- Joined
- Nov 27, 2019
When I was in elementary, a new boy joined the grade below me, I'll call him Tom. Tom was tubby and had long greasy hair that would go down to his shoulders, and his head was slightly pear shaped. He had major ADHD, and you could feel that he was not all there in his head. He wasn't exactly a bad kid, a little whiny and annoying but not the worst.
Fast forward a couple years. Tom joined the same middle school as I did. It seemed like as the years went by, he was slowly losing his cognitive ability. He stopped bringing his school bag, and he would wear the same dirty clothes everyday. Tom wouldn't attend class, and he had no friends. He would just walk slowly around the school nonstop. It got even stranger when he stopped speaking all together, and he begun to bring a giant stuffed animal of a manta ray to school. He would just walk around, dragging this dirty manta ray with him, not speaking, with a one thousand yard stare. If anyone were to come up and speak to him, he would start swinging the manta ray towards them until they backed off, and he would continue walking without even saying a word. I even saw him walking around the town multiple times, the same way he did at school, alone and with that manta ray. I left that middle school that year and I never saw him again.
Ive thought about whether he was faking all this for attention. Although the fact that he would act like this even if no one was around him, and how he would walk around the school nonstop for hours brings this into doubt. Especially with his ADHD. He may have been annoying, but the fact that this is what he became is tragic. He came from very a broken home. I doubt whoever looked after him cared about how he was doing, otherwise they would have gotten him help.
That's so sad. I wish a counselor or something would have tried to help him, get him into a smaller class where he got more one on one attention