Ewon

Cognitive delay.

It was official. I hated special education meetings. I had spent two hours in one, only to leave deflated. Not onlyhad they put me in a romm filled with experts who told me one by one that my baby sister was abnornal, only using terms like "cognitive delay" instead of abnormal and stupid, but they did it in the most condescending manner ever. I knew cognitive delay was awful at the time, but had no idea how completely awful until I got to work and googled the out of it.

I'd spent hours at the coffee house trying to sneak into the back room under the guise of stocking the coffee cups or beans just to get a moment to look for answers. Three websites in, and I knew all of the teachers, or "team", as they called themselves, were wrong about Jessica. She wasn't congitive delayed. Not even close.

It wasn't as if I wore rose-colored glasses and thought Jessica was going to be accepted  to Seoul Uni. by age nine. I knew she struggled in school, far more than I ever had. But she was smart. So incredibly smart, and nothing on those websites sounded like the diagnosis they tried to get me to sign off on.

Sure, she couldn't read, but when I told her a story, she remembered more details than I did. When she pulled out her building set, the one I picked up at a yard sale as a bucket of random pieces with no constractions of pictures, she'd create the most amazing vehicles and structures. When I cooked, she would tell me what I could do next to make it even better. No, intelligence was not her issue.

Reading was. And it crushed me.

Reading was like Chinese to her, and it . I wanted to give her a magic pill that made it make sense to her. I thought when the school had offered to test her and get her help, that they would actually do that-help he. Instead, they gave her a test that they claimed indicated her IQ was almost seventy. Not seventy, but almost. I called bull, but then they went through page after page of "proof" that she was lacking the intelligence she so very much had.

No amount of arguing had gotten them to agree to try a new test or reassess her using other means. They had set their mind to their conclusions, which included putting Sica into a special education school for the seriously disabled. Not that I signed off on any of it. I still had no clue what I was going to do next, but sending her to that school was not it.

I sat in my car outside our apartment, dreading the moment Jessica saw me. She was going to know things hadn't gone well at the school. Her teacher was quick to tell her we were meeting today, forgetting that she was a child and shouldn't be worried about those kinds of things. She needed to worry about how high the swing would go or what to bring to show-and-tell, not people having a meeting about her.

Her life had been hard enough, an orphan living with her undereducated, poorly employed brother, without knowing the people who were supposed to believe in her the most had already written her off as unteachable, although they'd never admit to those words. Only through her placement.

Just as I was about to bolter the courage to grab her from Sohyang-ssi, our neighbor, my phone rang.

"Hello." I answered without looking, confident it was Sohyang-ssi wondering why I was late or wanting me to grab her a loaf of bread.

"Jung Ewon-ssi, this is Im Yoona."

I racked my brain for who she was, but came up blank, and assumed here to be a sales person giving me a free cruise or some other scam. I might not have a pot to piss in, bit I somehow managed to make sure every bill was paid, even if it meant I didn't eat anything other than what I could snag from my shifts at the coffee house or bar, so I knew it wan't a bill collector.

"Who are you with?" I asked, wishing I had looked at my phone before answering it.

"I'm Jessica's art teacher and I heard about today's meeting. I wish I had been invited."

I climbed out of the car, suddenly feeling claustrophobic.

"I'm sure you are well meaninged and all, but I just can't listen to another person dress up with fancy words that they think my sister is less than capable. I just can't handle this right now."

Or ever.

What I wanted to do was hang up, but the gentleness in her voice made me willing to at least listen. I started to walk away from my building, not wanting Jessica to see me before I was off the phone. She looked forward to Wednesdays because it was the one school night I didn't work at the bar and could eat dinner with her and watch a movie. If I had my way, all days would end that way, but rent, food, and utilities all came with bills, so second job it was.

"That's just it." Yoona-ssi paused long enough that I almost interrupted before she let out "I think they are wrong."

I stopped dead in my tracks. Yoona-ssi, my new favorite person, agreed with me. I wasn't sure how that was going to change things, but at least I knew I wasn't alone. Someone else was on my side, our side.

"I know they are. She is so smart, smarter than me in most ways. Reading just doesn't click for her." At freaking all.

"If I were a gambler, Jung-ssi, I'd put my money on her IQ being in the genius level."

"Why are you calling?" I knew there had to be more than telling me the school was wrong. In isolation that would accomplish nothing whatsoever other than to make it worse.

"Like I said, I think they're wrong. They mean well, but they look at things only one way and only use one set of assessments."

I started to walk again, the doorman across the street at the "nice" apartments giving me the eye as if I were about to mug someone or something equally as dastardly. Rumor had it they planned to redo the entire neighborhood, gentrifying the crap out of it and raising the neighborhood out of most of the current residents' price ranges. Not that they took into account the rent control that was currently in place in both my building and the adjacent to it. Which was good, because I could in no way afford a price increase.

"I don't want her going to that school." which was the crux of my largest, most immediate soncern. Once you went to a school designed for people someone had already decided would grow up to live in a group home, at best, you weren't getting out of there easily.

"Nor do I." she spoke more confidently than she had only a minute earlier "My son, he was like your Jessica when he was in elementary school. quick as a whip, but failing miserably at reading, to the point he hated school. They kept referring to him as ADHD, which was wrong. I knew it, his doctor knew it, and one day a mom on the social media posted something about her son, and I didn't know better, I'd have sworn it was about my son. It turned out her child hade a severe dyslexia and went to Cloverville Academy. Within three months, he was doing better, a