CHAPTER ONE. School and Football

I was born an idiot - but I’m cleverer than people think. I can think things OK, but when I have to say them or write them down, sometimes they come out all wrong. When I was born, my Mom named me Forrest. My daddy died just after I was born. He worked on the ships. One day a big box of bananas fell down on my daddy and killed him.

I don’t like bananas much. Only banana cake. I like that all right.

At first when I was growing up, I played with everybody. But then some boys hit me, and my Mom didn’t want me to play with them again. I tried to play with girls, but they all ran away from me.

I went to an ordinary school for a year. Then the children started laughing and running away from me. But one girl, Jenny Curran, didn’t run away, and sometimes she walked home with me. She was nice.

Then they put me into another kind of school, and there were some strange boys there. Some couldn’t eat or go to the toilet without help. I stayed in that school for five or six years. But when I was thirteen, I grew six inches in six months! And by the time I was sixteen, I was bigger and heavier than all the other boys in the school.

One day I was walking home, and a car stopped next to me. The driver asked me my name, and I told him. ‘What school do you go to?’ he asked.

I told him about the idiot school.

‘Do you ever play football?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘I see other people playing, but I don’t play and they never ask me to play with them.’

‘OK,’ the man said.

Three days later, the man in the car came and got me out of school. Mom was there, and they got all the things out of my desk and put them in a brown paper bag. Then they told me to say goodbye to the teacher.

The man in the car took me and Mom to the new high school. There, an old man with grey hair asked me lots of questions. But I knew that they really wanted me to play football. The man in the car was a football coach called Fellers. Coach Fellers asked me to put on a football suit, then asked me to undress and dress again, twenty times, until I could do it easily.

I began to play football with the high school team, and Coach Fellers helped me. And I went to lessons in the school. One teacher, Miss Henderson, was really nice. She taught me to read. And who do you think I saw in the school cafe? Jenny Curran! She was all grown-up now, with pretty black hair, long legs, and a beautiful face. I went and sat with her, and she remembered me!