Edward Adrift

left him in Billings, you bitch.”
    My left arm shoots out, and my hand grabs Kyle by his coat. This surprises me, as I did not ask my left arm and hand to do any such thing.
    “Let go of me, you fucking freak.”
    Donna slaps Kyle across the face. Hard. The sound of her hand against his skin reverberates (I love the word “reverberates”) through the cold in this empty park.
    Kyle looks at her. He looks shocked, like someone told him something incredible and scary. He looks at me. Donna is twitching beside me. I want to start running and not stop until I am away from here and what just happened.
    And then Kyle starts crying. He cries and he cries and Donna stops twitching, and she reaches for her boy, and he tries to shoveher off, but she reaches for him again, and he lets her pull him in. He sobs into her shoulder, and Donna is crying, too. There’s a very small voice inside of me that says I should hug them, but that impulse does not prevail.
    I sit down on a park bench and I watch them.
    I wish I weren’t here, but I also feel like this is where I am supposed to be.
    Those two things, together, make no sense.
    How can I help my friend when I am lost, too?

    By Kyle’s own action, he is stuck in his bedroom again, the door closed. Donna says she isn’t sure if Kyle is locked away from the rest of us, or if we’re locked away from him. This is one of the things I like about Donna. She is clearly hurting for her son, and though she can cry and hug him when he needs it, she’s also not one to let him slide when he acts inappropriately and calls her a nasty name like “bitch.” (I’m setting aside, for a moment, the fact that he called me a freak. That hurt my feelings, but I’m trying to remember that none of these things with Kyle are about me. He will have to do something to repair his relationship with me. That much is clear. But that can wait for another time.)
    Donna takes away his Wii and his computer. She tells him that he needs to sit quietly and think about things, and that he can come out when Victor comes home. Together, as a family—and it makes me feel good that Donna includes me in that word, “family”—we will all sit down and talk about Kyle and where we will go from here.
    Even though these are awful circumstances, I’m glad to be part of this. I usually don’t get to help sort out adult situations with other adults. When I think about it rationally, which is what Ialways try to do, I can see that this is an understandable response, given some of the things I have struggled with, but being left out of things for my own benefit still frustrates me. What few people outside of my friends and family seem to grasp is that I am not too stupid to understand adult problems. I am not stupid at all. I’m developmentally disabled, and so I process information in ways that often don’t make sense to the people they call neurotypical. (I love the word “neurotypical.”)
    There’s something else that people don’t realize. Because of my long association with Dr. Buckley, I have come to know something about rage and how to control it, or at least mitigate it. When I began to see Dr. Buckley, I was consumed with rage, although I didn’t realize it, and I did not know how to let it go or channel it into something constructive. I had been ordered to stay at least five hundred feet away from Garth Brooks and to not send him any more letters of complaint, even though I still contend that he ruined country music. I had been fired from a job—that time for my conduct and not as an involuntary separation. I had been banned from an Albertsons in Billings—not my favorite one, the one on Grand Avenue and Thirteenth Street West, but the one on Sixth Street West—because I had knocked down an old lady, even though I still contend that was not my fault.
    Dr. Buckley helped me overcome all of that. She helped me see that writing my letters of complaint could be a positive action, in that it would allow me to blow off steam in the act of writing. I could then file the letter away without ever sending it. That didn’t make a lot of sense at first, but it really does work. These days, I no longer write a daily letter of complaint, although I will write one if someone genuinely wrongs me. In those cases I even send the letter, and I’ve often seen positive results (in November, for instance, I got ten free pizzas because one that was delivered to my house arrivedsoggy and I wrote a letter of