Austin pulled on the shorts, righted his suitcase, and began to shovel his clothes back inside. It was only when he got out to the car that he remembered the trouble that might be waiting for him at school. He was so eager to be sprung from the tension of his household he had forgotten all about the love he’d professed, and the drama that had followed.
You coming?
Austin opened the door for his mom up front, then climbed into the backseat.
Sorry about the messy room.
Don’t worry, you have nothing else to do this weekend!
For a moment Austin thought his father had looked right inside his head and was teasing him about the breakup, but Austin couldn’t recall mentioning it to either of his parents. If his father had learned about the relationship through the River Valley grapevine, he didn’t say anything more, just twisted the key in the ignition. His other hand flicked a h-a-h-a, the visual accompaniment to laughter in the habit of most signers, and Austin wondered, not for the first time, what such a thing might sound like.
triple duty—nouns, verbs, and adverbs in asl
DID YOU KNOW? The number or quality of repeated movements within a sign can mean the difference between a noun, verb, or adverb, or provide multiple kinds of information simultaneously. This grammatical feature means ASL is often more economical than spoken language.
NOUN: Repeat the sign’s movement twice using a small range of motion. For example, the pointer and middle fingers are tapped against each other to make the sign “chair.”
VERB: The sign’s movement is made only once, using a larger range of motion. Sometimes this movement is altered to more closely mirror the real-life action (see: “cup” → “drink”). Here the pointer and middle fingers of one hand are set on the other to make the verb “to sit.” Greater force and a stern facial expression can form the command “sit down.”
ADVERB: Some signs can be imbued with descriptive information by tweaking or adding movement. For example, to add the information for a long period of time, a sign can be adjusted to incorporate a slow, circular motion (see: working, sitting).
NOW YOU TRY! Using the base sign study, tell a partner about a time when you had to study hard or for a long time.
charlie remembered the earliest years of her education with a certain fondness—less unsupervised time and therefore less bullying, snack breaks, and coloring and scissor skills she could ace alongside her peers. But the language acquisition the doctors had promised post-implant had been slow to materialize. For a while she made progress in a little white room, where she sat at a table across from a well-intentioned blond lady who dealt largely in spit. Charlie had spent hours with that woman, learning about mouth shapes and airflow by blowing out candles, or holding her nose, or pressing an upside-down spoon on her tongue. But outside the confines of the therapist’s office, so many sounds were still inscrutable. Her classrooms were noisy, and she couldn’t find the words they’d practiced out there, amid the din.
It started to show. The students began learning to read, spell, even add via call-and-response, a mire of sounds through which Charlie waded with trepidation. Her teachers scolded her when she was slow or off-task, raised concerns at parent conferences about whether she had “additional disabilities.” Charlie did not know how to explain that she couldn’t possibly find the answers when she didn’t know the questions.
She became prone to what her mother called “spells.” Her teachers called them “behaviors,” as if any action from a child beyond total compliance was implicitly bad. Charlie, of course, called them nothing at all, which was part of the problem.
She didn’t remember much about the outbursts now, just flashes: her teacher trying to peel her from the tile floor while Charlie thrashed in her grip, the heat of her tears and phlegm midtantrum, and most of all that burning feeling that ran from her forehead straight to the pit of her stomach, when the word you need is on the tip of your tongue but you can’t quite wrangle it. Except for Charlie it was all the words. And this was how she’d come to do a stint in special ed.
In the special ed room, Charlie spent most of her time alone. She was given a desk, workbooks, pretzels, and water in a spill-proof cup with a spout that looked like it was for someone much younger. Perhaps they originally had other plans for her, but day in and day out the teacher and aides were consumed by the room’s myriad emergencies—feeding and washing and toilet training, the constant sidelong minding of a boy who was prone to banging his front teeth against the cinder-block wall when he was upset.
One of her new classmates had a flip-book wallet full of little pictures that she wore hooked to her belt loop—cartoon images of a toilet, various foods and drinks, classroom toys. Charlie liked the bright, bold pictures and wondered if someone might make such a book for her, but they never did. Some afternoons the girl would appear at Charlie’s side and show her a picture of Lego, and the two would retreat to the circle time carpet and build a tower. Besides her, Charlie didn’t interact much with the other students, save for one kid who’d scratched her when she’d unwittingly taken his favorite seat at the craft table. The teacher had sent Charlie down to the nurse with a note pinned to her shirt requesting antiseptic, harsh stuff that chapped her cheek.
At first Charlie’s own “behaviors” continued, too, meltdowns in the face of unfathomable phonics workbooks. The special ed program was equipped for these moments; Charlie was placed in the Quiet Room—an empty closet lined with blue gymnasium mats. Charlie hated the Quiet Room. Quiet was not hard for her to come by and more of it certainly didn’t calm her. The closet door had a small window, but it was too high for Charlie to see out of, and she worried that her teachers would be distracted by some crisis and forget her in there. She knew the only way to keep from being trapped forever was to stop the spells, so bit by bit she learned to swallow them, curl her toes inside her sneakers and clamp her back teeth down hard when she was angry. Her visits to the room became fewer and fewer, but with little instructional time and no friends, her academic progress was still bleak. Some days, the speech therapist was the only person she talked to at all.