There's just one group at SMS that stays together always - in assemblies, at lunch-time, anytime. They don't even change rooms during the day. That's the class for handicapped students. A bunch of the kids in the class are retarded, and the others have different kinds of problems. Guess where the BSC sat during the assembly? Right behind the special class. The kids in that class took up exactly one row, plus three kids who sat in the aisles in wheelchairs.

Mary Anne had been wrong about the assembly. It wasn't about our dress code, the food fight, or student government. As a surprise, to celebrate something going on at school called Kids' Week, our principal had organized a program for us. For once, it was fun. First a really famous author talked to US about the books she writes. She had traveled all the way from Arizona just to come to SMS.

That made me feel sort of important. Then a songwriter sang a song he had composed about our school. Finally an artist called five teachers onto the stage and drew funny caricatures of them.

Did I pay attention to any of this? Barely. And why wasn't 1 paying attention? Not because the program was brain-numbing. For once, it was fascinating - but I couldn't pay attention because I was so busy watching the kids in the class in front of me.

At one end of the row were two of the kids in wheelchairs. (Their chairs were placed one in front of the other so as not to block the aisle and be a fire hazard.) The kid sitting in the front chair couldn't even hold herself up straight. She was strapped in everywhere - her arms strapped to the armrests, her feet to the footrests. Her head was even strapped to the back of the chair. And somehow, she managed to slump anyway. I'd seen her around school before. She tries to talk sometimes but she's harder to understand than our PA system. Her eyes don't focus on anything. She looks like she doesn't have a bone or a muscle in her body. Somebody once told me she has cerebral palsy.