Free Silent Boy by Torey Hayden Page A

I not talk about it?’

Chapter Eight
    T here were two matters with Kevin that were going to have to be tackled sooner or later. First was Kevin’s hygiene. I realized right from the beginning that part of his difficulty with cleanliness was tied to his numerous fears. For instance, he was so afraid of water that there was no hope of getting him into a bathtub. However, lack of good hygiene made him generally so unpleasant to be with and so unattractive that I felt it should be given some priority. Beauty may be only skin deep but the judgments founded on it tend to go a lot deeper, whether we wished they would or not. No one was going to take to a kid who looked like the aftermath of Mount St Helens and smelled like a locker room after a game, regardless of how clever I or Dana or anyone else might be about changing his behavior. Ordinary people just aren’t that accepting.
    Kevin never would set the world on fire in the looks department. He was sort of your basic model ugly kid. But if his hair hadn’t looked like someone had tested their lawn mower on it and his clothes fit and he washed, he had the potential to be a whole lot closer to average.
    Unfortunately, I quickly learned that many of Kevin’s problems were beyond my control. His hair, for instance. It was the old buzz job up the back and around the sides, leaving one long lock hanging over his forehead. It looked like a grown-out Mohican. Unfortunately, all the boys at Garson Gayer looked like that. Zoe, the cook, brought in her clippers once a month and gave all the fellows a workover. But there wasn’t much to be done about it. She was free and she was there. I didn’t know any barbers at all, particularly ones who made house calls. And I couldn’t cut hair myself. I had tried once when I was a teacher at a state hospital, and one of my boys complained about looking like a girl. So I took the school shears from my desk and gave him a trim and, while he no longer would be mistaken for a girl, it ended any ideas I might have had about a potential future in hairdressing.
    Kevin’s clothes were about as bad as his haircut. They were obviously thirdhand and at least ten years out of style. This wouldn’t have mattered much if it weren’t that they were so small for him. One shirt’s sleeves couldn’t be buttoned because they came so far up on his wrists that the cuffs wouldn’t fit around that part of his arm. He owned no pants that covered the tops of his socks. Worse, the pants were all too tight in the crotch. In the beginning, I had thought he was constantly masturbating. As it turned out, he was simply trying to pull the pants down a little to allow himself to sit comfortably. This daily torture was almost more than I could bear to watch.
    Perhaps worst of all was Kevin’s skin. It could have kept a dermatologist in business for life. He had acne everywhere, undoubtedly aggravated by the fact that he did not wash. There were pimples on his cheeks, on his nose, on his chin, on his forehead, even on his ears. In the bad places, his pimples seemed to have pimples. It was gruesome to have to sit really near him, forced to view such devastation at close range, and I could only imagine, if it repulsed me, what it would do to strangers.
    Clearly Kevin’s appearance and hygiene were areas for some definite overhauling, and as we grew more comfortable with one another, I mulled over methods of approaching it. However, before embarking on any wild schemes of improvement, I wanted to enlist the cooperation of Dana and the Garson Gayer staff who supervised the rest of Kevin’s day.
    We were in a team meeting when I brought it up. I pointed out my reasoning on the matter, that it would make him more pleasant to be with, that it would reduce people’s negative image of him, that it would eliminate some of the prejudices surrounding this boy because he looked so retarded and disturbed when, indeed, I would not be surprised to find his IQ quite close to average,