Fuck(, it's) the police!

Three shadows in the rafters dressed in dark clothing fall suddenly silent at the heavy footsteps below. We can see him walking two floors below us, or more we can see his flashlight at the bottom of the drop. A door closes and we hear the footsteps fade into the next room.

"Oink," one of my friends giggles, "oink oink oink!"

"This place is getting busier and busier, we may need to move on."

***

When it drizzled we all piled back into the house and under the makeshift tent, and when the sun returned we piled back out to the grills in the parking lot with fresh beers. Spirits were high; both among the partygoers and in the bottles Hammertime was using to make me another SoCo and lime.

The majority of the party did not need Hammertime's extensive bartending talents to wind up a bit besides themselves and removed from their common sense, and whoever had placed the grill under an open window on the third floor might not have had much common sense to remove. The third floor residents had never been on the best terms with the rest of unit 66 to begin with, and it wasn't too long before rumors of the police having been called on the party were flying thick as underclassmen began slinking away from the scene. I caught out of the corner of my eye Magpie vaulting up onto the railing of the first floor deck and from there onto the garage roof, bottle of whiskey in hand bolting for the pinnacle of the structure roaring "Fuck the police!" the whole way. Reaching the top he stood there, still waving the jar and screaming his head off.

It wasn't actually the police who showed up the first time but the fire department. We got Magpie down from the roof prior to that, and convinced the 20 year old carrying an illegal firearm in one hand and a beer in the other to go back in the house just prior to their arrival. Py was dispatched to greet them, and aside from the fact that he was wearing a shirt which read "Fuck politics, I just want to burn shit down," it all went rather well. He laughed and considered changing shirts after that, but decided it would be useless after the fire department already left, much to our amusement when he later had to entertain a police squad car which had found our party particularly interesting.

***

"And," the officer leans in close to Py, "Do they let you do this at home?"

Its dark outside and we're standing on a rural bystreet not too far from the university. I'm facing one cop car, and I can tell there is another behind me from my shadow. There's a third one on my left and behind the one I am facing I can see two more. Ginger, Gilby and Py aren't doing a whole ton better.

"My dad...we lit these off when I was little...I thought fireworks were a fine-able offense in this state officer...not an arrest-able one..."

The officer leans over close to Py's face and raises his flashlight, "Oh?"

They rattled us for a significant amount of time before letting us go, enough that when I woke up the next morning and put on my black robe I was still thinking a bit of them.

It is tradition that the city police line the top of the crowd the graduation procession walks through, and as I strode to pomp and circumstance I suddenly found a hand on my shoulder and upon turning, a familiar grinning face. It was the same cop from the night before.

"You're being good today, aren't you Pika?"

A flippant giggling boy from my freshman dorm was in line right behind me, "oh HER officer, she's never up to anything good..."

***

"And his hand tightened on my shoulder," I reached out and pinched Brewer's shoulder next to me at the table for effect, "and I honestly stood there and thought 'man, if I don't get my diploma out of this, the scene at my graduation will be the least of my problems' so I bolted for it."

Brewer giggled and so did the rest of his team-mates. "So," he asked, "Did he chase?"

"Nah," I laughed, "I guess he was just taking an opportunity to fuck with me, see if he could scare me. He did a damn good job I'll admit..."

Captain grinned and split his chopsticks to dig into his meal, "That's 90% of a good cop's job you realize... scaring people into behaving."

Brewer giggled a little again, "Well, looks like most of them are only good at about half of it."

Eighths

When my brother was young he lacked the insight that other people were people too. When he hurt himself he caused himself physical pain which his body told him was bad. When he caused physical pain to others it did not hurt him. Thus, his mind never added up that it was bad.

This resulted in a two year old child who would grab a fist full of hair and pull it as hard as he could to get your attention. From a standpoint of a logical human who completely lacked empathy this was a very effective tactic: all his mind saw was the cause and effect that causing people pain would promptly get their attention. I understood that there would be strict penalties to hitting my brother, so I didn't, and so in my brother's perception there were no negative consequences to this action.

He and our dog, a very mild mannered part German Shepard part yellow lab, had the same favourite beanbag chair. This was a major source of inconvenience for Issac who frequently wished to remove the dog from the chair so he could use it. Issac would toddle up and begin kicking the dog, pulling on its ears, and yanking on its tail until she got up and left. The dog tried to express her dislike of this procedure politely by growling and snarling but my brother blew past these warnings for the same reasons he had no problem pulling my hair or hitting me. One day the dog simply decided to not put up with it anymore. She lept up and with a single paw the 60 pound dog swatted my two year old brother to the ground. She used the paw to hold him there and began gnawing on his hair, moving across his scalp like she might clean a puppy's fur. My brother howled and screamed but was unable to escape until the dog finished. At that point he lay bawling on the floor completely overwhelmed and baffled with what had just transpired. That was the day he learned that there were other things in the world which felt pain, that the rest of the creatures in the world were a little more than moving scenery. The dog served as his best friend well into my college years when it died.

***

Brown on one side, black with white spots on the other. I was wrapped from head to toe in this blanket with a portion of it looped up over my head like a hood. My mother lay in a large bed and next to her was a small bedside table with white sanitary plastic walls around the top.

"You want to see him?" my maternal grandmother asked.

"Mmm!" I said, extending both arms in a y above me as my way of asking to be picked up.

She picked me up and now I could see over the edge of the hospital crib. There was something small ugly and pink in it. "See?" grandma asked, "there he is!"

"Mom says we'll be best friends for our whole lives," I recited.

"That's right," grandma said.

"How long before we can play T-ball and tag?"

Grandma laughed a little, "not so long, but you'll have to be patient."

As it turned out my brother needed significantly more patience than anybody had anticipated. Even after he started preschool a firetruck or an ambulance driving within earshot would cause him to dissolve in a fit of tears on the floor from sensory overload. Any game which involved coordination was almost entirely out of the question, as a matter of fact his motor skills were so poor that my dad use to give him candy to practice playing catch with him in the back yard. When this failed to provide results he was sent to physical therapy.

Perhaps it was because my parents were at that age too busy for me or perhaps its because I have always been an attention whore but I remember being terribly jealous of my brother for getting to go to physical therapy. In my eyes it seemed like my brother randomly recieved the undivided attention of an adult for several hours a week for doing mind-numbingly easy tasks. Sometimes the therapist would meet us at a park and I would be told to go play while they worked, but sometimes I was permitted to stay and watch quietly. I remember watching him being handed playing cards back and forth and them discussing them. I remember them not even throwing and catching a ball but sitting down and rolling it back and forth to each other. Once or twice being I was permitted to play too. I blew through all the games, only to find that doing so did not result in candy or being lavished with praise and that it made my brother cranky and jealous of my progress. Once I went with my dad to pick him up from physical therapy and I remember being green with envy. Everywhere as far as I could see were giant balls to play on and large foam structures to climb on like at gymnastics class. It looked like the ultimate playground. My brother wandered out looking very tired.

"He did a great job today," the therapist said.

"That's great," my dad said, "Issac, you can choose what we have for dinner tonight."

"Pick soup!" I said as I ran up to the nearest foam toy and begin climbing on it.

"Now Pika," my dad said, "your brother worked very hard today and its his...Pika! Pika get down from there! You're not allowed up there!"

It all seemed so horrendously unfair.

***

"Now," my mother asked my brother as they sat on the floor with a poster of faces and a pile of candy. "Which of these faces is the annoyed face?"

It is a good thing one of my brother's greatest difficulties was non-verbal communication because I didn't do a whole lot to contain my eye-rolling.

***

"One eigff of..."

"Eighth," my mother corrected.

"Uh-huh."

"You must work to say all the letters in the words Pika."

I continued to draw on the piece of paper in front of me.

"Pika, are you listening to me? You never use to speak like this. You have gotten lazy recently with your speech. You are copying Issac."

As the days passed my mother found me more stubbornly lazy...and so I found myself sitting in the first day of speech therapy. I was terribly excited. I knew that my brother came here for an hour or so each week to recieve the undivided attention of an adult and then be treated to ice cream by our parents. It seemed that I was finally getting in on this scam too.

The therapist's name was Mrs. Buss. I remember thinking that a funny name for a speech therapist as none of her patients would be able to call her by name until they didn't need her anymore.

We talked for a little bit as she studied the way I spoke, when finally she held up a diagram and said "Now," said Mrs. Buss, "what fraction of the pie is shaded?"

"Three out of eight."

"And how else might you say that?"

"Not five out of eight."

Mrs. Buss was not amused. "Say three eighths."

I frowned. I had carefully learned to dance around hard 's' sounds and 'th's around strangers as I was aware that I would frequently say them inaccurately and I found the new lisp embarassing. As a side note, who decided that lisp should have a hard 's' in it? This seems about the equivalent of making the word "mute" in sign language require a verbal component to it.

The rest of the hour dragged on. Mrs. Buss had sheets of sentances littered with difficult words to say. It was not tiring of itself, but the humiliation of knowing that this sort of thing should be a cakewalk wore on me. For the first time I began to understand what a complete asshole I was for belittling how difficult my brother's physical therapy tasks were.

"Eighths," Mrs. Buss said.

"Eigffs."

***

Gilby's standing in the kitchen making himself a meal and so am I. Truth be told, its the only time we see each other normally. We don't have a lot in common to discuss otherwise.

"I've got no problem," he said, "With autistic people just so long as they work and overcome it."

"So, basically, you have no problem with autistic people who aren't autistic?"

"No, they can still have problems, but they have to be trying, and they have to improve. If that happens, well they're just doing their best..."

"And how will you know how far these people have come?"

Busted

I've been attending to other matters but out of the corner of my eye I'm minding the table.

A blond girl with a beach bag of a purse approaches the table from the wrong angle to be coming off the table where you assemble a burger. She takes her soda from the table, then throws it in the bag, then a second. Emboldened by her success she grabs another one in each hand and begins moving them to her bag.

"What are you doing?"

The girl is cool as she keeps pocketing more sodas, "Our hotel doesn't have a soda machine, I'm stocking up. You know what I mean..."

"No, I don't."

The girl turns red and keeps taking the sodas "I'm just taking a few." She's probably taken at least 8.

"Stop."

"I'm just getting them for my team!" The girl is shouting now, "I don't know why you care!"

I stare at her for a moment. She takes one last defiant soda and stalks off in the opposite direction. Honestly if I cared about the girl I would have made her give them back, but I honestly was too pissed to care if she learned a lesson or not from all this. I have enough kids of my own that want to be taught for me to take on more that don't even want to change their ways.

Looking back on it though, I probably did that kid a disservice. Success only makes you bolder.

The next few kids try to take two sodas just to prove they can. I roll my eyes and give them a hearty "You're pathetic" look. Kids rarely respond to adult's rage, but anybody who ever survived middle school should know that people drop dead if you can combine disdain with any inner source of their guilt.

"Don't be such pigs."

One kid who already has two sodas in his hand takes them to prove he's not scared of me, but the line goes back to one a person after that.

I guess that's the latest and greatest in the American way. If you get busted, pretend you're right, and if pressed, its the messenger's fault. After all, we're all delicate and unique snowflakes right? Being wrong might hurt somebody's ego.

What I find most impressive was that these kids were also jacking what I personally thought to be some pretty nasty soda. When was the last time you saw high schoolers buy fruit seltzer?

***

Once when I was in Hong Kong I was on the subway with about 20 non-native kids from my university when in walks a little girl and her mother. The child is holding her mother's hand by the thumb. I smile and wave at her. The little girl looks at me for a long moment and then says to her mother in Cantonese, "Look mommy, there's a devil here."

Chinese body language is so subtle compared to ours, but I don't see any visible reaction from the mother. She instead walks to a hand loop and puts her arm in as she guides her daughter to a cherry red pole to hold on to so she can weather the movement of the train.

"Mommy," she continues still in Cantonese, "There are so many devils here."

There's not hatred in this little girl's voice. The sentence wouldn't have sounded a whole lot different if it had read "There are so many chairs here." She continues her ramble, but her speech is becoming progressively more complicated and I have trouble following it.

"Mommy, I have never seen so many devils together here."

I feel bad calling out a little girl, so I sit quiet and turn to smile at her.

"Devil's looking at me!"

By this time we're all looking at each other, and a few of us are chuckling nervously. We had read how in Hong Kong the language barrier meant that racial slurs had just become part of the language. If somebody started calling me names in America I might fear for my physical safety but here there was supposedly no need to fear. We had all read that this wasn't culturally meant as a serious insult, and that it carried no threat of harm, but we all felt a little awkward being cursed out and not knowing what the socially acceptable thing to do about it would be.

"Devil's are laughing!"

I remember looking around the train for any sort of social cue at all but everybody on the train, including the kids from Hong Kong University who were helping us learn our way around, were avoiding our eyes. For a brief few seconds I could hear every clatter of every wheel on the train track. The little girl turned away from us and was quiet.

I remember being very impressed that the mother seemed to share in the shame she thought her daughter should feel rather than ignoring its existence or handing it all back to her kid. What I found more bizarre was that everybody on the train seemed to share the kid's shame, like one bizarre cold shoulder of an apology. Oddly enough, the shared guilt which created this neat little line between "us" and "them" was more alienating than being called names in some sense.

Half in defiance, and half from not knowing what else to do with ourselves, being called out as "ghosts" after that became a sick little game. I would wait until somebody went on a reasonable rant calling me a ghost and a devil, and then turn and respond in my politest Cantonese, "yes."

The response was always the same. The speaker would always look away in shame, and sometimes even apologize in Cantonese a few times. Apparently most white people didn't learn to speak any Cantonese there, so they were not use to being caught. I was amazed though that none of them ever got in my face about it, they just acted embarrassed.

Where did our society lose that skill of admitting we are wrong when we are?

***

"And," the officer leans in close to Py, "Do they let you do this at home?"

Its dark outside and we're standing on a rural bystreet not too far from the university. I'm facing one cop car, and I can tell there is another behind me from my shadow. There's a third one on my left and behind the one I am facing I can see two more. Ginger, Gilby and Py aren't doing a whole ton better.

"My dad...we lit these off when I was little...I thought fireworks were a fine-able offense in this state officer...not an arrest-able one..."

The officer leans over close to Py's face and raises his flashlight, "Oh?"

"Look," I interrupt, "Officer, we're sorry and we have given you everything. Please let us go."

The officers tried hard to rattle us after that and we pretended to be appropriately terrified of jail time or not graduating or whatever they were theatening at that moment (for portions of it, I'll admit, I did not have to pretend). Then they took our fireworks and left. I remember being thunderstruck. All they wanted to see was a little fear in us, scare us into saying sorry and hopefully into not doing it again.

***

"So what happened then?" I asked.

"Not a whole lot," Magpie shrugged, "The kid who ratted got suspended for a year, the kid he ratted on just went on academic probation."

"But I though that was part of his plea...he turns in his cohort and..."

"Guess the campus hearing board didn't feel that way for very long. Ratter didn't apologize in his closing statements, CoLo did."

"And that made..."

"All the difference I guess."

We're All Adults Here

[So...big pause...I'm working on a large-thought post...hope to finish it later this week. Not that it will be especially profound, those posts are just a lot more time consuming.]

My brother, Isaac, has come to visit today.

He's going to community college next year. He keeps asking me what I think of that, and I keep saying "whatever makes you happy man." It kills me a little that he's talking about considering going to community college for English. If you're going to piss away four years of your life on a useless degree at least do it in a pretty location with some good drinking pals...get the full experience. God knows Mom would spring for it.

"He's not ready to go so far afield." Mom says.

Far afield? The school in question is right next to my high school...and not more than an exit from the middle school he attended at the time. He went that far every morning then...why not now?

"Well, I'm going to take Mom's advice," he says.

Ugh.

Its several hours later now, he's standing in my kitchen. Gilby is wandering around making dinner. We have come to a truce in some sense, I think everybody has calmed down since his move-in and found a little common ground. I'm cooking a vat of plain pasta for my brother, who is strolling around the kitchen venting his excitement by fluttering his arms and hands as he walks, grinning to himself.

"You want some sauce for your pasta?" Gilby asks him.

I find myself answering on my brother's behalf before he does, "No, he doesn't like that, he likes it plain."

"Maybe...some pasta sauce from a jar then if he doesn't like mine?"

"No, he eats things plain, he's like Hannalore."

Gilby grins a little, "There are more people like Hannalore?"

"Yup."

We share a few minutes of comfortable silence as the grease bubbles on the stove and my brother paces. I can't help but compare my brother and Gilby. Gilby may be immature and stupid but I still think of him as my peer in some sense, which is probably why I give him such a rough time on all his flaws.

"When's your birthday Gilby?"

Gilby looks up from a pan of hot greese and steak bits to tell me.

"Huh," I said, "Hey Isaac, you're twins with Gilby, what do you think of that?"

Gilby smiled, "Yeah, but not the same year."

"Guess again."

Isaac is pretty excited by this. "What time of day?" he asks. Gilby doesn't know, and this frustrates Isaac. I drain his pasta and begin serving him a portion.

"I can do it myself," Isaac informs me and takes the tongs and plate for himself.

Oh...yes...of course. I stutter mentally. I can't treat him like this, after all, would I ever serve Gilby his pasta? I'd tell him to get his lazy ass up to the stove and do it himself.

I watch Isaac, quietly marveling how much his coordination has improved. He use to be unable to throw and catch a ball. A physical therapist would throw and catch with him for hours. First she would roll a ball to him on the ground which he would capture and return. It was ages before he could catch it in the air himself. He found it infuriating. My parents would bribe him with candy and anything his heart desired to get him to keep trying. I remember running in front of him and catching the ball instead, hoping to get the same amount of praise. It didn't quite work like that.

I've never regarded my brother as disabled. I have, since a very young age, always known he was different, but it had been ages since I had compared him to anybody. I avoid it normally, try to take him as he comes.

I find that he is older than the high school kids I coach, and yet requires more care and supervision. I find that my middle school sister is beginning to overtake him in many ways, and that it is growing far easier to bond to her than to him.

You can't treat him like a normal person. If a normal person talked to me with the same ignorant narrow-minded black-and-white view of the world I wouldn't hang out with them. Depending on my mood I'd probably also tell that person off too. Personal beliefs aside, its pretty difficult to hold conversations with somebody who has, medically speaking, pretty much no sense of subtlety.

Yet, to not take my brother's words and thoughts seriously, to shrug it off as simply as an artifact of a medical condition, is to not take him seriously as a peer who requires my respect as a fellow human being. He can sense when I do this, and it infuriates him. After all, what right do I have to treat somebody only three years younger than myself as a child?

I'm almost positive both of us have expressed at some point in our lives, although never directly to each other, that we wish he simply needed a wheelchair instead. It would be so much easier on so many levels.

I'm telling Gilby and Isaac the story of the bar fight in the pancake house by this point.

"So we're in this pancake place...nice middle aged lady is our waitress...kinda heavset...wears a red checkered apron, big smile, calls you dear, asks you if you want gravy on your gravy..."

"Gravy on your gravy?" Isaac asks. "What about your food?"

"Its..." I pause, "you know the sort of place I mean. The place where everything comes with gravy."

"Ice cream?"

"Well...uh...not everything."

"She's evoking an archetype," Gilby said. He paused for a second. "How do you prounounce that?"

"Ar-keh-type," I responded.

My brother grinned. We were now discussing true and false statements, which is a favourite topic of his, "Yup! That's right!"

I nodded and continued my story, "So, there we are...and one of my friends...this kid is probably the whitest guy I know..."

Gilby grins and nods his head to my brother, not putting down his food, "Whiter than him?"

"I'm actually really pleased with my tan this summer," Isaac chirps excidedly.

Gilby starts cracking up.

"That's not quite what I meant," I said, looking at my food.

Isaac is puzzled, "What then?"

I put a chunk of meat in my mouth to chew to buy myself some time. We can make jokes at our own expense...I mean...we're all adults here...right?

Gilby, for once in his life, seems to be catching on. "Its another archetype."

We finished our meal and cleared the plates. My brother is thrilled. I can tell this meant a lot to him, and that he had a really good time. I walk him downstairs and let him out, then come back upstairs to help Gilby clear.

"Hey, thanks for..."

Gilby cuts me off with a laugh, "No, thank you for not being like your brother."

I feel like a total asshole but I laugh anyway. It definately is a relief when people acknowledge that we're not alike.

"Your brother has white-person syndrome...doesn't he?"

"What?"

"He's Asperger's."

I start cracking up again. It isn't even that funny, I'm just massively relieved.

"He's gone right?" Magpie pokes his head out the door of his room.

"Yeah," I said.

Magpie shakes his head, "You two are so mean."

"Aww come on," Gilby smiles, "We're all adults here..."

Broccoli

"But, Anne" my uncle asked looking quizzically at my mother across the dinner table as we ate, "you hate broccoli."

My mother was strangely upset by this. She pointed at me and said with a raised voice, "I've been eating broccoli all her life to set a good example for her, and telling her that I like it, and smiling through the whole thing."

I remember being approximately 10 at the time and thinking that that was a silly way to go about things. If my mom really wanted to teach me a lesson about healthy eating she should have told me that she hated broccoli but ate it anyway because she knew it was good for her. I thought that would have been a lot more relevant a lesson for me, given my mother's cooking. The whole of it wasn't a very big deal to me though.

At this point I remember being woken from my thoughts by a significant shouting match between my mother and my uncle. Looking over across the table I saw my two cousins who were present, my brother Isaac, and my infant sister, all of them younger than me. I was thinking that this was somewhat of a silly thing to get so upset about, and that this probably constituted a far worse example than having a personal distaste for vegetables. I guess it takes a hell of a bratty 10 year old to be mentally condescending to adults, but I've never been a particularly nice or polite person anyway.

The next day we had the bane of my existence: freeze dried peas with carrot cubes, corn, and lima beans. I suppose none of those items would be so terrible of themselves, it was more they had been frozen together in one bag and the soupy water which emerged from the microwave reheating process and coated everything. It always tasted to me just like too many colors of paint mixed together looked: not unlike puke. I was careful not to protest, seeing as my mother had apparently suffered for 10 years with broccoli and was quite bitter about it, I figured my requests would fall on deaf ears.

The day after that was broccoli again but my mother had a bowl of the leftover frozen vegetable mishmash. I remember getting caught glancing at it.

"I don't have to eat broccoli because I don't like it," my mother snapped defensively.

My grin must have given me away as I eyed her bowl eager to file away that logic for the next meal I didn't like. She puffed up like a cat or a bird trying to look bigger than it is and glared at me a little.

"I can do that because I'm an adult."

That is, for the record, one of my least favourite excuses ever.

My mother is still very bitter that my uncle ever let on that she doesn't like broccoli. So bitter in fact that I have, on numerous occasions, forgotten that this incident ever happened only to later be reminded of it when my mother complains about it. I'm probably not going to ever understand that.

I cook with broccoli from time to time now, but it is always in something. Stir fry is the usual candidate for this. My mother always served the broccoli plain and soggy from steaming, not even with butter. This is another thing I'll never understand. Almost all vegetables can be dressed up and made tolerable if you put the effort in and can stand spices. Perhaps the fact that we ate everything plain in my house growing up has something to do with my brother, or perhaps mom never really learned to cook. Maybe its a little of both.

The steamed broccoli on the stove looked odd today at first and I stood there for a moment staring at the chunks, almost not recognizing what they were, before adding a portion to my bowl.

"I don't think I have had broccoli in years," I said, "like I think last time I had it was high school."

Magpie looked up from his bowl, "You don't like it?"

"Nah, its alright. It probably just says something odd about my eating habits."

"Pretty sure I've had dishes where you cooked it."

"Guess I haven't eaten it plain in some time."

Oddly enough the broccoli was probably the highlight of the meal. Its not to say Magpie can't cook: far from it, it is simply that I have been eating almost exclusively sandwiches and things which can be ordered via phone for delivery to my lab for the last week. At some point the grease just gets to you. You miss fresh fruit and vegetables. Sometimes you don't even know you miss them until you have them again. Apparently I missed supposedly boring, flavorless, steamed broccoli enough to go back for seconds on it.

Everybody always says that as you get older you grow more like your parents. This is a concept I'm uncomfortable with on many levels. Somehow, in that sense, I find eating plain broccoli, (which I find a bit boring and slightly unpleasant but quite tolerable) very comforting. Its purely symbolic and has no real bearing on anything. However, its one of those pleasant reminders that we are all individuals with wills of our own to be what we choose to be, and not necessarily victims to the same shortcomings as our parents, or mindless automations crafted by our circumstances.

Surprise! You've Got a New Housemate!

"Oh, and Gilby moving in tomorrow," Hannalore added yesterday afternoon as she walked past my room.

"Uh...who is Gilby?"

"He's replacing you on the lease."

"I'm paid up until June..."

"Oh, well he is going to live in our living room during May, then he is going to live in your room."

"Uh...were you going to tell me?"

Hannalore looked at me fairly quizzically, "I just did."

You may think Hannalore is the resounding jackass of the century but the reality is she is not. She has a fascinating cocktail of neurological issues, a few of which overlap with my brother's, but she is not nearly as severe. This helps me understand her a little and sometimes translate her issues to the other housemates.

The bottom line is she lives in a totally different world than the rest of us. There are many things about her we will simply never be able to sympathize with: for example, she can not stand physical contact with other human beings in any form. It bothers her deeply. She is one of the most absurdly picky eaters I have ever met. I can probably count all of the food items she will eat on my fingers. These things are just how she was wired when she was born.

Just like we find her bizarre and alien, she finds us bizarre. Everything she does makes perfect sense to her. If you ask her she can even explain it to you in ways that make sense if you can accept her base premises. In her world we are the irrational and bizarre ones. I suppose if you didn't have a sex drive sex would sound pretty bizarre to you too wouldn't it?

The name I use for her here, Hannalore, comes from the Questionable Content character. Its a humorous (and hopefully not considered mean) reference to the fact that another part of her "abnormal wiring" is the fact that she is clincally OCD.

Our common method of communication is logic. Basically we both assert the premises by which we live our lives and then explain the logic which makes us feel the way we feel about things. In this way we can resolve disagreements.

This has its ups and downs. One of the major benefits of this is as long as I can explain to her just why something she didn't like happened, and why it won't happen again, she's pretty much ok with it no matter what it is. For example, the first time she met Magpie, our other current housemate, he had accidentally woken her up by drunkenly stumbling into her room (thinking it was the bathroom) and accidentally ripping the doorknob off the door. I'm a pretty tolerant person but Magpie is a pretty big guy and looks rather intimidating until you learn he wouldn't hurt a fly. But if I didn't know him and he had wandered into my room very drunk? I would have punched him and then run. Hannalore was pretty ok with this situation under the condition that I promised to show everybody where the bathroom was previous to bringing out the alcohol at parties.

The downside of her being like this is from time to time she does things which upset me greatly without having the faintest idea of why I am upset.

When she had found Gilby off some department mailing list and announced he would be replacing me when I left...I thought little of it. After all, I would never live with him right? If my current housemates wanted to live with some total stranger from the internet, they were adults, that was their choice, and I wasn't going to question it. Now, however, Gilby was my problem too. A quick call to Magpie (who was on a camping trip/picking up more crap to put in his room trip I had to skip due to finals) confirmed that he was also not expecting Gilby.

"He can't live here," I said, coming back out of my room and finding Hannalore.

"Why not?"

"He hasn't signed papers. The landlords wil be angry."

"Can he put his things here?"

"No"

"Why?"

"Where would he put them?"

Hannalore paused a moment. "I hadn't thought of that."

Bright and early the next morning the doorbell rang and I rolled over and rolled my eyes. Of course. I had explained my issue to Hannalore as "the landlords won't like it" and "we don't have space." She had, like always, taken me completely literally and probably resolved both those issues herself. She was not going to be able to read the meaning behind my words of "I don't want him here."

Wandering down the stairs I pulled the door open and found a tall dark-haired young man holding a printer in a box.

"So, you're moving in now?"
"Yeah."

"Uh..." I stammered, feeling like all of this was getting a bit out of hand and also struggling to remember what the kid's name was, "How is that going to work?"

Hannalore was standing over my shoulder, "I took care of everything. He's going to store his belongings in my room, I cleared a space. He's also going to live in my room during May as soon as finals are done. I'll be leaving as soon as finals are done so I won't need the space. When June comes and you leave he can move into your room.

"...and...you're going to pay?" I asked. Both of them nodded.

A part of me just wanted to scream and stamp "No," but I am quite short on cash right now due to being both a college student and employment impaired. Additionally, if I upset him too badly I would be screwing my current housemates out of a lot of money next year while they paid for my empty room. Besides, he didn't seem too overly creepy.

We cleared him a space in a storage area and he put his printer in it. We also gave him some keys.

"Do you guys drink?" he asked.

"Yeah, sometimes."

"Do you have a bucket?"

"What?"

"In my dorm, we had a bucket. His name was Mr. Bucket."

There didn't seem to be anything good to say in response to that.

Gilby wandered our house for a little while after that, belittled the sanitation of our kitchen, and left. We saw him again at about 6PM. He said he would be back at about 7 with a friend or two who was helping him move in. At about 8:15 he and the better chunk of a freshman floor arrived and situated themselves in my living room. They commented on how small my home was, and how ideal the back porch was for smoking weed. They then left with the living room mostly unnavigatible due to his stuff.

Gilby returned shortly later and sat himself down on the couch. I asked him to please put his stuff in the storage space he gave him so we could walk around the living room. He made fun of how I keep my room. I gave him wifi access. He complained about the bathroom being dirty. He then started eying the alcohol in the refrigerator.

"Can I have some?"

Normally I answer "yes" automatically but he seemed a little too excited about it and his perpetual whining was beginning to eat at me. "Um, if you pay me back for it."

Gilby wandered the house for a moment and retrieved a shotglass with the school insignia on it. "How much of it can I have of the Smirnoff for five dollars?"

"Um...well...a whole bottle is about 20...so you can have a quarter of it."

"Great" he said, emptying the five dollars from his wallet in my hands. He then removed the vodka from the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table to pour himself a shot. I watched silently.

"Man, this stuff is QUALITY, you can see how much better is is than Gilby's just in the glass."

I remained quiet, trying to be expressionless.

"Gilby's," he announced, "Is like State vodka, but its cheaper. You don't want to try it I think."

I nodded and then returned to my room to study for finals. At least he had a nickname now. About 10 minutes later he wandered into my room still holding the bottle of Smirnoff. "Have I had my quarter?" he asked.

"Uh," I said trying to be perfectly fair, "you probably have one shot left."

"Awesome!" he grinned.