Stuck in Neutral Read Online Free PDF

people look pretty in studio photographs.
    Are these memories of real things or imagined ones? I don’t know. Are your dreams real or imagined? You don’t imagine a dream, do you? I don’t know what’s real or what’s imagined when I have a seizure, and to tell you the truth, I don’t care.
    All I know is that my seizures are a nice part of my life, a part I love. Seizure trips are as real to me as sitting in this wheelchair right now, remembering, in perfect detail, two months ago when I heard the sounds of the furnace humming and my brother talking on the phone to one of his friends about getting a pizza and a half rack a brewskies. My seizures are as real as my schooling and a lot more sane. Did I mention that I go to school? Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, it was at school yesterday that I had to face the fact, again, that my dad might be thinking about killing me.

7
    Shawn does not grow,
    he stays the same....
    His arms and legs
    are overcooked spaghetti
    laced with the bones of dead birds....
    Behind his eyes it’s blank
    as fog over snow .
    S chool. The retards’ class. Jeez, what a friggin’ zoo. The Severely/Profoundly Handicapped Special Education Program at Shoreline is an amazing piece of work. There are only seven of us kids in the room, along with our teacher, Mrs. Hare, and two teacher’s assistants, Becky and William. William is this incredibly cruel, vicious psychopath with huge hairy arms who tortures us and does terrible things to us whenever we’re alone with him … did that get your attention? I’m just messing with you.
    Actually, William is an incredibly nice guy. He’s about fifty and real strong and big. He’s great. Once William accidentally broke my arm when I was falling out of my wheelchair. He grabbed me as I was nose-diving toward the hard tile floor; he didn’t want me to crack my skull, so he grabbed me, catching my arm at the wrong angle. I was in the middle of a seizure when it happened, but I came back into my body pretty fast when that bone snapped. Of course, there was a big-deal Incident Report and William had to answer a lot of questions, but he never treated me any differently than he always had; he was just as nice as always. He’s not afraid of us retards.
    Becky is great too. She has red hair, long and soft. She’s only about twenty years old and her body’s gorgeous and she’s super nice. I love it when Becky works with me, especially when she wears a low-cut top and has to bend over to load and unload me from this special standing contraption they put me in a couple hours every day. Her breasts are perfect: round and smooth and big. If I could be William, I’d spend every hour of every workday trying to figure out how to score with Becky. Hell, I’m me and I do that already, but you’d have to figure William would at least have a chance. I mean, he speaks the same language as Becky, and can walk around and smile and do all of those necessary prerequisites to scoring. You’d figure the guy would have at least a chance. But I’ve never seen anything sexy or weird ever going back and forth between them. For some reason that makes me like William even more.
    Mrs. Hare is an older teacher lady, little reading glasses hanging on the end of her nose. She always looks like she just got back from a walk on a windy day. She’s nice, patient, a little boring but real caring. I don’t like her quite as much as I like William and Becky, but she does a good job running the show. And what a show it is.
    I’m making this all sound normal and sane. Mrs. Hare and William and Becky are fine, but that’s where normalcy and sanity end. The zoo is not like any other schoolroom you’ve ever seen. Although we’re located at Shoreline High School, we’re not really a part of it.
    First of all, remember that we students are all retards.
    We moan, we drool, we take dumps in our