Out of My Mind Read Free

me in my seat, she almost screamed at me, “What is wrong with you?”
    Well, she knew the answer to that one, but she knew that was not my usual behavior. I gulped, sniffed, and finally calmed down. I hoped the people at the store watched the news.
    When we got home, she called the doctor and told him about my crazy behavior. He sent a prescription for a sedative, but Mom didn’t give it to me. The crisis was over by then.
    I don’t think Mom ever figured out what I was trying to say that day.

CHAPTER 4
    Doctors. Where do I start? Doctors really don’t get me. Mom’s a nurse, so I guess she speaks their language, but they sure don’t know how to talk to me.
    I’ve seen dozens of doctors in my life, who all try to analyze me and figure me out. None of them can fix me, so I usually ignore them and act like the retarded person they think I am. I paste on a blank look, focus on one wall, and pretend their questions are too hard for me to understand. It’s sort of what they expect anyway.
    When I turned five, it was time to think about enrolling me in school. So my mother took me to adoctor whose job it was to figure out how smart I was. She wheeled me in, locked the brake so my wheelchair would not roll, and made sure the lap strap was fastened. When my seat belt comes undone—and it does every once in a while—I slide out of that wheelchair like a piece of wet spaghetti.
    The specialist was a very large man. The bottom button of his shirt had come undone, and his stomach poked through above his belt. Gross!
    “My name is Dr. Hugely,” he said in a booming voice.
    For real. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
    “We’re going to play a game today, okay? I’ll ask you some questions, and you get to play with the toys here. Won’t that be fun?”
    I knew it would be a long, long hour.
    He brought out a stack of well-used, hopefully not lead-tainted, wood blocks, then leaned in so close to me, I could see the pores in his face. Gross! “Can you stack these in order according to size?” he said loudly and slowly, as if I were hard of hearing and really stupid.
    But who was being stupid? Didn’t he know I couldn’t grab the blocks? Of course I knew which block was bigger than the other. But I couldn’t stack them if he paid me money! So I just took my arm and swept them all to the floor. They fell with a wooden clatter. I triednot to laugh as he picked them up. He breathed really hard as he reached for them.
    Next, he held up glossy eight-by-ten cards with different colors painted on each one. “Tell me when you see the color blue, Melody,” he said in that voice that told me he thought this was all a waste of time.
    When the blue card showed up, I pointed to it and made a noise. “Buh!” I said.
    “Marvelous! Tremendous! Stupendous!” he shouted. He praised me like I had just passed the test to get into college. If I could have rolled my eyes, I would have.
    Then he showed me green, so I kicked and made a noise, but my mouth can’t make the G sound. The doctor looked disappointed.
    He scribbled something on his clipboard, pulled out another stack of cards, then said, loudly, “I’m going to ask you some questions now, Melody. These might be hard, but do your best, okay?”
    I just looked at him and waited while he placed the first set of cards in front of me.
    “Number one. Which one of these is not like the others?”
    Did he get this stuff from Sesame Street ?
    He showed me pictures of a tomato, a cherry, a round red balloon, and a banana. I know he was probably looking for the balloon as the answer, but that just seemedtoo easy. So I pointed to the banana because the first three were round and red, and the banana was not.
    Dr. Hugely sighed and scribbled more notes. “Number two,” he said. He showed me four more cards. This time there were pictures of a cow, a whale, a camel, and an elephant. “Which animal gives birth to a calf?”
    Now, I watch Animal Planet all the time. I know for a fact that