Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige Read Online Free Page B

Capital P.”
    Oh. HYP. Harvard, Yale, Princeton. The three highest-ranked colleges in the country.
    “And some girls in the costume department,” he continued, “found this really thin silver fabric that you can see through. They were going to make Harry Potter Invisibility Cloaks. The deal was that Invisibility Cloaks were the only way that most of us could get into those places, but the fabric was pretty expensive.”
    “Those schools are pretty expensive, too.”
    “Oh, come on, Mom,” he scoffed. “Don’t you think if I could get into Princeton, Dad would pay anything it took?”
    He was right about that, but even if his transcript showed only his much improved second-semester junior grades, Zackcould not have gotten into Princeton. “Let’s see what this counselor has to say.”
    “If he uses the word
package,
I’m walking out.”
    “Me too.”
     

     
S
      o,” Mike said to the college counselor eighteen hours later, “how should we be packaging him?”
    Zack slumped in his chair and kicked at his backpack. Where were the Harry Potter Invisibility Cloaks when you needed them?
    Zack hadn’t done well at Selwyn. Small for his age when he’d started in fourth grade, he’d never had the gang of friends that Jeremy always had. Nor did he do well academically. He never brought the right books home from school; he never knew what assignments were due when.
    We’d had him tested for everything—auditory processing disorder, attention deficit disorder, sensory integration disorder. You name it, we tested for it, he didn’t have it.
    These results should have been good news, but Mike was frustrated by the absence of a diagnosis. He was a goal-oriented, problem-solving person. If Zack had a diagnosis, a label, then we could design a protocol and set out to fix him. Even better than a protocol would have been a pill—Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta. Mike kept hearing about how other people’s kids had been transformed by one of these ADD medications.
    So Mike did research. “Zack’s not hyperactive,” Mike said. “That’s why they missed the diagnosis, but he’s impulsive and inattentive.”
    And if we give him a pill, he will be “fixed.”
That’s what Mike really wanted—a pill that would turn Zack into Jeremy.
    Reluctantly I dragged the poor kid in for yet more tests during his middle-school years. The results were the same. One of his scores on the TOVA—Test of Variables of Attention—was borderline, but the rest were fine. Zack did not need to be “fixed.” He was Zack, not Jeremy, and the sooner Mike realized that, the better.
    Then Mike left, moving out four days before Zack started high school.
    Zack’s grades immediately got even worse. He started sneaking off with upperclassmen to those kids’ parked cars where they would, at best, smoke cigarettes. His teachers were frustrated with him because he would start ambitious projects and not finish them. The school’s athletes shunned him, disappointed that he wasn’t going to contribute what Jeremy had. He was miserable. I had no idea how to motivate him to work harder, to care more . . . because I was miserable myself. My mother had died, my husband had left, my younger son was floundering. I had no advice for anyone.
    Finally, after an incident that involved storing another kid’s Jell-O shots—little pockets of Jell-O made with more vodka than water—leaving them in his locker overnight so that they melted and attracted ants, the school suspended him for three days and strongly encouraged us not to re-enroll him in the fall. He wasn’t formally expelled, but the school staff told us that he would be happier someplace else. Both Zack and I agreed.
    His horrible grades were going to make transferring a problem. Tense and angry, believing that he was the reason Mike had left, he insisted that he didn’t care where he went. Wilson, our local public high school, was fine with him—fine as in “fine, Mom, fine; now leave me