“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
“I said you were in the shower. But then you were away so long I thought he might call back. Or something.” He looked at her, a worried, almost paternal furrow in his brow. “So I thought I’d better find you.”
She looked at him and thought her heart might burst.
“Mom,” he said as she pulled him close, pressed him against her chest, the smell of Chloraseptic and panic, “are you okay?”
The corridors were empty, but all the classroom doors were open, the June heat filling the old high school and stray sounds wafting, the chant of French verb conjugations, the squeak of moving chairs, one student’s lone protestation, I’m so hot, Mr. Manear. Can we have class outside?
Drew kept wandering from her, staring up at the display cabinets, the team banners, the signs—Stay Strong, Jay Chong! and Seniors: Take the Pledge Today!—all so mysterious to Katie, who hadn’t been inside the school since parent-teacher conferences months ago.
“Devon,” Drew said, and she turned quickly.
But he was only pointing to a bulletin board: Tenth-Grade Writing Contest: “Dreams, Wishes, Goals.”
Beneath it were the top three essays, and Devon’s was number one. Always number one.
Katie walked closer. She’d never seen the essay and Devon hadn’t said anything about the contest.
She started reading it, her eyes moving so fast the words seemed to smear.
My Dream by Devon Emory Knox
I have never had any desire to be ordinary, or normal. But to be extraordinary, one must learn to conquer weakness.
I was three years old when I first set foot on the gymnastics beam.
“You were fearless,” my parents tell me. They believed in me from the start.
I was seven when I got my first rip, a flap of skin the size of a nickel torn from the center of my palm. I knew what it was. All gymnasts get them, from the friction of your hands on the bars all day long.
And I rubbed chalk on it and went straight back to the bars.
Same with the jammed fingers, the wrist sprains, the hamstring that cost me a year.
All those years, all that work, I can’t believe I never got broken.
Now I am almost sixteen and I have known fear, and failure.
Two years ago, I had my crisis point. I faced a difficult vault. No, I did not fall. But I did fail. And it was because I was afraid and I was weak. I didn’t want it enough. Or I was afraid to want something so completely, as completely as my coach did, my parents do. They want everything for me.
So, for many months, I became a slave to my weakness. I was afraid of falling. Of landing on my neck, my head. Of my bones breaking like wishbones. But most of all, of failing.
I lived with that fear, saw it in the faces of others as they watched how close I came. To falling. To losing. The greatest of all fears and the one that can destroy you.
My dad tried to fix it. He built me a landing pit, and he worked very hard to show me how important it was.
But the day the pit was finished, I was afraid again. More afraid than ever.
“What if I don’t want it enough,” I asked my dad.
He looked at me. “Devon, I promise you do. It’s the reason you’re here. This,” he said, pointing to the vault, “is why you’re here.”
He was right. Because my vault was perfect, I was fixed, and everyone loved me again.
I learned that day that I must trample fear and I must own my desire. To be extraordinary.
It has been hard. I had to learn how to go inside myself. Places no one could touch, or see.
But I can say today that I am no longer afraid. I have learned to make fear my slave. Whenever I confront my own weaknesses, I look in the mirror and say, “You have taken things from me. You will take nothing more.”
Now it is only desire that rules me. Desire to win, yes, but also to be the best. To be extraordinary.
It was like a picture of your life from an angle you’d never seen before. And Katie didn’t know what to do with it, one hand pressing the paper, her other hand on her mouth.
Then she saw it. Across the bottom of the page, scrawled in giant diagonal letters and paper-tearing tugs, was a word:
Freak!!!!
Underneath, someone had drawn a cartoon, lurid and X-rated, a girl whose head dwarfed her little naked body, doing a split, her hairless crotch exposed.
“She’s in her history class right now,” said the principal, an earnest-jawed man named Mr. Waltham whom Katie had never met. “Room one twelve, if you’d like to check.”
“I’m sorry about all this,” Katie said. “My husband is having some medical issues.”
“He seemed very upset,” said the principal, who seemed upset himself. “He seemed to believe we were being deliberately obstructive.”
His gaze falling, nervously, to Drew’s pink, gummy face, the way he kept scratching at his scaly skin.