Nobody knows what went wrong, exactly. Mom’s water broke at a Fourth of July picnic right as she was taking a bite of egg salad. How much less prepared could you be if you’re eating a sandwich in the middle of a field when you go into labor? You can’t blame her, though. She was supposed to have three more months before I showed up.

It happens to a lot of really early babies, I guess, this cerebral (“brain”) palsy (“paralysis”) that left me different from everybody else. The brain just isn’t ready to protect itself from the bumps and bruises of the outside world. It’s like a snail that hasn’t grown its shell.

The doctors may not know what caused it, but they know what it does to me. It makes it so I can’t move my body like I want. It’s like everything is both weaker and heavier at the same time—like your leg’s gone numb, and you know if you could just shake the pins and needles out, then you could get up and walk it off. Or at least that’s what I imagine, when I imagine standing and walking on my own.

It’s not as bad as it was in the beginning, though. I couldn’t eat or even breathe without help at first. I stayed with all the other tiny sick babies in intensive care for weeks and weeks. Mom thinks it’s luck and a blessing that I came home on what was supposed to be my actual birth date. We celebrate both every year—the day I was born and the day I came home.

But what Mrs. Hayes is writing down now and what Mrs. Lawrence is nodding along to, thanks to Lauren’s brilliant input, is that I’m still a baby. Never mind that I worked with a physical therapist to get strong enough to wheel my own chair. Never mind that the feeding therapist let me “graduate” when I could eat and drink on my own without dribbling food down my front or choking on it. Never mind all that.

Just one mention of the “history” and I’m back to square one.

I nudge Mom with my elbow. She can’t let them put that on my record and stick me with an aide at my new school. I give her the say something look.

And she does.

She looks at all of those ladies in that room and says, “I think that’s a wise decision.”

We do not talk all the way home.

We do not talk over a dinner of cheese toast and milk and shriveled grapes, which are the last things in our fridge before we leave tomorrow.

We do not talk until it is the middle of the night and I have to yell from the bathroom for her to bring me toilet paper because there’s none on the roll.