Authors: Ashley Edward Miller,Zack Stentz
Colin Fischer (23 page)
Dr. Doran walked briskly
up the front hallway toward the main office, heels clicking against the tile, her eyes narrowed and jaw set. She was marching into a battle she did not choose, but intended to win. And God help anyone who kept her from it.
Wayne Connelly’s voice echoed out into the hallway. “I told you,” he was saying to the secretary, “I’m here to see Dr. Doran.”
Dr. Doran moved in behind him with her arms crossed, a formidable presence. Wayne knew from the look on the secretary’s face and the prickling of the hair on the back of his neck that he should turn around.
31
The boy who imagined himself afraid of nothing was, in his heart, as afraid as he had ever been.
“You were told to stay off-campus, period.” Somehow, her lack of emotion was scarier to Wayne than his stepfather Ken’s white-hot rage. “I didn’t want to handle things this way, but you don’t leave me much choice. The police are on the way, and they’ll take it—and you—from here.”
Wayne felt heavy, his limbs leaden. His head slumped down toward his chest, and he could not stop it no matter how hard he tried. It was all so desperately unfair; he knew that no matter what he said, he would not be believed. No one cared.
“Good,” Colin said, appearing from practically nowhere at the office door.
Wayne found the strength to lift his eyes toward Colin, betrayal and confusion stinging them. Dr. Doran took a step to the side so she could stare down both boys at once. She was no more certain of Colin’s intentions or his meaning than Wayne was.
Colin stood tall, arms straight. His glasses seemed to sit right on his nose. He did not slouch, or slump, or look away. For the first time in his life, he didn’t look like a boy who could be bullied or in need of protection from bullies. Colin looked
CERTAIN
.
“The police will be here when Wayne is proved innocent,” Colin said.
Sandy entered behind Colin, as confused by the
gathering as anyone. “Dr. Doran?” she asked. “I got a note that you wanted to see me?”
Dr. Doran looked between Colin and Wayne and then at Sandy, suddenly understanding why Sandy had come even if she didn’t understand the reason behind the invitation. “I didn’t send anybody a note. If you got one, it was forged.” She directed the word
forged
at Colin, as if to say, “We’re going to talk.”
Colin shook his head, clearly disagreeing with Dr. Doran’s conclusion. “The note only said that you want to see her, which you do, even if you don’t know it yet. I know this because I sent the note.”
Dr. Doran took a deep, cleansing breath. “Colin, I told you before: There are limits to my indulgence of you.”
“I told you before: The gun didn’t belong to Wayne. And I was right.”
Sandy shifted nervously. She edged back toward the door. “Can I go?”
“Go, Sandy,” Dr. Doran said.
“
Stay
, Sandy,” Colin said.
“Wake up, Wayne,” Wayne said. He slapped his own cheek, hard.
Colin was acutely aware of the
SHOCK
that rippled through the office from his clear but simple defiance. He could feel the stares directed at him, the
CONFUSION
and
ANGER
of the teachers and staff, the
ADMIRATION
of his fellow students. None of that mattered. None of that could be allowed to distract him from his mission now.
Sandy had gone pale. She shook with
FEAR
.
Colin turned to her. There was no malice in him. No cruelty. There was just a relentless confidence in the facts. “It was Eddie’s gun,” Colin explained. “He bought it from a
La Familia
in Sylmar named
El Cocodrilo
, which is Spanish for ‘The Crocodile.’ They call him this on account of his toothy smile. I think that’s a bad metaphor because crocodiles can’t smile.
32
But it’s his name, and I suppose he can call himself whatever he likes.”
“Dude,” Wayne interjected, “if you could get to the point, that would kick ass.”
“Yes,” Dr. Doran agreed, ignoring his language. “Less color, more fact.”
“Eddie bought the gun because he was mad at Wayne and wanted to scare him. But he never got the chance,” Colin revealed. He fixed his gaze on Sandy, not letting the
FEAR
in her eyes stop him. “You took it out of his locker when he wasn’t looking and you hid it in your purse.”
“That—that’s crazy,” Sandy stammered.
“No, it’s perfectly rational. You took the gun to protect Eddie because you like him. The same reason why you ate ice cream with him when your mother wasn’t home.”
Whatever color remained in Sandy’s face drained away. She seemed to know what Colin was referring to, but no one else did. Colin himself only understood it in the context of Eddie’s story. Not even Wayne, schooled as he was in the dark arts of schoolyard innuendo, could say for certain what ice cream had to do with anything.
“You can’t prove anything,” Sandy croaked past the lump in her throat.
Dr. Doran stepped between Colin and Sandy. She had seen and heard quite enough, and if there was more to hear, the main office wasn’t the place for it. “Sandy is right,” she said to Colin. “And without proof, you’re just harassing an innocent student.”
“Like Wayne?” Colin asked.
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I’m not. Wayne
is
the subject. And the gun.” He gestured toward Sandy and the large purse slung over her shoulder. “Look inside her purse. You’ll find residual gun oil and some pink-and-white-chocolate frosting, from the piece with the rose.”
In spite of herself, Dr. Doran glanced down at Sandy’s open purse. Was that dried chocolate frosting crusted on the inside? It was hard to say.
“You saved a piece of Melissa Greer’s birthday cake to take to Eddie after his workout,” Colin reminded Sandy. “The gun must have rubbed against it as it fell out during the disturbance in the cafeteria. Just like your tube of melon lipstick, which you had to replace.”
Wayne just stared at Colin. This was the most amazing thing he had seen in a week of amazing things. He made a surreptitious attempt to gain Colin’s attention and share the moment, but Colin was oblivious to Wayne’s sudden swell of camaraderie.
Sandy shook her head in denial and disbelief. She glared at Colin, her
FEAR
transforming into
HATE
. As an adolescent girl, hate was a weapon she knew how to use. “I don’t have to say anything to you…
Shortbus.
”
“Don’t call him that,” Wayne growled before he realized he had said anything at all. Dr. Doran frowned. If Colin noticed the slur, it made no difference.
“I already spoke to Eddie,” Colin pressed. “He knows what you did.” The first assertion was a fact, the second a strongly stated conjecture. Still, there was no way to know whether Colin was telling the truth to manipulate Sandy’s response or not. His expression was blank, his voice emotionless. He was a walking, talking Kuleshov Effect.
“Tell the truth or take the consequences. I know it seems like you’ll be better off if you don’t say anything, but it’s not true. The math just isn’t on your side.” He stepped closer to her, unconscious of encroaching on Sandy’s personal space in a way that under other circumstances would have been impossible for him. “Tell the truth now before the police get here,” he insisted. “And maybe you won’t go to jail.”
“That’s it,” Dr. Doran broke in, and she meant it. “We’re done here.”
“But we have to bring Eddie in. We have to ask him how he made contact with
La Familia
and arranged for the purchase. This is much bigger than—”
“
Enough
.”
Colin was silenced by her intensity—even taken aback. “Dr. Doran…”
“He was so mad at Wayne,” Sandy broke in suddenly, staring out the window. She sounded strange, disconnected from everything and everyone. Even the fear seemed to have fled from her as the words flooded out. “I didn’t know what he would do. I couldn’t let him hurt anyone, and I couldn’t let him get in trouble.” She looked over to Dr. Doran, pleading now. “Please don’t let me go to jail.”
Dr. Doran’s eyes flicked toward the picture window on the far side of the office, behind the secretaries’ desks. Outside, she could see what Sandy had been staring at the entire time she’d been speaking: A police cruiser was parked in the driveway now. A pair of LAPD school policemen were making their way to the front door.
“Sandy, get in my office and call your parents,” Dr. Doran snapped. “Call them right now.” Sandy didn’t have to be spoken to again; she did as she was instructed and disappeared down the narrow hallway to Dr. Doran’s private office. Dr. Doran waited for her
to close the door behind her, then fixed on Wayne and Colin. Hers was not the look of an authority figure grateful for the efforts of private citizens.
“Wayne, go home. We’ll work this out tomorrow. And Colin…” Her voice trailed off. She was less certain about how to deal with Colin than she was about anything in this sea of uncertainties she found herself swimming in.
“No need to thank me,” Colin said helpfully. “We will deal with Eddie next.”
“You missed detention yesterday. Now you owe me two.”
With that, she turned on her heel and marched out of the office to intercept the police before the situation got any bigger or any worse. Wayne watched her go, waiting for the click of her heels to fade to inaudibility before daring to address Colin.
“Dude,” Wayne said finally. “That blows.”
Colin slumped ever so slightly. His glasses slipped, and he pushed them back up. This was not how he expected all of this to end. Later, in his Notebook he observed:
Real life doesn’t work like a mystery novel. But it should. Investigate.
“It’s quiet in detention,” Colin said. “I like it when it’s quiet.”
31
Many experiments have actually been carried out to determine the existence of the so-called psychic staring effect, most notably by biochemist and fringe researcher Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake found that blindfolded test subjects could detect when someone was staring at them at rates consistently above what could be accounted for by random chance. A handful of subjects answered correctly every time. Michael Shermer and others from the skeptic community attempted to debunk Sheldrake’s results by pointing to potential bias on the part of the experimenters. However, Sheldrake’s findings were reproduced by other researchers who altered their methods to answer skeptics’ objections.
32
Crocodiles have a habit of lying on a riverbank with their mouths wide open, displaying twenty-four jagged teeth. This was thought to be a “smile” by some observers and a show of aggression by others. Zoologists, however, discovered that crocodiles sweat through their mouths. Smiling is just how a crocodile stays cool.
HANS ASPERGER
The subcategory of autistic spectrum disorders called Asperger’s syndrome takes its name from Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician who did most of his work in Vienna during the 1930s and ’40s. As a child, Asperger himself displayed many traits of the syndrome that bears his name. Shy, remote, and lonely, Asperger had a gift for languages and an astonishing memory for subjects he was interested in and would often bore and alienate his classmates with recitations of long passages by his favorite poet.
As an adult working with disabled children, he was fascinated by a group of patients he called his “little professors”—socially awkward boys and girls who would fixate on a subject and talk about it passionately and in great detail. While mainstream
autism researchers in the United States focused on these patients’ disabilities, Asperger emphasized their special talents and their potential for great contributions to society in adulthood. “They fulfill their role well,” he wrote, “perhaps better than anyone else could, and we are talking of people who as children had the greatest difficulties and caused untold worries to their caregivers.”
Only later did researchers realize Asperger had another motive for emphasizing his patients’ gifts rather than their deficiencies: his desire to save their lives. While he was careful never to lie, he managed to artfully arrange the facts in a way to best make his case to the Nazi authorities in Vienna that his patients did indeed have lives worthy of living. As a scientist, Asperger felt a commitment to the truth. As a doctor, he felt an even greater commitment to the welfare of the children in his care.
This is why I would not make a very good doctor. I have a difficult time making decisions under pressure. Especially when there are consequences.