I had liked Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart, and when I was thirteen, he had me thinking of taking up sword fighting as a lifelong career until it clicked in my still slightly bruised brain that there probably wasn’t much of a calling for sword fighting anymore.
Then Mrs. Dalway read a few more lines from the bard:
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements! Good!
Such was my distraction that I had not been keeping an eye on Andrea, and when I looked over towards the computers she was gone.
What I did next was considered to be quite unusual in a high school English classroom. I began to cry. I really did.
I know. A sixteen-year-old boy crying in the middle of Shakespeare is a little weird — well, a lot weird. I mean, almost anyone at Stockton High could tell you I was not normal. Normal and me just didn’t go hand in hand. It wasn’t the first time I’d cried. I’d done it before. And it’s not just a sudden downpour of tears. It’s not like throwing up where it just suddenly happens when you eat some bad pizza.
My crying is attached to a very deep-seated emotional response to things. I can’t watch the news, for example. If bombs are dropping or if children are starving or even if the president of the United States is spreading hatred again with one of those speeches — well, I’ll start to blubber.
Mrs. Dalway thought I was so moved by her reading that it had unleashed the floods. She stopped mid-speech, looked my way, and seemed stunned. She had never moved a student to tears before.
“Are you all right?”
I blew my nose loudly. “I’m okay. Continue,” I said, droopy-faced and sodden.
The class was laughing by now. What else could they do? Many of them had seen me act oddly before, but I was still a reliable source of entertainment. Mrs. Dalway stumbled over her lines and finally gave up. “Are there any questions?” she asked. The old standby.
Tanya Webb, a girl whose beauty had held my attention for quite a long time, raised her hand. “Is any of this going to be on the exam?” This was the question she asked in every class.
Mrs. Dalway set her book down on her desk and just stared at Tanya. Then, in a bit of a fluster, she asked us to spend the rest of the class writing down our impressions of Macbeth as a person and what advice we would give him if he were our best friend. Eventually the bell rang and feet began shuffling out of the room.
I handed in a blank sheet of paper with my name on it. I was sorely afraid that this amazing girl, Andrea, real or imagined, had swept into my life for a brief encounter and then disappeared forever. I had not figured out who she was or even what she was, but I was certain she was the best thing that had happened to me in a long, long time.
“Simon, are you sure you are all right?” Mrs. Dalway asked.
I wasn’t all right. My world had collapsed around me like a bubble yet again and I was adrift in a meaningless universe, but all I said was, “I’ll be okay.”
The upside was that Mrs. Dalway would probably take pity on me — or secretly be pleased that I seemed to be so moved by her Mel Gibson story and the reading — and would give me a good grade no matter how badly I screwed up. And when it came to school, I screwed up badly and often. So there was this positive aspect.
But aside from that glimmer of academic brightness, I was devastated. Over the years my parents had invested heavily in the proper professional treatment to see if something could be done about my emotional outbursts. Although they disagreed about a lot of things during what little time they spent at home, they were unanimous in wishing they had produced a normal child instead of me.
The skateboard near-death head injury had supposedly severed some of the connective tissue between the left hemisphere and right hemisphere of my brain. One doctor had even shown me a model of the brain in its two lovely halves. I held one half in my hand; Dr. Yumato held the other half in his. “See,” he said, “two seemingly independent parts of the brain. Now give me back the left hemisphere.”
He wanted to prove some point about how the two were normally connected but, because I was annoyed by his condescending attitude, I would not hand back to him the left hemisphere of the brain. “This is not a game,” he said.
But it was a game. It was all a game. I didn’t like what he was telling me about my connective tissue and I didn’t like the way he was treating me like a child. I was nearly thirteen at that point. Dr. Yumato became angry with me. “You are a very stubborn boy,” he said. This was not news to me.“You cannot be helped if you keep acting like this.”
Maybe that’s why I kept acting like that. I don’t know, but I never did give him back his other half of the brain. It’s still in my room at home and it is one of my prized possessions.
The doctors all agreed I could not have my two hemispheres stitched back together. There was no quick fix, no easy repair. Most thought I would just have to adapt. So I would remain a kid and ultimately a teenager with some problems. Emotional. Mental. But adapting as best as I could with my two free-floating hemispheres in my head.
My parents were continually disappointed that they couldn’t buy their way back to having a normal son. Sometimes they argued with each other about whether I had been normal even before the clunk on the concrete. Sometimes I cried myself to sleep at night listening to them through the wall. At such times, I wished myself back on that beach I had been on with the two girls and the surfer pouring the ball bearing planets into my hands. Other times I wished I were dead.
After my teary English class, a fight broke out between Charles Fishman and Barry Sung. It was one of those odd high school disagreements between two ethnically proud individuals. Fishman was Jewish and Sung was Chinese and they were arguing over who made better hockey players, Jews or Chinese. It’s possible that this argument had never happened before anywhere on earth, but that’s the way our high school was. I wasn’t going to be the one to break it up. I had my own problems with my right brain probably not even knowing what my left brain was doing. I wondered if I would eventually grow up to have a split personality and end up having my own arguments with myself as to who were better hockey players, left-brained people or right-brained people.
Tanya Webb looked right at me as I walked to my locker. I had known Tanya since the second grade, and while I had evolved into this strange creature that I now was, she had somehow matured into a beautiful and sometimes intelligent young woman. She had a legion of male admirers and I was at the far perimeter of that crowd, but she was not an insensitive goddess. And today, in post-English-class-meltdown, she took pity on me, I suppose, and walked alongside of me down the hall.
“You really like Shakespeare, don’t you?”
“It’s the beauty of the language,” I lied.
“I know what you mean. It’s fluid and musical.”
“And all those deep meanings,” I added.
“What do you think she’ll ask on the exam?”
Well, that was a bit of a letdown. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to study for the exam. I never did. “I don’t know,” I said. “But maybe we can study together or something?”
In high school, we always added vague phrases like “or something” into our conversations
