Free The Magical Stranger by Stephen Rodrick Page A

Crayolas. I spend a half hour trying to complete the first step, cutting a triangle out of my paper. There are no green-handled lefty scissors, so I try to cut with my right hand, more like my right claw. I bawl and tell my teacher I can’t do it. She watches me fumble with the scissors. She then grabs my face and yanks it toward her own.
    â€œStop joking around and acting stupid.”
    It takes her a few minutes to catch on that I’m not acting stupid. I just can’t do it. She pulls out a manila envelope and stuffs my crappily cut-out paper inside and dashes a note off to Mom. I take it home on the bus. Mom reads the note and sighs.
    â€œYou know you’re embarrassing me, right?”
    Immediately, she regrets saying it. I can see it in her eyes. She’s trying so hard. And I know she loves me. She cooks and cleans and listens to my long monologues about the Raiders and third-party presidential candidates. For hours, she listens. And then Dad comes home and I fly to him.
    There are things I can do. I can read and I can run my mouth. Mom and Dad give me a boys’ history of the United States for Christmas, and I memorize all the small-type bios in the back. Who’s Alger Hiss? John Nance Garner? No one cares but me. There’s not a subject that I don’t have a thousand questions for: When was Halley’s comet coming back? How could Joe Rudi hurt his shoulder while lifting a bag of groceries? Why did Ronald Reagan always look so happy?
    This is California in the 1970s. My second-grade year is spent in a pod classroom where three teachers roam between ninety students. Everyone is always shouting with my voice rising above all the others until Mrs. Monaghetti loses it.
    â€œCan you please shut up for a while?”
    I try, I really do. My teachers don’t understand. I take tests and finish in the top 1 percent, but I can’t build a one-story house with Legos. At home, Mom says she’s trying her best, but I’m driving her to the loony bin. I believe her. One afternoon, she puts bright red lipstick on and picks me up early from school. We drive the forty-five minutes to the base, me chattering away, her preoccupied with traffic and our destination.
    I meet with a Navy doctor with tired eyes. We talk about Dad and what he does for a living. We talk about school and how boring it is. We talk about me getting along with Mom. After an hour, he pats me on the head, and Mom leaves the hospital with a bottle filled with white tablets.
    It’s Ritalin. I take one in the morning and then one from the school nurse around lunchtime. I can’t tell you if they help or not. Probably not, because the school comes up with a new idea: I’ll spend half the day with my regular class and half the day with special-ed kids.
    This is a disaster. I spend afternoons with retarded boys and girls a half foot taller than me who outweigh me by sixty or seventy pounds. I cry and they cry too, but their tears come with rage. One day, a kid with a crew cut throws a Chinese checkers game at my head, marbles and all. I hide in a closet.
    After that, Mom moves to straight bribery. Mom and the base psychologist come up with Snoopy Dollars; every day I keep my mouth shut and make my bed I get a fake dollar with a beagle on it. Once I reach twenty Snoopy Dollars I can buy baseball cards with the proceeds. It sort of works, and by summertime I have an almost complete collection of 1974 Topps cards, but Mom grows tired of keeping track. The contest ends.
    â€œI shouldn’t have to pay you to be good.”
    What does Dad say? Not much. He is a ghost.
    O ne Saturday, Mom says she needs a break. She takes Terry shopping. Dad is in the garage working on his MG. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and stained khakis. We live at the top of a hill in a new subdivision; I’m a little bit up the street riding my new blue bicycle. Well, riding it is a big fat lie. I’m six or seven, but still