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under the bed. One only feels comfortable working the graveyard shift when nobody else is awake. One of us hides chocolate all over the house (actually, a couple of us do this). But we are comfortable in ourpeculiarities because, in my house, to be average was to be disappointing. To be different was good. We are products of our differences and this is what we have always known. If any of us felt as if we never quite fit in (as I did for most of my life), it was all right, because there was always home to retreat to. Home, where the rest of our kind resided.
    I was in no way alarmed, then, when my own child exhibited some very specific differences early in his life. For example, Blaze never crawled. He preferred to slide backwards on his head to get where he was going. At twelve months he just got up and walked.
    He had an acute sensitivity to loud noises and an extraordinary appreciation for all kinds of music by the time he was four years old. Although Maya is the only bona fide musician, music has always played a large role in my family. I listened to all kinds of music with Blaze, wanting to expose him to everything. By the time he approached his fifth birthday, he could single out the styles and voices of specific artists and showed a definite preference for jazz. I could never get Blaze to initiate dressing himself and it was very difficult for him to put his own shoes on, but when it came to picking out and playing music, he was adept with tapes and CDs and was more or less in control of the playlist in our house.
    Unlike me, he never showed any kind of interest in drawing pictures. I bought him colored pens and markers just as my mother had for me, but he was much more interested in making up his own names for the different shades and gradations of color and then playing with the pens as if they were building blocks.
    He toilet trained himself in the space of a week when he was two years old but preferred to sit backwards on the toilet until he was seven. Of course, this position necessitated taking off a fair amount of clothing, but I wasn’t about to complain. I’d heard horror stories of parents who couldn’t get their kids potty trained even after a year of trying so I considered myself lucky.
    I read to Blaze daily and, by five, he knew the alphabet and the numbers to ten. I bought a map puzzle of the United States and before long he’d learned the names of all fifty states but he refused to put the puzzle together. He started speaking late, around the age of three, but early on he was able to replicate various sounds such as trains, bells, air brakes, and sirens.
    None of these oddities seemed disturbing to me when Blaze was younger. He was beautiful, luminous, and receptive. He was special, yes, undoubtedly. I expected this. He was, after all, one of us.
    When I enrolled Blaze in kindergarten in the fall of 1992, I expected that he would be a star in his class. He seemed ready, willing, and even happy to start. Although I had never minded the constant moving of my childhood, I planned to stay in one place and let Blaze put down his own roots in what I considered a safe, pleasant neighborhood. Four years before, my family left Portland and moved to California. Maya and I followed a few months later.
    Now, she and I had just moved into a rapidly developing upper-middle-class neighborhood near the Pacific Ocean. We didn’t exactly fit the community profile. We were a couple of waitresses among white-collar families with SUVs and mortgages and, according to the school directory, I was the only single mother with a child in kindergarten that year.
    It was the elementary school itself that had attracted me to the area. The year before, Blaze and I had watched it being built as we rounded the neighborhood on our daily walks. I loved the look of it and the fact that it was so new and fresh. I met Blaze’s teacher at the orientation for parents. She was very cool, very pretty, and very young. The school day for