“Watch your mouth!” she snapped in her husky voice. “She was just unlucky to trip. Who do you think you are to blame my boy?”
Granny didn’t forget to say a word to the kids, either.
“What are you staring at, you little brats?”
When we walked farther away, I looked up to see Granny with her lips pressed tight.
“Granny, why do people call me weird?”
Her lips loosened.
“Maybe it’s because you’re special. People just can’t stand it when something is different, eigoo, my adorable little monster.”
Granny hugged me so tight my ribs hurt. She always called me a monster. To her, that wasn’t a bad thing.
4
To be honest, it took me a while to understand the nickname Granny had so affectionately given me. Monsters in books weren’t adorable. In fact, monsters were completely opposite to everything adorable. I wondered why she’d call me that. Even after I learned the word “paradox”—which meant putting contradictory ideas together—I was confused. Did the stress fall on “adorable” or “monster?” Anyway, she said she called me that out of love, so I decided to trust her.
Tears welled up in Mom’s eyes as Granny told her about the Mickey Mouse girl.
“I knew this day would come . . . I just didn’t expect it to be this soon . . .”
“Oh, stop that nonsense! If you want to whine, go whine in your room and keep the door shut!”
That stopped Mom’s crying for a moment. She glanced at Granny, a bit startled by the sudden outburst. Then she began to cry even harder. Granny clucked her tongue and shook her head, her eyes resting on a corner of the ceiling, heaving a deep sigh. This seemed to be their typical routine.
It was true, Mom had been worried about me for a long time. That was because I was always different from other kids—different from birth even, because:
I never smiled.
At first, Mom had thought I was just slow to develop. But parenting books told her that a baby starts smiling three days after being born. She counted the days—it had been nearly a hundred.
Like a fairy-tale princess cursed to never smile, I didn’t bat an eye. And like a prince from a faraway land trying to win over his beloved’s heart, Mom tried everything. She tried clapping, bought different colored rattles, and even did silly dances to children’s songs. When she wore herself out, she went out to the veranda and smoked, a habit she’d barely managed to quit after finding out she was pregnant with me. I once saw a video filmed around that time, where Mom was trying so hard, and I was just staring at her. My eyes were too deep and calm to be those of a child’s. Whatever she did, Mom couldn’t make me smile.
The doctor said I had no particular issues. Except for the lack of smiles, the test results showed that my height, weight, and behavioral development were all normal for my age. The pediatrician in our neighborhood dismissed Mom’s concerns, telling her not to worry, because her baby was growing just fine. For a while after that, Mom tried to comfort herself by saying that I was just a little quieter than other kids.
Then something happened around my first birthday, which proved that she’d been right to worry.
That day, Mom had put a red kettle filled with hot water on the table. She turned her back to mix the powdered milk. I reached for the kettle and it fell from the table, tumbling down to the floor, splashing hot water everywhere. I still have a faint burn mark like a medal from that day. I screamed and cried. Mom thought I’d be scared of water or red kettles from that point on, like a normal kid would be. But I wasn’t. I was afraid of neither water nor kettles. I kept reaching for the red kettle whenever I saw it, whether it had cold or hot water inside.
The evidence kept adding up. There was a one-eyed old man who lived downstairs with a big black dog he always kept tied to the post in the yard. I stared straight into the old man’s milky-white pupils without fear, and when Mom lost track of me for a moment, I reached out to touch his dog, who bared his teeth and growled. Even after seeing the kid next door, bitten and bleeding from doing the very same thing, I did it again. Mom had to constantly intervene.
After several incidents like this, Mom started worrying that I might have a low IQ, but there was no other proof of that. So, like any mother, she tried to find a way to cast her doubts about her child in a positive light.
He’s just more fearless than other kids.
That was how she described me in her diary.
*
Even so, any mother’s anxiety would peak if their child hadn’t smiled by their fourth birthday. Mom held my hand and took me to a bigger hospital. That day is the first memory carved into my brain. It’s blurry, as if I were watching from underwater, but comes into sharp focus every once in a while, like this: