Autism Awareness Network

The Autism Awareness Network is a campus group organized around students’ experiences of having a sibling on the autism spectrum. Its meetings make room for accounts of family difficulty as well as practical language and mutual support; its president, Amber, also draws Brendan into the group after meeting him at an information table. The organization’s importance lies in this double role: it offers a setting for people to speak about autism in their families, while becoming the route through which Brendan and Amber begin to know each other.

Presence and Organization

The Network first enters Brendan’s story through a table bearing its name. When Amber asks whether he knows someone on the spectrum, he is about to explain that he stopped there at random. He then realizes that he does know someone: his brother. The question turns an accidental encounter into a possible point of connection, although Brendan is also struck by Amber’s appearance. The scene introduces the organization through direct outreach rather than through a description of its history or formal structure.

The group’s campus presence is visible again during a protest in the library over Michael Brown. Brendan recognizes Amber from the Network as she moves through the line of protesters and comes over to greet him. The protest is not identified as an activity organized by the Network; instead, it brings Amber back into Brendan’s view and recalls their earlier meeting at the table. Her greeting also indicates that she expects him to return: she says the group missed him at its last meeting.

Amber’s position is made clearer at the October meeting, where she is described as the club’s president, elected as a sophomore. Cat serves as vice president. The meeting includes a roomful of students, and Amber introduces Brendan to Cat as the first-year student she had told her about. These details establish a student-run organization with identifiable leadership, though the account does not specify a larger staff or formal membership requirements.

Meetings and Shared Experience

The group meets regularly: Amber’s first invitation directs Brendan to a meeting on the third Thursday of every month. At the October gathering, he arrives after having texted Amber repeatedly during the preceding week to ask her to meet for coffee or pizza. She has deferred making plans until the meeting, leaving him unsure whether she sees him as someone she might date or chiefly as a new recruit. The meeting is therefore both an organizational gathering and the occasion Brendan has been waiting for to understand Amber’s intentions.

Much of the meeting consists of people recounting what it is like to have an autistic brother or sister. One attendee describes her twenty-two-year-old sister Ellen, who has a GED and works full time as a cashier at CVS. Small talk used to unsettle Ellen, the account explains, but she has trained herself to manage familiar exchanges; difficulties arise when customers ask too many questions or try to use expired coupons. The concrete details resist reducing her life to a diagnosis: the story includes her employment, the conditions that make the job easier or harder, and the strategies she has developed.

Another attendee recalls a childhood visit from a girl named Tierney. Ellen entered the room, asked the visitor a succession of questions about family members’ birthdays, and then asked about the dog’s birthday. The attendee remembers feeling ashamed and overwhelmed, eventually shouting at Ellen and throwing a Barbie at her. She also remembers that Ellen continued speaking in a robotic voice, listing people born on particular dates, apparently unaffected by the insult. The story brings together the sibling’s behavior, the narrator’s childhood response, and the cruelty of Tierney’s judgment; it is not presented as an abstract account of autism but as a difficult family memory.

After the meeting’s break, further accounts extend the range of experiences shared. Nellie describes a brother who is very smart but flaps his hands and grunts, making it difficult to take him places. Three girls in succession mention siblings with Asperger’s. Dora says that three of her four siblings have been diagnosed with PDD-NOS, including one who is nonverbal. The sequence shows how the meeting gathers experiences that are related but not interchangeable, from challenges in public outings to the varied needs within a single family.

Support, Language, and Leadership

Amber explicitly frames the meeting as a safe space where no one is judging participants. She describes having a sibling on the spectrum as a challenge and presents listening and supporting one another as the reason the group meets. That assurance responds to the redheaded attendee’s vulnerable account of childhood shame and isolation. The group’s method, as shown here, is not to solve the family’s difficulties but to let members speak and receive recognition from people likely to understand the pressures involved.

The meeting also attends to the language used to describe people. When Dora calls herself the only normal child in a family of four, Amber suggests using neurotypical instead, explaining that it is less hurtful. She also points out the irony that, within Dora’s family, autism may be the norm. Dora adds that her mother introduces her to strangers as her normal one. The exchange makes the organization’s support practical and linguistic: it questions a label that marks one sibling as the standard and the others as deviations, while acknowledging that the word has also become part of Dora’s family experience.

Amber’s leadership is visible in small acts of attention as well as in her stated role. When Ellen’s sister passes around a phone displaying Ellen’s picture, Amber deliberately spends time looking at it. The narration links this care to her election as president: members’ siblings matter to her, and she treats their stories and images as deserving attention. In the meeting, she welcomes Brendan, introduces him to others, and guides the discussion without making his presence the center of it.

Brendan’s Connection to the Network

Brendan’s participation begins with a chance stop at the table, followed by his recognition that his brother gives him a personal reason to engage. At the library protest, Amber’s exuberant reunion shows that she remembers him and that his absence from the previous meeting has registered. He explains that he has been busy with work, holding up his book about climate change. Their conversation shifts his first encounter with the organization into an ongoing connection, though the text does not establish that he has become a regular member.

At the October meeting, Brendan is impatient with the volume of sibling stories and privately wonders whether Amber is more interested in recruiting him than in meeting him socially. At the same time, her pleased response when he arrives and her introductions to her friends encourage his hope that their connection may become romantic. The Network’s purpose and Brendan’s purpose consequently do not fully coincide: he comes largely because he wants time with Amber, while the meeting centers on listening to families’ experiences. His presence nevertheless places him among students discussing a reality he recognizes through his own family.

The organization is thus portrayed through its recurring practices rather than an institutional overview: an information table, a monthly invitation, student leadership, stories about siblings, and a shared commitment to listening. Its gathering gives personal experiences a social setting and offers language for discussing them; for Brendan, it also turns a passing campus encounter into a relationship that continues beyond the table.