Page 6 of Role Model

I step into the SEN space. It’s a spacious room with brightly coloured animals painted onto the white walls. An insipid zebra. A dopey giraffe. A lion that is smiling out at us.

As if trying to say: ‘I’m not really a predator. Don’t be scared. I’m actually really nice.’

“Aeriel!”

Dr Mars is sitting at a large, square table.

Papers, pens and stim toys are scattered across it.

Two other students are already there, Txai being one of them.

He looks up when Dr Mars says my name and his face breaks into a wide smile.

I’m not used to people reacting like this when I enter a room, so I don’t know what to do.

I try smiling back, though it’s a small and slightly embarrassed one.

“She’s here!” he cries out. “Niamh, this is Aeriel.”

41 The girl is small with brown hair and brown eyes.

She gives me a small nod in greeting and then goes back to what she’s writing.

She also has an electronic tablet next to her pencil case.

She sees me looking at it, so types some words into it.

She speaks to me through the device, with a voice that sounds a little like the navigational woman in Dad’s car.

“I’m Niamh.”

While the device says the words, she is the one I look at. “I’m Aeriel.”

“Nice to meet you,” Niamh says, through the tablet. She then returns her full attention to her drawing pad. I notice that she is wearing vibrant friendship bracelets, about ten on each wrist.

“You’re all over the internet,” Txai tells me.

I wince. “Apparently so.”

“Because of that message they made you film?”

I glance over at him, curiously. “How do you know they made me?”

He makes a scoffing sound. “It was all that neurotypical guff. ‘It doesn’t define me’. Whenever they make us say stuff like that, I want to be violently ill.”

I stare at him. I feel strangely stupid. It has never occurred to me that I’m allowed to think the sickly-sweet, inspirational rhetoric they want me to spout 42 is nonsense. That I’m allowed to laugh at it.

“Of course our brains define us,” Txai goes on. “Our brains control everything. We are our brains!”

Niamh nods in agreement and they share a look of solidarity.

I shakily sit down at the table, hoping that he’ll drop the subject. Dr Mars enters the room just in time, beaming at me.

“Excellent to see you joining us here today, Aeriel,” she says in her bombastic voice.

I’m polite enough to avoid reminding her that I didn’t really have a choice.

I think about Ana, Sable and Jaya back in Miss Leslie’s form room.

I wonder and worry about what they’re discussing.

I panic that they’re saying unkind things about me.

I bite my lip over it, feeling sick at the likely prospect.

“I thought,” Dr Mars interrupts my thoughts with her cheerful voice, “that you could start with an exercise that Txai and Niamh both did at the beginning of term.”

Txai snorts in amusement. He’s reading a graphic novel. Niamh does not react.

“You found it instructing, didn’t you, Txai?” Dr Mars says pointedly.

“Not even sure what that means,” Txai responds 43 without looking up from his reading.

“What is it?” I ask, my eyes flitting between the two of them.

“I want you to write letters to your autism.”

She cannot be serious.

Txai locks eyes with Niamh and both of their shoulders are shaking. They are both autistic, like me, and yet, unlike me, they are so free and exuberant. Well, Txai is. Niamh just seems so calm. So comfortable in her skin.

I wish I could find the will to laugh along, too.

“Letters to…”

“To your autism. What would you tell it? How does it make you feel? What would you like to say to it?”

Txai suddenly watches me with a serious expression, almost like he’s waiting to see what I will do.

I think the idea is extremely stupid. I don’t think of autism as this separate part of me, even though neurotypicals always act like it is.

It’s woven into me. It’s not a small part of the tapestry, it’s every piece of string. It’s every fibre.

When they want me to talk about being autistic, they still want it on their terms. And when I try to do it my way, they hear something completely different to what I’m trying to communicate.

But.

44 “Okay.”

Txai looks away, almost disappointed. Dr Mars, however, looks thrilled. She hands me paper and a pencil.

I stare at it for at least five minutes.

Niamh is colouring and drawing, with the kind of artistic skill that looks like a magic trick to someone like me, who cannot draw.

Txai is happily reading, breaking out occasionally to voice a seemingly random thought to Dr Mars, who smiles.

He will sometimes get up to walk around the room; sitting still for too long obviously unsettles him.

I make myself write.

Dear Autism,

I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t know what they want me to say to you.

You’re just there. Neutral, which means neither good or bad.

A part of me. I don’t like that teachers say it in front of everyone, because then everyone stares.

I know they don’t understand what it means and it makes me wish I could reach inside people’s heads and tidy them up.

I just want to be like everyone else. I didn’t like how they stared before the viral video, and I really 45 don’t like how they stare now.

Whether it’s doctors asking me questions, therapists making me talk to them, teachers pulling me up on stage or Mum’s weird staff members forcing me to film stuff for them, I feel like an animal in a cage.

It makes me feel wild. And I don’t like feeling wild. I want to feel easy.

I want to be just like other people.

There.

Aeriel.