Special(Jaskirat Kaur) My name is Tanya and I am 8 years old, my best friend’s name is Avinash and we both are in grade 3. All the teachers and parents love me because they say I’m a great kid but no one really likes Ash. He’s always really quiet and his grades suck, no one talks to him except me. He’s a pretty nice guy once you get to know him but he’s kind of boring. Last summer his mom passed away and left him a camera, he always has that thing with him. He takes pictures of everything and sends them off somewhere and they give him money for them, he says he needs money because his dad doesn’t have enough. I’ve never seen the pictures he takes but I guess they are good because he does it every day and gets money for it.

I feel really bad for Ash, people are really mean to him because he sucks at everything. At school everyone calls him a loser. The artistic people don’t like him because he can’t draw and the athletic people are the meanest to him because he couldn’t even catch an underhand throw if his life depended on it. He can’t even hang out with the mean kids because he doesn’t gossip and talk a lot. So Ash just spends his time all alone taking pictures of things. I check up on him sometimes but he’s too boring to hang out with all the time.

A few months into the school year I went on vacation with my family to visit my grandparents in Portugal for a week. When I got back Ash wasn’t at school and he wasn’t there the next day either so I went to his house and found him at home sitting in his backyard alone. I asked him what happened and he said he didn’t feel good but I felt like he was lying because he seemed perfectly healthy so I convinced him to come to school the next day. The next day Ash came but he was different and there was something missing, he wasn’t just walking around alone taking pictures anymore, it was much worse; he had his hands in his pockets and his head down, he just stood in a corner as if he was scared. After begging him the whole lunch break he finally told me some of what happened during recess. He said while I was gone it was raining for 4 days straight and they had to have indoor recess every day and that made picking on him easier for everyone, each day it got worse. On the last day, the teacher had to leave so the class was playing some ball game in the classroom with the silent ball. As they were playing this boy threw the ball really hard at Ash’s face which made his glasses fall and break, he put his camera down to pick up his glasses, at that point, he was really mad and might have turned and punched the boy in the face. But they were yelling at him to fetch the ball and give it to them. since he was mad he didn’t move a muscle and stayed where he was. then one of the girls came and picked up his camera and said, it’s okay, we’ll just play with this. Suddenly his anger turned into fear and he ran from person to person trying to catch his camera before them, but like I said before, Ash couldn’t catch even if his life depended on it. He saw his camera fall apart in their hands and it fell to the ground with a loud thud just as the teacher came walking down the hallway. The kids heard her coming and picked up the camera and the other things on the ground and sat down in their desks calmly as if they were there the whole time, leaving him on the ground collecting the little pieces of the camera. When the teacher came in she started yelling at Ash about why he is on the ground and how he had made such a huge mess. She made him sweep the whole class for the rest of the recess while the other kids just looked at him and snickered. At the end of the day, Ash went to the boy who had picked up his camera and pleaded him to give him his camera back, he said he will give it to him if he could catch him and his friends. Ash ran after them but they rode away on their bikes and he was too out of breath to run any further. When he got home he had to tell his father about his broken glasses and he didn’t care how they broke he was just furious that he would have to spend so much money so now Ash is grounded.

I didn’t know what to say, I was shocked. By the time I got my self together the bell rang and we went to class. The teacher said for the last two periods they were going to learn about the 7 smarts and experiment who is smart at what. she said everyone is special and it’s ok if you aren’t good at some, because you will probably good at another. She was right because when we got to the drawing part the people who were good at sports failed miserably and the people good at art failed even worse than Ash at sports. Some were really good at spelling and some at math, everyone was good at something, whether it be music or just being smart at things like trivia. At the end of class, each of us had to stand up and share what we got the highest scores at. All the kids said their talents proud and loud including me, but when it was Ash’s turn he just stood there and looked down. I saw some kids sneak some rude comments and got mad. I stood up and said to the teacher that everyone is special because they all can do something better than some people, but they can still all do it, so my friend Ash is extra special because he can do something no one in our class can, not even the teacher, because he can take amazing photos. The teacher seemed pretty impressed and asked Ash to show the class his photos, but Ash said he didn’t have his camera, but if she wanted he could bring some of the pictures he has printed at home. Then something I didn’t expect happened. the boy who had Ash’s camera got up and said, I have it, and asked the teacher if he and his friends could get it. The boys returned with a very broken camera and gave it back to Ash as if they were sorry. Turns out Ash had another smart, he was good at fixing things too, so he fixed his camera and the whole class looked at the pictures he had taken of sunsets, animals, and us with woah’s and wow’s until the bell rang. That day everyone from our class said bye to Ash before going home and Ash looked like he was glowing and a whole new person every day after.

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