Oliver Lauredo goes to class at a wooden desk in the corner of his bedroom, far from the packed classrooms and crowded high school corridors that doctors said made him ill.
Below the desk, his pet skink, Jep, sleeps curled up in a terrarium, next to a posterboard plastered with pictures of iguanas, turtles, snakes and the other animals that fascinate Oliver.
Oliver has Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism usually marked by intense social anxiety. Any slight noise rattles his cluttered nerves, so his parents keep his bedroom -- for now his classroom -- quiet..