A classmate, Candace, caught me coming up from the special-ed wing after recess and called me Queen Retardo. Back in elementary school if a teacher had caught a whiff of that they’d have shut it down right away. Probably Candace would’ve had to give a presentation on Williams syndrome in front of the whole school. At East Oak, Mademoiselle Malcolm either didn’t hear or didn’t care.
The nickname stuck. It meant I didn’t have much of a social life until grade ten, when I made the track team. I got some friends and, by the end of the term, a crush. Owen Lenton was six foot three, but his thighs were thinner than my dad’s arms. He was a distance runner and the coach thought he was good enough to make provincials. I liked how driven he was, the contrast of his determination with the breezy, re
