Attachment 4
Part One: August
“Ordinary”
Excerpt from Wonder
I know I’m not an ordinary ten-year-old kid. I mean, sure, I do ordinary things. I eat ice
cream. I ride my bike. I play ball. I have an Xbox. Stuff like that makes me ordinary. I guess. And
I feel ordinary. Inside. But I know ordinary kids don’t make other ordinary kids run away
screaming in playgrounds. I know ordinary kids don’t get stared at wherever they go.
If I found a magic lamp and I could have one wish, I would wish that I had a normal face
that no one ever noticed at all. I would wish that I could walk down the street without people
seeing me and then doing that look-away thing. Here’s what I think: the only reason I’m not
ordinary is that no one else sees me that way.
But I’m kind of used to how I look by now. I know how to pretend I don’t see the faces
people make. We’ve all gotten pretty good at that sort of thing: me, Mom and Dad, Via.
Actually, I take that back: Via’s not so good at it. She can really get annoyed when people do
something rude. Like, for instance, one time in the playground some older kids made some
noises. I don’t even know what the noises were exactly because I didn’t hear them myself, but
Via heard and she just started yelling at the kids. That’s the way she is. I’m not that way.
Via doesn’t see me as ordinary. She says she does, but if I were ordinary, she wouldn’t feel
she needs to protect me as much. And Mom and Dad don’t see me as ordinary, either. They see
me as extraordinary. I think the only person in the world who realizes how ordinary I am is me.
My name is August, by the way. I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re
thinking, it’s probably worse.
Attachment 4
Part Four: Jack
“Carvel”
Excerpt from Wonder
I remember seeing him for the first time in front of the Carvel on Amesfort Avenue when I
was about five or six. Me and Veronica, my babysitter, were sitting on the bench outside the
store with Jamie, my baby brother, who was sitting in his stroller facing us. I guess I was busy
eating my ice cream cone, because I didn’t even notice the people who sat down next to us.
Then at one point I turned my head to suck the ice cream right out of the bottom of my
cone, and that’s when I saw him: August. He was sitting right next to me. I know it wasn’t cool,
but I kind of went “Uhh!” when I saw him because I honestly got scared. I thought he was
wearing a zombie mask or something. It was the kind of “uhh” you say when you’re watching a
scary movie and the bad guy like jumps out of the bushes. Anyway, I know it wasn’t nice of me
to do that, and though the kid didn’t hear me, I know his sister did.
“Jack! We have to go!” said Veronica. She had gotten up and was turning the stroller
around because Jamie, who had obviously just noticed the kid, too, was about to say something
embarrassing. So I jumped up kind of suddenly, like a bee had landed on me, and followed
Veronica as she zoomed away. I could hear the kid’s mom saying softly behind us: “Okay, guys, I
think it’s time to go,” and I turned around to look at them one more time. The kid was licking
his ice cream cone, the mom was picking up his scooter, and the sister was glaring at me like
she was going to kill me. I looked away quickly.
“Veronica, what was wrong with that kid?” I whispered.
“Hush, boy!” she said, her voice angry. I loved Veronica, but when got mad, she got mad.
Meanwhile, Jamie was practically spilling out of his stroller trying to get another look as
Veronica pushed him away.
“But, Vonica…” said Jamie.
“You boys were very naughty! Very naughty!” said Veronica as soon as we were farther
down the block. “Staring like that!”
“I didn’t mean to!” I said.
“Vonica,” said Jamie.
“Us leaving like that,” Veronica was muttering. “Oh Lord, that poor lady. I tell you, boys.
Every day we should thank the Lord for our blessings, you hear me?”
“Vonica!”
“What is it, Jamie?”
“Is it Halloween?”
“No, Jamie.”
“Then why was that boy wearing a mask?”
Veronica didn’t answer. Sometimes, when she was mad about something, she would do
that.
“He wasn’t wearing a mask,” I explained to Jamie.
“Hush, Jack!” said Veronica.
“Why are you so mad, Veronica?” I couldn’t help asking.
I thought this would make her angrier, but actually she shook her head.
Attachment 4
“It was bad how we did that,” she said. “Just getting up like that, like we’d just seen the
devil. I was scared for what Jamie was going to say, you know? I didn’t want him to say anything
that would hurt that little boy’s feelings. But it was very bad, us leaving like that. That momma
knew what was going on.”
“But we didn’t mean it,” I answered.
“Jack, sometimes you don’t have to mean to hurt someone to hurt someone. You
understand?”
That was the first time I ever saw August in the neighborhood, at least that I remember.
But I’ve seen him around ever since then: a couple of times in the playground, a few times in
the park. He used to wear an astronaut helmet sometimes. But I always knew it was him
underneath the helmet. All the kids in the neighborhood knew it was him. Everyone has seen
August at some point or another. We all know his name, though he doesn’t know ours.
And whenever I’ve seen him, I try to remember what Veronica said. But it’s hard. It’s hard
not to sneak a second look. It’s hard to act normal when you see him.
Attachment 4
Part Two: Via
“August Through the Peephole”
Excerpt from Wonder
His eyes are about an inch below where they should be on his face, almost to halfway down his cheeks. They
slant downward at an extreme angle, almost like diagonal slits that someone cut into his face, and the left one is
noticeably lower than the right one. They bulge outward because his eye cavities are too shallow to accommodate
them. The top eyelids are always halfway closed, like he’s on the verge of sleeping. The lower eyelids sag so much
they almost look like a piece of invisible string is pulling them downward: you can see the red part on the inside,
like they’re almost inside out. He doesn’t have eyebrows or eyelashes. His nose is disproportionately big for his
face, and kind of fleshy. His head is pinched in on the sides where the ears should be, like someone used giant
pliers and crushed the middle part of his face. He doesn’t have cheekbones. There are deep creases running down
both sides of his nose to his mouth, which gives him a waxy appearance. Sometimes people assume he’s been
burned in a fire: his features look like they’ve been melted, like the drippings on the side of a candle. Several
surgeries to correct his lip have left a scar around his mouth, the most noticeable one being a jagged gash running
from the middle of his upper lip to his nose. His upper teeth are small and splay out. He has a severe overbite and
an extremely undersized jawbone. He has a very small chin. When he was very little, before a piece of his hipbone
was surgically implanted into his lower jaw, he really had no chin at all. His tongue would just hang out of his
mouth with nothing underneath to block it. Thankfully, it’s better now. He can eat, at least: when he was younger,
he had a feeding tube. And he can talk. And he’s learned to keep his tongue inside his mouth, though that took him
several years to master. He’s also learned to control the drool that used to run down his neck. These are
considered miracles. When he was a baby, the doctors didn’t think he’d live.
He can hear, too. Most kids born with these types of birth defects have problems with their middle ears that
prevent them from hearing, but so far August can hear well enough through his tiny cauliflower-shaped ears. The
doctors think that eventually he’ll need to wear hearing aids, though. August hates the thought of this. He thinks
the hearing aids will get noticed too much. I don’t tell him that the hearing aids would be the least of his problems,
of course, because I’m sure he knows this.
Then again, I’m not really sure what August knows or doesn’t know, what he understands and doesn’t
understand.
Does August see how other people see him, or has he gotten so good at pretending that it doesn’t bother
him? Or does it bother him? When he looks in the mirror, does he see the Auggie Mom and Dad see, or does he
see the Auggie everyone else sees? Or is there another August he sees, someone in his dreams behind the
misshapen head and face? Sometimes when I looked at Grans, I could see the pretty girl she used to be
underneath the wrinkles. I could see the girl from Ipanema inside the old-lady walk. Does August see himself as he
might have looked without that single gene that caused the catastrophe of his face?
I wish I could ask him this stuff. I wish he would tell me how he feels. He used to be easier to read before the
surgeries. You knew that when his eyes squinted, he was happy. When his mouth went straight, he was being
mischievous. When his cheeks trembled, he was about to cry. He looks better now, no doubt about that, but the
signs we used to gauge his moods are all gone. There are new ones, of course. Mom and Dad can read every single
one. But I’m having trouble keeping up. And there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to keep trying: why can’t he
just say what he’s feeling like everyone else? He doesn’t have a trachea tube in his mouth anymore that keeps him
from talking. His jaw’s not wired shut. He’s ten years old. He can use his words. But we circle around him like he’s
still the baby he used to be. We change plans, go to plan B, interrupt conversations, go back on promises
depending on his moods, his whims, his needs. That was fine when he was little. But he needs to grow up now. We
need to let him, help him, make him grow up. Here’s what I think: we’ve all spent so much time trying to make
August think he’s normal that he actually thinks he is normal. And the problem is, he’s not.