When the doctor said I had lost the hearing in my left ear, I pictured a wall between my two ears, and me hearing only what was on one side of the wall. The whole left half of the world would be silent. But I heard the doctor’s words and he was sitting on my left side.
“I can hear you fine,” I said. He smiled at me and kept talking to my mom. I had been thinking the muffledness was due to the bandage on my ear. But the doctor disagreed. It was true I could hear, but it was also true that hearing was different than before. I had to work harder to hear. My ear had to stretch itself out further into the world, around the sticky bandages, to gather in more sound. I felt it was actually working. My ear was a hard-working, talented ear. In any case, I didn’t always mind the world outside my head being muffled. The world was a loud world.
At home after the appointment, I laid on the couch and my mom went into the kitchen with my aunt, telling her in a quiet voice about the doctor’s visit and then giving her the details about how I got beat up. Her whisper was sharp and fast. I pictured her as a bird perched on my aunt’s shoulders, trying to convey an urgent message before she had to fly away again. She was angry. So angry. I could see it in her beady bird eyes that looked at my aunt as if my aunt could do anything about bullies.
Maybe my aunt could. I pictured her as a knight, like the ones from the fairy tales. She was the youngest child, and the youngest child was always the one who saved the family.
I was the oldest child. The oldest child was always the responsible one, or the proud one. I wasn’t either of those things. I was the one who needed talk therapy and occupational therapy and equestrian therapy and visits to special classrooms. My mom said autism gave me special strengths, which was nice of her to say, and I even knew she meant it. But I also knew that they weren’t the kind of special strengths appreciated by people my age, or maybe people in general. Was burying your head in the crook of your elbow and curling up like a ball while someone hit you a special strength? Maybe. Mostly I thought it was a stupid thing to do because I had still gotten hurt. If I had hit him back or if I were a faster runner, I would still have a working left ear.
I watched muffled TV and tried not to listen to my aunt and my mom. My cousin, Dodie, sat on the arm of my chair and watched with me. My little brother was upstairs napping. Dodie sang along with a commercial jingle. Then there was an ad for a lawyer. My brother and I knew all the words to this commercial even though it wasn’t a song. I whispered with the narrator’s voice, “Have you or a loved one been in an accident?”
The only time I had ever seen an ear bleed was in an old black and white movie where a boy had his ears boxed. That was also the first time I had heard the phrase “ears boxed” and at first I pictured the boy’s ears wrapped up in a box. Blood in black and white movies looks like molasses.
I kept whispering. “Call the law offices of Joe Bornstein. Operators are standing by. Call now at 1-800-347-5737. That’s 1-800-347-5737.” They always repeated the number two more times, just in case you had to get up to get a pencil and paper to write it down, which was silly because anyone could find Joe Bornstein’s number by Googling it, or by just looking at the side of a city bus.
I heard my aunt’s voice drift in from the kitchen. “You could call a lawyer.”
My mom huffed.
“I’m serious. It’s one option. You could sue.”
“Who? A thirteen year old?”
“The art school. Or the boy’s parents.”
I pictured Kenneth and his parents standing opposite my mom and I, with Judge Judy in front of us. I saw the kids from cartooning class who always laughed at Kenneth’s jokes sitting on Kenneth’s side, behind the low wooden wall that separates the audience from the defendants and the plaintiffs. I saw the red-faced man from the commercials standing next to me. I said a little silent prayer to my mom, Don’t call Joe Bornstein. Please don’t call Joe Bornstein.
I didn’t realize my ear was bleeding when I first got hit. It just hurt and I fell down in the head-in-the-elbow pose. Which my mom said was good because it protected my teeth. If I had been facing him head on, he probably would have knocked out some of my teeth.
I still don’t know why Kenneth hit me. It was the end of art class and many of the moms were already there for pick-up. My mom was not there yet. If she had been, maybe Kenneth would have thought twice. I walked by him on my way out while he was bent over on the floor tying his shoes. It was a narrow hallway. I didn’t think I had bumped into him, but he called out to me, “Hey! Why’d you do that?”
I said, “What?” and I saw him, crouched on the floor; his pale face was sharp. It was a scary look, the kind of look I didn’t want to look at, so I just turned and kept walking out the door and into the parking lot.
He followed me and he pulled me around to face him and he said something else, but I didn’t hear it. He raised his hand to hit me, and my brain was smart enough to move my head to protect my teeth, but not smart enough to protect my left ear. It only took one hit. So I guess Kenneth was stronger than he realized or maybe he was exactly as strong as he wanted to be. He moved away from me the minute I went down, still in my head-in-the-crook-of-my-elbow pose.
Even though I could only see him out of the corner of the eye that peeked around my elbow, my eyes were fixed on him, attached to him. I couldn’t let him out of my sight. There was no other sight besides him. And so I saw everything. I saw what other people probably couldn’t see. The punch connected us, the punch giver and the punch receiver, tied together by a thread like the drip of blood between my hand and my ear. I saw weird emotions cross his face after I went down. He looked afraid and I immediately understood it, even though I had not understood anything this kid had done before. The jokes he made were always confusing and not funny, but I laughed at them because all the kids in the class did and I knew I was supposed to laugh too. Or face the consequences. Immediately, without wanting to, I felt sorry for Kenneth, which made me feel stupid. Just as stupid as protecting my teeth but not my left ear made me feel. Poor Kenneth, I thought, he didn’t mean to do that.
The other kids had stopped walking to their individual cars and were standing there, looking at us. Maybe they were feeling sorry for Kenneth too. Their moms stood there watching too, also seeing Kenneth see himself do something so unexpected. Kenneth backed away from me and then he pulled himself up like a heron on the edge of a pond about to take flight, and he ran to the end of the parking lot where his dad always parked their silver SUV. His dad was looking at his phone, not looking at Kenneth, not looking at me. Kenneth got in the car on the passenger’s side and then the silver SUV pulled out of the parking lot. I pictured them in their car as they drove away.
Kenneth’s dad: How was art class today, kiddo?
Kenneth (a little out of breath): Not bad.
Kenneth’s dad: Learning some new skills?
Kenneth: Yeah, I’m getting pretty good.
By that point the drawing teacher had come out and someone was telling him what happened. I was still crouched down. All I felt in my ear was some pain. I put my hand up to it and it was sticky, like warm molasses. I looked at the blood, which looked dark gray in the shadow created by the parking lot lights. My mom came and put her hand on me. I could hear her saying, “What happened? What happened?” But I couldn’t answer her because I was still with Kenneth in his dad’s car, watching to see what he would say, whether he would tell his dad what happened. Maybe if he told his dad, I could find a way to tell my mom.
A mom of someone else in class came up to us. This mom had yellow hair like straw, that stretched in an arc around her chin. She had two flower-shaped earrings in each ear. She said to my mom, “We don’t really know what happened. They came out of the door and Kenneth was running right behind Jacob. Then he grabbed him, hit him, and ran off.”
“And none of you stopped him?”
“It happened really fast.” Another mom chimed in. My mom had gotten me up by this point. I was looking at my hand, at the liquid that had come out of my ear. Now that I was in the light, it was red, as it should be.
“It wasn’t so fast,” I said. It was slow. It wasn’t over. It was still happening.
Kenneth was still riding in his car, not telling his dad what he had done. I was still standing in the parking lot with strings of blood dripping through my knuckle.
My mom stopped to look me over then. She touched my ear and then wiped the blood she got on her finger onto her other hand. She was trying to get it off by spreading it around both hands and diluting it. I couldn’t dilute the blood on me because it kept flowing.
“I’ve got to get you to urgent care,” she said to me. The other moms and kids were starting to go to their cars. I kept thinking something else was going to happen. Maybe my mom did too. Maybe a parade of us were all going to walk down the street, all the way to Kenneth’s house (I didn’t know where Kenneth’s house was, but I was sure some of the other kids did), so we could tell Kenneth’s parents what Kenneth probably wasn’t going to tell them.
Our teacher patted me on the back and asked my mom to tell her how it went. Then she went inside.
Cartoons came back on and my mom and my aunt kept talking.
It had been three days and I hadn’t been back to school yet. My mom was afraid to send me and I didn’t want to go with my ear bandage and muffled hearing. Kenneth was at school. Dodie told me she had seen him. She said she and her friends refused to talk to him. One of them even called him a loser. I knew she meant well, but did they know how it was for him? I might not hear again in my left ear, but he was someone who could take away someone else’s hearing without even knowing he was doing it. This was there on his face, plain as day, after he hit me. I think not knowing what your hand will do is worse than muffled hearing. I pictured Kenneth wearing a sling for the rest of his life, his pale peach hand stuck inside the sweaty cotton, wrapped up so it would be under his control and Kenneth wouldn’t have to worry what it might do next.
Later, once my aunt and cousin went home, my mom called my teacher to tell her about the doctor’s appointment. My mom was angry, but trying not to let it show too much. She didn’t mention Joe Bornstein and I was relieved. Toward the end of the phone call, my mom said to her, “I just don’t get it. Who was watching the kids? Why wasn’t someone there?”
I didn’t hear my teacher’s answer, but I didn’t have to. I could tell my mom myself. It was an easy answer. Everyone was there. Everyone was watching.