Hello and welcome to Stories from the Spectrum, a series of short fiction about a neurodivergent family. These are the recent stories:
Art below by the incomparable Katie Alexander.
DROP-OFF
The morning started as it usually does: the kids tackling us in bed, wanting to play immediately, and us not being awake enough to get up.
There was a lot of screaming and running away while we tried to get them dressed and eat breakfast. Levi, my six-year-old son, and Wendy, my four-year-old daughter, alternate days to complain about breakfast. They are masters at the art of procrastination.
After about an hour of this constant whining and cajoling to do every little thing, we started making progress towards the car.
Wendy starts whining about it being her song day.
“No!” shouts Levi, strapping himself into the booster seat. “It’s mine.”
“Mine,” Wendy insists.
“If you guys don’t agree, it’ll be my song day,” Cornelia—their mom gets into the passenger seat.
“Wendy!” shouts Levi again. His volume is always at eleven. “Choose a song!”
“Nooo!” shouts Wendy, slowly getting into her car seat. She’s like a snail in molasses. It takes her forever. I swear that there is no way that Wendy could get into her car seat in under five minutes.
I’m furious.
Counting to ten always works.
Cornelia locks the front door, hefting her backpack. She sees it’s open and starts making sure she has everything for the first class of the spring semester.
We’re environmentally conscious people, so we only have one car, and since I work at the local Target part-time, I’m essentially *Mr. Mom*.
Here’s our agenda:
Get Wendy to daycare on the north side of town. We live on the south side.
Drop Cornelia off on campus for her first class of the semester.
Then get brother back to this side of town before kindergarten starts at 9:15 am, and hopefully get him on the bus.
Doing all of that is a forty-five-minute round trip. It’s 7:53 am. Cornelia’s class starts at nine. I start the car and a notification pings both of our phones. Wide-eyed, we look at each other.
I’m backing out of the driveway so I don’t check my phone, but Cornelia reads the message with so much venom a snake would die. “The bus is running forty-five minutes late.”
I groan. “Shocking.” I guess I’ll have to wait in the forever line for school drop-off if I’m going to make it to work on time. My dad used to say that the universe wants us to die and will do anything in its power to fuck up our plans.
There’s maybe three inches of snow on the ground, and everyone panics and slows to crawl in mellon-farming southern Indiana when there’s anything more than a dusting of snow. We’ve had two days of “E-Learning” as a result. (I am so fucking glad the coronavirus pandemic solved the issue of snow days for public schools.)
The highway at eight in the morning features Indiana drivers riding your tail like it’s the Indianapolis 500—an event only Hoosiers care about, so they drive right up on your tail in the left lane.
So when you move to the middle lane they pass, when they finally pass you they merge into your lane and slow down to the speed limit so the guy who was behind them can do the same thing.
It is an infuriating way to drive.
A constant game of one-upmanship.
A minivan and lifted pickup truck try this behind me two miles from the exit, so I say to nobody in particular, but probably should not have said this out loud—“How about a little New York driving, schmucks?”
Cornelia looks at me with wide, lemur-like eyes, “John, the kids are in the car.”
“What’s a schmuck?” asks Levi, who looks as placid as a clear lake looking out his window.
“Don’t worry about it.”
I merge the car into the left lane to pass the soccer dad van doing 70 in a 55, as the pick-up truck with the Let’s Go Brandon stickers gets right up on my bumper.
I pass the minivan and go to the right so the pickup truck can pass but instead of slowing down to let the truck and the minivan pass me I stay at twenty over the speed limit and merge our small SUV into the exit lane, cutting off both the minivan and the pick up truck from cutting me off in the exit.
“Eat my road, Hoosier idiot!” I say to myself, making sure I say Hoosier like “Who’s your” like the locals.
The kids cheer.
Cornelia groans and turns her back to me, annoyed that I just threatened the kids’ lives.
If you haven’t realized, I hate it here. Here being Bobville, Indiana.
We get off on university drive and pass the limestone sample gates that locals are proud of because they have so little to be proud of due to the chair throwing former men’s basketball coach that put the town on the sports ball map.
He’s the only reason anyone knows of this town, because of his antics, and the locals treat him like Voldemort and refuse to use his name. I use it all the time and laugh about it. He’s a stain on the town that will never get flushed.
As the kids say these days: LOL.
We pull into the daycare center.
People are total idiots about parking here.
They regularly pull out and barely acknowledge that there are parents walking by with their little kids.
Everyone is in such a rush to get to their jobs.
They barely recognize the work that matters you’re dropping off for someone else to do. I’m guilty of it too. I’m dropping my kids off so I can go work at Target and scratch in half an hour of writing here and there. But that’s the way things work in America, if you’re a parent and not contributing to the economy, do you even exist? The system doesn’t care about us, but it will if we work.
“C’mon, Wendy!” Cornelia picks her up from her car seat in the back.
I open the passenger side door for Levi to get out. “Come on, pal!” clapping my boy’s hand. We enter the center and immediately Levi attracts his old pals from pre-school who all want to play with him.
It takes a little bit to get the three of us to get Levi out of there because he just wants to play with his old friends. We get out of the center and Levi sprints ahead of us heading for the parking lot shouting, “Chase me!” We hustle into the car and I strap Levi into his booster seat and go around to the front.
I put the car in reverse. Cornelia struggles to get buckled in. “Slow down! I barely have my seat belt on!”
I make sure there aren’t any suicidal parents with their little kids walking behind the car like they’ve never been in a parking lot before I start backing out.
Cornelia starts tapping her pockets. “Where’s my phone?”
“Why should I know?” I ask a little too loudly.
“Turn around.”
I go back through the other side of the parking lot. It’s unclear whether people know how traffic is supposed to flow since there are no arrows indicating directions. The daycare center always posts updates on Microsoft Teams channel that no one checks, it’s created a quagmire in terms of driving in this parking lot.
While we get around the staff’s cars, pulling into the five parent parking spaces (which are indicated by university signs because damn we don’t want to the university to lose money on parking passes that they charge faculty, staff, and students for.)
There, where we parked, is Cornerlia’s cell-phone. Face down, between the white lines of the parking spot.
It’s a miracle I didn’t run it over when I backed out.
We all would have been in deep shit.
Cornelia gives me a look, If you weren’t in such a rush maybe I would not have dropped my phone. As if I made her hand drop the phone or stop paying attention to where she put it down.
My dad used to say that most people don’t like that you’re doing what you can, with what you have, where you are; but that’s their problem, and not yours.
The classroom building where Cornelia teaches is an old brick building with tiered shingles and white shades. She gets out and hustles towards the front door.
The campus is both made out of the limestone Indiana is known for and the New England tiered houses of the East Coast colleges and universities. The limestone buildings look like prisons, especially the library, which is the ugliest library I’ve ever seen. The classroom buildings and school copy the East Coast; they remind me of my former institution—Skidmore—and I sneer whenever I drive through the campus because, for some reason, this institution wants nothing to do with me. It’s their loss.
The museums like the Art Institute and the Rare Materials Library look like Frank Lloyd Wright designed them but with terrible materials.
Indiana as a state is the kind of place that bakes its cake and wants to eat it too, and the result is a mess of mediocrity. In Minnesota, there’s Midwestern Nice, but in Indiana, it’s just Midwestern Mediocrity.
My cell phone pings, flashing the notification bar that displays the text from a five-digit number. I catch three words: “Bus 1179 is—”
I put the car in park just a little ways from the classroom building, and open the text bubble over the previous bubble that said the school bus was running late. Now it says “Bus 1179 is running on time.”
I swear under my breath. The time on the dash is 8:15 am. It usually shows up between 8:30 and 8:45. I do the five second thinking of how e can get back in time to catch the bus, so I can take a walk and regulate myself before having to show up for my shift at Target.
Doubling back the way we came is for the best.
State road, highway, two exits south, getting off at the third exit, and drifting down the road that leads to the subdivision.
I take the shortcut through the new townhouse development that has made the neighborhood a flooding nightmare because the developers clear-cut a nice forest that mitigated the flood waters from the neighboring golf course.
Pulling around a traffic circle, I notice none of the usual bus riders are standing at their corner spots—it’s 8:33.
We’ve missed it.
When I turn the corner for our road, I see the bus pulling away from our corner, a full half mile from us.
I try flashing my lights to get the bus driver’s attention, but it’s too late, and Levi’s bus pulls away.
Levi groans.
“I guess that means the line for us, bud,” I say to him as we pull into our driveway, back out, and go the way back towards his elementary school.
The school sits on top of a hill. And the line curves all the way from the top of the hill to the bottom of the hill, through the parking lot, down the hill, snaking into the neighborhood.
On Levi’s first day of school, we waited in line for 45 minutes to drop him off.
Apparently, parents start lining up as early as ninety minutes before classroom doors open.
We settle in. Levi goes up front and buckles himself into the passenger seat.
I pull out the family iPad from my messenger bag that rests between the two child car seats.
I’ve downloaded an episode of Wild Kratts for us to watch.
The animated zoologists, Martin and Chris Kratt, are tracking flying squirrels and Levi is engrossed. His jaw hangs open, eyes are glued to the screen.
I try to get his attention but he is transfixed by the brothers who overly explicate themselves into flying squirrels and the distraction that comes with being those flying rodents.
Flying squirrels are jittery, on a permanent caffeine fix, and float through the sky.
They are ADHD in animal form and I look at Levi.
He watches like I used to watch TV, when mom would tell me to close my mouth, or at least blink while watching TV.
If I have ADHD, then so does Levi.
You could take this moment to work on your daily sketches, my brain tells me.
Instead, I watch my boy, watching the show, and inch closer and closer to the front of the line. Imprinting this quiet moment where it’s just the two of us.
Most days I take him to the bus stop, and Cornelia takes Wendy to preschool. In those moments, Levi and I will read a story—currently we’re reading Jeff Smith’s Bone.
Before we know it we’re at the head of the line and Levi hands back the iPad.
“Thanks, Dad,” he says as the PE teacher greets him at the passenger door, “for the show.” He reaches down for his backpack but at the last second, he changes his mind and reaches up and hugs me around the neck so hard I hold my breath.
“Love you, pal,” I whisper. “Make good choices.”
“Ok, love you. Bye.” He gets out, and I watch him walk up the sidewalk with the teacher towards the school building. His backpack is half the size of him. He’s just a head and two legs and floppy, wavy hair that he—like his baby sister—hates to comb. We call his head of hair his rooster feathers.
I pull away and look at the dashboard clock: 9:15am—I have forty-five minutes until my six-hour shift at the north side Target begins—just enough time to go for a walk before I have to make the second trip to the north side.
I laugh to myself: parking in a lot down the hill from the elementary school. The lot used to belong to a limestone mill that has long been abandoned. I get out and start walking on the trail between the mill and a side road that hugs a creek.
I can’t stop laughing. What is the rush? Some day—hopefully not soon—I will die. My kids will die too. Why the constant busyness? Take your sweet time with them now before they take themselves to school. There is not a moment to rush or to waste. Every moment is the last of its kind.
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