They did not close the door, however, so I overheard the conversation they had with our principal. It went like this:
Mrs. Mussbaum: You’re leaving?
E.E.P.: I’m afraid we’ve accomplished all we can here. Too many of your students are special needs. Too many are on the spectrum. What you need is professional help.
Mrs. Mussbaum: You are professionals.
E.E.P.: Not the kind you need. We’re sorry we can’t offer more assistance. As a gesture of goodwill, we’ll waive half our fee.
Mrs. Mussbaum: Half? You didn’t do anything.
E.E.P.: We’re consultants. We consulted. Implementation of our recommendations is the school’s responsibility.
Mrs. Mussbaum: You didn’t recommend anything either.
E.E.P.: We recommend seeking professional help. You’ll have our bill by the end of the week.
Mrs. Mussbaum: Eep.
Before that I did not know what “special needs” meant, and I did not know what “on the spectrum” meant. So I asked Pastor Jeff.
Or, to be more accurate, I asked Dr. Lilly. Dr. Lilly is Bourne’s only doctor, but he prefers to go by Pastor Jeff because he is also Bourne’s only priest. He used to be a Catholic priest, but there are not enough people in Bourne anymore for everyone to have different religions. Whatever sickness you have and whatever prayers you pray, Pastor Jeff is your only option anyway. Mab, Mirabel, and I are a trinity, but we are not a Trinity—which is how capital letters work—and we are not religious, but this does not matter to Pastor Jeff. We are his flock, he says. A doctor’s job and a priest’s job are both to spread care and love and healing no matter what you believe, he says. Bourne could use some ministering, he says. When I was little, I hoped he would marry our mother because he is nice and because husband and father are also both jobs with lots of ministering, but he said that is not how it works with Catholic priests.
When I told him what Effective Education Passport said about us, he said, “Everyone needs air, water, food, shelter, and clothing all the time, Monday. Everyone needs care when they’re sick or hurt, love when they’re sad or scared, someone to tell them no or stop when they’re being unsafe. Everything else people need sometimes—and it’s a lot—is special. All of us have special needs.”
I felt happy because that made sense, and I like when things make sense.
“Do you know what a spectrum is?” he asked me.
I did not because I was only ten.
“A spectrum is a classification system that arranges everyone or everything between two opposite extremes, which means a spectrum, by definition, includes everyone. For a spectrum to be a thing, we all have to be on it.”
“So E.E.P. is wrong about us?”
He shrugged. “Some people really like labels, Monday.”
“I do!” I waved my hand like he was across a parking lot or at the other end of a grocery store aisle. “I like labels because they mean organized and order and control and correct.”
“Sometimes they do. And sometimes they just give you the illusion of those things. Giving something a label and putting it in a box makes you feel like you’ve understood it and accounted for it and can keep track of it, and that’s great for things like paperwork or books, but sometimes things get mislabeled or misfiled, and then they get misunderstood or misaccounted for.”
“That is why you have to label things carefully,” I told him.
“Sure. But when those things aren’t things but people, it’s not just a question of careful. People are complicated. They’re more than one thing. They’re less than another. You, for instance. We could file you under ‘Girl’ or ‘Student’ or ‘Triplet’ or ‘Tall.’”
“I did not think of that.” Thinking about it then made my skin feel itchy.
“We could file me under ‘Pastor’ or ‘Doctor’ or ‘Man’ or ‘Black’ because I’m all of those things, but we could also file me under ‘Catholic’ or ‘Priest’ or ‘Yoga Teacher’ or ‘Irish’ because I’m those things too.”
He was right, so I thought hard until I came up with a solution. “Extra labels. Extra files.”
He tilted his head back and forth. “Except labels separate things that actually overlap. I’m different from other medical professionals because I’m also a religious professional. I’m different from other Catholic priests because I also practice other religions. I’m different from other Black men because my mother was white.”
“I do not like when things overlap.”
“Don’t think of them as overlapping then. Think of them as having more than one side. We could say your preference for yellow things is a detriment in a world full of other colors, or we could say it’s an advantage in a world that demands quick decisions and clarity of purpose.”
“I am able to choose what to wear to school every morning more quickly than Mab,” I agreed. “And it is only one color so it always matches.”
“Exactly. So one good solution is we could decide not to file you at all. Some people really like labels, and some people need them to access other things.”
“Like what?”
“Like medical care. But since I’m all you’ve got on that front under any circumstances, that part doesn’t matter. And since I happen to know Bourne’s spectrum looks different than most, I haven’t found labels and official diagnoses terribly useful.”
“Then why could not E.E.P. help us?” I asked.
Pastor Jeff winked. “Because they are not very E.”
This could mean that they were not very effective or that they were not very educational, and even though I do not like when you cannot tell which, it was okay because Pastor Jeff was making a joke and both were funny.
He was also right about spectrums.
For instance, except on green days, I only like yellow things.
I only eat yellow foods. I only drink yellow drinks. (Except coffee. I drink coffee because even though coffee is brown, it is also really great.) I sleep on yellow sheets, get dressed in yellow clothes, study yellow subject matter. Choosing only yellow is not as limiting as it sounds. A lot of things are yellow. If I have to do a report on an animal, I pick a baby chicken. If I have to do a report on a fish, I pick a Zebrasoma flavescens, which is Latin for yellow tang. If I have to do a report on a song, I pick “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles, which I know was written for people like me who prefer yellow because otherwise it does not make any sense. My mother says it is a good thing it rains sometimes or else I would never eat a salad, but this is not true. I would eat egg salad. My mother also tries to pass off pale orange and very off-white things as yellow, but I am not fooled.
All of which proves Pastor Jeff’s point. I may be at the far end of the flexible-about-food spectrum and the normal-about-colors spectrum and the easy-to-buy-clothes-for spectrum, but on the yellow spectrum I am firmly in the center.
Three
It’s not that it’s not hard to be me. Or the mother of me. It is. Monday is a stickler for many things, including language, which is why she likes the term “birth defect.” I was born defective. Harsh, but true in some ways. Monday doesn’t care for “some ways.” Too vague. Mab—who is infatuated with vocabulary and chooses longer words whenever possible—says “congenital disorders.” Nora objects to both. You are lovely just the way you are, she insists, neither defective nor disordered, so she goes with “congenital anomalies,” never mind that in Bourne—the only place we ever are—I’m not even all that anomalous. Whatever you call conditions like what I have, sometimes they’re inherited and sometimes they’re accidents, and sometimes it’s just because shit happens, but in my case, in all our cases, it’s none of those reasons, and that is worst of all. There are ways, many ways, in which Bourne has destroyed us.