SHOUT - Adopted by Lin Manuel Miranda

NERD DOOM

My suspension consists of napping and only waking to feed Sebastian and help him use the bathroom. Occasionally he drags me from my bed and forces me to play trains and conjugate verbs with him. My brain feels likes it's been submerged in marshmallow fluff since the whole Gracie incident, but I force myself to suffer through thirty minutes of verb conjugation with Sebastian so he doesn't rat me out to Lin for sleeping through the day instead of making up undone homework assignments, or starting a new hobby, or changing the world or whatever.

At night, I will myself to dream of Pakistan, but I end up having nightmares: visions of tall men with knives for hands and hollow corpses in saris. On the night before going back to school, I wake screaming. Lin and Vanessa run in and breathe a sigh of relief when they see I'm safe in bed.

Lin rubs his eyes and squints into the dark. "We thought there was an intruder."

He crouches by the bedside and tells Vanessa to make me a cup of tea. He strokes my hair and sings Lullaby by Billy Joel while I weep into my pillow like some Precious Baby Bitch. Sucks, doesn't it? How Lin and Vanessa can see my tears, but they don't see the beast in my gut, scraping away at the walls of my chest, or the knives in my body, cut-cut-cutting me up-- or Operation Pakistan hammering holes in my brain. Don't care. Don't care about nightmares or Lin or the tea Vanessa is making me, or Lin's voice as he sings me to sleep, or the tears seeping through the pillow sham. After thirty minutes of Lin singing the same song over and over again, and Vanessa sitting on the bed with her hand on my arm, I tell them to screw off. They don't challenge me. When the door shuts, I get up and sit on the windowsill like I used to when I first came here. Somehow, the brick exterior of the next building looks more worn than it did in September. 

On the first day back at school, I ditch half of first period and retreat to the library, where I find a collection of ancient ghost stories and sit in the corner to read. Just when the protagonist is about to discover the poltergeist living in his closet, the librarian peeks her head around the bookcase. She tells me to report to first period immediately, and that I have after-school detention for cutting class. 

The first half of the day lasts ten years. I suffer through one class, put one foot in front of the other, and suffer through another one, and another, until the bell rings for lunch. Before I can escape to the cafeteria, my math teacher asks me to stay after class and hands back my most recent test grade. 39%. He tells me if I don't pass the next exam, I'll fail the course for good. I ignore him when he asks if everything is okay at home and chuck the paper in the trash on my way out the door. 

Now that I have no friends in the known universe, my lunch strategy has changed. For awhile I sat with Gracie and The Guys From the Newspaper Club. Now I eat alone at the end of the table next to theirs, where the only other inhabitants are a group of sixth grade boys who trade Pokemon cards and blow bubbles in their chocolate milk through their straws. I sit without going through the lunch line and slip in my earbuds. A burst of laughter cuts through the music. It's Gracie and her friends at the other table. I turn to watch them. Are they talking about me? They're certainly laughing enough. I turn the volume all the way up and rest my head on the table. If my family had stayed in Pakistan, I wouldn't have gone to school at all. Rohiwol's school was a tin roof sustained by four metal poles. Only boys whose families could pay the tuition were able to attend classes. I would have stayed home with my mother and learned to cook, clean, obey.

Who will I become when I go back? Will I still be able to be an artist?

I feel a hand on my shoulder. I look up from the table to see Ms. Rishanki standing over me. She says something I can't hear over the music.

I pull my earbuds out. "What?"

"I said, come to my classroom with me," she says. "You have work to do."