A Stuttering College Student’s Short Story

Never one to lack contradictions, I took a few creative writing courses in college while working on my accounting degree. The decisions I made all because I assumed I couldn’t get a job that required talking.

… Anyway, we had to do daily writing in my fiction class to get the juices rolling. One thing about fiction I’ve always liked is that it’s usually more honest than non-fiction. But wait - isn’t fiction fake stuff? And non-fiction is real?

Exactly. Non-fiction is subject to worry about perception - which means we tend to overanalyze it. There’s no veil between an author and their writing. In the demand for the truth, we usually lose some aspect of it.

Fiction, however… well, an author can hide behind fiction. ‘All likelihoods are accidental’ is just a big liability cover. (After all, it’s a non-fiction disclaimer before the story begins.)

I wrote the following story in Spring 2013. I was 4 years out of high school, but my stories usually focused on those years. The character’s reflection of speech therapy reveals a lot about how I felt then, and I just think it’s worth reading…

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Fifteen minutes before lunchtime was when I heard that quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson. As usual, I wouldn’t have to make a presentation, so I was hardly paying attention when I heard the words spoken by a classmate: “How much of human life is lost in waiting.”

Mr. Jamerson, who was about as exciting as a walk through a desert, was making some announcement as I continued to carefully write the quote on my notebook; I had pretty awful handwriting so it was taking me awhile to make sure it was perfect. My best friend, Brody, was at my side as soon as the class was dismissed.

“Skyler, what are you doing?” he asked me; I didn’t look up. When Brody knocked the pen out of my hand, I sighed dramatically and glared at him through my long brown hair that my mom was always nagging me to tie back.

“What w-w-was that for?”

“Did you even listen to my speech today?”

“D-d-d-d,” I took a deep breath, “Did you have the Emerson quote?” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t his voice that spoke those carefully chosen words.

“No,” Brody replied with a bit of confusion in his voice.

“Then no.” I stood to retrieve my pen. “Today is Wednesday so I am looking forward to anything except the last thirty minutes of l-l-l-lunch.”

“You could have at least tried to listen, you know.” Brody ignored my comment as I followed him out of the classroom, my pen now safely in my backpack.

“If it was interesting, then you would have t-t-told me when you were researching it.”

He shrugged and smiled at me. “Fair enough. So today you have a wonderful session of speech therapy?”

I groaned. “Not sure how wonderful works in your vocabulary, but that’s the opposite w-w-word choice that I w-w-would use.” I exhaled sharply and took another deep breath. There were lots of techniques for stuttering, but I thought most of the ones my speech therapist lady suggested were stupid.

“Sorry, hun,” Brody said as I rolled my eyes at his pet names.

We had been friends since freshman year of high school, after he made a smart aleck remark to me in our ninth grade Spanish class. It was our one elective that we had to take and we both sat in the back of the room and tried to get by unnoticed. Not long after that, I learned that Brody was actually an ace student in every other class and had tried to get his mom to let him take French instead. She said Spanish was more useful, which I thought was fair considering we lived in the San Diego county of California.

Back then, Brody’s spikey blonde hair fit his lanky body that could have belonged to a nine year old, despite him being almost fifteen. His blue eyes, by default, were full of energy and excitement, and his freckles added to the typical white child look. We were two of three white kids in that Spanish class freshman year and the only two kids in the class who had not been fluent in some type of Spanish.

So now we were seniors, seniors who did not by any means rule the school, and puberty had done well to both of us. Brody had grown an entire foot and stood at 6’3” and his blonde hair grew out and as a surprise to his entire curly-haired family, had been straight. I liked to call Brody a one-hit-wonder, as his dating life never seemed to get past one date. He was attractive but not what girls were looking for; he told every girl on his first date that he role-played online and his best friend was a girl. Though I tried to convince him to at least wait for the second or third date to relay that information, he never did. He said it was crucial that he only date a girl that would agree to those terms on a first date.

I too had changed for the better. I didn’t grow a single inch over the years in height, but my awkwardly scrawny body had some shape, albeit not much since I still wore a small size, and I learned how to wear makeup and do my hair. Brody had complained when I bought a straightening iron, saying that my frizzy and crazy hair was the best part of his day and could always make him laugh after a difficult exam. But after sitting on my bed for thirty minutes as I straightened my hair, he saw the end results and just nodded, telling me that it made my light brown eyes look even nicer. I threw a ball of my socks at him.

There was one problem I could not fix: my speech. I had been going to speech therapy since I had developed my stutter when I was six years old. I hated every technique that anyone tried to teach me. I felt fury when a speech therapist told me, “Your speech is improving!” as if they were some freaking magical worker when in reality, I had just grown comfortable enough around them for my speech to improve slightly. This therapist was no different; I had her all four years of high school. She said she saw an improvement but all I saw was a waste of taxpayer money for her job.

“Sky?” Brody was waving his hand in front of my face. “I know you hate when I call you dear, but you don’t need to just shut off.”

“Sorry,” I muttered as I closed my locker. We took our lunches and sat outside of the nurse’s office, like we did every Wednesday, so that I didn’t have to walk across campus to my meeting and thereby waste an extra eight minutes of our forty-five minute lunch blocks.

After updating me on what level he was on in his newest game, I had eaten my entire lunch while Brody’s sat unfinished. I pointed it out and he shrugged, saying he had the whole time I was gone to eat anyway. He pointed to his wrist and I looked over to see that, sure enough, it was 12:59 and time for me to walk into my personal room of torture.

Even though we had an academic counseling office, the speech therapist had her office in a room inside the nurse’s office building. Not only did this make zero sense, but it also made me feel even worse about my language barrier, as if I had some sort of illness. I only walked through those doors if I was sick and had to go home, or if I had to talk about my stutter.