt.9

I wondered, with the first few kittens – the big questions, like if there was a God, or if animals had souls. The questions narrowed in scope as the litter dwindled, to more immediate concerns like how one watches an innocent creature take its last, shuttering breaths without letting ragged screams escape to the sky.10

Now there are no questions. I simply press my lips to its stiff frame, and drop it into the hole, pushing the dirt over it with steady hands.11

No, there are no words.12

But then again, that’s nothing new.13

I exhaled – had it been anyone else, the gesture would have been considered a sigh, but it was silent, and not quite angsty enough to earn the title. I marked out that last, sarcastic line, and rose to turn my paper into the box in the front of the room marked “in”, scanning the other students as I did so. We’d been asked to write a page about one event that had occurred this summer – “just to see where we were” – and I couldn’t help but notice that the majority of my classmates were still in the process of getting their folders out or writing their names on their papers. I dropped my own neat sheet in the empty container, turning to return to my institutional plastic chair when I heard a prim clearing of a throat behind me. I turned, my expression carefully blank in reaction to the teacher’s frown. She leaned forward, her glasses sliding to the tip of her nose.14

“You are not to be out of your seat without my permission. If I catch you out of it again, you will be sent to the Assistant Principal’s office for disciplinary action. Is this clear?” she questioned sternly, her tone sharp and unmasked by the gentle Southern nuances I was used to. Her mouth was small, puckered – almost comically so, especially when set between her accentuated jaws, though her face may very well have been beautiful once. The thick salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a careless bun hinted at the possibility of curls, and her eyes were a very pretty blue, I noticed as I waited for her to dismiss me.15

“I said, is that clear?” she repeated, her frown deepening. I waited for a moment longer, then decided that she wasn’t going to be cordial any time soon and returned to my table. As I waited for the other students, I found her name – Ms. Hull – on the door. She’d neglected to provide it at the beginning of class, which I took to be not only extraordinarily unorthodox and inconvenient, but a premonition for how the entire year would turn out. 16

My family had moved from a small town in Tennessee – “small” was optimistic, it didn’t even make it on the majority of the local maps – as a result of my father’s job. He did something with computers, and this northern city, home of the corporation he’d always dreamt of working with, was perfect for him. It was perfect for my mother, too – she was brought up as a socially active individual, but country people could only be so socially aware when struggling to put food on the table. Within a week of moving to our “happy suburban home”, she had designated a room as her office and cluttered it with flyers and paraphernalia from various organizations – MADD, VFW, JKHM…none of us knew what the acronyms stood for. I’m not sure that she did, either, but it kept her busy, and that was what really mattered. 17

My brother and I were supposed to be busy, too, as the school regaled us with endless mailing campaigns about the after-school activities and special classes they offered for a full month before we tried to transfer. It was almost eerie, how perfectly things worked out – our old home sold the day before we were to sign the contract on our new one, and my father’s new company unexpectedly offered to pay all of our moving expenses. Our small school let out for the summer a full two weeks before theirs, so we would be able to get registered for the following year and choose classes along with everyone else – and that is where the trouble started. They tried to sign me up as a senior, seeing as how I had performed exceptionally well on their online aptitude tests, and insisted upon seeing transcripts and teacher evaluations when my parents told them that I was to be a junior in the fall – they figured that I might be trying to coast for a year, although why anyone would try to spend longer in school is beyond me. It was those damned teacher evaluations that did me in:18

~ “Refuses to participate in class discussions.”19

~ “Oral work is insufficient.”20

~ “Attitude problems – refuses to speak to teacher or students.”21

~ “No speech, unsatisfactory class participation.”22

Those were from freshman year #1, as I called it in my head, the year I’d failed. The year I’d stopped talking. When the second freshman year rolled around, the teachers had made up their minds to simply deal with me, and we got along just fine. There was hardly a mention of my “little peculiarity” (my mother’s words) in the teacher evaluations from sophomore year. Only one teacher thought to mention it at all, and it was in passing – “She doesn’t speak…” she commented, the phrase sandwiched between lines of nearly excessive praise. But it was this line the new school focused on, and the reports from freshman year #1. They made my parents bring me to the school, and after trying unsuccessfully to coax me to talk, sent me for government-funded testing. The day before I was to choose the classes for the following year, I was drilled by doctors. I didn’t speak, instead choosing to politely ignore them – apparently that was the wrong choice. I was pulled out of the counselor’s office, where I had just finished filling out an advanced courseload, and informed that I had been diagnosed with a form of autism in a tone that made it clear that they didn’t expect me to understand. I was to be enrolled in Special Education, kept apart from the other students and barred from after-school activities until I displayed improvement or graduated.23

This was completely illegal, of course – Special Education students were supposed to be mainstreamed as much as possible, not kept in a small room clearly designed for the few with uncontrollable mental illnesses, as we were. And, truth be told, we all knew that my “diagnosis” was far from concrete. It was an excuse to prevent their teachers from having to do the extra work tabulating a grade without oral participation required, and a punishment for my failure to comply with their award-winning methods. I was not what they wanted, and so they made sure I was not what I wanted, either – it was unfair, and immoral, and about a million other negative adjectives, but I knew it would never be corrected. My parents didn’t care, and unless your parents are the sort to get very nasty, very quickly, a school this size had little trouble concealing a few broken rules. I noticed, as I doodled on my folder with my felt-tipped pen, that the thick table legs were screwed into the floor, and the corners of the hard tabletops had been rounded to keep us from hurting ourselves. Had my voice not been trained to stifle even the most involuntary reactions, I would have scoffed. As it was, I glanced at the wall clock and suppressed my irritation at the fact that we’d been given almost an hour to complete this simple assignment. Ms. Hull met my eyes, and with a condescending smirk, pulled my paper out of the basket and walked to my table, sitting it down in front of me.24

“I’m assuming everyone’s finished. We are now going to read our papers out loud. Cacophony will begin,” she announced, her voice dripping with sadism as she looked at me. She pronounced my name cake-oh-phony, incorrectly, but I ignored this as thoroughly as I ignored her request.25

“Now you may go stand at the front of the class,” she told me pointedly. I briefly considered leaving the paper there, just to irritate her, but almost immediately decided against it and strode to the front of the room with my sheet clutched firmly in my hand. I turned to face the class, letting my left hand grace my hip as I waited for her to let me sit down.26

“Cacophony, nobody else is doing anything until you speak,” she warned after a very slow thirty seconds had passed. My eyes flicked to her face, then back to nothing – I dared her to. She clearly understood, for she sat down in my seat.27

“We really do have all day. This isn’t some Podunk school with a curriculum to run through for fear of being shut down. Your test scores aren’t counted,” she smirked caustically. I took an immediate and vehement dislike to the woman, the emotion surpassed only by the desire to prove her wrong. Inside, I was smiling…it was cute, how she thought I was bluffing.28

At twelve, the students lined up to go to lunch. At her request, I remained standing at the front of the room, my posture proud and erect.29

The bell rang at two-thirty, seven hours after class began. I walked from my post at the front of the room to my seat, collecting my feather light backpack and brushing past her on my way to my short bus, where the nice attendant chattered about nothing and left me to my thoughts in the roomy quiet – being discriminated against and misdiagnosed had to have its advantages somewhere…30