“When you all came into the classroom today and saw Kelli for the first time,” said my mother after everyone had settled and gaped, “what was your impression of her?”

“There’s something different about her,” one tactful girl responded. The children had already been infected by my mother’s air of benevolence — they knew not to come out with an indiscreet word like wrong.

“She’s special!” said a triumphant boy. He knew this word because there was a group of students known as the “special” class in our school — more functional than Kelli, able to learn a few academic basics. We only saw them coming and going in the hallways, though — they weren’t permitted to linger in the playground at recess with the rest of us. I knew, from watching kids following behind them in the hallways, limping and slobbering in comic exaggeration, they would’ve been mocked to death if they were.

“She is special,” said my mother. “We’re all special, because God made every one of us. But Kelli is special in a different way. You might say extra-special.”

And if I had not been eleven years old at the time I would’ve been thinking words along the lines of Oh, for fuck’s sake.

“And how did you know she was special?” asked my mother. “How could you tell?”

Why was she doing this? Making my classmates itemize all the ways that Kelli was different? Did my mother not know that children were shits? Did she have no idea all those Kelli-qualities she was forcing them to scrutinize would be thrown, viciously distorted, into my face at recess?

The kids respectfully answered my mother. They cited the rocking, the humming. The whispering to herself. One kid attempted to reference the fact that Kelli was fat by calling it “her, kinda, squishiness,” which made my mother laugh. To me it felt like they were stockpiling ammo.

Then: “Why did God make Kelli the way she is, do you think?” my mother asked, silencing everyone. I looked up, interested at last. It was not a question my mother had ever brought up before. My mother was an ours-is-not-to-reason-why kind of gal, or so I’d always thought. The idea that she might actually have been formulating an answer to such an unfathomable question over the years, without my knowledge, was tantalizing.

One brave child, the class keener, tried to answer. “Maybe . . . for us to help?”

I knew my mother and I knew this was the wrong answer. On some level I was surprised she didn’t take umbrage and overturn the table, because imagine if I had said such a thing. That Kelli was put on earth for others, as a kind of pet, a creature of need and dependence offered up by the almighty the way a parent gives a child a hamster in order to impart responsibility. No. My mother had always maintained that Kelli was her own person, of and for herself, just like anyone else. She always stopped short of saying independent, because that, of course, was clearly not the case. Kelli could never be independent. Yet I knew, weirdly, that was what she meant. In her mind, somehow, Kelli stood on her own.