Free One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir by Paul Guest

inspiration.
    And it was true: it was good to be back and I was glad to be in class.
     
    Ronnie began to ride the short bus not long after I did. He was lean, with long arms and splayed fingers. His hair, dark and slick, drew back from his forehead as if in retreat. His face narrowed to a point like a wedge and was scab-wet all over, malignant with acne. He wore heavy denim and his long-sleeved shirts were always stained. He never spoke. Not a word. I’m not sure he could speak and no one ever explained him to us, except to announce his name like a warning.
    He lived in a trailer with adults I never assumed were his parents. Stooped and leathery, they rarely appeared, except to stand balefully beside the mailbox, smoking thoughtfullywhile the bus shuddered to a stop and the doors slid open for Ronnie. When the driver had seated him, they went back inside their home, having said nothing.
    When the short bus started up again, Ronnie would rock back and forth where he sat alone. He made noises. Little whimpers. Snuffles at first that might have been troubled sleep. None of us spoke while he rode with us, watching him lurch.
     
    Once, when the driver had stepped off the short bus and no one’s eyes were on him but ours, Ronnie leaped up from his seat and moved lithely towards the back of the bus, where I sat. An obese girl, who was mute and had difficulty walking, sat across the way. He took her head in his arms, locked one around her throat, and was yanked away by the driver. The girl, weeping wildly, coughed and mewled and thrashed at the air.
     
    He would take his fingers in his mouth, two or three at a time, and bite down on them, still rocking, until they bled from his mouth and down his chin and onto his shirt.
    Still rocking.
    A squeal now like the rasp of a saw through wood.
    Still rocking.
    And then, through all the short bus, through all its confined space, the stink of his shit would go, while he smiled and bled.
    Every day for a year this happened.
    We all tried not to breathe. To deny that air.
    Every day on the short bus from which none of us could escape.

chapter EIGHT
    When school was over, the short bus would lower my chair by hydraulic lift into the street. At our front door, my mother waited for me to come up the long ramp to the porch and let me inside, though there was little room to freely move about. The hallway to my bedroom was so narrow both sides of my wheelchair dug long trenches into the sheetrock. So that I could enter and exit my bedroom the frame around the doorway had to be removed. Inside, there was a hospital bed with rails pushed up against a wall. I had a small desk, high enough for me to roll under, and an old typewriter. To the right, the other wall. If I turned around in the room, Ihad to be careful of my toes: they would hit the bed or the desk or the wall.
    And there was less room when Chan began to sleep on a small mattress on the floor beside my bed. Every night for almost a year we slept this way. The room had been his. It had always been his. Downstairs, where the den and my old bedroom were dug into the earth and were always dark and cool, he had never been comfortable. He was a child, eight years old, quiet and shy. One night, soon after my return, he wanted to watch a late-night movie with me. He never left.
     
    At home, my mornings began, even earlier than they had at Shepherd, with exercise while I was still in bed. First, my mother stretched my legs as best she could, straightening them, rocking my hips from one side to the other. Then she helped me raise my knees and immobilize my feet: I lifted my bottom from the mattress by flexing my quadriceps. It was hard work for me, and harder for her, a small, compact woman. After thirty minutes she dressed me and because the bathroom in the hallway beside my bedroom was too small, I brushed my teeth in the kitchen sink and washed my hair in a plastic basin on the kitchen table with thick towels wrapped around my neck and in my