Fingertips

Chapter One

By: Lil Inu Yahsa

Everything started a year and a half ago, when I met Inu Yasha. I remember everything from that day. I remember the bus I rode on to meet him, I remember the way the paint smelled because they had been repainting an old building on that day and I smelled it while I was coming outside to go on the bus. But most of all, I remember seeing Inu Yasha's face. I remember the curiousity, and the small bit of admiration his face made me feel. But most of all, more than anything, I remember looking at him and feeling one prevailing thing:

Fear

My name is Kagome Higurashi. I live with my brother, Souta, my mom, and my grandpa. My dad doesn't live with us any more because he died. he died when Souta was young, so he doesn't remember him, but I do. And sometimes I feel sad about it, but it's okay, because everyone feels sad sometimes.

My mom is a heavensent though, and everything my dad has not been able to give me, she has. And even though my brother is annoying sometimes, I love him too. My grandpa is very old and strict, and sometimes he thinks that I am the spokeswoman for the Choco Loco commercials because he has a disease in his brain that makes him think that, but my mom does not want to put him in a home for people like him.

I live on an old shrine because my grandfather, when he was not crazy, believed in that sort of thing and wanted to teach it to other people. And by teach it to other people, I mean that he wanted to show them immitations of artifacts and charge them to look at them, and make them want buy things from the gift shop.

I go to a school called Sen-Zi-Sai High' I really do not like the name of my high school because it rhymes and that makes it sound planned and it sounds more fitting for something like a preschool or elementary school, because when kids are little they think that things like that are cool. At my school, we have a class called Leadership'. I do not like this class because it is pointless, and I do not learn anything and the teacher is old and when he leans against a desk, his fat thighs make creases in his pants. But now, I am thankful for having that class, because I met Inu Yasha because of it.

Who is Inu Yasha? Oh be patient will you.

I remember when our teacher told us the special project' we would be embarking on'. At first I thought it would just be going around the school and asking for donations to give to people with cancer and the such, but no, this was much more personal. We would be going to the Special Needs' school a few minutes away and council the kids there. Everyone would be paired up with a special needs' child.

Guess who I got. Yeah, so now it's starting to come together right?

I got Inu Yasha.

Inu Yasha was sitting at a desk coloring when I met him. I remember his picture exactly because it was a very strange looking bus that was drawn in perfect perspective. I looked at it from over his shoulder and he didn't say anything when I stood there. I thought he did not realize I was there and I tapped his shoulder. I really only tapped it lightly. But this was too much apperently, because he screamed and leapt out of his chair and ran across the classroom. It took him fifteen minutes for the teachers to coax him out of the corner.

Later, the idiots at that school explained to me that Inu Yasha was a special needs' student and as such he had special needs'. I wanted hit the lady explaining this to me for not telling me earlier that Inu Yasha had what they call behavioral problems'. Among these, he could not be touched. He hated being touched. He also hated the colors green and yellow and did not smile. He has a list of behavioral probloms a mile long and from time to time I just want to slap that boy so hard, but I know he can't help t because he is different from me, and that's OK.

The reason i waited so long to write this was because I really didn't like INu Yasha at all when I first met him. I actually kind of hated him for being so mean and indifferent towards me. I would smile and tell jokes to make him laugh, and I would bring him things, like Milky Way bars, which he liked, but he would not change, and that made me resent him.

I learned later on that another one of Inu Yasha's behavioral problems was that he did not smile. No one will ever understand how angry this made me. I don't even know why it pissed me off so much, but for some reason, i felt like he didn't give a shit at all about anything. And that also made me sad.

But I was wrong. He likes dogs, and computer games, and he likes to look at the stars, and that was something that I thought was kind of cute.

Inu Yasha has jet black hair, which is like mine, but mine is more brown and his is more black. And he has the most amazing eyes I have ever seen. They are a bluish color but the are really more violet than they are blue. His fingernails are really long because he wont let anyone get near enough to him to let them cut them, so they usually just end up coming off because they get too long and this bother me, because his nails are always different lengths.

I found out later that Inu Yasha loves the color red. He once told me so when I asked him. I told him my favorite color was purple and then he didn't say anything because he didn't have anything to say.

This is a defect I find sometimes very aggravating. On the second meeting (Because he wouldn't talk to me on the first day because he though I was going to hurt him.) our conversation went like this.

We were both sitting down coloring because he has Creativity on his last period on wednessdays. And I asked him, So, what's your name?

And then he said nothing, so I asked him again, What's your name?

And reluctantly he answered me, Inu yasha. Then I nodded and grabbed a green marker to color in my tree.

So ... I started, trying to find a way to make conversation. how do you like school?
And then he didn't answer me. And I asked him again. Then he made a snarling sound that resembled a growling dog and I raised an eyebrow. How come you wont talk to me?

And he did not look up when he spoke. Because you are a stranger, and you are not a friend, and you are not family. And I do not want to talk to you. And then he said nothing the rest of the time. I was so angry at this that I spent the next week thinking of something to do for him that would make him like me and I decided to bring him a candy.

I decided on bringing him sour strips, because they are my favorite, so I brought half a pound of them from The Sweet Factory and it cost me three dollars and eighty six cents, and when I handed the bag to him, I told him it was because I wanted to be his friend, and I wanted him to trust me and talk to me (I did not tell him that my leadership grade was riding on my being nice to him.) he looked at the bag and then made a groaning sound and said he wouldn't eat them

So I asked,

And you know what he told me? I hate green things.

I was so angry at him then, it took everything in me not to pat his back and send him back to the back of the class screaming like the insane retarded boy I thought he was. Next time, I brought him strawberry strips and he ate them.

Little did I know that the description insane retarded boy' could not be farther from the truth. As it turns out, Inu Yasha is a genius. A pure mathmatical genius. He has a condition called autism that is bad that makes him the way he is, however, he also has another thing called Savant Syndrome'. Savant Syndrome is where someone has one amazing skill despite the fact that they are mentally challenged. (In this case, he has Autism.)

I found a good article written by Sural Shah online that kind of reminds me of Inu Yasha:

A genius. A prodigy. One might label this child as such after witnessing this type of performance, were it not for the little nuances of the situation: the rocking, the cold, unemotional expression on the boy's face, and his lack of response to the voices around him. Instead, this boy is diagnosed with Savant Syndrome, a disorder in which individuals with neurological developmental delays in socialization and communication possess "astonishing islands of brilliance that stand in stark, markedly incongruous contrast to the over-all handicap"

Inu Yasha is brilliant, on one hand, because he can answer almost any question on maths that I ask him in his head. In the time it would take any person to answer three plus four, he would be doing advanced calculus.

However, there is a terrible side to him that worries me. He is detatched. I will admit it here and now, even after all I have been through with him, I can not deny that it is true. He is the coldest, most insensitive, most detatched, and unemotional boy I have ever met in my entire life. But this is not his fault. He was born that way and I know that. And sometimes, when I wish he would show me a smile for once in a while (I have never seen him smile. Not once in one and a half years.) I remember he can not help it and that that is just him being him and I feel better.

Author's Notes

This is not a one shot!

I repeat, NOT A ONE SHOT! I do plan on making another chapter. This will not be a normal story because it is more of a reflection of Kagome's time with an autistic savant Inu Yasha.

This was inspired by a wonderful book called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' It is written by Mark Haddon and it is a wonderfully eccentric tale of a mentlly challenged boy who sets out to solve he mystery of who killed a neighborhood dog when he ends up finding out much more than her bargained for. Even though this child literally had no feelings, I found his character to be so interesting that I just had to write SOMETHING about it. The next chapter will be out sometime, but I don't know when. This story won't be long by the way.

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