by Timothy Jung (6th)

Chapter 1

Life isn’t that simple.

For example, I could’ve realized that before I went to school today. But, like I said, life isn’t that simple. Of course Jim was here at school. No one calls him Peter, unless the rumors are true, and his parents call him by that name. Not even the teacher. Then again, nobody calls me Johnathon. No one ever calls me anyways. No one speaks to me. Not even the teacher. But who knows, maybe they do call me Johnathon. For me, communication is sign language or writing. Nothing else. It was like that from the very beginning. How did I get so successful?

That’s a story for another time. 

I’m in middle school, and it’s becoming more and more difficult. For one, there’s Jim. You’d think that my being deaf would make it any easier to focus. Not really. There’s always some sort of vibrations getting toward me. They hit desks, or as my teacher calls it, “banging”. I sometimes wonder, or imagine what it would be like to hear something. I try to think about that, but it’s hard to think about listening to something when you’ve never done it before. Like a baby, who doesn’t know any language, he finds it hard to communicate other than shouting. But unlike me, it can shout and hear itself. When I was a baby, I would cry for hours on end, not knowing that they could hear me. Well, that’s what Grandfather communicated to me, and that’s all I’ll ever know about my childhood.

There are always people at my school, trying to help people like me. And sometimes I feel as if the best way of helping me is by bringing me into a real classroom, you know, the kind that doesn’t need SED. SED is so annoying! They make it look like some great place to be, having the name, Special Education for the Disabled. To me, it’s name is just supposed to make fun of the people in it. For one, my friend Jackson is always being hunted by people like Jim, and my other friend Sam is always ganged up on, and he can’t fight them all himself. I communicate to him to try not to fight, but his temper is always high, so he starts getting ideas of how to beat them all.

Right now I’m in math class, and that means that I’m in trouble. The only reason I haven’t completed my homework was because this week was only the first week of school, and they mixed up the homework for me with braille homework, and I’ve never in my life studied braille, but my teacher didn’t know that. And it didn’t help when I tried to communicate to her trying to say that I was supposed to take the other math homework sheet, because she obviously couldn’t understand my sign language. But that was only because she only understood American sign language. I was doing universal sign language. So when I went over to her to communicate to her that I was supposed to do the other math homework, she just looked at me, and couldn’t understand. Then I tried to do the one thing I learned in American sign language. 

I do universal sign. Finally, after 3 times of doing it, she understood. But then her mouth opened. Uh-oh. I’ve never tried to lip-read, let alone successfully doing it. When I tried to communicate with her again, she tried to nod her head and say something, and then she stopped. 

She tried the universal sign, but all I saw was, Do you need to stop iPhone marshmallows? Well, that was it, and I couldn’t survive one bit of it. I even got an F on my homework.