section 4

Andrew was up at the crack of dawn and I was serenaded with the Wizard of Oz melody that he had come up with. Andrew was obsessed with the Wizard of Oz right now. At least he wasn’t watching the Spanish Telemundo shows anymore. We didn’t even know anyone who spoke Spanish.

Desperately, I pulled my pillow over my head. “Shut up, Andrew!” I heard the door of my parents room open and close softly.

“Andrew, come on.” It was Dad. I didn’t need to get up and open my door to know that he was trying to shuffle Andrew to the den downstairs. I peaked out from the darkness under my pillow to get a look at my clock.

6:57.

The fates were sick, sick people.

Begrudgingly, I rolled out of bed and pulled on my school uniform. In a weak attempt at rebellion most of the girls wore leggings instead of the mandatory tights and in a typical school board response the teachers did nothing.

When I went downstairs Andrew was sitting in front of the TV eating a bowl of Boo Berry cereal. He sat there, munching on the cereal with some slipping out of his mouth when he repeated the commercial. “But I’ve got blueberry flavored marshmallows.”

“Andrew, it’s a little early for that,” Dad said softly.

“It’s my hauntingly delicious cereal,” he continued. With any other kid it would have been just to spite the parent, but with Andrew he simply didn’t understand that at 7:03 in the morning no one wanted to listen to his rendition of the Boo Berry commercials.

I grabbed my box of waffles out of the freezer. The box felt lighter than normal and when I looked in it I saw that there was only one left.

“Who eats just one waffle?” I asked, even thought I knew exactly who it was.

“Brigitte, there’s some cereal in the pantry.”

“I want waffles though.”

“Could you just deal with cereal for a few days?”

I rolled my eyes and stomped over to the cabinet and pulled out a box of cereal. It didn’t matter what kind. I had eaten toaster waffles every day for awhile now. I hated having to change something like that, especially when I was looking forward to it so much.

I put together the bowl of cereal and slid it across the counter to the stool. I slumped in to the stool at the counter and let my head rest on the cold stone. “Good morning!” Mom’s cheerful voice came through the hallway, singing out to us in a sickly sweet salutation. Her cheerfulness in the morning seemed almost inhumane.

“Good morning, munchkin.” She leaned over Andrew and gave him a tight hug around the shoulders, peppering his cheek with kisses. Andrew giggled.

“Mom, I need more waffles.”

“Morning, munchkin,” Andrew said.

Mom swept through the kitchen and piled papers together, sliding them in to her briefcase and making sure her phone was packed away.

“Brigitte, I’m gonna need you to pick Andrew up after school,” Andrew was usually walked home from school because he couldn’t ride the buses since he always acted up, even though the school had to bus him due to some law or another. “I have a meeting until four. I’ll leave a note about dinner, I just need a little help getting it together—”

I cut her off. “I have SAT practice until five. Remember? You had me sign up for it. In January. It started three weeks ago.”

It was stupid question because of course she didn’t remember. It was like she had all these hopes and dreams for me but at the end of the day I was just an after thought; at the very, very bottom of her priority list. If I was even on it.

“Oh, God,” she covered her face with her hands before recovering and looking around frantically. I didn’t do anything though. This was nothing new. “I completely forgot. Do you think you could skip this one? Just once, I’ll be sure not to schedule anything else on Mondays.” Oh, how considerate of you.

“You signed me up for this,” I stressed again. SAT prep was not how I imaged spending the hours from three to five on Mondays. Mondays were bad enough, but Mom had high hopes and big dreams for me. She didn’t want me to end up like her, stuck in a job that she hated. Somehow this meant that I had to go through hell right now. “We’re getting back our practice scores today,” I said as some incentive for her to go to plan B. I didn’t know what plan B was, but that wasn’t my problem.

“I guess I could bring him to the office. Suzie could watch him, “ Suzie was her assistant at the real estate office that she worked at. Suzie’s son had down syndrome, so she knew how to handle Andrew.

Most people tended to act weirdly around Andrew because they didn’t know how to respond to half the things he did. You would think that the pointing and staring would stop once someone grew up and realized that it was wrong, but even adults did that. The brave ones would ask questions. “Why’s he doing that?”

I don’t know, let me get out my autism decoder ring.

I guess the questions were better than staring though. They at least wanted to understand… maybe.

“Oh Susie Q, baby I love you, Susie Q,” Andrew mumbled through his cereal. He only ate three kernels of cereal at a time so it took him some time. “Oh Susie Q.” This threw him off his Boo Berry track and for that I was thankful.

“I think that’d be great,” Dad piped in, setting down the obligatory omelette he made for Mom every Monday morning. Dad was the great peacemaker between Mom and I an I would be the first to admit that that was a hard job. If she would just get it through her head that as a fifteen year old girl I had more on my plate than watching her weird little brother. You would think parents would be all for focusing on school, leave it to mine to stray from the status quo.

“Kayla’s parents already said they could give me a ride home.” So you don’t need to worry about that, I added silently to myself. Not that they would actually worry. I had been forgotten about plenty of times, so much that getting left at school was an almost regular situation for me. Louie the janitor knew me by name and always shared some of beef jerky or some of his chips with me. I had a cellphone but my parents tended not to answer their own. It was usually when Andrew was acting up and they needed me to do something.

“Well, that’s nice of them,” Mom said idly. She was already sitting down with the newspaper and her omelette. Crisis averted, the planets could continue spinning around her.

“Come on Andrew, let’s go get dressed.” Dad picked up by the arm pits and carried him up to his room, swinging him like a pendulum. Andrew giggled the entire way up. It would have been nice to be able to know that that was a foreteller of a good day with him, but being autistic meant that you could go from good day to bad day in a matter of minutes. Laughing in the morning didn’t necessarily lead to laughing till bed time. Good days were few and far between, but you learned to settle for decent days.

word count: 1277