Star Witness

3

JESSE

"So Jesse, I want honesty. You ever going to participate in group?"

"I don't really have anything to say."

Imani, my Nar-anon group leader, stares at me, folding chair held against her hip. "You believe that?"

Nar-anon doesn't make me feel any better. I guess it's supposed to. Therapy teaches you how to be a human. That's what my dad said once. I wanted to ask him what he knows about being human.

Imani's tried everything to get me involved. She's always holding me back like this. Sometimes people make me feel like a feral cat they're trying to trap and take to the vet. But what is there for me to say? Everything is already over. How does it matter whether I heal when my mother's gone?

How am I even supposed to?

Okay, Nar-anon works for some people, and that's great. Some say it's cathartic. To me it's sad, and it's not new, either. The world is full of people losing their teeth from meth and who can't stop taking Roxicet after surgery and it's filled with the collateral damage, too. I know this already. My existence is collateral damage.

Anyway, I don't like watching people cry; it makes me feel weird. Imani laughed when I told her that. It's called sympathy, she said.

How do I uninstall it, I said.

"I believe that," I say.

She stacks another folding chair against the wall of the church. "I know it's hard. But that's what happened in October; you'd been holding everything in and it finally came out, badly. You're full of explosions. That's dangerous."

What happened in October is code for when I met Nico.

How we met is I punched him.

After my mother died in July, I stopped talking for months. Not a word. This has always happened to me when a feeling is intense, and most feelings are. Words take energy; speaking doesn't come naturally to me, and when I'm overwhelmed, I don't have the energy to untangle things. People call it selective mutism, and, well, it is, but it's also really not so selective. My brain talks when it wants to. I just sort of live here.

Since mutism is not an incredibly common trauma response in older people, I got checked out. The doctors pretty much took one look at me and said "autism." Amongst a long list of other possibilities, but that was the main takeaway.

I made it to October this way, through yes or no questions, held together with a paste of shock and spit. I started my new school in Arizona.

Nico was in my history class.

Look.

I'm fine with other people. Like--noise bothers me, not the people making it. Everyone else has a right to live their lives. But, when they touch me, this is when there becomes a problem.

So I didn't care when Nico made it his game to get a rise out of me. Fun fact: I am kind of the most impossible person in the world to get a rise out of. I didn't care when he threw bits of paper at me and whispered things and laughed with his friends. I really didn't.

Then one day, the person who sat behind me was absent, so he sat there. Everyone was just working independently. He started bothering me. Why don't you talk, huh? Random slurs. I swear he must have a slur generator or something.

And then he poked me.

In the back, with a pencil. I glared. Delighted by receiving a reaction, he started poking me over and over. Touches are like clothes--I feel them amplified. It hurts sometimes. I smacked his hand away, which is what I do a lot when people touch me. It just made him laugh. He kept doing it, and I smacked him again, and he poked again, really hard that time, and said something along the lines of what are you gonna do about it, and, feeling an anger more intense than anything I had felt before or have felt since, I got up and I punched him.