The visit went as most of them did; the tests, the pictures, the questions—only this time the doctor kept asking Ronnie if anything was bothering him, if he felt sadder than usual. Ronnie knew it wasn’t right to lie to someone, but he couldn’t figure out a way to make the doctor understand what had happened without sounding like a “ree-tard” or a “sped”…so he said everything was okay, he was just having bad dreams. The doctor nodded his head and made the Hmmmm-sound that he made a lot whenever he saw Ronnie, and then took out his square gray pad and began writing on it. Ronnie knew what that meant: more pills. That seemed to be the doctor’s solution to everything: the gray pad and pills.

The doctor asked Ronnie to go out in the waiting room and oh, by the way, would he please ask his Mommy to come back here for a few minutes. Ronnie did as he was asked.

Mommy was back there an awful long time and Ronnie quickly became bored with the toys and back issues of Highlights for Children, so he looked around the waiting room to make sure no one was watching him (no one was), slipped out of his chair, and made his way outside like a phantom, like he was invisible, like he was the Green Hornet.

The doctor’s office was in a strip of doctor’s offices located across the parking lot from the hospital, so there were always lots of cars and people coming and going. Ronnie liked to watch the people as they came and went, so he found a bench and sat down and for a little while had a grand old time just watching the people. Then he became aware of the sound of someone crying nearby.

He looked around and saw her, sitting two benches away from him. She was a lot older than he was—maybe even in her twenties!—and she was kinda fat (not really fat, just a little, all of it in one spot where her tummy was) and she was holding a bunch of square gray pieces of paper (pills, pills, pills) and she seemed so sad.

Ronnie stared at her for a minute, looked around again, then jumped down off the bench and walked over to her.

“How come you’re so sad?” he asked.

The woman looked up at him and wiped her eyes, then tried to smile. “Oh, hon, I’m…I’m okay, really.” Then she looked around. “Where’s your mommy?”

“She’s inside talkin to the doctor. He’s tellin her that I ain’t ever gonna be real smart like the other kids.” And this was true. Ronnie had overhead the doctor and Mommy talking once; the doctor had said something like “…he’ll never be older than ten or eleven, mentally and emotionally…” Ronnie didn’t understand what the doctor meant by that, and as the days went on, he didn’t really care.

The crying lady stared at him for a moment, then blew her nose on a tissue she was holding. “Don’t you say that, hon. You’re going to turn out to be just fine.”