Five(40)

What made it harder wasn’t just that he had something in his brain he couldn’t shut off, it was that his mother refused to accept that she couldn’t change it. She would not believe that no number of irate phone calls and radical defenses of his most irrational and ridiculous behaviors was going to change the pace of his thoughts, his need to move, the things he forgot, the things he lost, the things he never finished, the sleep he couldn’t sleep, the meals he didn’t eat, the speed of his brain, the exhaustion of living inside his attention-deficit head, inside his hyperactive-disordered body.

He had sports. Ever since he could remember, the only time his brain and body felt like they were part of him simultaneously was when he was doing some kind of sport. He could focus when he was running (he won all the county medals for cross-country) or kicking a ball (he had been top scorer every season since he was twelve) or on a rugby pitch, where he was rarely tackled because he was just too fast for everyone that went after him. He understood tacitly that the only thing keeping him at his fancy school was the sports, as in, he hadn’t been kicked out yet because they needed him on all the teams so they could keep up their national rankings and advertise their sporting excellence to prospective parents.

Also, there was his face, right there on the cover of the glossy admissions brochure, with his copper Afro-Latino spiral curls and light brown skin, right next to Afan, a Malaysian kid, who had just won some robotics thing, who was sitting next to a Nigerian kid, Chickezie, who went by Charlie, who had also just won some young entrepreneur thing, sitting on a wall together, laughing, with William, George, and Harry, who were representing the traditional whites.

When Sonny was called to the office and he saw William, George, and Harry, who had recently won Model UN or the Math Olympics or whatever, Sonny could not imagine why he would ever be mentioned on the same list as them for anything. Until he saw Afan and Charlie. And the photographer. And then he understood. He could pretend he was asked to be there because he was one of the best athletes at the school, but he had a feeling it was because he had the most interesting hair—big, colorful, and curly, his hair was a perfect symbol of the school’s commitment to diversity. So Sonny figured that the school wouldn’t kick him out until the administration was ready to pay for new brochures.

“And did Sonny tell you, Mrs. Bell, that he was throwing the other child’s shoe around the gym when the incident occurred?”

“No, he did not, and I fail to see the relevance, Mrs. Murdoch, unless you are suggesting that Sonny deserved to be pummeled in the head with a basketball repeatedly because the punishment for moving another student’s shoe at this school is enforced concussion?”

Sonny couldn’t take it, he had to interject. “Mum! Just listen, it is relevant. I took it, I took his shoe, I threw it to another kid, I grabbed it to hit him with it. He was being a shit—sorry, Mrs. Murdoch, for saying shit—and we were in a fight. He deserved it. We were fighting, Mum. That’s why he chucked the ball at me, it was a fight. I was fighting.”

Luna looked at him, focused on his green eye, and said, “No, you were not. And even if you were, you wouldn’t do that unless you were provoked, and you struggle with impulse control—”

When he did the wrong thing it was never his fault in her eyes, even when it was. And besides the occasional fights and disrupting class, there was the academic stuff too. He was really good at geography, history, philosophy. He thought they were interesting and he was great at class discussions, at asking questions and making comments that no one else had thought of. He could see patterns and poke holes in places that the other kids, so entrenched in rote learning and performing for their robotic conformist parents, just didn’t think to look.

And some of his teachers saw this innate curiosity in him, this unique way of seeing the world. But he couldn’t get it onto paper. His ideas moved too fast for him to catch them and write them down. It was too hard to sit, in silence, confined in a room for an exam, so his results never showed what he actually knew. It was the same refrain, over and over again. He didn’t apply himself, he didn’t focus, he needed to slow down, he wasn’t organized, he didn’t hand his homework in on time, he didn’t wear the right shoes with his uniform. In so, so many ways he was smart, but the message from school was that in so many more ways he was inadequate.

“You’re perfect,” she would say to him, every time she was called in for another meeting to “support” him and he had to sit there, and endure it, and watch her face fall when his teachers disagreed.

She’d rail against them: “Yes, but what did he do well?” “Yes, and did you have the same discussion with the other child involved, with his parents, whichever William, George, or Harry it was?” She refused to believe the truth, which was that he just couldn’t do it.

“You’re ours,” she would say after, and Sonny didn’t know what to do with that because the person included in the plural pronoun had long been dead, had long been only a big, burly memory of a bear-like man carrying Sonny on his shoulders so he could try to touch the sky.

But he resolved to finish his degree for his mum. Someday. She had worked too hard to get him there. So he would do it, he would, just not right now. Because she was dying.

He felt paralyzed when she told him about the cancer, about how far gone she was, about how she would fight but the chances were slim that she would win. She would really only be buying time. He could not absorb the words she said, aggressive, metastasis, tumors. He’d always thought she would be old one day. That he had time. That by the time she was an old lady he’d have his shit finally together enough to give her the best old lady life ever, to buy her a house and give her grandchildren and fly her first class to Jamaica whenever she wanted to go.