Miracle Boy Grows Up Read Online Free Page B

wrong with them. They must be spastic, talk funny, and drool. I’m certain they dress badly, have choppy haircuts, and sometimes smell bad. I don’t know for sure because I haven’t really been around other handicapped kids, but you kind of pick up impressions.
    “Handicapped” is the word my family uses—the polite word, that is, as opposed to “crippled.”
    Dad is editor of GQ magazine, which he calls Gentleman’s Quarterly . Mom worked for the producers of a TV program called Playhouse 90 on CBS before Alec was born. They’re modern thinkers. In a time when it’s widely accepted that even the best parents can’t easily cope with having a handicapped child, or wouldn’t want to, Mom and Dad go against the grain.
    Yet every now and then Mom wonders if the kids who are warehoused in these special-ed ghettos develop a sense of camaraderie, of shared frustration, that I’m missing. She says being with these kids might provide me with an “emotional support system.”
    “Oh puh-lease!” I say.
    “Don’t be such a smart aleck! Sometimes people need help with emotional issues. It can’t be easy being different. Being you.”
    “But I don’t have those kinds of problems. I’m fine.” Smart aleck , I’m thinking. Yeah, my brother Alec is smart. But saying anything like that will make Mom angry. Or angrier.
    “Okay. Well, maybe talking to a psychologist sometime is something you’d like to try. Just to talk about what it’s like being you. They can help you sort out your feelings and—”
    “That’s worse! I’m not crazy. I’m not sad. And I don’t like other handicapped kids. They’re gross!”
    “How do you know that, dear? They might be just like you. You certainly share the problem of getting along, of confronting the non-handicapped world around you.”
    Confronting? “I know how to fit in.” I say.
    She says that’s terrific and she’s proud of me. For her, being properly socialized is half the point of keeping me mainstreamed. “It’s important to learn to get along with others, to look nice and behave attractively, if you want to get anywhere in the world.”
    “Ai-yai-yai , Mom!”
    “I don’t make the rules, that’s just the way it is. We all have to face it.”
    Mom has her reasons, beyond vanity. She grew up poor because her father, Grandpa Sam, a Cincinnati defense lawyer, had such an unpleasant manner the only clients he could keep were the most desperate and destitute.
    The other reasons she and Dad insist on a regular private school are, (1) they know separate isn’t equal, (2) they want the best education possible for their kids, and (3) they’re snobs and only consider the finest schools.
    So I start first grade at the Walden School, on West 88th Street. It’s a regular, albeit progressive, private school with a liberal admissions policy. I mingle with kids of all colors, many on scholarships, many others from the creative elite of the Upper West Side. As the only wheelchair-riding student, I’m a pioneer of sorts. It’s not exactly wheelchair accessible—each morning Dad has to schlep me, in wheelchair, up a small flight of steps at the entry, and every afternoon Mom hauls me back down again.
    One evening I overhear Mom and Dad talking in the kitchen. They are grateful for Walden. Dad says he isn’t sure about its prestige but Mom says it will be fine. Best of all, she says, Walden doesn’t see me as a typical handicapped kid. Dad agrees. It’s making an exception for me because of my intelligence and alertness, he says.
    Judy, my new class teacher—a tall, slender woman with dark hair and warm eyes as expressive as a cartoon character’s—quickly makes accommodations. For example, at the end of the first week she gathers the entire class of sixteen kids in a circle and introduces me. Just me! She explains why I use a wheelchair and then says something funny:
    “Would any of you like to touch Ben’s wheelchair?”
    If they touch it, she explains, they