Excerpt: Talia (The Moebius Strip, Book 2)

Sometimes Sylvie creeps me out. She’s so smart, but you wouldn’t guess it to look at her. She spends a lot of her time listening to music – usually Yanni – or sorting glass beads by colour and size and stuff. She can communicate, though, with her Dynamo. It’s a computer device with a touch screen that has pictures she can choose to “say” and it speaks the sentences for her. She’s learning to type now, too, and it has a touch-screen keyboard so she can type whole sentences instead of the weird garbled sentences she said when she first got it.

I suppose, though, that Sylvie creeps me out mostly because she reminds me so much of myself.

We’re both autistic. Sylvie’s six and I’m fourteen now, but she’s a lot like I was at her age. Except I think she’s got advantages I didn’t. For example, she got a Dynamo when she was five, and she’s been a student at Moebius since before that. Me, well, I didn’t get my first communication device until I was eight, and I only came to Moebius last year. Maybe I’ve known Jessica longer – she used to work with me when I was Sylvie’s age – but I first knew her when she was doing behavioural stuff, and Sylvie’s only known her as the wholistic director of Moebius.

Jessica is Ms Holland. Like I said, she’s the director of Moebius. She got here in a round-about way, but so did all of us, really. Her career has run the gamut of autism treatment: from behaviourism to play-based; from psychoanalytics to psychiatry. She’s dabbled in causation, but focuses mainly on advocacy now. Disability rights is a big focus for her, and it shows in Moebius. She started the place with her husband, multi-billionaire Chad Davis. It’s kind of like a haven for all us misfits. There are adults with disabilities living out here, working the farm, making things in the workshops, etc. And then there’s the school, which is where Sylvie and I go. It’s like being homeschooled, only with lots of other students who have reasons they don’t fit in at regular school. Lots of us have disabilities, but some don’t. Or, at least, they don’t have diagnoses.

Like Rosemarie. She’s not diagnosed. Yet. I swear she’s Aspie. That’s Asperger Syndrome. That or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. She feels more Aspie to me, though. Rosie’s a dancer. A ballerina, to be exact. She passed up a chance to go to the ballet school in Winnipeg. I’m still not completely sure why, but made sense to her. I hope she doesn’t regret it.

Rosie is fourteen, like me. I live with her and her parents; it gets them a decrease in the tuition they have to pay for Rosemarie to go to Moebius. Sylvie lives with us, too. Same deal. She’s been there a few months longer than I have; part of her going to Moebius had to do with her placement in the Comptons’ home, I think. I don’t really know for sure about all that.

Me, I wound up living with the Comptons because I had to move out of the residence at Moebius. Didn’t take too long for one of the residential staff there to start abusing me, you see. I guess he figured that a little thirteen year old who used to be a gymnast and didn’t speak would be good target practice for his dick.

He was wrong.

I put up with it for a while. Mostly because I couldn’t figure out what to do about it. I have tardive dyskinesia because I took risperdal for four years (my mother thought puberty might make me violent), and it totally screwed up my ability to control my own body. So I couldn’t really fight him off, and years of behavioural training had taught me to just do whatever I was told. Not a good situation.

But the day I fell while I was practicing my gymnastics? That was it. I wanted – I want to be a gymnast again. I was one, once. Haven’t been able to do it properly since the risperdal kicked in all those years ago. But stress makes the TD act up, and having that man around was all kinds of stress for me. And I seized up in the middle of a flip.

So I told Rosie. And she said I’d better tell someone. So we told Jessica.

And now we’re going to court. Finally. It’s been a year, and we’re going to court.

I’m glad it’s going to be over soon, but I don’t want to see him in court. I have to testify, because I’m the victim. Well, I mean, I guess I don’t have to testify, but it’ll be better if I do. So I’ll have to bring my laptop, because my speech goes wonky under stress, and even on good days it’s pretty spotty.

I’m scared as hell.