Just — complicated.

A whole boy reduced to an adjective that meant, as far as I could tell, we do not understand him and he has made our jobs difficult.”

I hated that word the instant she said it, and I hated it because I had heard it before, from people who should have known better.

Years earlier, after my husband died, Aaron’s teachers had started calling my son complicated — when he stopped raising his hand in class, when he went quiet and inward, when he stopped being the easy, cheerful boy he had been before his father’s death.

Complicated, I had learned, was very often the word adults used for a child whose pain was inconvenient to them.