And I did my presentation on Eleanor Roosevelt. I used a PowerPoint, because PowerPoints make me more comfortable.

When I pulled up the first picture of Eleanor Roosevelt, though, Dustin and his cronies snickered from the back row.

“Something’s wrong with that lady’s chin,” Dustin said. “Is that why you picked her?” More snickers.

Then I had something that maybe could be called a Silent Moment. I don’t mean I suddenly went deaf. What I mean is that it felt like I could see everybody in the room as if they were moving in slow motion, slow enough for me to read their faces. I saw Dustin look back and forth at his two buddies and I knew he was saying whatever he thought might make them laugh, might make them think he was cool. Ms. Trepky was standing in the back of the room, and I saw her look down at Dustin, ready to stop the nonsense. Except then she looked at me and I knew she was asking me a Silent Question, asking me if I wanted to respond to the Nonsense Boys myself.

I did.

“Well,” I said. “Since you’re kind enough to bring that up, I’ll start with a quote from Ms. Eleanor Roosevelt, who, if you’ll remember, was First Lady of the United States.” I clicked ahead in my PowerPoint to a page with a big block quote. “She said, ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’ And so I think, since we’re trying to figure out these historical figures like they were our best friends, what I think is that if Eleanor were here right now, she wouldn’t care at all what you thought of her chin. And not like she was trying to ignore it and she secretly did care. No, what I think is that if she heard you say that, she might look at you and smile and maybe even blow you a kiss with that weird mouth and then go back to talking to people who had more interesting things to say.”

Dustin’s face was red, and his shoulders slumped. I did feel a tiny bit bad for being mean like that. Only a tiny bit, though, because saying those things out loud made me realize something. It made me realize that sometimes I only pretended not to care when people whispered my name and I couldn’t hear, or about my neck being thick on the sides, or being one of the slowest runners in PE. I wanted to know how to really not care. How to spend more time thinking about more important things. Like Eleanor.

Ms. Trepky was smiling.

I finished my presentation on Eleanor Roosevelt.

I got an A.

Gray Walls and Gas Masks

Here’s something I learned: Sometimes what a place looks like on the outside changes depending on how you feel on the inside.

To explain what I’m talking about, let me tell you about the Denver International Airport.

Some airports are big, and some are small. Some are square and glass, some are brown and flat. Some, like the Denver airport, look like a long spiky row of white circus tents.