Crayons

The day at school started like any other. Emily Warrd was first sent to Art, where she used a special type of brush to paint a very abstract picture. Next, was gym. She went into a specific corner of the gym and mostly jogged in place or did sit ups. Next was English nine, for the second year in a row, where, like her next class, Algebra one, she was helped one-on-one with a student teacher and reviewed things many, many times. After this, it was time for lunch. The lunch lady helped her remember to carry her food with both hands, and made sure she had enough money.

And then Emily sat alone.

For a fifteen year old with her condition, a type of Pervasive Developmental Disorder*, it was hard to do almost anything.

Emily’s case was not very severe. In comparison to her younger cousin, who also had a version of PDD, it almost seemed as if she had no condition at all. But she did, and her mom noticed it at the age of three.

Emily was a very smart girl. She always had been. By the age of three, she knew all the same words as her preschool friends. She knew all of her numbers up to 10 by heart, and even knew a lot of the other, much bigger ones, like 20 and 30.

However, on Bring Your Parents to School day, Lindsey Warrd noticed some things about her daughter that troubled her greatly.

During the morning announcements, she continuously picked at the place rug she sat on. And she had obviously done it many times before, because patches of the rug were completely bare.

During snack, she sat alone, not talking, and she would never eat two things together. She ate her sandwich first, and then her animal crackers.

And, during recess, she continued to stay alone, playing with the toy cars the entire time and moving them in the wrong direction.

Now, to any other mother, these might seem like normal behavior. Perhaps their daughter was, fidgety, shy, or just very creative. But Lindsey Warrd was familiar with the symptoms of PDD because of her older sister who had the condition, and immediately took Emily to the doctor.

Six weeks later, Emily was diagnosed with moderate PDD, and her life started going downhill.

Her father left her mother, saying that everything was “too much for him to handle”, and Emily’s preschool kindly asked her mother to take her out of the school, because they were “not a therapy school for disabled children.”

Lindsey was furious.

She home-schooled Emily throughout Elementary and Middle School, but by ninth grade, the subjects became too hard for even Lindsey to understand, and so she was forced to get another job and start Emily into the town’s public high school.

By October, Lindsey had pulled her daughter out of the school, tired of the fourteen year old coming home crying every day.

Eventually, Emily was forced to go to school. She started ninth grade a year late, and this class was more than happy to just ignore her. She only had a few instances of teasing and hurtful comments, and she was usually happy.

When she wasn’t struggling in class, that is. All of her home tutoring was one-on-one with someone she knew well and loved, had many breaks, and continued throughout the summer.

The public school was much different. She was in a classroom full of people she had never even seen before, there was only one lunch break, one teacher, and a very long summer break, in which she forgot most of the things she had learned.

At the beginning of her sophomore year, Emily’s mother had found a therapy school for special students with conditions like her daughters. She signed her up for a half day, and agreed to allow Emily to ride the Votech pick-up bus that would drop her off at her new school.

Emily was anxious about the change in ritual, but her mother promised her that this new one would be permanent.

-

On the first day, Lindsey met her daughter at her New Half-Day School, as they called it, and let Emily get use to riding the bus. When she arrived, Emily was just getting off the bus, and they walked inside together.

“Hello.” Lindsey said to the lady at the office. “This is my daughter Emily, and today is her first day.”

The office lady said something to Emily, but Emily didn’t realize that she was talking her. She stared at the polka-dots on the carpet.

Suddenly, the door opened, and two men walked in. One was old, with curling gray hair, and the other looked young enough to go to her school. He had short, wavy brown and hair, and eyes to match.

Emily thought he was cute. And she felt very nervous around him, for some reason unknown to her.

“This is Emily’s new private tutor, Adam Watson.” The older man said, and Lindsey looked shocked.

“But he’s so young!” she question, grabbing Emily’s hand tightly in her own, ignoring her daughter’s struggle to get out of her grasp. “I’m sorry, but they’d be too close in age, I just wouldn’t trust it!”

“Miss Warrd,” the man pacified. “I assure you, Emily will be very safe with Mister Watson, and-”

“But-but, how can he be trained in this field already?” Emily’s mother interrupted. “He couldn’t have possibly gone to college already!”

“Mister Watson started training at the Votech school for child psychology and development two years ago, and I trained him myself in helping children with developmental and other disabilities. He will be attending a very elite college to get his degrees in all of these fields next fall, and you can think of him as an intern.”

“And you're sure she’ll be safe?”

“Positive.”

And Emily was sent into her New, Half-Day classroom.