“I can’t believe it,” Melissa said softly, interrupting Colin’s thought. “Expelled.”
“She had a gun,” Colin said. “It was in her purse.”
“Eddie’s gun.” Melissa gestured with her chin, drawing his attention to Eddie. He stood at the other end of the hall with a knot of his friends. They were usually the loudest and most boisterous students in the school, but this morning they were quiet—especially Eddie. Colin wrote all of this down.
Eddie watches Sandy clear out her locker. He does not help. He looks SAD. Sandy must know he is there, but she does not look at him.
“He doesn’t get so much as a detention,” Melissa said. “It’s not fair.”
“Oh,” Colin said. “Is that why she is crying?”
“Of course it is. It’s not fair, and she knows it. Anyone would cry.”
“It’s not about what’s fair,” Colin said as he wrote this down. “It’s about what can be proved by the evidence. The police can’t prove the gun belonged to Eddie.”
Melissa turned to face him. She was close enough for Colin to be acutely aware that while her left eye was blue like Colin’s, her right had a nearly imperceptible greenish tint—a condition called heterochromia. Colin wondered if she started life in the womb as a twin and then absorbed her brother or sister into her own body early in her mother’s pregnancy, a phenomenon that was sometimes responsible for chimerism.33
Then Colin felt a strange sensation. He realized Melissa was holding his hand. In fact, she most likely had been holding it for the last few seconds, as he had pondered the circumstances of her conception. He did not recall her touching him.
“You could,” she said.
With that, the first bell rang. Melissa squeezed Colin’s hand once, then headed off to her first class of the day. Colin looked down at his hand—he could still see faint impressions of Melissa’s fingers on his skin. He walked down the corridor, staring at his hand, watching the mark she had left upon him slowly fade.
All thoughts of Melissa suddenly fled as Colin felt his body slam into a locker.
The locker’s dial dug into his back, and his ears rang from the impact. Colin winced, closing his eyes to block out the pain. He started to count. When he opened his eyes again, he saw Stan’s face, six inches from his own. Stan was ANGRY.
Stan breathed so hard, the bandages that covered his nose bloomed red from the blood vessel he had just reopened. Colin was fascinated by the sticky, scarlet fractal pattern spreading through the ragged weave of gauze.34 “You shouldn’t get so angry,” Colin said. “You could hurt yourself again.”
Stan grabbed Colin by his jacket with both hands and slammed him against the locker again. Colin’s teeth rattled. “You think you’re funny, Shortbus?”
“I’m going to be late to class,” Colin said, and tried to step away.
Eddie blocked his path. If anything, he looked even ANGRIER than Stan. Cooper and three of Stan’s other friends hovered behind him. Colin calculated the boys had positioned themselves to cut off any other avenue of escape.
“Good,” Eddie rasped. “So is Sandy. Like, for the rest of her life.” He grabbed Colin, twisting the top of his shirt in his fists, winching him up off his feet.
“Don’t touch me,” Colin said, his breath coming faster now. “I—”
“I know. You don’t like to be touched. Well, boo-hoo, you little bitch—what are you gonna do, kick my ass? One sucker punch doesn’t make you Jet Li.”
Stan touched his own nose, not noticing the smear of blood that rubbed off onto his finger. “Yeah,” Stan repeated. “You’re not Jet Li.”
“He doesn’t need Jet Li.”
Wayne stepped around the corner, a half smile hanging on his face. The smile suggested to Colin that whatever Wayne was planning to do next, Wayne believed he was going to enjoy it. A lot.
Eddie laughed. “Get over yourself. You’re never gonna take all of us.”
“No, Eddie,” Wayne said. “Just you.”
CRUEL, Colin decided. Wayne’s smile was definitely CRUEL. For some reason, this didn’t bother Colin in the slightest.
Eddie released Colin, letting him drop to the tile. He and Stan made fists. Wayne simply stood, his body relaxed but completely alert.
“Wayne is very strong,” Colin said as he slipped past Stan and Eddie to Wayne’s side. “His muscles have clearly developed at an accelerated rate. A combination of diet, genetics, and environmental conditions probably forced him into early puberty. If you look at his upper lip, you’ll see that he—”
Wayne cleared his throat. “Colin. Bio lecture later, okay?”
“Okay.” In his Notebook, Colin opened to a fresh page and recorded a reminder to explain the development of secondary sexual characteristics in early adolescence to Wayne at a mutually convenient time.
No one on either side of the face-off spoke or even moved for the next twenty-five seconds. Colin knew this because he maintained a silent count and recorded it in his Notebook. The confrontation ended only when the tardy bell rang, which Colin found slightly disappointing—he was curious to see how long this could continue.
A history teacher with gray, frizzy hair stuck her head out of her classroom. “Get to class, you animals,” she barked, then slammed her door shut.
Eddie looked one last time at Colin and Wayne before he turned to Stan, Cooper, and the others. With a nod of his head, the other boys dispersed in silence. Colin and Wayne were left standing alone in the hallway. “Hey,” Wayne said.
“Good morning, Wayne. How are you today?”
Wayne paused for seven seconds. “You doing anything after school?”
“I have detention.”
“I mean, after that.”
Colin furrowed his brow, deep in thought as he reviewed his schedule. Then his face suddenly brightened. He had an idea, and it seemed like a very good one. “Do you like trampolines?” he asked.
Wayne shrugged. There was really only one way to find out.
33 Chimerism is a condition wherein a single organism derives traits from multiple, fused zygotes. For example, an Olympic cyclist accused of blood doping contended that blood cells found in his body with DNA different than his own were actually produced by an absorbed fraternal twin. And a woman who needed a kidney transplant discovered that her adult children who had themselves tested for genetic compatibility were not actually hers. They were the product of ovarian tissue from a “sister” who had vanished in the womb.
34 Fractal geometry is a branch of mathematics that is used primarily to understand recursive processes. A “fractal” is an irregular polygon that appears roughly the same at any scale, from the infinitesimal to the infinite. This property is referred to as “self-similarity,” which refers to the repetition of statistical features. These concepts as they apply to chaos theory were popularized in the novel and movie about dinosaurs run amok, Jurassic Park. Colin appreciated the special effects but quibbled with the title since half the dinosaurs on display were actually from the Cretaceous period.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
TWO DOCTORS IN VIENNA
While Hans Asperger did his pioneering work in Vienna’s University Children’s Hospital, another pediatric psychiatrist named Heinrich Gross was doing work of his own barely a mile away in the Am Spiegelgrund Children’s Clinic. Children at the clinic remembered Dr. Gross walking the hallways in his crisp brown uniform with the swastika armband. He took particular interest in those diagnosed with the physical, mental, and behavioral disabilities that led the Nazi authorities to designate them as “unclean.”
Gross and his colleagues were performing experiments on these children and then murdering them, usually through drug overdoses, starvation, or exposing them to the elements until they caught fatal pneumonia. More than eight hundred children died at Spiegelgrund in this fashion—“lives unworthy of life,” as the Nazis called them.
Meanwhile, Dr. Asperger argued passionately for the social usefulness of his patients. He emphas
ized the extraordinary abilities that often accompanied their handicaps. Families of children whom Asperger treated were struck by his sensitivity and compassion. Many of his patients went on to live happy, successful lives, including Elfriede Jelinek, who would one day win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In late 1944, Asperger’s clinic was destroyed in a bombing raid by the Allies. His colleague Sister Victorine was killed. Most of his research was lost. Asperger’s work had been largely forgotten when he died in relative obscurity in 1981.
Fellow physician Gross escaped prosecution at the end of the Second World War. He went on to become one of Austria’s most distinguished physicians, even winning the nation’s highest honor for medicine. For several decades, Gross continued neurological research on the preserved brains of the children he had helped murder. Only toward the end of his life in the early 2000s was Gross prosecuted for war crimes—a trial that was dismissed because of the accused’s alleged senility. He finally died in 2005.
The remains of Gross’s victims were formally cremated in a memorial ceremony in 2002, and he died free but recognized for the monster he was. Asperger’s reputation was rehabilitated when his work was rediscovered and translated into English in the 1990s. The syndrome that bears his name has become a household word.
My father says that Heinrich Gross was simply evil, and some people are like that. I’m not sure if I can accept this explanation. Try as I might, I can’t understand how so much horror can be encompassed by such a tiny word. I told my father this once, and he asked me to consider how so much good is encompassed by a word as tiny as “love.”
Colin had only served detention once before, over a misunderstanding involving the Case of the Talking Doll. He had been conducting a noisy experiment with the motion sensor that caused the subject doll to bark like a dog instead of say “Mama” or “I love you.” His homeroom teacher, Ms. Breyman, thought Colin was intentionally disrupting class and gave him a stern warning. When Colin pointed out that homeroom was not in fact a class, and therefore there was nothing to disrupt, Ms. Breyman gave him lunch detention. Colin didn’t think this was fair, but Marie pointed out that sometimes fairness was a difficult balancing act when attempting to maintain basic social order.
“She’s your teacher,” Marie had said. “She has thirty students to worry about. If they all talked back to her, where would she be?”
“Her classroom,” Colin replied. He didn’t understand why Marie laughed.
Today, detention was not to be served in peace and quiet in the classroom of an aging teacher who simply wanted to grade papers. Mr. Turrentine was on detention duty. Unlike many of his peers, Mr. Turrentine believed detention—as with any punishment—was an instructional opportunity. He took instruction very seriously.
Colin stood alone in Mr. Turrentine’s office. The gym itself was smelly and dirty, but Colin was beginning to admire his teacher’s sense of order. It wasn’t just the way the gym equipment all seemed to find its way back exactly where it belonged at the end of each class (every ball, for example, was numbered such that it was assigned to a specific rack and had to be arranged in a specific, ordinal sequence), but everything in the gym seemed to have a place. This was even truer in Turrentine’s inner sanctum.
Mr. Turrentine had lists for everything. Equipment, supplies, and students—it didn’t matter; it was all tracked, labeled, and categorized. There was a clipboard for every class, with every student’s name, the day in the semester, and a “” or an “×” on a grid. Fascinated, Colin found his period and scanned the list of names until he found his own:
Fischer, C.M. followed by seven marks. Colin smiled. He looked for his friends and people he knew, eager to compare their performance. Greer, M.A. also had seven check marks. Connelly, W.J. had seven ×’s. It was as Colin’s finger alighted on the listing for Moore, R.T. that he heard Mr. Turrentine clear his throat behind him.
“Are you my personal assistant, Fischer?” Mr. Turrentine asked.
“No,” Colin replied, turning.
“Are you a helpful gnome who cleans my desk, organizes my files, and shines my shoes at night so that I don’t have to?”
“No,” Colin said. “I am not.”
“That is correct, Fischer. You are none of those things. So would you care to explain to me why, in the name of all that is good and holy, you would be in my office poking your nose in my belongings?” Mr. Turrentine stared down at him, his hands resting on his hips. Strangely, he did not look ANGRY.
“I’m here because this is the first of two detentions I’ve been assigned. The first was for fighting in class—you were there—the second was for proving that Sandy Ryan brought the gun into the cafeteria and not Wayne Connelly. But I’m not supposed to talk about any of that for legal reasons. You understand.”
“I do.”
“Mr. Turrentine,” Colin asked, “where do I sit?”
“Sit?” Mr. Turrentine turned on his heel. He did not beckon to Colin or do anything other than expect to be followed, and Colin complied. They marched out into the auxiliary gym, where Colin found a line of students in their regular clothes lined up and standing at attention. “Get in line, Fischer,” Mr. Turrentine barked. So Colin did.
Colin was keenly aware that he knew no one in this line. Most were upperclassmen, and physically Colin was the smallest. The boy next to him smelled like feet. Colin scrunched up his nose to keep the odor out, watching as Mr. Turrentine stepped into a closet and then back out with a bucket full of scrub brushes of various colors.
Turrentine moved down the line, handing each student in turn a scrub brush and a map. When he reached Colin, only a musty blue brush remained. The undesirable color notwithstanding, Colin was expected to take what was offered, just like everyone else.
“This is blue,” Colin said.
“Yes, Fischer.” Mr. Turrentine nodded. “I know this.”
He turned to address the others. “Today,” he said, “we give back. We will clean every bathroom in this building. We will scrub every toilet, we will scour every sink, we will mop every floor until you would be happy to lick Jell-O pudding off the tile. We will not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, or socioeconomic status. Are we clear?”
Everyone in line nodded emphatically, especially the boy who smelled like feet.
“Then what are you waiting for? Move with a sense of urgency.”
The detainees moved—all but Colin, who had been studying his map and realized the bathroom he was expected to clean was by the cafeteria. This was easily the most horrific facility in the entire school, and Colin’s head had already been in one of those toilets. It wasn’t a pleasant memory.
“Problem, Fischer?”
“Yes,” Colin said. He held up his scrub brush. “I don’t like the color blue.”
The bathroom by the cafeteria was even dirtier than Colin remembered from the first day of school.
At least, it was that way before Colin began cleaning. He found that once he mastered his horror and revulsion, he had a real talent for scrubbing out even the most difficult of stains. It helped to think of it as a problem that needed to be solved, rather than dirt, grime, and unspeakable human detritus that had to be washed away by hand.
That night, Colin wrote:
Being a janitor is difficult. I wonder if janitors clean up after themselves, or if they leave it for other janitors. Tomorrow, I will ask them.
He was working on scrubbing the last toilet in the last stall when he heard the bathroom door open behind him. At first, Colin thought to confront whomever had walked in and point out the yellow sandwich board that was supposed to warn people away during the cleaning process. Then he heard a familiar, but trembling voice and decided it would be best not to show himself. Instead, he quietly pulled the stall door shut, crouched on the newly clean toilet seat, and listened very carefully. He wished he had his Notebook.
“…I just want it all to go away,” Colin heard Eddie say. But Eddie wasn’t alone.
&
nbsp; Two sets of footfalls clopped against the spotless tile floor as the door swung shut, leaving Eddie and his companion in apparent solitude. Colin could just make them out through the crack in the door. Eddie stood in front of the sink, and behind him—
“Pull yourself together,” Rudy said. “You didn’t even like the girl.”
“That’s not true. I love her.”
“You love her. You love her so much, you let her swing while you walk around a free man. Excuse me while I dry a tear for the overwhelming humanity of it all. But your self-delusion and hypocrisy aren’t at issue here.”
Rudy leaned in close to Eddie, uncomfortably so. Colin realized his stall was visible in the mirror and hoped against hope that he would not be seen. He had only the scrub brush to defend himself.
Eddie slumped, bracing himself against the porcelain. “So can you help her or not?” he asked.
“My father is a partner at the most powerful law firm in Los Angeles. Of course I can help her.” Rudy’s eyes drifted across the mirror, toward Colin’s stall. It was like Rudy knew Colin was there, though Colin calculated from the angle this was impossible.
Colin’s heart slammed against his rib cage. A scream tickled his throat, demanding release. His legs and arms struggled to move—to cover his ears, to flee—but they could not. They were bound in place by force of will. Colin knew he could not be seen by Rudy, knew somehow this was important above all other things. Colin squeezed his eyes shut, a compromise with the instinct that battled his reason for supremacy.
Eddie nodded slowly. “Thanks, I guess.”
Rudy patted Eddie on the back, but there was no comfort in it. He started to leave, but stopped, as he had one final message to deliver. “Eddie? Next time, put the gun in the right locker before your girlfriend finds it and decides to do you a favor. Your laziness cost me three hundred dollars. You’re going to have to work that off.”
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