I Will Not Kiss You

My name’s Frank Anthony Thomas Iero. I’m sixteen years old and my birthday is 31st of October. I have aspergers syndrome. That doesn’t make me a ‘spazzer’ or a ‘retard’ or whatever else you want to throw at me! It just means that my mind is socially dysfunctional. Don’t go stereotypical and think I’m good at math because I’m not! However, I am very good on my guitar and I like English!

There’s a book about a person with aspergers. Have you read it? It’s called ‘The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night Time’. It’s a good book with an accurate view on someone with aspergers badly. I don’t have it as bad as the boy in that book; but I don’t have it as minor as some people have.

I don’t like it when people touch me unexpectedly or if I don’t know them. I get frightened because I don’t know what they’re going to do. Crowds scare me as well. When I was younger, I used to lie down and scream if it was too crowded. I’m not a very good sleeper. I can stay awake until 3:30 am every morning,easily. My Mom says it’s because of my aspergers. The doctor tried putting me on this stuff called ‘Menatolin’ to help me sleep but I wouldn’t take it for the first few months because I didn’t know what it was or where it had been beforehand. Then we discovered that it didn’t work anyway; so I stopped taking it.

Not many people understand me. My parents and close family understand, obviously. My best friend understands too! His name’s Michael James Way but everyone calls him Mikey. I insisted on calling him Michael for the first five months of our friendship. I think he thought it was a little bit strange but he didn’t say anything. He understood a lot better when they took him out of class and told him about my ‘condition’. We were ten at the time. They’d only just worked out that I had aspergers. We kept it quiet at school because, as well as it being my business, I didn’t want people treating me different or bullying me. They found out anyway. I’d gotten into a fight with Ellis West:

Ellis shoved me aside as he walked towards his group of friends, waiting for him on the grass in the cool shade of the old oak tree. As soon as he touched me, my skin burned. It hurt. I jerked away from him, accidentally hitting Mikey as I did so.

“Don’t touch me!” I yelled automatically, causing everyone around to stare.

Ellis sneered at me in that usual superior way that every thirteen year old stereotypical ‘popular kid’ does. As he returned to our bench, I shifted away from him, scared that he would do it again.

“Why shouldn’t I?” He demanded.

I remained silent. If I ignored him, he’d get bored and go away. That’s what the support staff always said. I didn’t have support staff in the class with me, as such. I saw them for an hour every week to ‘work on my social skills’. They always told me to ignore people who were upsetting me and then they’d get bored and go away. It stopped working when we reached the age of eleven.

“Hello?” Ellis shouted right in my ear, causing me to flinch at the sudden change in volume.

Mikey leant backwards so that he could see Ellis properly. I slouched forward a little more, giving him a better view.

“Hey, look, Ellis,” Mikey said hastily “Just leave him alone, yeah? He didn’t mean to yell at you.”

Ellis glared Mikey into silence. I never understood how he could scare people into being quiet. But then again, I try not to look at people’s facial expressions because all those different faces meaning all those different things confuses me. It’s hard trying to work out what mood a person is in. For example, a smile can be ‘I’m happy’ or it can be ‘I’m making fun of you’ and there are lots of other things that it can mean. I shifted further away from Ellis as he got even closer to me.

“You still haven’t answered my question, Iero,” He sneered “Why shouldn’t I touch you?”

I kept my mouth shut, slowly breathing in and out whilst counting to fifty in my head. I’ve been told to do that when I get angry or scared so that I can calm down and won’t start screaming. Ellis raised a hand threateningly. I began to feel scared, thinking he might hit me.

“Seriously, Ellis!” Mikey said firmly “Just go away.”

Ellis ignored him and mockingly waved his hand around in front of my face whilst muttering stuff about touching me whenever he wanted. Mikey said later on that he sounded gay when he said that, which is true but Ellis is not gay. He is what’s called a homophobe, which means he doesn’t like homosexuals. What’s strange is that Ellis says that ‘Seeing chicks get it on turns him on’ but ‘Fags make him fucking sick’. This is unfair because that means he likes lesbians but not gays even though they are both homosexuals. But I digress.

“Ellis! Just leave him alone,” Mikey commanded, standing up “He didn’t mean to yell at you.”

Mikey was ignored. I knew Ellis had slapped his hand down on my forearm before I even felt the weight of his hand upon my arm. The pain spread from where his hand was, spreading up my arm and through my body in less than a second.

“Don’t touch me!!” I shrieked at him.

He just laughed and pressed his hand down harder onto my skin. The pain got worse; I began to feel sick from it. In that moment, I automatically did what I always do when someone touches me. My fist struck out and crashed straight into his nose. Ellis unexpectedly dived at me, knocking me off my seat and began hitting at me. The pain got even worse as his full weight pressed down onto me. I began screaming and hit at him crazily, determined to get him off of me. And then it was all over. Mikey had grabbed Ellis and pulled him away from me while I lay on the ground, tears silently spilling from my eyes.

“Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?” Ellis cried “I was kidding!”

“Just go,” Mikey ordered, sitting beside me.

I stayed still, tears still falling from my eyes. This is something that Mikey is accustomed to. He’s often the one that has to pick me up and calm me down when this happens.

“Frank?” He said softly “Frankie? I’m gonna’ touch you okay? I’m gonna’ hug you.”

And then he slowly and gently edged his arms around me, hugging me carefully. And it didn’t hurt because he’d told me that he was going to do it and that’s allowed.

Ellis had a nose bleed where I’d hit him and his Mom wasn’t too ecstatic about it. She wanted me to be expelled. So the school explained to her what had happened, which meant telling her about me. She told Ellis and Ellis told everyone. Now I’m the laughing stock of the school.

Some people take the piss out of me and others are just scared of me; which is exactly what I didn’t want. I’ve even been accused of lying by this girl called Josie Taylor. She said ‘You don’t really have anything wrong with you!’ and I said ‘You’re right; there’s nothing wrong with me’ so she said ‘So you’re lying about this whole thing? Aspergers doesn’t even exist, does it?’ then I said ‘Yes, it does exist. But it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me’. This made her angry and she said ‘You don’t have a disability! If you did we’d be able to see it’. I laughed at that and decided I wasn’t going to reply because that was a stupid thing to say.

The people at my school are morons. Half of them don’t even know what aspergers is. And, before I explained otherwise, these two girls thought that you get skin cancer from smoking. I’m not stupid like them. Mom says I’m very clever and that makes everyone jealous. But that’s not true because if people were jealous of me and wanted to be smarter, they’d pay attention on class. Yet they don’t pay attention in class because they simply can’t be bothered.

Should I continue?