Lions
Spencer Tallis didn’t want to ride the school bus. He would figure out how not to. It wasn’t a real school bus anyway. It was a van.
Spencer went to the Francis Institute, which was part of a university. To be clear, Spencer was not a student at the university. University students, especially grad students, received credit toward their degree by being “instructors” and “paraprofessionals” to the fifteen or twenty individuals who attended the Francis Institute at any given time.
Sometimes children left the Francis Institute because they moved away, and soon they were replaced by new individuals. A kid named Aaron Brown had left for real. Spencer had not liked Aaron as much as he had ever not liked anyone. Aaron wore glasses, had dark greasy hair, and did things carefully. his mouth almost moving with the effort of remembering how. None of these things were the reason Spencer didn’t like him. Spencer also wore glasses and was careful, although only when he wanted to be.
Spencer’s favorite shirt had belonged to his father before his father got fat. His father wasn’t fat, but Spencer was really thin because from the time he was eleven he had been growing “like a weed.” Spencer’s mother regretted telling him to try on the shirt, because he wore it all the time and would even try to hide it to keep her from taking it away and washing it. The shirt had brown, white, and gold stripes and it reminded Spencer of a lion. The shirt was fading the more Spencer wore it but Spencer pretended the lion was getting old.
Spencer was twelve years old and he was part lion. His sister Rosemary, his twin, was also twelve years old and fully human.
///
Well, this wasn’t strictly true; Rosemary loved mermaids, which were part animal but human “in the face,” their mother said when trying to explain why she was slightly afraid of Spencer’s human lion picture. Once, at school, Spencer had completed all his worksheets in a very short period of time and been allowed to use a computer to make an image of his face melting into a lion’s face. Spencer took a picture of himself in Photobooth imitating the face of the lion in the picture he was going to use. Then he placed them on top of each other in Photoshop and adjusted the opacity.
Spencer printed multiple copies of the picture and put them on the inside of his bedroom door, on the cover of his school journal, on the ceiling above his head so he could see it when he woke up, and in other places where his mother (though this wasn’t his intention) would run into them and flinch. Spencer felt comfortable and excited when he looked at the lion he would someday become.
Spencer thought he probably shouldn’t have done all those worksheets because now all the students (that is, the teachers) were trying to figure out a way to make him do that many worksheets every day. It was just as aggravating for them as it was for him, because it had become obvious that Spencer would do many things for a lion picture, but they were trying to discourage Spencer from thinking and talking so much about lions. This resulted in programs like telling Spencer he could watch a movie about lions if he did all the worksheets he was supposed to do for two weeks. Even Spencer wasn’t going to do that much work for only a few hours of lions.
///
When they were eleven, Rosemary and Spencer’s parents had taken them to a museum exhibit about mermaids. The picture on the museum website was a sculpture of a mermaid climbing out of the sea, and some of the exhibit was things like this, but there was also a fake mermaid that had been made by a carnival a century ago. It had been made by sewing together a dead monkey and a big trout. It had a puckered little face and long hair. Rosemary screamed.
“It’s hard to believe anyone would think that was a mermaid,” Spencer said as their parents hurried over from another part of the exhibition. Rosemary nodded, turning her back on the thing and swallowing thickly.
Their parents emerged from behind a wall of mermaid comics and looked at the twins. “I saw something gross,” Rosemary explained.
Their dad inspected the mermaid at an unwisely close range. “Jesus,” he said. Their mother gave him a look because Spencer swore a lot even when he didn’t want to. “There are some neat tapestries in the next room,” their father said, and Rosemary sighed and nodded again.
Later Spencer would try to work out how you could make a mermaid that wasn’t gross. First of all it would have to be human “in the face.” It would also have to not be dead. (He asked Rosemary and she said the fact that it was a monkey wasn’t as bad as the fact that it was dead.) Spencer tried to figure out if you could sew two things together without killing them. For a while, Spencer wanted to be a doctor.
///
Spencer kept imagining that soon he would figure out how to make a mermaid for Rosemary. He thought it would come to him by the time they turned twelve, and so he didn’t make any plans to get her a present. When the time came, Spencer hastily drew her a picture book with some crayons he drew under his bed. The book was mean, but only to be funny. Rosemary thought it was funny.
Rosemary gave Spencer Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and a pack of gum. She’d been forbidden to give Spencer any presents relating to lions.
///
Rosemary went to an expensive school called the Road School. Spencer’s school was also expensive, but only for the Tallises because they could afford it. The Francis Institute was able to give scholarships because so many of the instructors were students and were not paid. Spencer’s best friend Danny wasn’t rich, because he rode home in the other van. Most of the kids in Spencer’s van were rich; he knew because of where they lived. Spencer was the last kid in the van to be dropped off and he wondered if this made him the richest of all.
Danny was fifteen, and he had never said they were best friends, but Danny never said what he was expected to say. He would give Spencer acorns that he found on the ground. Once he gave Spencer a crabapple and Spencer ate it right in front of him and made Danny laugh. Danny had a funny, deep laugh that didn’t sound like the rest of his voice.
On the day that changed Spencer’s life he saw Danny standing in front of the school director, Eliza, trying to tell her that Spencer was coming to his house and wouldn’t be riding home in his usual van. Spencer knew that Danny’s mom must have told Danny to do this to make him practice talking, because usually their parents would just send one or the other of them in with a note. Danny mostly liked to communicate by grabbing people and pulling them in the direction he wanted them to go.
“Eliza,” Danny was saying, “Spencer’s coming. So we’re going to play chestnuts. No! He’s coming over.”
“What?”
“He’s coming with me, chestnuts.”
“Don’t say chestnuts.”
“But Eliza. He’s coming with me. We’re going to play chestnuts.”
“Don’t say chestnuts. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Chestnuts,” Danny said. He didn’t mean to. He closed his eyes, trying to remember what his mom had told him to say. “Spencer is going to be with me.”
“No,” Eliza said. “You don’t have lunch together anymore after what happened last week.”
Danny started wringing his hands and Spencer interrupted and said, “Excuse me. Danny is trying to say that I’m going to his house tonight so I’m riding home in his van with him.”
“Is that true?” Eliza asked.
Danny nodded.
“You’re too old to be wiggling your hands like that. Only little kids do that.”
Danny stopped wringing his hands. Later, when the individuals went out to the parking area, Danny’s van aide nodded; Eliza had told him Spencer was coming.
///
Spencer realized that a person didn’t need a note to get on a different van. He could go on Danny’s van without asking his parents.
But he could go to Danny’s house any time, and if he went without asking his parents, they would find out and he would be in trouble. His mom had already said that having lions all over the house was a “privilege” and if Spencer didn’t behave there would be no more lions.
Spencer wondered what else he could ask to do that he wouldn’t need a note for.
///
Spencer had been taught that people who are lying look away from the person they’re speaking to, like Spencer usually did. “People who are telling the truth look straight into each other’s eyes--so you better do it, or people will think that you’re lying,” his old instructor Shasta had once said.
Rosemary looked at everyone. As babies, the two of them had been very much alike, and Spencer wondered if people had only been able to tell them apart because of where they were looking.
///
When Aaron Brown still went to the Francis Institute, he left early on Monday so he could go to tae kwon do. In his head Spencer called him Aaron Burr and hoped he would get off more lightly than Alexander Hamilton had. Aaron Brown was always popping up when Spencer and Danny were having perfectly normal conversations about Danny’s dog or about the water pipes in his house. (Spencer gathered, although it was hard to tell, that Danny could take off a vent to look at the pipes and that he was afraid of them.)
“Stop talking about pipes, Danny,” Aaron would say. “Who cares about that stuff?” Aaron was Spencer’s age, much younger than Danny, but he didn’t seem to have learned the lesson of respecting your elders.
Spencer would say, “When I turn into a lion I’m going to rip you limb from limb.”
Aaron would burst out laughing--a waterfalling, perfectly composed laugh that Spencer was sure must have been one of his programs because it didn’t sound like Danny’d laugh or any real laugh Spencer had ever heard. Aaron rocked back on his heels, stared straight into Spencer’s eyes so that Spencer jumped, and told him, “I wouldn’t talk about lions so much if I were you. It’s kind of weird.”
///
For a while Spencer thought that he could make up a pretend kind of lesson to leave school early for, but then he realized that someone would probably be sent outside with him to see that he was picked up. Spencer thought about paying a stranger to pick him up from school, but he didn’t know where to find such a person.
///
Rosemary and Spencer both were twelve years old. They looked human. They wore glasses. They had dark blond hair. Spencer thought they didn’t have blond hair anymore, but whenever he said they had brown hair Rosemary would get mad.
Rosemary had a quality of an angel. At lunch at the Road School, the kitchen staff would actually try to force food on her. Rosemary could make mistakes and laugh them off, and although she sometimes exploited this because she was lazy, she was also genuinely kind.
Spencer and Rosemary when they were younger had tried to have a midnight feast. They had bought a pinata to fill with all the secret food, but Rosemary loved the pinata too much and didn’t want to break it, so the food inside got bad and smelled. Rosemary and Spencer were both approaching an age when they would feel like pinatas filled with rotten food. They both kept quiet about it, except that Spencer would swear and sometimes kick doors, and all of Rosemary’s friends were mean to her. Once or twice Rosemary kicked doors knowing Spencer would be blamed for it. She felt terrible about this.
At twelve, and throughout all those years, Rosemary and Spencer spent less time with each other but when they were together their minds would just slip into each other like the pieces of a machine. It was nothing fancy. They just felt safe when they walked around together, and each wanted to say, “Let’s do this more often,” they were young enough that they didn’t say “Let’s do this more often” yet, especially to people in their family.
///
Spencer imagined, if he did get someone to pick him up, what he would do. He wanted to go visit Rosemary and pretend to be her brother from a public school. Rosemary wasn’t the kind of person who would contradict him even though she wouldn’t understand why he was doing it. But what if a kid at Rosemary’s school had used to go to public school and asked Spencer which teachers the person had had and he’d say he had those. He’d look them straight in the eye so they’d think he was telling the truth.
Spencer also thought that even if he couldn’t get someone to pick him up, he could run away. He could get an instructor to take him outside, edge out of the range where he could be easy grabbed, and just take off. It would only work once, but he didn’t have to come back because his parents had another child.
Spencer didn’t really think he was going to physically turn into a lion--he hadn’t thought that for a long time, although he still dreamed about it. For a while he had wanted to play a lion in the Lion King musical, but he knew he wasn’t a good actor. Then he decided he wanted to go to Italy and be a living statue that painted himself every day to look like a lion. If he couldn’t make enough money, he could just be a janitor or something at night. He would be a mysterious janitor who rarely spoke and everyone who worked with him would wonder who he was and comment on his resemblance to the living lion statue that roared without even being given any money sometimes.
Spencer knew he’d have to steal a lot of money to get to Italy and he was starting to think about how he would do it but he figured he’d wait until he got a little older and wouldn’t be so conspicuous riding a plane to Italy by himself.
///
Spencer made up a poem about lions and when he was upset he would recite it to himself while looking at the lion picture on his journal. Spencer would sometimes write journal entries where he swore and then drew black bars over the words. He used to write entries about Aaron Brown but he was given a talk. He also was told that swearing with bars on it is still swearing, and he should stay on topic and write about what he learned. The idea of keeping his own journal did not occur to Spencer (although sometimes, on the rare occasions when he finished his work, he would turn off one of the school computers and type on it, imagining the words floating into the air and entering someone’s mind through their dreams).
Even when Spencer just thought about how Aaron Brown used to act, it made him so angry he wanted to break windows. It didn’t even matter that Aaron wasn’t here anymore. He just hated how careful Aaron was and how he thought that made him better than other people.
Spencer also thought that when he was a lion he would miss his sister and Danny, and he knew that if he wrote Danny a letter Danny would need help reading it but no one would help him because they wouldn’t want him to know that it was possible to escape from the Francis Institute and become a lion.
It never occurred to Spencer to wonder who the person was that the Francis Institute was named after, and what he was doing now.
///
Spencer would just stop sometimes and recite the poem to the lion face picture on his journal. His instructor Ann tried to take his journal away and he tried to hit her.
Spencer was sent to talk to Eliza in her office. She talked really loud.
“Look at me, Spencer. I don’t know what to do with you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Saying you’re sorry doesn’t help if you keep hitting people.”
“I won’t.”
Spencer looked down and spaced out and Eliza got mad. She was holding onto his hands to keep them still, and it hurt. Spencer looked up and stared straight into her eyes.
“I’m sorry. But Ann took my journal away and I’m supposed to have my journal. I’m supposed to be writing in it. Why would she take it away?”
“Spencer, we’re not going to be able to let you keep those lion pictures at school.”
“Fine,” Spencer growled. “I don’t care.”
Eliza leaned back; her hold on him loosened a little. Spencer could feel a bunch of pressure building up in his head but lions don’t cry. “Spencer, a person can’t turn into a lion. That’s kid stuff. You’re a person, not a lion. When you grow up you’re going to still be a person.” She smiled. “It would be kind of funny if you were a full-grown man who didn’t know how to act like a person and thought he was a lion.”
“You think I’m stupid,” Spencer said. “I know I’m not a fucking lion.”
Eliza’s face closed off again as Spencer felt his mind open up. The word fucking had felt like a scalpel, specific and sharp. Like the time that he had had coffee.
He felt himself relax into her grip, which was painful again. He felt himself smile. “You’re so fucking stupid, Eliza. You all are. You think that I think I’m a motherfucking actual lion.”
///
That day, when Spencer got off the van, the van aide walked him to the door with his hand on Spencer’s shoulder like he was going to make a break for it. Like anyone could stop him if he really wanted to.
Spencer’s house had been emptied. No lions on the doors. He even went to the bathroom and the laminated lion on the inside of the shower was gone. Spencer’s mom had been crying he was pretty sure. She said they were going to have a meeting when his father came home.
Spencer went to his room and dug into his drawer for his lion-striped shirt, but it was gone. He knew he shouldn’t make any noise because his mom could hear him and it would make things worse. Instead of hitting anything he sat on his bed for nine minutes not moving and staring at the clock and thinking that he could calm himself this way and if he practiced more and more all the time he would be such a good statue that he wouldn’t even need another job.
(questions for the people in my workshop, but also you if you want)
easy questions:
1. I guess that not everyone is familiar with this kind of behaviorist/points-based special ed environment but I'm wondering how much of the structure of Spencer's school seems to intuitively make sense and how much, or which particular things, I should make more of an effort to explain.
2. A lot of kids with disabilities aren't actually told that they have a disability or what their disability is, and that is why I didn't use any words related to disability/special ed/autism. But I break from close third person sometimes, so I guess "it's from Spencer's perspective" isn't an excuse for leaving out those words. I would prefer not to use them because it would feel like a big change, but I also don't know if it seems gimmicky to avoid using them.
hard question:
Spencer’s anger/violence?
I feel uncomfortable because it seems like a stereotype that I don’t want to promote. To ask an incredibly vague question, I was wondering what your reaction was to Spencer’s emotions, and times in the story when he wanted to be destructive, or swore at people, etc.--I mean, your impression of him as a person.
Spencer went to the Francis Institute, which was part of a university. To be clear, Spencer was not a student at the university. University students, especially grad students, received credit toward their degree by being “instructors” and “paraprofessionals” to the fifteen or twenty individuals who attended the Francis Institute at any given time.
Sometimes children left the Francis Institute because they moved away, and soon they were replaced by new individuals. A kid named Aaron Brown had left for real. Spencer had not liked Aaron as much as he had ever not liked anyone. Aaron wore glasses, had dark greasy hair, and did things carefully. his mouth almost moving with the effort of remembering how. None of these things were the reason Spencer didn’t like him. Spencer also wore glasses and was careful, although only when he wanted to be.
Spencer’s favorite shirt had belonged to his father before his father got fat. His father wasn’t fat, but Spencer was really thin because from the time he was eleven he had been growing “like a weed.” Spencer’s mother regretted telling him to try on the shirt, because he wore it all the time and would even try to hide it to keep her from taking it away and washing it. The shirt had brown, white, and gold stripes and it reminded Spencer of a lion. The shirt was fading the more Spencer wore it but Spencer pretended the lion was getting old.
Spencer was twelve years old and he was part lion. His sister Rosemary, his twin, was also twelve years old and fully human.
///
Well, this wasn’t strictly true; Rosemary loved mermaids, which were part animal but human “in the face,” their mother said when trying to explain why she was slightly afraid of Spencer’s human lion picture. Once, at school, Spencer had completed all his worksheets in a very short period of time and been allowed to use a computer to make an image of his face melting into a lion’s face. Spencer took a picture of himself in Photobooth imitating the face of the lion in the picture he was going to use. Then he placed them on top of each other in Photoshop and adjusted the opacity.
Spencer printed multiple copies of the picture and put them on the inside of his bedroom door, on the cover of his school journal, on the ceiling above his head so he could see it when he woke up, and in other places where his mother (though this wasn’t his intention) would run into them and flinch. Spencer felt comfortable and excited when he looked at the lion he would someday become.
Spencer thought he probably shouldn’t have done all those worksheets because now all the students (that is, the teachers) were trying to figure out a way to make him do that many worksheets every day. It was just as aggravating for them as it was for him, because it had become obvious that Spencer would do many things for a lion picture, but they were trying to discourage Spencer from thinking and talking so much about lions. This resulted in programs like telling Spencer he could watch a movie about lions if he did all the worksheets he was supposed to do for two weeks. Even Spencer wasn’t going to do that much work for only a few hours of lions.
///
When they were eleven, Rosemary and Spencer’s parents had taken them to a museum exhibit about mermaids. The picture on the museum website was a sculpture of a mermaid climbing out of the sea, and some of the exhibit was things like this, but there was also a fake mermaid that had been made by a carnival a century ago. It had been made by sewing together a dead monkey and a big trout. It had a puckered little face and long hair. Rosemary screamed.
“It’s hard to believe anyone would think that was a mermaid,” Spencer said as their parents hurried over from another part of the exhibition. Rosemary nodded, turning her back on the thing and swallowing thickly.
Their parents emerged from behind a wall of mermaid comics and looked at the twins. “I saw something gross,” Rosemary explained.
Their dad inspected the mermaid at an unwisely close range. “Jesus,” he said. Their mother gave him a look because Spencer swore a lot even when he didn’t want to. “There are some neat tapestries in the next room,” their father said, and Rosemary sighed and nodded again.
Later Spencer would try to work out how you could make a mermaid that wasn’t gross. First of all it would have to be human “in the face.” It would also have to not be dead. (He asked Rosemary and she said the fact that it was a monkey wasn’t as bad as the fact that it was dead.) Spencer tried to figure out if you could sew two things together without killing them. For a while, Spencer wanted to be a doctor.
///
Spencer kept imagining that soon he would figure out how to make a mermaid for Rosemary. He thought it would come to him by the time they turned twelve, and so he didn’t make any plans to get her a present. When the time came, Spencer hastily drew her a picture book with some crayons he drew under his bed. The book was mean, but only to be funny. Rosemary thought it was funny.
Rosemary gave Spencer Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and a pack of gum. She’d been forbidden to give Spencer any presents relating to lions.
///
Rosemary went to an expensive school called the Road School. Spencer’s school was also expensive, but only for the Tallises because they could afford it. The Francis Institute was able to give scholarships because so many of the instructors were students and were not paid. Spencer’s best friend Danny wasn’t rich, because he rode home in the other van. Most of the kids in Spencer’s van were rich; he knew because of where they lived. Spencer was the last kid in the van to be dropped off and he wondered if this made him the richest of all.
Danny was fifteen, and he had never said they were best friends, but Danny never said what he was expected to say. He would give Spencer acorns that he found on the ground. Once he gave Spencer a crabapple and Spencer ate it right in front of him and made Danny laugh. Danny had a funny, deep laugh that didn’t sound like the rest of his voice.
On the day that changed Spencer’s life he saw Danny standing in front of the school director, Eliza, trying to tell her that Spencer was coming to his house and wouldn’t be riding home in his usual van. Spencer knew that Danny’s mom must have told Danny to do this to make him practice talking, because usually their parents would just send one or the other of them in with a note. Danny mostly liked to communicate by grabbing people and pulling them in the direction he wanted them to go.
“Eliza,” Danny was saying, “Spencer’s coming. So we’re going to play chestnuts. No! He’s coming over.”
“What?”
“He’s coming with me, chestnuts.”
“Don’t say chestnuts.”
“But Eliza. He’s coming with me. We’re going to play chestnuts.”
“Don’t say chestnuts. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Chestnuts,” Danny said. He didn’t mean to. He closed his eyes, trying to remember what his mom had told him to say. “Spencer is going to be with me.”
“No,” Eliza said. “You don’t have lunch together anymore after what happened last week.”
Danny started wringing his hands and Spencer interrupted and said, “Excuse me. Danny is trying to say that I’m going to his house tonight so I’m riding home in his van with him.”
“Is that true?” Eliza asked.
Danny nodded.
“You’re too old to be wiggling your hands like that. Only little kids do that.”
Danny stopped wringing his hands. Later, when the individuals went out to the parking area, Danny’s van aide nodded; Eliza had told him Spencer was coming.
///
Spencer realized that a person didn’t need a note to get on a different van. He could go on Danny’s van without asking his parents.
But he could go to Danny’s house any time, and if he went without asking his parents, they would find out and he would be in trouble. His mom had already said that having lions all over the house was a “privilege” and if Spencer didn’t behave there would be no more lions.
Spencer wondered what else he could ask to do that he wouldn’t need a note for.
///
Spencer had been taught that people who are lying look away from the person they’re speaking to, like Spencer usually did. “People who are telling the truth look straight into each other’s eyes--so you better do it, or people will think that you’re lying,” his old instructor Shasta had once said.
Rosemary looked at everyone. As babies, the two of them had been very much alike, and Spencer wondered if people had only been able to tell them apart because of where they were looking.
///
When Aaron Brown still went to the Francis Institute, he left early on Monday so he could go to tae kwon do. In his head Spencer called him Aaron Burr and hoped he would get off more lightly than Alexander Hamilton had. Aaron Brown was always popping up when Spencer and Danny were having perfectly normal conversations about Danny’s dog or about the water pipes in his house. (Spencer gathered, although it was hard to tell, that Danny could take off a vent to look at the pipes and that he was afraid of them.)
“Stop talking about pipes, Danny,” Aaron would say. “Who cares about that stuff?” Aaron was Spencer’s age, much younger than Danny, but he didn’t seem to have learned the lesson of respecting your elders.
Spencer would say, “When I turn into a lion I’m going to rip you limb from limb.”
Aaron would burst out laughing--a waterfalling, perfectly composed laugh that Spencer was sure must have been one of his programs because it didn’t sound like Danny’d laugh or any real laugh Spencer had ever heard. Aaron rocked back on his heels, stared straight into Spencer’s eyes so that Spencer jumped, and told him, “I wouldn’t talk about lions so much if I were you. It’s kind of weird.”
///
For a while Spencer thought that he could make up a pretend kind of lesson to leave school early for, but then he realized that someone would probably be sent outside with him to see that he was picked up. Spencer thought about paying a stranger to pick him up from school, but he didn’t know where to find such a person.
///
Rosemary and Spencer both were twelve years old. They looked human. They wore glasses. They had dark blond hair. Spencer thought they didn’t have blond hair anymore, but whenever he said they had brown hair Rosemary would get mad.
Rosemary had a quality of an angel. At lunch at the Road School, the kitchen staff would actually try to force food on her. Rosemary could make mistakes and laugh them off, and although she sometimes exploited this because she was lazy, she was also genuinely kind.
Spencer and Rosemary when they were younger had tried to have a midnight feast. They had bought a pinata to fill with all the secret food, but Rosemary loved the pinata too much and didn’t want to break it, so the food inside got bad and smelled. Rosemary and Spencer were both approaching an age when they would feel like pinatas filled with rotten food. They both kept quiet about it, except that Spencer would swear and sometimes kick doors, and all of Rosemary’s friends were mean to her. Once or twice Rosemary kicked doors knowing Spencer would be blamed for it. She felt terrible about this.
At twelve, and throughout all those years, Rosemary and Spencer spent less time with each other but when they were together their minds would just slip into each other like the pieces of a machine. It was nothing fancy. They just felt safe when they walked around together, and each wanted to say, “Let’s do this more often,” they were young enough that they didn’t say “Let’s do this more often” yet, especially to people in their family.
///
Spencer imagined, if he did get someone to pick him up, what he would do. He wanted to go visit Rosemary and pretend to be her brother from a public school. Rosemary wasn’t the kind of person who would contradict him even though she wouldn’t understand why he was doing it. But what if a kid at Rosemary’s school had used to go to public school and asked Spencer which teachers the person had had and he’d say he had those. He’d look them straight in the eye so they’d think he was telling the truth.
Spencer also thought that even if he couldn’t get someone to pick him up, he could run away. He could get an instructor to take him outside, edge out of the range where he could be easy grabbed, and just take off. It would only work once, but he didn’t have to come back because his parents had another child.
Spencer didn’t really think he was going to physically turn into a lion--he hadn’t thought that for a long time, although he still dreamed about it. For a while he had wanted to play a lion in the Lion King musical, but he knew he wasn’t a good actor. Then he decided he wanted to go to Italy and be a living statue that painted himself every day to look like a lion. If he couldn’t make enough money, he could just be a janitor or something at night. He would be a mysterious janitor who rarely spoke and everyone who worked with him would wonder who he was and comment on his resemblance to the living lion statue that roared without even being given any money sometimes.
Spencer knew he’d have to steal a lot of money to get to Italy and he was starting to think about how he would do it but he figured he’d wait until he got a little older and wouldn’t be so conspicuous riding a plane to Italy by himself.
///
Spencer made up a poem about lions and when he was upset he would recite it to himself while looking at the lion picture on his journal. Spencer would sometimes write journal entries where he swore and then drew black bars over the words. He used to write entries about Aaron Brown but he was given a talk. He also was told that swearing with bars on it is still swearing, and he should stay on topic and write about what he learned. The idea of keeping his own journal did not occur to Spencer (although sometimes, on the rare occasions when he finished his work, he would turn off one of the school computers and type on it, imagining the words floating into the air and entering someone’s mind through their dreams).
Even when Spencer just thought about how Aaron Brown used to act, it made him so angry he wanted to break windows. It didn’t even matter that Aaron wasn’t here anymore. He just hated how careful Aaron was and how he thought that made him better than other people.
Spencer also thought that when he was a lion he would miss his sister and Danny, and he knew that if he wrote Danny a letter Danny would need help reading it but no one would help him because they wouldn’t want him to know that it was possible to escape from the Francis Institute and become a lion.
It never occurred to Spencer to wonder who the person was that the Francis Institute was named after, and what he was doing now.
///
Spencer would just stop sometimes and recite the poem to the lion face picture on his journal. His instructor Ann tried to take his journal away and he tried to hit her.
Spencer was sent to talk to Eliza in her office. She talked really loud.
“Look at me, Spencer. I don’t know what to do with you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Saying you’re sorry doesn’t help if you keep hitting people.”
“I won’t.”
Spencer looked down and spaced out and Eliza got mad. She was holding onto his hands to keep them still, and it hurt. Spencer looked up and stared straight into her eyes.
“I’m sorry. But Ann took my journal away and I’m supposed to have my journal. I’m supposed to be writing in it. Why would she take it away?”
“Spencer, we’re not going to be able to let you keep those lion pictures at school.”
“Fine,” Spencer growled. “I don’t care.”
Eliza leaned back; her hold on him loosened a little. Spencer could feel a bunch of pressure building up in his head but lions don’t cry. “Spencer, a person can’t turn into a lion. That’s kid stuff. You’re a person, not a lion. When you grow up you’re going to still be a person.” She smiled. “It would be kind of funny if you were a full-grown man who didn’t know how to act like a person and thought he was a lion.”
“You think I’m stupid,” Spencer said. “I know I’m not a fucking lion.”
Eliza’s face closed off again as Spencer felt his mind open up. The word fucking had felt like a scalpel, specific and sharp. Like the time that he had had coffee.
He felt himself relax into her grip, which was painful again. He felt himself smile. “You’re so fucking stupid, Eliza. You all are. You think that I think I’m a motherfucking actual lion.”
///
That day, when Spencer got off the van, the van aide walked him to the door with his hand on Spencer’s shoulder like he was going to make a break for it. Like anyone could stop him if he really wanted to.
Spencer’s house had been emptied. No lions on the doors. He even went to the bathroom and the laminated lion on the inside of the shower was gone. Spencer’s mom had been crying he was pretty sure. She said they were going to have a meeting when his father came home.
Spencer went to his room and dug into his drawer for his lion-striped shirt, but it was gone. He knew he shouldn’t make any noise because his mom could hear him and it would make things worse. Instead of hitting anything he sat on his bed for nine minutes not moving and staring at the clock and thinking that he could calm himself this way and if he practiced more and more all the time he would be such a good statue that he wouldn’t even need another job.
(questions for the people in my workshop, but also you if you want)
easy questions:
1. I guess that not everyone is familiar with this kind of behaviorist/points-based special ed environment but I'm wondering how much of the structure of Spencer's school seems to intuitively make sense and how much, or which particular things, I should make more of an effort to explain.
2. A lot of kids with disabilities aren't actually told that they have a disability or what their disability is, and that is why I didn't use any words related to disability/special ed/autism. But I break from close third person sometimes, so I guess "it's from Spencer's perspective" isn't an excuse for leaving out those words. I would prefer not to use them because it would feel like a big change, but I also don't know if it seems gimmicky to avoid using them.
hard question:
Spencer’s anger/violence?
I feel uncomfortable because it seems like a stereotype that I don’t want to promote. To ask an incredibly vague question, I was wondering what your reaction was to Spencer’s emotions, and times in the story when he wanted to be destructive, or swore at people, etc.--I mean, your impression of him as a person.