Anything But Typical: Chapters 6–12

There are basically two types of fiction, literary and genre. Science fiction would be one type of genre fiction, but there are so many, like mysteries, western novels, crime novels, fantasy. And romance.

Adjudicate.
That’s the word that came into my mind this morning. I think I know what it means, or I can figure it out. Usually you can figure out a word by its place in a sentence or by breaking it down. I see the word “judge” in “adjudicate.”

She is not happy now. She wants me to act like Jeremy does when he is homesick. He runs up and smothers his face, but I couldn’t breathe if I did that.

I look up at the ceiling of my room, where my dad has stenciled letters, the whole alphabet.

“Why is he writing all those meaningless words?” my grandmother said, my genius apparently lost on her.

Part of the whole family of the English alphabet—of letters that have resonance to make words that sound different in different mouths and have different meanings to different people.

And there they are, all the twenty-six letters but forty-four sounds called phonemes. If you look closely, there are diphthongs and schwa sounds.

And there they are, all the twenty-six letters but forty-four sounds called phonemes. If you look closely, there are diphthongs and schwa sounds.

And there they are, all the twenty-six letters but forty-four sounds called phonemes. If you look closely, there are diphthongs and schwa sounds.

I wasn’t such a genius anymore, and by third grade I was behind in almost everything else: verbal skills, social performance, physical aptitude, and age-appropriate behavior.

The potter’s wheel was attached to a chair, and you were supposed to sit in the chair and put your allotment of wet clay on the wheel, and then the teacher would push the power button and the wheel would spin around.

I knew my parents went in to the school to talk to Dr. T.
I knew they were in battle mode.

Later Lara Mok told me her mother said I was dangerous and shouldn’t be in school with the normal kids. That I was disruptive and holding everyone back.

The word that popped into my brain this morning was “regurgitate.”

As this child grows, she wants to help other people. No matter how many times people tell her they don’t need her, she persists.

A narrator can be unreliable.
They can be telling the truth or just the truth as they see it.

He says the hard drive needs to be rebooted and he has to call technical assistance because there is some special override code.

The swivel chair spins out from under Seth’s weight and careens into his stack of CDs, which then tumble onto the rug.

He is one of those disproportional dwarfs, so his arms and legs are very short in proportion to his body, and it makes his head look big.

Bennu is the Egyptian word for phoenix.