Colin Fischer (13 page)

Dude
was an all-purpose slang term that often denoted affection, a decided promotion from the insensitive and pejorative
shortbus
. Colin absorbed the change.

It certainly sounded as though the boys were inviting him into their social circle. This was exciting because it meant they might be willing to talk to him about The Case of the Birthday Cake and the Gun.

“Yeah, whattaya say?” Eddie pressed.

“Then you can ask whatever you want,” Cooper added.

“I’ll be back shortly,” Colin said.

He marched past three different games of three-on-three half-court basketball and noted with
apprehension the fouling, trash-talking, and roughhousing that accompanied the play. Colin scanned the area for Mr. Turrentine but didn’t see him anywhere.

“Fischer,” Mr. Turrentine said, standing beside him. He seemed to come out of nowhere, but it occurred to Colin that Mr. Turrentine might have been there the whole time. Colin wondered idly how a man as old as Mr. Turrentine could move so quietly, but more immediate concerns needed to be addressed.

“Mr. Turrentine?”

“Yes, Fischer.”

“Does basketball involve a lot of physical contact?”

Mr. Turrentine fixed his gaze on Colin for what felt like a very long time, during which Colin tried to be polite and maintain eye contact. The intense stare reminded Colin of one of his favorite mystery stories:
The Thirty-Nine Steps
,
¹⁵
by John Buchan. Buchan described the story’s villain as having “eyes hooded like a hawk’s.” Colin had always thought that statement a hyperbolic one, but Mr. Turrentine’s strangely hooded eyes indeed suggested an observant bird of prey.

“Are you a little china doll, Fischer?” Mr. Turrentine
asked. “Are you afraid you might break? Because you don’t look like a little china doll to me.”

Colin recognized this, too, as a rhetorical question—Mr. Turrentine seemed fond of them. But truth be told, Colin only identified this one because Mr. Turrentine had helpfully supplied the answer himself.

“No,” said Colin. “I’m not a little china doll. I just don’t like to be touched unless I’m asked first.”

“Me neither, but life is a contact sport and pads are not an option.” Mr. Turrentine’s raptor eyes gave away nothing. “It’s not football. You’ll be fine.”

With that, he turned his attention to a game in progress. Colin remained dubious about the prospect of playing basketball, his concern counterbalanced by the enticement of getting to question Cooper and Eddie. He walked back to them.

“I’m ready to play.”

The opposing team consisted of Stan and two of his equally large, muscular friends. For a moment, Colin hesitated. On one hand, the presence of another eyewitness to the gun incident was a stroke of good fortune. On the other hand, playing against the notoriously cruel, short-tempered Stan was not.

Colin observed carefully as the game began, trying to imitate Cooper and Eddie’s bobbing, wide-legged stances. Stan covered Eddie, slapping at him and trying to force him out of bounds until Eddie quickly fed
the ball to Colin, left open as Stan’s friends had run to cover the tall and obviously dangerous Cooper.

The ball stung his fingertips but stuck in place. Colin stared down at it, mesmerized by the patterned stripes. “Shoot it!” Eddie hollered across the court.

Colin obeyed. He shot two-handed, thinking as it sailed through the air that its parabolic arc evoked the elliptical stripes of the ball itself. He was pondering whether or not the similarity was a coincidence as the ball sailed cleanly through the basket.

“Good one!” shouted Cooper, visibly
EXCITED
. Stan’s arms flopped to his sides in disbelief, reminding Colin of a marionette whose strings had suddenly been cut. “Two points for the man!”

As Cooper and Eddie ran to take up defensive positions, Cooper playfully slapped Colin on the shoulder. Colin cringed and recoiled, suppressing the urge to scream and strike back. After all, he reasoned, the other boy was only trying to congratulate him.

“Please don’t do that,” Colin said, his voice tighter and flatter than usual. “Or warn me first.”

Cooper put his hands up and backed away from Colin. “Fine.”

It was a statement, not a judgment. Like everyone who had gone to school with Colin for several years, Cooper was aware of Colin’s idiosyncrasies—even if he didn’t understand them.

None of this went unnoticed by Stan. He nudged
his two teammates, miming a shove. The boys nodded in affirmation of their silent, spontaneous conspiracy.

The game resumed. Cooper stripped the ball from one of Stan’s teammates, and the teams switched positions. This time, Stan moved to cover Colin, hanging back while Cooper passed Colin the ball.

Stan matched Colin’s stride, expertly anticipating his clumsy attempts at evasion for a clear shot. Stan’s long arms shot outward. He slapped at Colin’s shirt and elbows, reaching for the ball.

“Don’t,” said Colin between breaths. “Please don’t do that.”

Too late. Stan stole the ball and took it into the paint for an easy basket. Colin watched, attempting to identify his emotions. Anger and fear he knew well, but another unfamiliar feeling had presented itself: disappointment. In that moment, Colin realized something very important about himself. He didn’t like to lose.

Cooper jogged up to him. “Don’t let Stan get in your head,” he said quietly, trying to be
SUPPORTIVE
. “That’s what he wants.”

A few seconds later, Eddie took the ball and checked it straight to Colin. Colin dribbled, trying to keep his free arm in front as a defensive shield, but it didn’t matter. No matter which way Colin turned, Stan was in his face.

Cooper and Eddie watched the dance,
FRUSTRATED
and growing
ANNOYED
. There was no official twenty-four-second shot clock in half-court three-on-three, but holding the ball for extended periods was still frowned upon.

“Come on, you’re open,” called Eddie. Colin was beyond that now. Stan’s harassment had flustered him too much to shoot, locking him into an endlessly repeating pattern—
step forward, feint, step back
—like an old vinyl record with a scratch repeating the same musical phrase over and over again. Colin finally broke the impasse and fed the ball to Eddie. But Eddie was too well-guarded. He flicked the ball back to Colin.

“Just
shoot
,” Eddie implored.

Stan stepped in front of Colin. He smiled, checking the playground for Mr. Turrentine. At that moment, the teacher was on the opposite side, helping an obese boy develop his jump shot. Satisfied, Stan turned back to Colin. He smiled again.
SMUG
.

Colin watched Stan’s feet. He had detected a pattern in Stan’s back-and-forth defensive weaving—a pattern he could learn and defeat by darting past him to a clear shooting position. It was a good plan, one that probably would have worked had Colin in that moment not felt a sudden searing pain in his left arm. Stan dug his hand into Colin’s wrist, his thumb stabbing the spot where nerve tissue ran close to the bone,
a juncture that martial artists referred to as a “pressure point.”
¹⁶

As Colin dropped the ball and Stan reached to take it, Colin released a hoarse, animalistic howl of pain and rage. The sound was terrifying. So terrifying, in fact, that it stunned Stan into inaction long enough for Colin to recover the stolen ball.

The basket was open. Colin did not shoot.

The next thing Stan saw were dark, elliptical lines as something heavy and orange smashed into his face. He felt Colin’s hands wrap around his throat, choking him with all his strength. Both boys tumbled to the blacktop.

Schoolyard fights at West Valley High tended to be short affairs, the combatants generally separated before too much damage could be done. However, Colin’s berserk attack on Stan was so violent and so unprecedented that Cooper, Eddie, and Stan’s friends could only watch in disbelief. Stan tried and failed to escape, his face turning a progressively deeper shade of purple as Colin made hoarse, barking noises in his throat.

Then Mr. Turrentine appeared between them.
Later, witnesses to the event were uncertain where he had come from, or how he had moved with such speed, but there he was, pulling Colin bodily away. Stan was choking, his face bleeding, his neck bruised in the shape of Colin’s grasping fingers. Mr. Turrentine tucked the barking, flailing Colin under his arm like a football and carried him off without a word.

Silence settled over the blacktop.

Cooper turned to Eddie. “Man,” he said, “do
not
foul Shortbus.”

Colin sat in the outer lobby
of the school principal’s office for nearly an hour while Dr. Doran spoke to Mr. Turrentine. They learned from Cooper that Stan had in many ways provoked the attack, which led to several calls with the school district’s attorneys. They in turn had advised Dr. Doran of the possible legal consequences of punishing a special-needs student, who, it could be argued, shouldn’t have been put in such a situation to begin with.

When it was all over, Dr. Doran silently handed Colin a one-day detention slip, which he accepted without complaint.

As someone who valued rules and order, Colin understood that breaking them had to come with consequences. More problematic were the stares and whispers directed his way as he walked across the cafeteria later that day. In high school, like prison, one
day tended to be very much like the next. It was only natural that a disruption as unusual as Colin’s would become the main topic of conversation.

Colin dealt with the attention the way he did with every stressful situation—he rededicated himself to his routine. He sat in his usual seat, spread out the neat plastic bags containing his lunch (five slices of reduced-fat salami, an apple, pretzels, celery and carrots, two Oreo cookies), and watched everyone else.

In his corner of the room, Rudy presided over his court of friends and followers, laughing while he told a story that involved miming a choking movement with his hands.

At the jocks’ table, Stan sat with a Lakers hoodie zipped up high to conceal the bruises around his neck. He swallowed his sandwich slowly and carefully, occasionally swiveling his head to shoot Colin a murderous look. Cooper avoided looking at Colin at all, indicating that he either did not see Colin or did not care to. Either way, an attempt to make good on the promised interview at this time seemed ill-advised.

Colin carefully put his lunch items back into their bag, then moved toward Melissa’s table. As he approached, Melissa’s friends stopped their conversations. They each shot him with silent,
HOSTILE
stares. Melissa didn’t share her friends’ hostility, but she did seem uncharacteristically
WARY
.

“Hello, Melissa,” Colin said. “How are you today?”

A silent, awkward moment followed, as Melissa debated whether to acknowledge Colin in front of her friends. Other conversations, too, trailed off. It seemed as though everyone across the entire cafeteria was watching them now.

“I’m fine, Colin. Is there something you need?”

Muffled titters erupted from the rest of Melissa’s table. Colin ignored them.

“Actually, yes, there is,” he continued. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Wait. I have a question for you first,” Sandy declared. Her friends covered their mouths. Colin wondered if they had food stuck in their teeth and were trying to disguise it. “We hear you totally hulked out in first period PE and started whaling on Stan Krantz like he stole your pocket protector or something. True or false?”

Abby and Emma laughed aloud, confirming Colin’s suspicion that Sandy’s question had been rhetorical rather than literal. Melissa looked away from him. Her face flushed red from her delicately pointed chin to the tips of her ears.
EMBARRASSED
.

“I don’t have a pocket protector,” Colin replied. “Also, there is no pocket on my gym shirt. It’s a T-shirt, and it’s from Caltech. I like it much better than the one I wore yesterday because it’s one hundred percent cotton and not polyester, which is a synthetic fiber. I don’t like synthetic fibers because they’re scratchy.”

Abby and Emma laughed even louder.

“That’s true. Also, if synthetic fabrics ever catch fire—”

“
Colin
,” Melissa cut him off. This was also an uncharacteristic behavior. Melissa was usually very considerate about letting Colin finish his thoughts, regardless of the odd directions they would sometimes take. “Ask your question.”

“If I wanted to lie to my parents, what would be the best way?”

In seventh grade
, Colin noticed an unusual phenomenon. Melissa would arrive at school in long skirts or sensible, dark trousers, then disappear into the girls’ room. A few minutes later, she would emerge in ripped jeans, short skirts, or whatever the popular fashion of the moment might be. At the end of the day, the process would reverse itself. Melissa always changed back into her original outfit before leaving for home.

After six months of observing this odd behavior, Colin pointed it out to Marie. He could not fathom why Melissa needed to wear two sets of clothes to school, and she refused to answer Colin’s direct inquiries. Her dismissals were the closest she had ever come to demonstrating
ANGER
with Colin, which deterred him from pursuing it further.

“She doesn’t want to wear what her parents want her to, and she doesn’t want them to know,” Marie
had suggested to him then. The apparent deception still made very little sense to Colin, but it acceptably explained what had otherwise seemed inexplicable. It also made Melissa the ideal teacher in the art of lying.

That afternoon Colin lied to his mother for the first time.

When the call came, Mrs. Fischer was folding laundry into careful, sorted piles while leading an online teleconference with engineers from NASA facilities at JPL, Houston, Washington, DC, and Florida. “So if we drop the infrared imaging package and stagger the inspections with the final prep work, we can still make our launch window,” Mrs. Fischer said, holding up a shirt and squinting to determine its owner. Her sons were getting to the age where it was becoming hard to distinguish their clothes from each other’s, or her husband’s. “Now—”