Eye Contact (9 page)

Balled into fists, her thumb and fingers look like the whorled side of a snail's shell. Or the pictures people draw of a snail's shell. He's never seen a real snail.

He can follow that rule because it is easy; he never talks to kids, either. There are other rules, though, interesting ones: “I can only walk on shadows. If there's no shadows I walk on my own. I walk backward if I have to, so I make a shadow.”

The day they went for their walk was sunny. “Plenty of shadows,” she said, turning the sink faucet on and off. “We'll have no problem.”

And they didn't. Once they walked so close their shadows touched. “Don't let anyone see,” she said, “or they'll shoot us with their stupid guns.” He followed her because he wanted to hear more of her singing, wanted to see her throat, where the sounds came from and how she bent the notes and then jiggled them. He imagined rubber bands inside her neck stretching and vibrating.

Once, his mother brought him to a piano lesson where the teacher started by opening the piano to show him the inside. For the first time he saw how the sound was made, a million felt hammers gently striking strings, and after that he couldn't bear to play. He wanted only to watch the mechanics of music, which is how he felt with her. He didn't want to sing himself. He wanted to look in her throat, see if it held pianolike surprises.

 

In the hallway at school, Marianne looks happy to see Morgan. “I'm so glad you're here,” she says. “So many kids have stayed home, which is terrible. It just makes everyone more scared.” She is wearing a black turtleneck and gray skirt with stockings that have little white balls of dryer lint stuck to them.

“I'm not scared,” Morgan says.

“Good. I think it's important that we show whoever did this he can't control our lives.”

“Only three people were in math. The teacher was supposed to give a quiz, but he canceled.”

She shakes her head, looks around the hallway. “You see, I think that's wrong. Even teachers are staying away. What are they
thinking
about?”

He doesn't know. He doesn't know what anyone else thinks about. Last night, after he and his mother had watched as much murder coverage as they possibly could, Morgan went into his room, closed the door, and opened his notebook. He had been thinking a great deal about clues, although until now he'd thought about clues to his own crime, not someone else's. Here was a new place to put his thoughts: “This is How I Will Make Up For What I've Done,” he wrote. “I will solve this crime and people will understand I'm a good person, not a criminal. If I get a record someday, maybe this will be part of it:
Committed One Crime; Solved Another
.” He studies Marianne. “There's something I wanted to ask you about.” He's been thinking about this all night, has made up his mind to ask at their next meeting, but now she's standing right here, so why not? “I had an idea about volunteering.”

She narrows her eyes, confused. “Volunteering? Oh yes. I'd forgotten about that.”

“I was thinking I could do something with that Adam guy. Play games with him after school maybe.”

“What Adam guy?”

“At the elementary school. The one who—”

“Oh yes. Yes, of course. I don't know, Morgan. I don't know about that. Why don't you stop by my office later and we can talk about it.”

For the rest of the morning, he feels good. He thinks of things he can say to Marianne in their meeting. He knows she likes to stay on topic, so he will: he'll tell her he's volunteered before, with special ed kids, that he liked it fine, he isn't scared of them. Of course, he won't tell her about the terrible job he did, dumping Leon after five sessions, pretending later not to recognize him in the hall.

At lunch Morgan gets his food and moves toward the table in the corner where he always sits alone and tries to eat as unobtrusively as possible, but then he sees Chris, from the group, sitting in his chair. Usually, the boys in group don't talk to each other outside of group. They might say “Hi” and wave, but that's it. Morgan considers taking a new seat, but what if a crowd shows up and yells at him, as people so easily can about seats in the cafeteria? Morgan slides his tray down across from Chris.

“I'm not supposed to be here,” Chris says. “I usually eat in one of the offices because crowds make me extremely uncomfortable. I got kicked out today because everyone's got meetings about the murder. Do you believe that?”

Believe what?
he wonders.
That a girl got murdered? That there were meetings as a result?
“Yeah,” Morgan says. “I believe it.”

Chris takes a sip from a juice box. He is eating food no one else would pack in a lunch: sweet potatoes, pineapple chunks, a box of raisins. “I'm extremely allergic,” he says when Morgan watches him spear a sweet potato. “One piece of bread and I'm covered in hives. Once I tried pizza, and you want to know what happened?”

Morgan stares at him. “What?”

“Hospital,” Chris says. “For three days. Oxygen tent and everything. It was okay, though. I don't mind being in the hospital. At least then you don't have to go to school. If things get bad enough, I might do it again.”

Chris is older than Morgan. He has been through a year of middle school already, which makes Morgan wonder what he might mean. “How bad does it get?”

“Believe me, you don't want to know. Wait until winter, when it gets really ugly. You'll be thinking an oxygen tent is nothing. Murder would be a relief.”

Morgan stares at Chris.

“Ha!”
Chris says, so nervously Morgan wonders if he should put Chris on his list. “Just kidding.”

In group, Chris has told stories about a summer camp he went to where, according to him, he was extremely popular and everyone loved him for who he was. “For two weeks I was voted Bunk Camper Overseer,” he told them. “Which means—you know—I oversaw things. Then at the end I won for Most Improved Athlete of the Summer.” At first, no one believed him because Chris is so thin he can't wear watches or keep most socks pulled up his legs. When Sean asked, “
You
won best athlete?” Chris closed his eyes and shook his head. “Most
improved.
In the beginning I couldn't kick a ball. By the end I made a soccer goal. At final campfire I got a standing ovation.” Anytime Chris mentions the summer camp, Morgan wants to come right out and ask him for the name. He tries to imagine standing up in the dusky light of a campfire, accepting an award to the music of a hundred people clapping for him.

Morgan decides to take a risk, tell Chris what is on his mind. “I keep thinking about that guy. Who saw the whole thing.”

“What about him?”

“I just keep thinking—I don't know. I don't know what I'm thinking.” Talking to someone his own age is confusing; Morgan's mind jumbles into a blur of words that won't organize themselves. “That he almost died, for one thing.”

“Well, sure,” Chris says. “But see, I don't like to think about those things. I don't like to think about almost dying.”

Down the table, a trio of older boys blow straw wrappers in their direction. They watch as the paper tubes float and dance toward them. “Yeah, all right. Very funny. Ha ha,” Chris says. “I'm putting them on my list.” He seems to be talking to the wrappers.

“What list?” Morgan asks.

“My list, all right? My list of people who are going to get in trouble for harassment very soon. We're trying to eat lunch here, right? This is what I can't stand.”

“It's just straw wrappers.”

“Yeah, to you maybe. You don't see half of it. You don't see what's really going on.”

Maybe Chris is right,
Morgan thinks, but when he looks up the table, the boys have walked away.

That afternoon, class schedules are changed to accommodate an all-school assembly about safety with strangers, led by a woman no one has ever seen before. She starts the meeting by standing onstage, a microphone in her hand, and saying nothing for so long that people grow nervous, turn around in their seats looking for a teacher who might explain. Then with a click of her thumb and a tiny peel of feedback, she begins: “You all know why we're here. You all know Amelia Best, a ten-year-old girl, was murdered in broad daylight during school hours about three hundred yards away from where we're sitting right now. You may be children, but you're not stupid. You know the perpetrator hasn't been caught. That a very real danger to all of you—every single one—is still out there.”

Morgan watches a girl in front of him start to cry. Beside her, another girl puts an arm around her shoulder. “He's not going to kill you, Amy,” she says. “He's
not.
” Morgan twists around in his seat, looks to see if other people are crying. No one is.

After the assembly, Morgan walks to Marianne's office. To his surprise, two kids he's never seen before are already waiting outside her office. Just as he arrives, Marianne pokes her head out. “Jeff, why don't you come in, and then you, Fiona. And Morgan—” She smiles. “Do you mind sticking around?”

“Not at all,” he says, nodding.

He sits down across from the girl, who in any other context would terrify him. Dressed all in black with dark makeup around her eyes and silver jewelry everywhere possible: her thumbs, her ears, even her nose. Maybe he is studying her too intently, because after a minute or two she surprises him by speaking: “You want to know what I heard?”

He shakes his head.

“I hear that she did it to herself. She was a cutter.”

Morgan has a hard time judging jokes, but he's pretty sure this must be one until she looks up to the light and he sees she is crying. He's had this problem himself before. After his conversation with Emma, crying at school was always a danger, and could happen any minute if he wasn't careful. Once, when Leon caught him in the hallway off guard and pulled him into a hug, he came away with his eyes filled, like this girl's. He had to go to the bathroom, sit down on a toilet until it passed. “I don't think so. I think she was killed, like they said.”

She turns from the light and stares at him. “But maybe she
wanted
it. Did you ever think about that? Maybe she was a sad girl who wanted something to happen to her. Maybe she saw the guy in the woods and thought, ‘I'm going to go out there and see what happens to me.'”

Morgan stares at her. This is the first time a girl has talked to him in middle school. Ever since Emma, he has been so scared of them. He wants to argue with this girl, but the words escape him, he can't think what to say. A minute later, Jeff walks out and the girl stands up.

By the time he gets inside her office, Marianne looks exhausted. “Do you mind if I eat while we talk, Morgan? This has been such a long day, I haven't even gotten a chance.” She pulls out a vinyl lunch bag, lifts half a sandwich out of it. “So here's the question, Morgan. Why are you picking this kid to volunteer with?”

“Well, I know him a little bit. I remember him. And I don't know what's wrong with him, but he's not—you know—retarded.”

“He's autistic.”

“Oh.”

“That shouldn't scare you necessarily. It's what makes this potentially a good idea. But we'd have to be very careful.”

“Okay.” He smiles. He loves that she said “we.”

“He's obviously been through a traumatizing experience. Something more terrible than we can imagine. I don't know very much about him, but I brought up your idea in a meeting we just had. I learned that he has a single mother, and he's considered moderately high functioning. They told me that he is generally very affable and well liked and that over at the elementary school, everyone is very worried about the toll this is going to take on him. As far as anyone knows, he hasn't spoken since the murder and has gone into a kind of regression.”

Morgan nods. He can't believe she's telling him all this.

“Here's the thing, though. I called over to the elementary school and spoke to the guidance counselor about your idea. She wants to run it by some people, but she didn't automatically say no. What she said was, it might actually be a decent idea. There's more and more research these days that says as these kids get older, the best thing for them is not necessarily more one-on-one time with adults, but simply being with other kids. Especially kids who are willing to be patient with a conversation that might take extra time.” She reaches into her bag, pulls out a granola bar. “There's this fascinating study, actually. We've always thought that the plasticity of children's brains stops at a certain point. That with developmentally delayed children early intervention is everything—you try to cram as much in before they're five or six years old, because after that there's not too much you can do. The gains they might make are much slower, more incremental. Now there's new research saying that the cusp of puberty is another opportunity—that the brain opens up again, grows more malleable, and certain strides can be made later as well.