their hair or touch their faces. Yes, but they’re normal and no one makes them stop. Other people don’t make good eye contact, but they’re normal and no one nags them to make eye contact. They have something else to make up for the tiny bit of themselves that acts autistic.
That’s what I want. I want—I want not to have to try so hard to look normal. I just want to be normal.”
“‘Normal’is a dryer setting,” Bailey says.
“Normal is other people.” Cameron’s arm twitches and he shrugs violently; sometimes that stops it.
“This—this stupid arm… I’m tired of trying to hide what’s wrong. I want it to be right ." His voice has gotten loud, and I do not know if he will be angrier if I ask him to be quieter. I wish I had not brought them here. “Anyway,” Cameron says, slightly softer, “I’m going to do it, and you can’t stop me.”
“I am not trying to stop you,” I say.
“Are you going to?” he asks. He looks at each of us in turn.
“I do not know. I am not ready to say.”
“Linda won’t,” Bailey says. “She says she will quit her job.”
“I do not know why the patterns would be the same,” Eric says. He is looking at the book. “It does not make sense.”
“A familiar face is a familiar face?”
“The task is finding familiar in different. The activation pattern should be more similar to finding a familiar nonface in different unfaces. Do they have that picture in this book?”
“It is on the next page,” I say. “It says the activation pattern is the same except that the face task activates the facial recognition area.”
“They care more about facial recognition,” Eric says.
“Normal people care about normal people,” Cameron says. “That is why I want to be normal.”
“Autistic people care about autistic people,” Eric says.
“Not the same,” Cameron says. He looks around the group. “Look at us. Eric is making patterns with his finger. Bailey is chewing on his lip, Lou is trying so hard to sit still that he looks like a piece of wood, and I’m bouncing whether I want to or not. You accept it that I bounce, you accept it that I have dice in my pocket, but you do not care about me. When I had flu last spring, you did not call or bring food.”
I do not say anything. There is nothing to say. I did not call or bring food because I did not know Cameron wanted me to do that. I think it is unfair of him to complain now. I am not sure that normal people always call and bring food when someone is sick. I glance at the others. They are all looking away from Cameron, as I am. I like Cameron; I am used to Cameron. What is the difference between liking and being used to? I am not sure. I do not like not being sure.
“You don’t, either,” Eric says finally. “You have not been to any meetings of the society in over a year.”
“I guess not,” Cameron’s voice is soft now. “I kept seeing—I can’t say it—the older ones, worse than we are. No young ones; they’re all cured at birth or before. When I was twenty it was a lot of help. But now… we are the only ones like us. The older autistics, the ones who didn’t get the good early training—I do not like to be around them. They make me afraid that I could go back to that, being like them. And there is no one for us to help, because there are no young ones. “
“Tony,” Bailey says, looking at his knees.
“Tony is the youngest and he is… what, twenty-seven? He’s the only one under thirty. All the rest of the younger people at the Center are… different.”
“Emmy likes Lou,” Eric says. I look at him; I do not know what he means by that.
“If I’m normal, I will never have to go to a psychiatrist again,” Cameron says. I think of Dr. Fornum and think that not seeing her is almost enough reason to risk the treatment. “I can marry without a certificate of stability. Have children.”
“You want to get married,” Bailey says.
“Yes,” Cameron says. His voice is louder again, but only a little louder, and his face is red. “I want to get married. I want to have children. I want to live in an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood and take the ordinary public transportation and live