Free Trout and Me by Susan Shreve Page A

get it. I feel completely in control of my behavior, which I think is excellent. Well, okay. No worse than anyone else’s. At least no worse than the boys’. The girls act like girls, so they’re always “picture perfect,” as my dad would say. But according to Mr. O’Dell, I interrupt classes, call attention to myself, annoy the other students. Mr. O’Dell goes on and on.
    “There’s a medicine called Ritalin,” Dr. Fern was saying.
    “I know about Ritalin. I won’t take it.”
    “I think it would be good for you to try it, just for a few weeks, to see if it helps your concentration.”
    I didn’t know why he was worried about my concentration since I wasn’t at all worried about it, and already my mother and father had said they were “dead set against Ritalin.”
    “I won’t,” I said.
    “Just hear me out, Ben,” Dr. Fern said.
    “Nope,” I said. “Either I can concentrate without medicine or I’ll end up as a zookeeper.”
    “Why a zookeeper?” my mother asked as we were leaving Dr. Fern’s office.
    “Maybe I like to shovel manure,” I said.
    My dad laughed and ruffled my hair and said this whole nightmare would be over in a heartbeat, and not to worry about the medicine or anything else. Everyone had learning disabilities. Just look at him.
    On the way home, my mother got the prescription for Ritalin at her own pharmacy and handed me the pills with the information about them, which pharmacists have to give a person when they order medicine. So I opened the package and read the information about side effects from Ritalin sitting in the back seat of our car.
    “‘This medicine is a central nervous system stimulant,’” I read out loud. So you see I’m a perfectly good reader if I’m not nervous in front of a teacher or the kids in my class. “It’s going to cause a lot of problems for me. Like, listen to this. They don’t
know
if it’s excreted in breast milk and I’m going to have to cut out drinking alcohol.”
    “Going to be pretty tough on you, especially the breast milk,” my dad joked.
    “And it’s going to make me sick. Listen to this— ‘check with your doctor if you experience a rash, itching, fever, joint pain.’”
    “Benjamin, they have to write everything on the information leaflet. These things almost
never
happen.”
    “‘Weight loss, irregular heartbeat, blurred vision,’” I went on.
    My dad couldn’t help himself. He was sitting in the passenger seat looking out the window, trying to hold in his laughter.
    “‘Seizures.’ Now seizures is something I really need, since I have so much trouble concentrating.”
    “Oh, Ben. Get a grip,” my mom said.
    “‘Involuntary muscle movements or changes in mood or personality.’ Is that what you want? A brand-new Benjamin Carter, new personality, new mood.
Mom
.”
    “We’re dropping the subject for now,” my mom said. “I’m getting a headache.”
    She always gets a headache when she doesn’t like the conversation.
    But my parents did decide we wouldn’t talk about Ritalin for a couple of days. We’d wait until I calmed down, which wasn’t exactly about to happen. Then, as my dad said, we’d discuss the “pros and cons.”
    “Some guys I know flush their Ritalin down the toilet,” I said. “Which is what I’ll do, just so you know.”
    After dinner, I called Trout.
    “I’m skipping tomorrow. No question. It’s a done deal,” I said.
    And I told him about the Ritalin.
    “I’m not going to a school where they make me take medicine to come there.”
    “Flush it down the toilet like I do,” he said.
    “I will, but I still hate it that the school treats me like I’m some kind of freak.”
    “Yeah. Me too. But you’ll get over it. They’ve thought I was a freak since I was six. I don’t even think about it anymore.”
    “So you’re up for going to New York tomorrow?”
    “I think I am.”
    “Well, I’m going whether you do or not,” I said.
    “What about calling in