Colin Fischer (11 page)
Authors: Ashley Edward Miller,Zack Stentz
“No,” Colin replied. “Everyone was running away, so whoever fired the gun must have stopped.”
She peered at his Notebook. Colin generally made it a point to guard its contents, but once again his reaction ran counter to his usual instincts. He focused instead on the spray of light freckles across Melissa’s nose. Suddenly, Colin developed an inexplicable craving for strawberry shortcake—which seemed odd, given its mushy texture.
Melissa looked at him, having read the page. Multiple emotions rippled across her face, too fast and too mixed up for Colin to lock in on any one of them.
“Wayne Connelly?” she asked.
“He isn’t in school today.”
“He’s been a creep and a bully since we were all in kindergarten, but I never thought he’d actually shoot someone.” Melissa fell silent for a moment. She looked away from Colin. Her face scrunched up a little. Then she turned back to him with a frown. “I guess he won’t be crashing any more parties to steal my cake, huh?”
Colin blinked. “
Cake
,” he said. He considered this word for a very long time. When he looked up again, Melissa was gone.
Colin scribbled furiously in his Notebook, then gathered his books and went for the door. The study hall monitor stopped him. His name was Mr. Bell, and he taught band. Band was a subject Colin endeavored to avoid at all costs.
“Colin,” Mr. Bell said, “where are you going?”
“Dr. Doran told me if I ever needed to see her, I would be excused from class. She said I wouldn’t be told ‘no.’”
And then Colin hurried away, deaf to Mr. Bell’s protests.
Dr. Doran looked up
from a stack of papers as Colin marched into her office unannounced and wordlessly took a seat.
“I’m a little busy at the moment,” she said. “And by the way, you should be in class right now.”
“Yes,” Colin answered. All of these things appeared to be true. “But it’s very important I tell you first that Wayne Connelly is innocent.”
Dr. Doran’s nose wrinkled. Colin took note of it.
“What makes you think Wayne Connelly is even a suspect?”
Colin pointed to a chair in the corner of the office. “The stack of schoolbooks and homework in the corner with Wayne’s name and address on them. They suggest he’s been suspended but not actually arrested or charged with a crime yet.”
Dr. Doran flicked her eyes toward the chair, then back to Colin. “Okay, I’ll bite. Is there something you didn’t tell the police when they interviewed you?”
“No. I described everything that I thought was important at the time. But what I didn’t realize then was the importance of the cake.”
“The cake?”
“Yes, the cake. The pistol grip of the gun was smeared with frosting, but Wayne Connelly eats very neatly. So you see? The gun couldn’t have been his.” Colin took Dr. Doran’s silence to be an acknowledgment of his hypothesis. “We have to tell the investigating authorities,” he insisted.
She wrinkled her nose again, just as she had when confronted with the trick cell phone, and just as she had at the assembly. He was beginning to detect a pattern. “There is no ‘we’ here, Colin. This is a police investigation, not mine. Or
yours
.”
“But you heard what I said about the cake—”
“And I’ll be sure to pass it on. Until then, ask my secretary to write you a note for your teacher on the way out.”
“Dr. Doran, I—”
“
Colin
. Enough. You’re a student, not a detective. Are we clear?”
Colin considered this for a very long moment, deciding against suggesting that she had just asserted a false dichotomy.
10
“Yes,” he said.
On his way out the door, he stopped. There was one
last thing he wanted to share. “Dr. Doran?” he asked carefully.
“Yes, Colin?”
“You wrinkle your nose when you know something and you don’t want to say it.”
Colin excused himself without another word.
Colin strode down
the empty hallway, not even bothering to count his steps as his pen moved furiously across a blank page of his Notebook:
Wayne Connelly is innocent, and I will prove it. The game is afoot.
7
The RMS
Titanic
sank on April 14, 1912, after a collision with an iceberg in the North Atlantic, killing 1,517 passengers. Since the collision occurred during the ship’s maiden voyage, her safety record was technically spotless prior to the incident. This made little difference to the victims.
8
Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term “uncanny valley” to describe how, as an object became more and more human-looking, it reached a point where it provoked fear and revulsion in a human observer instead of empathy. Other researchers hypothesized this phenomenon might trace to a genetic imperative to avoid diseased or dead members of one’s own species. Whatever its cause, computer animators have been aware of the uncanny valley since 1988, when audiences watching Pixar’s short film
Tin Toy
were charmed by the titular windup character but horrified by the film’s animated human infant.
9
In the closing moments of the
St. Elsewhere
series finale, the boy (Tommy Westphall) is shown holding a snow globe containing the hospital in which the show was set. The image strongly suggests Tommy had imagined every character and situation. Because of an unusual and intricate web of connections between characters (from crossovers and writer references on subsequent programs) it could be inferred that other shows were constructs of Tommy’s expansive imagination. This list includes such notables as
M*A*S*H
,
Law & Order
, and
The X-Files
, and continues to add to itself.
10
A false dichotomy occurs when two ideas are presented as mutually exclusive, but are in fact perfectly compatible. For example: “You can have either peanut butter or you can have chocolate” is a false dichotomy. This is most easily demonstrated by the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Peanut Butter Cups were Colin’s favorite example, because proving chocolate and peanut butter go together was always delicious.
THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
Our neighbors once witnessed me take a metal mixing bowl and some household chemicals into the garage. After hearing a loud bang, they called the police, assuming I was attempting to manufacture drugs—a not uncommon activity on the fringes of the San Fernando Valley. What the neighbors didn’t know and my father eventually confirmed for the police was the truth: I was trying to work out the principles of explosive pulse propulsion in spaceflight for a science project. The police laughed, although my father made me spend a month’s allowance to replace the bowl.
The misunderstanding that arose from my experiment with rocketry was in many ways an echo of the consequences of Kuleshov’s experiments with film. His work sparked a revolution in filmmaking because the implication of his results went far
beyond the meaning of facial expressions. Kuleshov demonstrated that when you present images together, the audience connects them whether they’re actually related or not. Sergei Eisenstein proved this when he cut old stock footage of British naval maneuvers into “The Battleship Potemkin,” a film he shot entirely on land.
Audiences assumed Eisenstein had shot it on the ocean. When Western diplomats saw this, they sent coded telegrams to their governments, relaying their horrifying discovery that the Soviets had secretly built a new navy. As a result, untold national resources were diverted in response to an escalation that existed only in a scene in a movie in which their own ships stood in for their enemy’s.
Without realizing it, Kuleshov confirmed a long-held belief about the best way to deceive people: Show them things they want to believe. The rest will take care of itself.
Mrs. Fischer
had been taking Colin to the shopping mall in Woodland Hills since he was a small boy. It began as a part of Colin’s therapy, meant to help him slowly overcome his fear of new places. “Like putting the frog in the pot of water and boiling it slowly,” his mother used to joke.
11
At first, they merely drove into the mall’s parking lot, where they would sit until returning home. After a month, Mrs. Fischer convinced Colin to walk to the front doors and touch them. The automatic glass doors presented a terrifying and impassable barrier for nearly a year, until his mother produced an article from the Internet that satisfied Colin he was in no danger of being chopped in half while crossing the threshold.
Now, the mall offered familiarity and comfort to Colin, as long as he avoided the row of electronics stores along a particular first-floor promenade or the talking snowmen on display during the Christmas season. Colin’s mother knew the drill. With a “Meet us at the west entrance in forty-five minutes,” she dropped Danny off to check out video games and took Colin to find the gym clothes and shoes he suddenly insisted he needed.
They ended up in a second-floor sporting goods shop where the clerks wore striped shirts meant to evoke the uniform of a football referee. Colin knew the exact brand, model number, and color of the shoes he wanted based on reviews on the Internet and an
article in
Consumer Reports
, and so he resisted the clerk’s attempts to sell him a more expensive shoe. “It’s what all the pro hoops players are wearing this year,” the clerk explained to Colin and his mother, as though he were confiding state secrets.
