I had a classmate in second grade who was different. We'll call him Barry. The first thing my classmates and I noticed was that Barry had a personality that made him very difficult to get along with. It clashed with everybody and I do mean everybody. Just about every interaction with him resulted in Barry starting an argument with the other person. Needless to say we quickly learned not to willingly chose him as a partner in assignments, and avoided him out on the playground as well.
Another thing is that the teacher automatically exempted Barry from the weekly five minute math quizzes before we ever took our first quiz. Even though the only way to become exempt from these quizzes was to prove yourself to be a total math genius, which very few people managed even at the end of the year, and especially not Barry.
The most mysterious thing however were the times Barry left the classroom. My elementary school(s) tutoring program was called the Chapter program. The dumb kids were weeded out and enrolled in Chapter within the first month of kindergarten, so everyone was familiar with the Tuesday and Thursday Chapter sessions and the kids who went to them, as every class had several. But Barry would leave class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Not only that, but he'd be gone at different hours than the Chapter kids, be the only one to leave class, and for longer periods too. As you can imagine we were very curious about that as Chapter wasn't a secret, but the few kids who dared to ask would have "None of your business!" snapped at them by the teacher. It seemed like we'd never know what Barry's mysterious sessions were.
One afternoon we were hard at work at our desks when I heard the teacher quietly talking to someone. It was Barry, who responded a bit loudly. I ignored it and tried to concentrate on my work, but this got harder to do as Barry got louder and louder. He sounded pissed. At about the same moment the teacher requested assistance over the intercom there was a loud crashing sound. That got me to look up. Turned out Barry had turned over his desk. As the class watched he flung over his chair and gave it a good kick. While he did this he was full-out screaming at this point.
At that moment the teacher announced that it was recess time and to go outside now. Shit, don't gotta tell us twice, we practically ran out the back door. Even with the door closed behind us we could still hear Barry's screaming through it. We moved away in case he ran out and tried to attack us before gathering together to wonder just what the hell happened. We had never seen anything like it before, but it was scary. Barry seemed like he had been in a bad mood earlier, but nobody thought it would lead into anything like this. My classmates with younger siblings said that it resembled the fits their siblings would throw when they were two or three, but had never seen anything like it in an elementary school age kid. None of us had.
Since we couldn't make heads or tails out of what happened we eventually gave up trying to figure it out and went to play on the playground equipment. Even though we stood around talking for at least five minutes it was still a very long time before we were finally called back into the classroom. I was pretty nervous coming back inside, but Barry was no where to be seen (or heard). The first thing I noticed after seeing that Barry's desk and chair were back upright, was that the classroom seemed very picked up, which was abnormal for the afternoon. Another was that even though we ran out with our workbooks open, many of them were now closed. Some kids even had new, freshly sharpened pencils.
We silently sat down while the teacher stood at the head of the class. Even after we sat down nobody said anything. "I'm very sorry about that, everyone," my teacher finally said. More silence, but my teacher was clearly thinking hard about her next words. At the time I didn't think she knew what to say, but years later I realized she was trying to choose her words very carefully so she didn't say anything that would get her fired.
"Barry is...different," she said at last. Yeah, no shit, we noticed that the first few days of school. She went on that it wasn't like the way we were different, but a "special" kind of different, that it makes it very difficult for Barry to get along with most people, and affects his behavior in certain ways too. This, she revealed, was why he left class three times a week. She said about how he had special teachers who knew how to deal with and treat these behaviors, and they were the ones who took him away. One of my classmates asked where they took him and our teacher admitted that he'd gone to where he has his special lessons, in the special ed room. She quickly added that Barry was not exceptional, because otherwise he wouldn't be allowed in regular classes.
I wasn't feeling convinced when another classmate asked how they got him out of our class in the first place. Our teacher explained that since he wasn't willing to leave they had to literally drag him kicking and screaming down the hall, though first they had to remove his shoes so he couldn't hurt them as severely by kicking them. Our teacher admitted that he threw things around the classroom before they got him out, though she didn't want us to actually see the destruction caused, and apologized on his behalf for the broken pencils she had to replace.
After that we moved onto normal class activities for the rest of the day. The next day Barry was back in class and the teacher pretended that nothing unusual had happened yesterday, though we never forgot about the incident.
And that was my very first run-in with autism. My luck is that the rest of my elementary school years I wound up in classes with other autistic kids in them, including Barry a second time in fifth grade.
