MY *SPECIAL THING*

(A revised version of my previously published story, "An Arts Education.")

I looked at my shitty, uninspiring middle school gym and the black shards of hair poking out of my thighs below my gym shorts.

This is not glory, I thought, exiting the locker room. 

I am destined for better.

But my yearning didn’t have an aim and I couldn’t name it. 

It was just a sixth grade malaise and a sense of waiting. For something. 

My foggy dissatisfaction took shape the day Lynn Hsu played a “gypsy dance” violin solo in front of the whole sixth grade. 

She was my friend and my touchstone for what glory looked like. In the case of Lynn, glory was a slim but sturdy looking child with wire glasses secured behind her by a tight croakie. She walked with an unevenness to her gait as if electricity was surging through her and she was trying to manage the current.

My body, in contrast, was already womanly and self-possessed at 11 years old, though I farted quite a lot, both from anxiety and from the rigorous course of oral antibiotics that I took, mostly in vain, to treat my untreatable acne.

Sometimes Lynn dressed like a little girl, and I so admired that she could still pass as one, with a headband that she would readjust as a physical tic to accompany her nervous laughter. 

I sat with Lynn at lunch and appreciated her curiosity and grounded demeanor. The cafeteria was debilitatingly loud, but our table had its own safer and softer energy in the glow of her focused presence.

Every so often, when she didn’t agree with something proclaimed at the table by one of the other girls, she’d cast her eyes down and levy a sharp judgment, but always in the words of someone else. 

Something like: “Well, I’m not allowed to have sleepovers. My father says it’s a waste of time.” Or “I’m not supposed to eat ice cream. My mom says I eat too much.” Or “My teacher says, ‘Never apologize for mistakes you make onstage. No one will notice unless you point them out.’”

Though she patently lacked physical grace, her percussive fingers thumped gamely when she spoke, flying across the expanse of Saran Wrap, searching her tuna sandwich for the Scotch Tape that held the plastic closed.

Lynn was a violinist, a pianist and a clarinetist. She once drew some quick drawing in art class and I later found out that it had sold:

To a grownup. For money. 

When it came time to estimate the number of jelly beans outside Ms. Grove’s math class, Lynn’s estimate of 547 beans was closest to the actual 549. 

My estimate was 315. Other kids guessed, ‘like …a thousand?’ ‘A million?’

Though I was in all the honors classes, no participation medal in the world could have tricked me into believing that I shared academic air space with Lynn.

Lynn was often teased, but the popular kids couldn’t really get an angle on her.

“Hey Lynn,” they’d call out, “Would you cry if you ever got a 99 percent on the science test?” 

Walking next to her during these intrusions, my heart tensed. What was she going to say?

Her rebuttals came in the disarming form of earnest statements. 

“Hah,” she’d reply. “I bet you did great on your science test, John.” 

Then she’d stage whisper to me, “John is really good at science.” 

John then would wander away, unclear as to whether he’d achieved his aim.

I, who was universally and equally liked by the popular kids, the goth kids, the unremarkable band kids, the kids who got bussed off to the high school for advanced math classes, was alert to every gentle tectonic shift of the sixth grade social landscape. I felt certain that, charming and inoffensive as I was, if I had wanted to, I could have devoted my Wednesday afternoons to treading the Westfarms mall’s sunny corridors with Carlee Stupak, popular Emily, Becky, Jenny and some of the other pretty Jewish girls, but I knew that wasn’t my true path. They were wasting their capable pre-teen minds, hemorrhaging their best brain cells at Bath and Body Works.

Lynn, though, she stayed above the fray. Or maybe she didn’t even notice the fray? She was always somewhere better than how it felt in my brain.

Lynn was wearing a puffed-sleeve dress with a pastel pink paisley print. A waist-high satin sash was tied at her back in a flouncy bow, that day, as we all gathered for the spring awards assembly. Lynn looked very 1989 that 1997 morning. A cardinal sin for any other student, but the way she carried her broad, even shoulders and positioned her patent leather feet beneath her hips, it was clear that Lynn was about to blow the roof off of King Phillip Middle School.

My mom was next to me because I was set to receive some dumb awards for some several silly things like: my beginner Spanish class and English class and select choir. As if other kids couldn’t also speak English, sing non-denominational winter songs and memorize a list of colors in a foreign language.

…Like, rojo is red. I could have literally guessed that….

My teachers were pleased with me, but I was unimpressed with my achievements and I wriggled in the auditorium seat, wincing because I had tried again to shave my pubes off and was incredibly itchy in this ill-fitting woman’s body that had been lent me too early. 

When all the parents and students had settled, Lynn, in her childlike dress, with the proud, flat chest that I was sure better suited a girl of our age, took to the stage and tucked herself neatly into the crook of the school’s baby grand piano.

An expectant hush fell over the audience. Even my inflamed mons pubis fell quiet now, as my focus extended fully toward my friend onstage. 

In the crackling silence, Lynn touched her bow voicelessly to the violin. She gave a pert, authoritative nod to the adult at the piano and they were off. It was a “gypsy dance.” I loved this type of virtuosic, cadenza-laden music that would accelerate from a danceable rhythm to something positively demonic that only a violin could conjure.

Lynn flew, darted, spun and dove across and around the instrument, making the halls of our cinder block school ring like none of us had ever known it could. The walls of the school itself seemed to come awake, blasting the dust off of groggy-eyed, middle-aged teachers, and their students, even the most chronically disruptive of them, were cowed into a docile state of suspended awe. By Lynn and her violin. 

My confused little purgatory body buzzed with something even more absorbing than envy — it was — a call to prayer — a desire to take my whole personhood and launch it in one direction at one thing.

But I didn’t know what my “one thing” was and my desperation for it reached a fever pitch as the last searingly clear, crisply-intoned double stops reverberated through the space: cutting straight across the expanse of humid air, pendulous with Teen Spirit, unrequited pubescent pheromones, and orthodontically-induced halitosis. 

Lynn held her violin aloft long enough for the sound to fill every corner of that moribund auditorium, kissed with new life by her genius. Then, releasing us from our trance, Lynn took her bow and… shuffled away, darting offstage with her head down, glasses slipping off to be caught by her croakie.

My mother, Margie, flew to her feet (we all did), and while applauding, understandably, after the feat she had just witnessed, my mother let her defenses down and she whispered to me, 

“You know with kids you just clap to be polite, but with this, you want to clap because it’s actually so good.”

My mother will deny having said this. And I admit that memory, as a general rule, is fallible, but… not mine! And that is what she said. 

“With kids… you just clap to be polite, but with this, you want to clap because it’s actually so good.”

So… that was that. 

My mom then, had been lying when she said I was “good” in the musical production of Cats. My “Skimbleshanks” was just average. I had sensed it then, now I knew for sure. And there was nothing special about my voice recitals, I realized now in the cacophony of endless applause for Lynn. When my voice would choke with fear because I was so nervous about forgetting the words… I saw it now. I was a dilettante. I had nowhere to put my greatness. No one true talent to hold it and to show it so that other people could see the power that I knew was secretly inside me. Power that felt just like this astounding solo looked and sounded. Like Lynn, burning down the assembly hall and birthing in its place, a cathedral. 

The rest of the day after the 11am awards assembly, I spent as a tween-aged zombie haunted by a lack of purpose. I watched the grownups in my midst to confirm that, yes, Lynn had unmoored them, too.

Hot Mrs. Paulus, our science teacher, stood mid-classroom as if stranded before our last period class.

“You know,” she began tremulously, facing the white board like it was Judgment Day, “Some of us will never be as good at anything as Lynn was today at 11 years old.” I felt my skeleton begin to fold and crumble into the earth. Our science teacher continued, now turning torpidly toward the class:

“What Lynn has is really special. And. Not everyone finds their special thing.” 

Mrs. Paulus’s faraway look and her constantly evolving hairdos told me that Hot Mrs. Paulus was one of those people who had not found her special thing. 

“Oh God, let that not be me,” I thought, gripping my pencil. “Let me find my special thing… before I am 12.”

The awards I’d amassed in that late-morning assembly, for my performance in Spanish class, choir, and English, were now with my mom, who’d frame them to hang in my room. She was proud of me. I mean. That was her job. Her job was to leave her job to come be proud of me, which was her real job. When she wasn’t at her full time office job, which was for money. (Also for me.)

But, awarded, as they were, after Lynn had played, my certificates seemed to me consolation prizes: A toaster instead of a yacht for my participation in the gameshow of middle school and its close cousin, the rest of my life.

“Everyone speaks English,” I grumbled into my baked potato at dinner that night. “How can they even give an award for that?”

Maybe, though, Lynn had found me just in time? Our friendship, just an acquaintance really, was about as close as I ever saw anyone get to her in that time. I enjoyed her singularly blunt remarks, always divorced from any semblance of sixth grade decorum. 

If I hung out with her, I thought, observing and copying her ways of being in the world, maybe then I’d be saved and never end up sad like Hot Mrs. Paulus, who had never found her special thing, and maybe then I would never end up dumbstruck like the parents in the auditorium, who could do nothing but clap and wonder how it might feel to be extraordinary, and most importantly, someday, maybe my mom would fly to her feet because some one thing I did was so good that she just — couldn’t — sit still. 

~~~

Lynn went on to do diabetes research. I met up with her, 20 years ago now, at a coffee shop near the Princeton laboratory where she was a freshman, and I asked her about her work. I knew that she used to see colors when she played music. So I wondered, did she see colors now, too, when she did science? 

Across our hot chocolates, she chewed her blueberry muffin. 

She told me of her work in the lab, saying:

“I hate when the mice scream,” then she shrugged:

“I play music whenever I can.”

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***All of the children’s names have been changed in this story.