Miracle Boy Grows Up Read Online Free PDF Page A

won’t be afraid of it. She is making a kind of case study of me for her master’s thesis, it turns out, testing the concept of mainstreaming.
    I’m startled to think that anyone would be afraid of my chair. Yet right away a few hands shoot up, then more. Soon I’m surrounded by grubby eager fingers. Many of these kids quickly become my new best friends. Within a day I’m appointing a trusted subset to be my first choices for wheelchair-pushing. We make a game of it—they compete to be my Chief Wheeler, and I choose the winners. “You were totally accepted by your classmates because you were so cute and so bright, just like everyone else, except you were on wheels,” recalls Judy, my teacher, four decades later.
    At the end of the semester she notes on my report card that I have “leadership skills.” If so, it comes from necessity. It’s a survival skill, a form of gentle manipulation that maybe all handicapped kids learn. Taking charge. Putting people at ease.
    One kid, however, isn’t so easy to figure out. On a half-cloudy November afternoon a girl named Carrie crawls across a classroom tabletop toward me, grinning. Bony and high strung, with long black hair she’s always tucking behind her ears, one of many tics, she’s a friend but not a member of my Club. I call my group of best friends a Club, a restricted club, and though it has no benefits other than wheelchair-pushing privileges, the other kids seem to like being members. “Hi, Ben!”
    “Carrie . . . what’re you doing on the table?”
    She inches closer. At the edge of the table she says “hi” again. Then she’s practically in my lap. She reaches out and begins unbuttoning my navy-blue corduroys and unzipping my fly—
    “Carrie!” Judy yells from across the room. Carrie’s white-hot face falls like a startled soufflé as she looks up and unhands my pants. Judy marches over. “Back to your seat!”
    Silently, Carrie crawls away. Judy steps closer and closes my pants. No more is said about the incident. Later, when Mom comes to pick me up, Judy tells her what happened. They talk in soft voices.
    On the chill walk home along Central Park West, Mom tells me to let her and Judy know if anything like this occurs again. Some children have a hard time accepting my handicap, she says. That’s not so, I say, not in this case. Mom says she understands it was just play, but still. I say okay, but I’m lying. I don’t want to tell Mom or Judy or anyone else if it happens again. If I commented on all the odd things people do around me, I’d never shut up.
    For instance, I never tell about Quentin. He’s a long-haired, pale-skinned, rangy boy with a taut, satanic grin who frightens me. It’s not merely his appearance. It’s something about the way he looks at me, or doesn’t, with his fanatical eyes. I try ignoring him. He’s one of the reasons I surround myself with a protective barrier of friends. Quentin pays us no mind, and at first I congratulate myself on a strategic victory. All goes smoothly, but only for a time.
    ***
    T o be nearer to Walden, we’ve moved from our second-story apartment on East 79th Street to a six-room co-op on the eighteenth floor of The Beresford, a cavernous Art Deco building on Central Park West near the Planetarium and dinosaur museum. Alec, who is eight, is against moving. He likes life to stay the same. Or maybe he just likes to argue.
    Soon after moving, Mom and Dad have all the doorway thresholds removed and smoothed over, an access modification for me. This is thirty years before access modifications become codified by law. Mom and Dad and the men they hire have to figure it out on their own. Pioneers, again!
    Workmen and sawdust fill the place for weeks. The light switch in the bedroom Alec and I share is lowered so I can reach it, if pushed close enough. I’ve never flipped a light on and off before. Who knew it was so simple? I flip it a hundred times that first day.
    I remember our first Halloween