Snapshot

My weekly lunches with Schuyler will end one day, and probably soon. I know that. I understand that she won't always want this. More to the point, she won't always need it. She'll find success in navigating the Lord of the Flies world of middle school. I'll be thrilled when that happens, even as I feel a certain selfish sadness, too.

One day she won't want this. But not just yet.

I join her for lunch like I do every Friday. Today, it's just the two of us. Schuyler is almost always the first to arrive in the lunch room. Today I stop by her special ed director's office for a moment, so when I walk into the lunch room, Schuyler is already there. She has her iPad out, and I can see she's sending a message. I feel my phone go off, but I don't look at it. I assume that she's asking where I am. Later, however, when I look at her message, it simply says, "Boo!"

I show up bearing Whataburger, and she's happy to eat some bad-for-her junk food instead of the mostly sensible lunches around her. She's happy today. Most days, lunch is when I remotely hear from Schuyler as she sends a short flurry of messages while she eats. I never know if I'm going to get expressions of anxiety over some complicated relationship with a persistent frenemy or an emoji farting monkey.

When I'm at the school for lunch, I can watch it play out in real time. Sometimes I see Schuyler watching someone with wary eyes, and I know something has happened, some interaction that has left Schuyler confused and hurt. Today, a girl with whom I know Schuyler has had frequent conflicts comes up to the table and greets her warmly, perhaps a little excessively so. I feel like I'm probably the intended audience for some of this, but Schuyler takes it at face value and delights in the attention. She is without guile, bordering on naive. But that's Schuyler, to the core. Her innocence scares me, but it's the thing I love about her perhaps most of all.

As we eat, her table fills up with girls she knows. They're not Schuyler's friends, not precisely. Many of them are from the HOPE program; neurotypical students who do things like eat lunch with and mentor kids with special needs. But they've grown close to Schuyler. They enjoy her company and gently tolerate her raucous sense of humor even when she's too much. Schuyler can sometimes be too much. It's another aspect of her personality that I value even when it's complicated.

When I visit Schuyler for lunch, I observe closely. I want a snapshot of what her life is like when she walks alone. I try to be a fly on the wall, which is hard for a 6'2" fat old man at a table full of thirteen year-old girls. Today, somehow, I achieve success. Schuyler has a new object of her eye, a boy with a hipster name, and she's pointing him out to her HOPE friends.

For a few moments, there's no boundaries between the typical and the broken. There's no communication barrier, no social fence, and no confusion. There is only a group of girls talking about the boys they like, and whether or not they'll gather the courage to talk to those boys, and what they think of each others' choices.

For a few minutes, before the societal narrative that so often holds them gently but firmly apart descends on Schuyler and her typical classmates, she's in the world in a way that means the most to her, without a monster and without that other monster, nearly invisible but so, so strong, the monster that walks among the world of the neurotypical and whispers into unimpaired young ears that difference is weakness, a thing to be avoided.

For a brief time, they were just little girls.

And I got to see it. My own monster stood in silent appreciation at the spectacle.