Lessons in Understanding
an excerpt

Let’s start somewhere near the beginning, shall we?

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On March 2nd, 1991, I, Emerson Marie Grier, was born.

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No, wait. That’s too far back. Sorry about that.

Let’s fast forward sixteen or so years in the future. That’s when it starts.

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March 2nd, 2007—my sweet sixteen. No, I did not go all out like some people do. Seriously, you can just drive legally when you’re sixteen. You can’t legally smoke (eighteen), vote (also eighteen), or drink alcohol (twenty-one). So, how come it’s such a big WHOOP for some? Don’t ask me; I have no clue. Maybe it’s the right of passage from driving…or, no, hold on a second; you can get a job at some places when you’re sixteen, but what’s so great about that either? Myself, I just thought it meant I only had two years left in high school. This is the plain and honest truth, mind you. Unless you fail a grade; then you have three years or however long left, depending on how many times you fail a grade (or grades in the plural sense). But most people at my age only had around two years left.

Let’s see, I had Jessica Roland over, my best friend (forever! That is, if you want to go spastic preteen on me) since kindergarten. You would expect that after thirteen years, we would get tired of each other. But somehow, we had survived the fights, cold shoulders, et cetera until we became friends again. I guess you could say we had a lucky friendship. Nothing too bad had ever come between us: the worst would have to probably be when her parents got divorced when we were thirteen. She was real torn up over their divorce for a while. (It had seemed like forever to me, because I lost the sense of what she had been like before “the break,” as she called it. But she’s come back to who she was now, if that makes any sense at all.)

Besides Jess, I had also invited over a handful of other friends: Kirsten, Rachel, and Sammi (short for Samantha). I had gone a bit old school (which means mid- to late-1990’s for me) in semblance to that phase slowly disappearing. Old cartoons such as Ren and Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, Catdog, Rocket Power, and others were played. We went through the process of stuffing old dolls of mine into boxes for my maybe children of the future to maybe play with, basically stuff like that.

Then we had gone on to do teenager stuff, such as putting on makeup, scoping out hot boys at the mall, things like that. It was weird, switching from early childhood to almost-adulthood all in one night and one morning. But all the same, looking back on it now…it was totally freaking awesome! It may not have been completely original, since I had heard of other people doing those sort of things but at differentiating ages, but I did it my own way with my own friends.

The next day week started off weird, though. Grant was finishing up his last year in middle school, eighth grade. But the signs of his schizophrenia were becoming more and more apparent to the point where they took him to a psychiatrist to see if there was a diagnosis back in mid-February 2007. It was becoming nearer and nearer to the one-month ‘trial’ period, and at the end of that month, it would be said if he did or did not have at least some form (short-term or long-term) of schizophrenia. Personally, the symptoms were getting worse instead of better, in my opinion. But I still did not want to have to say that I had a self-proclaimed “schizo” for a brother. He was already embarrassing enough before the change—it became much weirder at school once he entered the ninth grade as a “freshman schizo” in two ways: he was certainly a freshman in high school, but was also a new schizophrenic. Two years ago, he had been as fine as he could have been. But then, it was like…wham! Everything does a 180° right in front of my face!

Sophomore year was another ‘trial’ period. I had to make a decision on how react to my brother if I ran across him in the hallways or at lunch. (I had so hoped that we wouldn’t have the same lunch, but to my bad luck, we did.) I so wanted to just ignore him, but being the kindhearted girl in my grade, it was hard to so. I was strong in my defensive front around him for the first month or so until he started to avoid me at home, saying I had changed. I wanted to have a heart-to-heart with him about the change—the real, concrete one—that had happened in him, but wasn’t sure how to bring it up or if he even fully understood it himself. I just truthfully didn’t know what the hell to do.

But after a while (two full weeks, to be precise about it) I had to do something or I felt like I would implode upon myself with tension, anger, and anxiety—among many other negative feelings. My heart (figurative form of the word) couldn’t take just plain ignoring Grant. He was, after all, my only brother and only sibling. I had no one else to really turn to, except for Jess, and she just wasn’t really cutting it anymore. She had her problems (which seemed petty to mine; and honestly, I still think that they were) and there was a time there at the beginning when we had one of our silent periods when we technically weren’t friends. This continued on and off through our junior and senior years.

This was when things started to get interesting. Specifically: senior year, first grading period, our sixth period of “technically not being friends” since the tenth grade. Oh yeah, was I in for one very interesting senior year!