Colin Fischer (16 page)
Authors: Ashley Edward Miller,Zack Stentz
Wayne wondered if he was the one having a hard time understanding a joke now. He became convinced of it when Colin broke into a wide smile and pointed behind him, apropos of nothing.
“Look!” Colin exclaimed. His voice was infused with pure joy.
Wayne looked. A dun-colored coyote loped confidently along the edge of the park, toward the hills to
the west. The coyote seemed to sense the boys’ stares and cast an acknowledging glance at them over his shoulder. Then, as if deciding Wayne and Colin were no threat, it continued on its way.
“You’re right,” Wayne said with a frown, watching the coyote disappear into the brush alone. “It would be better if it were a lion.”
Colin shrugged. Coyotes were pretty great too.
Fifteen minutes later
, the phone rang in the Fischer kitchen. Colin’s mother unloaded groceries while Danny stood in front of the open refrigerator, dissatisfied with the snacking possibilities it presented.
It was Colin. Mrs. Fischer set down a box of cereal and picked up the phone. “Hey, you. Everything okay?”
“Oh, yes,” she heard Colin say. “I just realized that I need to do more research and wanted to let you know. But I should be home by dinner.”
“Okay…” Mrs. Fischer started, trailing off as she detected an odd noise in the background of the call. It sounded like the deep hum of a diesel motor.
“Colin—is that an engine?”
“The book I need isn’t at the Chatsworth Library,” Colin said, as though his mother’s question were never asked. “So I’m taking the bus to the Northridge branch. It shouldn’t take me long.”
His mother frowned. Something in the content and delivery of Colin’s answer rubbed her the wrong
way. Were he any other boy, Mrs. Fischer would have thought the answer sounded rehearsed, as if he had expected her to ask the question and had already prepared his reply. But Colin wasn’t any other boy.
“Well…be careful,” she finally said. “And remember, it’s pizza night.”
For a long moment, the only response was the distant hum of a diesel engine.
“I love you, Mom,” Colin said, and hung up.
Mrs. Fischer replaced the phone in its cradle, her hand hovering above it for a moment as she debated whether or not to call Colin back. She, her husband, and a team of therapists had worked years to get Colin to the point where he could express affection for his mother without prompting. For him just to blurt it out was odd.
The first time Colin told his mother he loved her, she had just suffered through a particularly difficult day at work. She sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of ice cream (a sure sign she was in need of a morale boost) as Colin swept in from the backyard. He pounded up the stairs to his room without a word, but stopped halfway—no one knew why—and ran back to her. “I love you, Mom,” he said. It was better than ice cream.
In his Notebook that night, Colin wrote:
Today I told my mother “I love you.” I am not sure if this was correct because she cried and
threw away her ice cream. Dad says women do that when they are “overwhelmed,” but I do not understand what is overwhelming about a fact my mother already knows. Investigate.
“He is so lying to you,” Danny said. He slammed the refrigerator door shut and moved to the cupboard.
“Don’t be silly,” she replied a little too quickly. “Colin doesn’t lie.”
“Yeah, right.” Danny stomped out to the living room with a pack of string cheese and an apple, leaving his mother alone, the groceries still unpacked.
“The library?” Wayne repeated
. “That had to be the weakest story ever. How did you get her to fall for it?”
They were four miles from Colin’s house now, aboard a grimy orange MTA bus, one among a fleet cruising the wide, twenty-mile-long streets that connected the San Fernando Valley from west to east. Colin rode with arms and legs pulled tight against his body. He was surrounded by strangers and presumably unfriendly faces, all packed into a space designed to comfortably carry far fewer passengers than the maximum allowed by law. It smelled strange too—acrid and sickly sweet, somewhere between the school locker room and a gas oven, now that the MTA had switched entirely to alternative fuels.
It was a near miracle that Colin had managed to
board the bus at all. Only the fact that Wayne was behind him, gently urging him forward, got Colin inside. “It’s like the Mos Eisley Cantina in here,” Wayne had noted as they took their seats.
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Colin was too busy counting and thinking about the call he had to make to agree or not.
Now, Colin checked the battery level on his cell phone as he returned it to its place in his backpack. He tried not to think about the incidental contact with Wayne that resulted from shifting his belongings around. Colin looked up and saw his reflection staring back at him from the tinted glass of the bus window. His expression was blank.
“I think it was the Kuleshov Effect,” Colin said. He looked down at the scrawl in his Notebook, more uneven than usual from the bumpy bus ride.
I just realized that I need to do more research, and I wanted to let you know. (SHE WILL ASK A QUESTION, OR EXPRESS CONCERN.) The book I need isn’t at the Chatsworth Library, so I’m taking
the bus to Northridge branch. It shouldn’t take long.
“The what?”
“I kept a blank voice when I lied. And because the only context my mother has is me telling her the truth, she chose to believe me.”
“You mean you never lied to her before.”
The interior of the bus darkened as it passed beneath the huge concrete expanse of the 405 freeway, heading east through endless miles of strip malls, bungalows, and crumbling, stucco-sided apartment buildings. The suburban wasteland stretched from Panorama City to the Verdugo Mountains. Colin watched it pass by through the blue-gray tint of the bus window, thinking about the coyote, and how coyotes had been here since this was all just rocks and trees and grass.
“Yes,” Colin said, realizing he had just crossed a Rubicon.
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“It was…
easy
.”
18
A little-known outpost of the Space Race of the 1960s, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory was the site of rocket-engine tests and experimental nuclear reactors. In 1959, an experimental reactor suffered the world’s first nuclear meltdown, a fact known by few of the homeowners in the immediate area.
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GSR, or “gunshot residue,” is the burnt and unburnt particles left on the skin and clothes of a shooter and his weapon, and the victim if the gun is discharged at close range. It can also be detected on the persons of nearby witnesses. Forensic scientists can use GSR to positively confirm someone’s presence at a crime scene, where they were standing, or even if they fired a particular gun. It is not a perfect analytical tool because sometimes particles from other sources so closely resemble the GSR that they confuse the results.
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The San Patricio Battalions were American deserters of Irish Catholic descent, who fought on the side of Santa Ana in the Mexican-American War. They served with distinction and were considered elite artillery units. During their final losing engagements, however, they refused to surrender for fear of being punished as traitors and went so far as to shoot Mexican regulars who attempted to lay down arms. Their motives are generally ascribed to religious sympathy with fellow Catholics against a largely Protestant US Army.
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The Mos Eisley Cantina was the famous bar from the original
Star Wars
film, in which Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi first met Han Solo. Colin puzzled at people who referred to the film as “Episode IV” or “A New Hope,” since it was clearly the first movie in the series, and “Star Wars” was bombastically presented in the main titles. He also didn’t understand the argument over whether Han Solo or Greedo shot first, since Greedo never actually shot anyone at all.
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The Rubicon is a river in Italy, famed for Julius Caesar’s crossing in 49 BC. Because Caesar’s action plunged the Roman Empire into war, the phrase “crossing the Rubicon” is meant to suggest a point of no return. Ironically, the shifting course of the Rubicon makes it impossible to determine where the real, historical “point of no return” actually lies.
THE PARKING PROBLEM
Life is math.
We know this because mathematicians can reduce anything to a system of equations. Sometimes, the solutions tell us things that seem “intuitively obvious.” This means that we do not need math to figure them out. For example, the Parking Problem.
Some mathematicians at a university wanted to know how people could minimize the time it takes to find a parking spot and get into a store. Here is what they found: The optimal strategy is to take the first space you see and then walk.
When I told my father about this, he asked why it took mathematicians at a university to figure it out. I explained that while the conclusion seems intuitively obvious, it runs counter to standard human
behavior. Most people will not take the first space they come across. Instead, they will seek out a better, theoretical spot that could be more convenient, incorrectly believing it will save them time.
I used to think people did this because they’re bad at math, but actually it’s because they’re gamblers. They pass up good opportunities that are right in front of them in exchange for imagined improvements that almost never materialize. This is why I trust math and I do not trust people. Math makes better decisions.
