(HANDPLATES) Give Me a Sign

  Sans stared. Stared at the cracks in his heart, the cracks in his desk, the journal reading S-1 instead of his name. He wrote... and the cracks in his heart leapt onto the paper, soothed with each word of the entry...
_____
hey. sans here. people in school can have a monumental dose of misunderstanding sometimes. alright, a lot of the time. i believe that we're speaking the same language, as far as my english teacher says, but... something weird is going on. they talk with each other with their mouths and carbon dioxide coursing through their windpipes, but their hands are still hanging motionless at their sides... no signing, no writing. i dunno. really.
just take today as an example. while i was walking into my school for the first block, some other, older students approached me. they said something. 'course, i didn't understand it. so i just started signing, "i don't understand" just in case it would work. 'course, it didn't work. but it was worth a try.
so they took these weird ear goggle things out of this plastic container that said "headphones". they put it over my ears, and all of a sudden, i couldn't hear anything. everything was...dimmed, i guess. but then, the loudest music started to rip into my earlobes. piercing. in fact, it was so painful that i started to make the same noises out of my throat that i make whenever i'm, well, in pain. and whenever others are in pain. it was all loud and dumb sounding and ugly, and i hit the headphones off of me. all i could hear was this ringing sound, like the ringing of a computer glitching or a super high pitched bell, before i started to hear... laughing.
laughing.
i don't know what's going on. my teacher wrote and asked if i was okay. i just hope papyrus is. i don't wanna see him go through the same thing.
i...
i dunno, really.
_______
I write on his paper. Gosh, having a special needs kid in a regular class is so hard sometimes.
Are you okay, young man?
Oh, no, oh, no, I didn't man to say "young man." Haha, I keep teaching the kids to use pencils, and look at how much of a hypocrite I am. "Young man." How embarrassing...
He nods.
He's still shaking.
Are you sure?
He nods.
He's still shaking.
He looks back at the Three.
He's shaking a little more.
I know what to do. Even if he doesn't, I still know what to do.
Mostly. Should I pat his head? Should I give him a hug? I know special needs children sometimes have special doses of affection- some need more, some need less- but what would happen to him if I just sprung on him now? What would happen to me if I just sprung on him now?
So I take a peer around the room.
Most of the other kids are still absorbed in their work or their conversations, especially the Three. No, not the wall not the wall not the- geez, it's going to cost me another ten dollars to get the Goof Off. I sigh, just loud enough for Sans underneath me to hear, and he sighs louder. That's what makes me pat his head before I go to the back of the room.
Of course the Three see me coming. Of course I do. And they stop talking, and they move out of the room, and they leave just another marker-streak on the hall before I leave.
"Now, can any of you three tell me what happened earlier?"
Three head-shakes, almost simultaneous.
"You know what I'm talking about. He's almost crying, you know."
God, I have such a big mouth. But it's all an experiment, you know. Just to see if they're paying attention. Or maybe it's to see whether it'll make things better or worse.
The three of them shift their gaze down a little, just a little.
"What happened first?"
Nothing. A whole heap of it, other than the kids chirping and working away behind me. Busy little bees, all of them. Even though God above placed me on this earth for sixty years, I still can't imagine how these kids survive under this wreck of an educational system.
"Well?"
Another heap of nothing before the dams break.
"It was all Malcolm's fault! He said it, he said it! But we just thought that he was deaf, that's all..."
"He is?" Just how drawn-up are these kids? Just how judgemental?
"Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yesyesyes Yes!"
They all chirped and chirped.
One of the others... Fred, I think it was... makes sure his eyes light up. "He does weird things with his hands all the time, and they're all spazzy whenever he wants to say something! It's so dang...weird, Mrs. Patrick! And we all did a little experiment, that was all, with our music..."
Everyone nodded.
"...just to see if he really, you know, couldn't hear! So we had to turn it allll the way up, just to make sure!"
At first, Ivan, the last of the three, was laughing. I think it was at first understanding, but a little edge started to come up, all crinkled and wrinkled and naughty. "Yeah, allll the way up. And then he just started screaming like those kids down the hall who have... something wrong with them, something-"
"Stop."
That was all that needed to be said. That was all that needed to be done. Except for one last thought process. How did I present it? How do I tell the unimaginable? How do I tell the story that even I couldn't hear fully? How do I tell the same story that he told me when he was first introduced to my classroom, trying to hide his face as he wrote entires about labs and death and hits and cuts and anger and comas and terror and terror and terror and terror and terror...
I am a teacher. This is what God put me on Earth to do. To tell the unexplainable. To explain the untellable.
"Everyone, put your hand over your left eye."
There were a few shrugs, a few "Why?"s, but in about a minute or so, everyone had a hand over their left eyes. It only took a few minutes for the complaints to start, to echo so that some of the kids in the room started to huddle. "Come out, come on out, everyone!" So Sans would see. So what if Sans would see? He would know. And he already knows so much. He's already seen too much.
"Now, I want to tell you about your brain. Your brain isn't exactly the same all the time. And sometimes changes can happen, boys. Some of these changes happen when you treat someone badly. Really badly. The more and more you treat someone badly, the more and more their brain changes. But life doesn't like it when your brain changes. So it gets harder and harder to live. When you're in a lab..."
Everybody knew- Sans, try as hard as he can, couldn't hide it indefinitely. I looked at the back of the crowd, and two little white eyes in black sockets stared at me back. Fixated, not terrified. This is what I needed.
"...when you're in a lab, or some other scary place, and somebody really, really mean has control of you, they start to treat you badly. Let's say they call you something bad. Well, your brain changes. Let's say they smack you. Your brain changes. They smack you again. Your brain changes again. And sometimes, you can't go back. So your brain is stuck like this."
The one pair of eyes turned into thirty little, fixated stars. There was no more stirring inside the classroom.
"These changes are called depression. And that's no laughing matter. And is that any way to treat anyone?"
A "no!", collective and massive, throbbed across the hallway.
Even the Three's headshakes looked genuine. Three little headshakes, three little changes in the world.