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Abed didn’t talk.
It’s not like he didn’t want to talk, like his mother used to say, just that he… didn’t. He wished he could tell her, but Abed didn’t talk, so he couldn’t.
She was gone, anyway.
-----
School was hard. Abed spent most of his school days staring off into space. Teachers asked him questions he didn’t answer. He didn’t do his assignments.
During recess, he sat on the seesaw. He liked the feeling of going up and down, like when his father lifted him up, but no one would sit on the other side. So he sat in the middle, rocking to tilt the seesaw back and forth. He didn’t get to go up and down, but it kept him occupied until he had to go back to class.
He heard his classmates talk about him, sometimes. They called him weird, they called him stupid. Abed wasn’t stupid. But he didn’t know how to tell them.
The thing about being quiet is that people ignore you. They forget your name, they forget you’re there, they forget you. Everything that happens happens without you. Abed watched the kids in his classroom run around this way and that with a blank face.
Something his teachers didn’t get, that his father didn’t get, when he heard them talking about him when they assumed he couldn’t hear them (he could. He always could), was that it wasn’t that he didn’t want to join in. He did. But he didn’t know how.
So he’d just have to be content with watching.
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Abed’s first words were “Play it again.”
He and his dad were sitting on the couch, watching The Goonies, a movie Abed’s dad had put on because it was one of his favorites. Abed smiled when the credits rolled. He pulled on his dad’s sleeve and pointed at the VCR, but his dad didn’t pay attention. Abed frowned.
“Play it again,” he said, with some effort. His dad reacted immediately.
“Abed! You spoke!” he exclaimed in arabic. Abed jumped at his volume. His dad smiled and hugged him. Abed didn’t hug back, but he rested his chin on his dad’s shoulder. “I’m very proud of you, son.”
“Thank you,” said Abed, not knowing how else to reply. It felt weird to speak aloud, but now that he’d started, it got easier with every syllable. “Play it again,” he repeated.
“We have to celebrate.” He held Abed’s hand and took him out the the car. “Let’s go get some ice cream.”
Technically, they got frozen yogurt, not ice cream. Abed didn’t mind. All he really wanted to do was watch the movie again, but his dad seemed really happy, so he smiled for him and piled gummy worms onto his chocolate yogurt.
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Abed was failing first grade.
He sat silently at the parent-teacher conference listening to his teachers list why they thought he should be held back. He couldn’t properly comprehend math, apparently. He didn’t understand duck duck goose. He held scissors wrong. But they spent longer talking about the ‘social aspect’. It had taken Abed a little while after he’d first spoken to his dad to say his first words in school, but even now, he didn’t talk very much. He still sat alone in the middle of the seesaw during recess.
As they walked out of the school, Abed looked at his father’s shoes instead of his eyes. “Baba, am I stupid?” he said quietly.
His father held his hand a little tighter. “No,” he said firmly. “They’re the stupid ones.”
-----
Abed was still quiet. He wasn’t silent anymore, but he was still quiet.
He never knew what to say. In conversation, he just parroted other people’s phrases--please, thank you, how are you?, good, yes, no, I don’t know, scripted responses he’d accumulated from all the years of watching other people talk to each other. But when he wasn’t answering simple questions, his mind just went blank. Most of the non-scripted things he said were things about movies. But his classmates didn’t like that much. Maybe they just didn’t like him.
Abed practiced his smile in the mirror. He didn’t think it was very good.
His dad seemed to like it, though. So there was that.