Late for school again. I don’t like being late for school. Everyone notices, and they laugh. They laugh real low because they know I can’t hear them. They know that I get distracted very easily by things. Especially the sky. If it were not for my condition, probably I could run to school and not be late. But my body is not as strong as everyone else’s, because my balance is not too good.

It’s why i’m in the special education class with other kids like me. Most days my condition doesn’t bother me. Or I pretend it doesn’t bother me. But days like today it does. Because I have to be extra careful where I’m putting my feet. I can’t find my way around as easily as everyone else. It takes me a while to get places. My memory is real bad. Other kids can hear a lot things and remember them forever. It takes me a few tries to learn things.

I hate how everyone else talks real low, but they have to raise their voices to teach my class. And they have to use the special books for us to read. And they have to go through the lessons a lot slower. Because the kids in my classes don’t have hyper-eidetic memories.

That’s what my teacher calls it. The reason her and all the normal people can remember things forever after hearing them once. It would be a lot easier to leave with my eye deformity if my mind at least worked right. Or my ears were normal. Or my balance. It’s not as though me and the other kids in my class are falling over all the time. But we can’t balance weights on the tips of our fingers, stacking them on top of each other, like the normal kids do at recess. There’s a lot of music we can’t listen to because it’s played at lower levels than our ears can hear. And even the music that’s loud enough for us to hear, we can’t hear the individual intruments and notes. All we hear is the big sound. I love music, but the other kids always laugh at me. Because I can’t even tell the decibel pitch that the notes are played at. But I like how it sounds.

My teacher, when the year started, told us how some researchers think that it’s possible that normal people have defective eyes. That, because of the say it’s formed and its shape and all, they think the human eye was originally designed to percieve visible light. That’s a phrase I know. It’s what the doctor says I’m percieving, instead of being like normal people. My teacher says that some people think, a long time ago, everyone walked around like me and the kids in my class. With hardly any balance. Really limited range of hearing. And having to rely on their eyes the way my doctor says I do. Eventually people evolved to the way they are now. But sometimes people like us are born. People who percieve visible light.