Every year, I take a walk that I loathe taking. It entails coming face to face with some of my most painful emotional scars. I stand on my doorstep and take a deep breath. My legs push off, and I end up on the next step and the next after.
I pass my car, a silver Nissan Versa, and my keys jingle. That’s when I see my first ghost.
I see myself as a boy with red hair, talking with his father, a man in his late 30s in a black leather jacket. They walk 10 feet or so in front of me, trading stories. I can hear my excited, young voice.
“First, we were talking about ‘Air Bud: Golden Receiver,’ then we talked about your work, now we’re talking about school. The things we discuss while walking to school, huh!”
We pass through a neighborhood of white picket fences and incessantly barking dogs. As we get closer to our destination, the air seems to thicken. Every step feels heavier than the last. I find myself leading with the point of my foot, stabbing the ground to keep moving.
Part of the reason this journey is as hard as it is for me comes from what it represents. Before I started as a student at Lawnton Elementary, none of the faculty (or the students for that matter) had any idea what autism was. Over the course of the next several years, I would witness the best and the worst of the human race: compassion and an eagerness to do what’s right, and cruelty in the most seemingly innocent of gestures.
Since I’d been walking so slowly, the ghosts got ahead of me. By the time I catch up, they’re standing by the entrance. Exchanging warm smiles, they fold their middle and ring fingers into their palms while extending index, pinky and thumb—sign language for “I love you.”
“Be good,” the father says. He watches his son disappear into the school, then turns and crosses my path. He keeps his smile but continues walking, vanishing at the stop sign.
The lobby of the school is almost empty, with only a few older people wandering the halls, observing the students’ artwork. I recognize none of them (probably a good thing) but the sound of a door to a nearby conference room shutting triggers my next memory.
After several principals had come and gone, the one who took over for the remainder of my elementary school days did not believe autistic students had any business in a public school. Every time I found myself in the most minimal of trouble, he would leave my parents a message suggesting stricter discipline instead of getting to the root of my problems.
In one of my worst memories, I’m sitting in a chilly room devouring a cold lunch while other students peer through the window slit. Eventually, I stand up and—“The Count of Monte Cristo” having made an everlasting impression on me—start to pace around the room, shouting “God will give me justice!” I make it to my third declaration before I notice the principal at the door, his eyes burning with rage.
“What do you think you’re doing?! Sit down and shut up!” he roars. I freeze in place and see him stomp towards me—and then the memory stops, and I’m in the present again, looking through the window at the empty room. My fist has stopped just moments before colliding with the door. I sigh and lean against the wall. “I’m sorry, kid,” I say quietly.
My journey takes me through the lobby, where I’m visited by another memory—myself as a boy again, sitting on a bench. He unzips a giant pack and pulls out a copy of “The Hobbit.” Occasionally, his eyes dart to his right, and he nods to himself, seeming to know what got him there.
The end is in sight. From where I stand, I can see the painted silhouettes of athletes on the gym wall. The only problem is that, to get there, I have to pass by my fifth-grade classroom.
As I draw closer, I notice it still has the same decorations. All of the supplies are stored in the back of the room, including a paper trimmer. The hopeful and optimistic child from the start of my journey is there, but now he’s a depressed, self-destructive pariah. His peers joke about him behind his back and coat his textbooks in gibberish with their pencils.
At the end of another miserable day, he gets out of his seat and walks over to the paper trimmer. The teacher forbade students from using it because of its sharpness. Putting his hand on the handle, he moves it up and down, testing its movement. His eyes shoot to his right hand before his teacher can make out what he’s doing. “Justin, get away from that!” she screams. She tears his hand from the handle and escorts him down the hallway.
As he passes me, I remember his confusion—his longing to be noticed, and the endless, futile attempts in the days that followed to convince people he didn’t want to slice his hand off. If there’s a hell, that kid was in it for the rest of the school year. As the teacher marches them down the hallway, they disappear.
Somehow, in spite of the painful memories, I arrive at the gym. There are tables all across one side, with attendants checking the names of people who will cast their votes in the machines in the center of the room. Eventually I find my section.
“Name, please?” the attendant asks.
Despite being at the end of this journey, my mind is still processing every memory. Half of me is in the present while the other is very much in the past.
“Name?” she asks again, snapping me back to reality.
“Justin Miller,” I say, giving her my driver’s license.
“Long day?” she asks.
“You could say that.”
She hands back my driver’s license and tells me to head for the machine in the middle. At the moment, I’m fourth in line. Watching the other voters cast their ballots, I notice that as they disappear through the back, bright light briefly spills into the room.
That light makes me experience one final memory, not from Lawnton, but from my house years later, as I hold my bachelor’s degree in my hands. I want to make photocopies and send them in spite to everyone who thought I would amount to nothing. I ask my mom if I should do it. She brings her hand down on the document.
“No, this isn’t good enough for them,” she said. “Send them your Emmy when your TV concept becomes a hit, send them your Oscar when you write the next great motion picture. But don’t you dare make them settle for only this.”
The election official calls my name, and I go under the curtain. After a vicious struggle, the final few steps become painless. I cast my vote and disappear out the back, humming the refrain of Steely Dan’s “My Old School”: “And I’m never going back to my old school.” At least, not until the next election.
Justin Marc Miller is a graduate student in communications at Penn State Harrisburg.
