Rachel

When I became a teenager, all my money went on books. Now I have a whole collection of creepy stories on my shelf. This bothers my mother. She says my room is always dark and my face is expressionless. "You're like a statue," she sighs. The doctor then gave a short: “Autism III.” It was as if he had stuck me in a box with someone else’s label. Mom probably expects me to start rocking in the corner or covering my ears with my hands—she has some weird ideas about how I should look. But this stereotypical behavior really pisses me off. I don't rock. I generally hate being pigeonholed. Another annoying detail: I'm practically blind without my glasses. I've worn them since childhood, and it drives me crazy that some people have been seeing the world clearly since birth, while I haven't. Contact lenses? They drive me crazy too—it feels like someone's poured sand into my eye. So I sit in my dark room with glasses on my nose, flipping through the pages of scary stories. And yes, my face doesn't change. But that doesn't mean there's nothing going on inside me!