TE22 Potpourri

Lada Vukić

Special Needs

It’s no good pretending to be cleverer than you are because in the end you can turn out looking even stupider. You have to be who you are in life, full stop. You have to know in your head exactly how to subtract the serious from the unserious. What’s left is funny. Naturally. Like in maths. That’s why I get it wrong. “Can anybody hear what you hear?” mum says when she wants to comfort me. “You see, we don’t all have the same abilities, and you certainly can do something that others can only dream of. Don’t worry about laughter and jokes at your expense; every fool has his own kind of fun.” The teacher didn’t have a single good thing to say about the butterflies. She said that as usual I hadn’t been listening when she was assigning the homework. That I was incapable of listening properly to even the simplest thing. I tried to say something in my defence, especially regarding my hearing and listening, but I had trouble with the words. My mouth stayed shut, full stop. “C’mon, tell me what’ve they got to do with anything?” she insisted, frowningwithdisapproval. “It’s about tosnowoutside, and you bring butterflies. Where can we see butterflies in the 144 I shake my head because I’ve never met anybody like me.

winter, Emil?”

Nowhere, I said tomyself and thought of Tonko. If I wereTonko maybe she would praise me. Maybe she would say: “What an imagination!” Maybe it’s just me who sees imagination in my pieces.

“I heard…”

“What? Butterflies?”

“Snow.”

“Snow?”

As soon as I said it, everyone from the first row to the last burst out laughing. It spread like waves in the sea. I didn’t laugh, of course, because I didn’t find anything funny about it. Especially not when they shouted from the back row: “Look at the imbecile lie!” “Alright! Quiet, children!” the teacher said, clapping her hands to silence them. “Let’s say you did hear it. Then why didn’t you use the modelling clay to make snowflakes, like Natalia, or a frozen lake or whatever, so that we know winter has arrived. Butterflies come with the spring. How many times do I have to keep repeating these things to you? The most I can give you for your incorrectly done homework is a grade 2, and even that’s a stretch. You exhaust me, Emil. It’s a shame, because you could 145