The kids down the hall

I don’t know why I wrote this. Sometimes I mentally leap back to junior high school's years and think of those who no one thought of then or now. So here we are ...

Keeping your head down in school sometimes meant other kids take the shots.Someone always faces worse mockery than you. I didn’t need to look far to find them in junior high or beyond, not in a place like the one where I grew up. In the eighth grade, I had full view of the kids who received the worst.

My locker stood near the classrooms for the disabled students. Although our county operated a school for more severely handicapped students where my brother Joe attended, a handful of handicapped children attended school in their own block of classrooms at the junior high. I never knew what criteria determined whether they attend the standard school or the one for the disabled. There might have been 15-18 students at any given time.

These kids only mingled with other students on occasion, and rarely gracefully. Some students volunteered in those classrooms. For the most part, these students were not integrated. They ate at their own lunch table to help the kids who used wheelchairs or crutches. Students outside their group only approached them to earn laughs from elsewhere in the lunchroom.

Many of these kids had an innocent streak that ran into the thresher of superficial teens. Too often the kids' attempts to strike up friendship resulted in them becoming the butt of jokes. I never mocked them, but I defended them irregularly for fear of becoming a target.

Having a locker close to their classrooms placed me in a spot where I could interact with them. If they talked with me, I never refused them and always treated them with respect. If it was the least I could do, at least I did it.

I only had regular conversations with one of them, a boy named Andy who would hang out near our lockers. He seemed laid back, but soon he grew pushy, wanting to borrow things. He wanted to borrow a book I was reading, but I told him I couldn’t, since it was my mom’s. Lending the book had nothing to do with Andy. Through my past gullibility, I had been burned by lending out books or cassettes to classmates feigning friendship. I turned him down, although he still came by to talk and ask to borrow things through the end of the school year. 

One kid who had a facial deformity, face flattened with one eye trailing to the side. In reference to him, many kids would quote Sloth from Goonies. Thank goodness I never saw anyone do it to the poor guy’s face. I can’t imagine what he went through.

He had a good support system. His family took certain lengths to protect him – his father walked him to the classrooms in the mornings, and you can be damn sure none of those little assholes said a peep as they passed the bays of lockers. The boy’s father was not imposing, but he was an adult, an authority figure, and no one risked his reaction to a mean comment. I overheard conversations between father and son, and their words were no different than any other parent and child. I remember the boy spoke slowly but carefully.

Next year I switched to the second floor lockers for ninth-graders, and I saw less of the kids down the hall. No one asked to borrow anything.

In high school, I caught only glimpses of the same kids. There was another poor fellow in high school who had soft spots on his skull, his hair grown haphazardly as cover. I never saw anyone haze him but I didn’t need to. One of the few bright moments was an article the high school paper wrote about the students in the handicapped unit. They explained their conditions, talked about their dreams beyond high school and were treated with a respect they never received in the halls. I couldn’t even name the high school paper now, but that article seared my memory. It was a rare positive moment.

I have searched for more information on those guys over the years and run into dead ends. The boy with the skull problems died a few years after high school. I wonder if any of those other kids got to grow up. They deserved better, and I can only hope someday they got it. They just wanted to be treated like normal kids.

My own brother seemed largely oblivious to stares and comments - whether or not he understood, I will never know. But these guys, in addition to whatever pains their disabilities inflicted, had to deal with understanding what their detractors said to them. Hopefully life outside those hallways treated them better.