Do You Think This Is Strange?

by Aaron Cully Drake

  I never saw her again.

  At suppertime, our third chair is always empty, and my father fills the vacant space with questions, while I fill the vacant space with abridged answers.

  SASKIA AT THE TABLE AGAIN

  The next day, Saskia Stiles sat at my lunch table in the cafeteria again.

  She wore the same pink coat, the same knitted wool cap, the same Bose headphones. But she didn’t have her notepad in front of her. She had her iPhone, and she clutched it to her chest like it was trying to leap from her grasp. She bent over, praying into it; her thumbs tapping away in bursts of frantic activity, then frozen in moments of thought assembly. She worked feverishly.

  I didn’t expect her to be at my table. I expected her to find somewhere else to eat. Somewhere less crowded. Somewhere uncrowded. That’s what I would have done.

  But there she was.

  I sat down, at the opposite end. She squeaked.

  We ate in silence, the only thing between us the empty space of a lunch table.

  When Saskia Stiles squeaked for a second time, she put her sandwich down, brought her hands up, and flapped them.

  Just then, a Tater bomb fell.

  “Heads up, fucknuts!” Danny Hardwick called out to me.

  —

  Six days after I arrived at Hampton Park, Jim Worley asked me how I was getting by.

  “Getting by what?” I asked him. His nostrils flared. Our relationship had progressed to the point where he was no longer certain I was as simple as he thought, and he suspected that I often baited him. His smile tightened a little more each time we talked. Although I understood what it means to “get by,” I also knew that with Jim Worley a literal response was the best response, because it annoyed him. The more annoyed he was with me, the fewer questions he asked.

  “I see you’re eating lunch in the cafeteria,” he said after my first month at Hampton Park. “Have you made any friends?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “You don’t talk to anyone at the lunch table?”

  I shook my head. “No one sits at my table.”

  “Why do you think that is?” he asked.

  “People throw Tater Tots at this table.”

  Jim Worley paused to absorb this. “Do you mean,” he said after a moment, “that they throw Tater Tots at you?”

  Don’t tell him, a thread advised. He’ll just ask more questions.

  “No,” I said.

  Jim Worley waited for more. Told you, shrugged the thread.

  “Sometimes they throw them at the janitors’ lunchroom. I think they’re trying to annoy the janitors.”

  Jim Worley nodded his head thoughtfully. “That stands to reason, I guess.”

  He leaned back and put his feet up on his desk. “It seems odd that they sell Tater Tots in the cafeteria. People buy them to throw them. Not to eat them, you know. Little Tater Bombs, we called them when I was a student here.” He looked at me and smiled, as if he was sharing an inside secret. “Yes, Frederick,” he said. “I was once a student, too. And they had invented Tater Tots by then, too.”

  “That’s not what I was wondering,” I told him.

  “No?”

  “No,” I said. “I was wondering if they threw them at you or if you threw Tater Tots at them.”

  His smile tightened.

  —

  In the cafeteria, Tater Tots fell.

  I sat, eating my lunch in silence, and wondered if I should advise Saskia Stiles to eat somewhere else, not because I didn’t want her at my table, but because I believed that eating at my table may cause her distress.

  Another Tater Tot arced across the cafeteria and bounced off our table. I gave no reaction. She jumped slightly, and I found myself compelled to say something reassuring. Which I have never felt compelled to do before.

  “It’s a stochastic event,” I said and looked down at the table like it was the most interesting surface I’d ever seen.

  Saskia stopped mid-chew, staring down at her phone. Then she put it down and reached into her backpack. She took out her notepad and a pen, and began scribbling.

  “A stochastic event,” I said again, “is an event that happens at random intervals but is expected to occur on a dependable frequency. The Tater Tots are a stochastic event.”

  The first time a Tater Tot landed near me, I was startled and looked around for an explanation. Why were little bits of deep-fried potato plummeting out of the air onto my table? The second time it happened, one landed on my plate, and Danny Hardwick laughed with his friends. Then they high-fived each other, and I knew the explanation for why little bits of deep-fried potato were plummeting out of the air was me. I was the target.

  After that, the Tater Tots came periodically, and I paid them no attention. When one hit me on the shoulder, I hardly noticed it. When Danny Hardwick and his friends cheered, I stared at the wall and ate my cheeseburger.

  After a while, Danny Hardwick realized I was a target that would not react. He became bored with me. Periodically, he fired a test shot, to see if I was ready to say something, but I never did.

  To be clear: my lack of response wasn’t a strategy. It wasn’t a plan at all. It was a realization that Tater Tot bombs would rain on me at random, unpredictable intervals. It was a realization that Tater Tots and thunder weren’t too different. Both were distressing. There was nothing I could do about either. That was enough to put me at peace with incoming Tater bombs.

  A second Tater Tot fell on the table near Saskia.

  “Ninety-five percent of the time,” I said to her, while still staring at the wall, “two or less Tater Tots are thrown at the table.” My cheeseburger was finished. It was time for me to go. But I sat. “They’ve only thrown three or more Tater Tots on four occasions.”

  A third Tater Tot bounced between us.

  “Five occasions,” I corrected.

  She glanced at the Tater Tot sideways and started typing on her iPhone again.

  A fourth bounced off my left ear. Danny Hardwick cheered.

  We were now outside the standard deviation.

  —

  I didn’t know Danny Hardwick or his friends personally, but I knew who they were, because they made it their business to make sure everyone in school knew who they were. They were the boys who sat at the seventh table on the first row of the cafeteria. No one else sat at the seventh table on the first row, except those who were invited.

  No one was invited.

  It was a loud table. Each lunch hour, they told loud stories and laughed at loud jokes. They ate popcorn and threw Tater Tots.

  Danny Hardwick’s friends deferred to him. When he threw kernels, they threw kernels. When he was quiet, they were quiet. He was the Alpha Tater. He wore a leather jacket and his hands were always stained black with grease and oil from the auto mechanics shop at the end of the school. He was large, with thick dark eyebrows and a face pocked with acne scars. His hair was blond with a thick dyed stripe of black running up the middle, like an etched mohawk. He only smiled when he threw Tater bombs.

  We went to different classes in different ends of the school. Although his locker was on the same bank of lockers as mine, we never talked. We only interacted in the cafeteria. It was our Jerusalem.

  Once, we bumped shoulders walking down the hall, but I didn’t turn to see what his reaction was. I had not bumped his shoulder; he had bumped mine, and I know he bumped it deliberately. At school, if you’re new, you will have your shoulder bumped. That’s residual instinct at work. Young men have been bumping each other’s shoulders for tens of thousands of years. That’s just the way it is. Danny Hardwick likes to bump shoulders. He wins at it a lot.

  Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him staring at me.

  Sometimes I sat, eating my lunch, and I knew Danny Hardwick wanted to bump my shoulder. But we were never in the same class together, and we walked different hallways.

  I think that made him angry. The corridors we walked defined, at a basic level, how m
uch more intelligent I am than he is. That’s just the way it is.

  Now that Saskia sat at my table, he seemed angrier. Tater bombs rained down.

  They rained down on the third day we ate lunch together.

  They rained on the fourth. And the fifth. I hardly noticed them.

  —

  On the sixth day, I stared at the wall across from the table. She drew pictures in her notebook for the first half of her lunch, then wrote text messages for the remaining half.

  My right hand stayed in my jacket pocket and played with a folded-up piece of paper. It was the now uncrumpled poem I took from the table on the first day I saw her.

  This is what she wrote on the paper:

  hello

  is there anybody in there

  I didn’t know what she meant by it, but it didn’t rest well with me, and the threads wondered about it.

  Is anybody in where? they asked.

  I gave up trying to figure out what she wanted to say. Google was helpful, and I discovered that they were lyrics by the band Pink Floyd. So I added, beneath her words:

  Just nod if you can hear me.

  Is there anyone at home?

  As I got up to leave, I took the poem from my pocket, unfolded it, and lay it before her.

  “Goodbye, Saskia,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

  —

  On the seventh day, she arrived to lunch late and sat down at the opposite end of the table. She pulled the poem from her pocket and uncrumpled it. She read it, then crumpled it up, then opened it again. Putting it down, she took her iPhone out of her pocket. She turned off her music, then scrolled through her selection, and started a new song.

  I could hear her listening to Pink Floyd.

  Relax, the song continued, I’ll need some information first.

  I listened to its tinny quality seeping out of her headphones, as the band broke into the main riff.

  I have become, they sang.

  —

  At lunch on the eighth day, she was agitated and turned her music up, then down, then up again. She tried to eat, but kept putting her food down, flapping her hands at shoulder level.

  She took a pencil from her backpack and opened the poem I had given her two days before. She scrawled on it, crumpled it back up, and lobbed the paper toward me. Then she got up and walked away, leaning forward, her hands clasped to her chest.

  There is no pain, you are receding, she wrote.

  THE STATUS UPDATE OF THE DAY

  I opened my eyes and I was sitting in the duck sauce chair, with Jim Worley staring at me. My status was yellow, but it had been green before this moment, turning yellow only when Jim Worley pressed the conversation forward.

  “I saw you in the cafeteria today,” he said, making a temple with his fingers. “You were sitting with a girl.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Did you mind it when she came and sat at your table?”

  “No,” I replied.

  He waited for more.

  “She was already sitting at my table when I got there.”

  He nodded, placing his index fingers, in the shape of a church steeple, under his chin. “And yet you sat beside her. This isn’t such a bad thing, I think.” He nodded. “Yes,” he continued. “Real progress.”

  “Maybe it’s because of this chair,” I offered. He frowned.

  “Probably not,” he answered after considering it for a moment. He tapped his desk with a pencil. “Did you talk to her?”

  “I said goodbye,” I confirmed.

  He nodded. “Well, that’s a start.” He opened his laptop and typed quickly. He smiled. “Ah. There she is. Her name is Saskia Stile.”

  “Stiles,” I corrected.

  His eyebrows went up. “You know her?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “When I was seven, we attended the same therapy sessions.”

  He tapped at his computer and went through various screens. “I see,” he said. “So you know she’s autistic.”

  “She has PDD-NOS,” I said.

  He squinted at his computer screen. “No, no,” he corrected me. “She’s autistic.”

  “Saskia Stiles is on the spectrum,” I agreed. “But her diagnosis is Pervasive Development Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified. PDD-NOS.”

  He pointed at his computer screen. “It says here she has—”

  “No,” I said. “She has PDD-NOS.”

  He closed his laptop. “Potato, potahto,” he allowed. “So, she’s your friend, then?”

  I didn’t reply.

  No one says potahto.

  —

  Listen: Here is how I knew Saskia Stiles had this diagnosis. She told me, eleven years ago. She was excited about it.

  “I have Puh-DID-noss!” she shouted, jumping up and down. I didn’t understand what she was saying.

  Nine days later, I overheard my mother and father talking about Saskia, and my mother said, “She has PDD-NOS.”

  I realized then that Saskia knew that she was diagnosed with PDD-NOS because she had read it. And she pronounced it PuhDiDNoSs.

  The things you remember.

  THE TRANSFER OF SASKIA STILES

  TO MY CHEMISTRY CLASS

  Jim Worley was not a man who let ideas linger, good or bad. Saskia Stiles was an idea.

  “I think we can build on this,” he said and looked at me. I continued to stare at the wall. He didn’t say anything more and I realized I was expected to answer a question he hadn’t asked. Those are the worst kinds of questions.

  “What?” I said.

  “I said we can build on this.”

  “What?” I said.

  “We can build on sitting at the same table as Saskia Stiles.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  He nodded and made a temple out of his fingers. “Excellent,” he explained.

  “What,” I agreed.

  “It’s fortuitous that the two of you met.” He said the words slowly, with a serious expression. “Do you understand what ‘fortuitous’ means?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  “To be fortuitous is to have the characteristic of experiencing good fortune.”

  “I suppose, I suppose.” He opened a folder on his desk and lifted a sheet of paper. “Saskia Stiles is in your grade. Takes the same classes as you. She’s also—” He stopped and looked at me. Paused. “—a loner. Like you.”

  “I’m not a loner. I’m an anthropophobe.”

  He blinked. “A what?”

  “I suffer from anthropophobia.”

  He opened a second folder and rifled through the papers. “I don’t—” he said, distracted. “It doesn’t say anything here about—”

  “I have a condition where I don’t enjoy interacting with others. At times it’s an irrational feeling and, therefore, a phobia.”

  He leaned forward. “When were you diagnosed with that?”

  “I’m self-diagnosed,” I explained.

  “Oh,” he said and looked at a sheet in his folder again. He looked at another. Picked up another sheet. Put it down. “I see,” he said.

  He didn’t.

  “This is a nice chair,” I offered.

  —

  Saskia Stiles was transferred to my chemistry class the next day.

  Jim Worley seemed pleased that we got along. He believed it was synchronous. She was non-verbal, and I didn’t like talking to people. It seemed to him, I expect, an ideal match. From that perspective, Jim Worley was a very insightful man.

  Saskia Stiles walked into my class only a few minutes after I took my seat at the back of the room. Her headphones ever over her wool cap. Her notebook ever present. She clutched it and her textbook to her chest like a breastplate. Hunched over, she looked down and moved with short quick steps, as if she were scrubbing the floor with her feet.

  She sat at the empty table next to mine. Like every other table, it seated four, on tall stools. At the centre of the table was a sin
k and a natural gas outlet for the Bunsen burners. She laid her books down, took off her backpack, and opened her notebook.

  I also sat by myself. When I first came to this class, people tried to engage me, or become lab partners with me. Usually, it was a girl who sat with me. While this may sound amenable to a typical teenage boy, it was annoying to me. Girls like to talk.

  I had endured several lab partners. Now, people rarely sat with me; it didn’t take long for the others to learn I was a poor conversationalist. I said things that weren’t in the proper context of the conversation. I said things that weren’t in the proper context of the silence. I said things that sometimes startled them. So now, I sat alone.

  Saskia and I sat silently, each at our own table, waiting for the class to begin, looking at the blackboard. It was the sensible thing to do.

  And then she began testing the taps. On. Off. On again.

  When the chemistry teacher walked into the classroom, he put down his notes and looked directly at Saskia.

  “Young lady,” he said. “Stop playing with the water.”

  She ignored him. Perhaps she didn’t hear him, but I think she did.

  “Young lady!” His palm slammed the desktop. “Hey!”

  The end to this was not going to be happy, I could see, especially if he did the thing he appeared about to do: walk up and grab her, or even try to take her headphones off. At best, there would be a confrontation. At worst, there would be a one-person riot.

  A deer in the city, said the threads.

  Shut up, I explained.

  Mr. Pringle stepped away from his desk, his jaw tight, his brow furrowed. He breathed through his nose.

  “Mr. Chips,” I said, softly, but clearly, crisply, as if I were speaking from the ranks at reveille.

  Seriously? asked the threads.

  Mr. Pringle stopped, mid-step, frozen. His eyes snapped to mine, then his head slowly followed suit.

  “What,” he said, his lips parted, his teeth clamped together, “did you just say?”

  I stared at my textbook and turned pages slowly. “She can’t hear you,” I said. “She has her headphones on.” I flipped the pages of my textbook back and forth.