Authors: Ashley Edward Miller,Zack Stentz
Colin Fischer (6 page)
If Sandy was aware of Colin, she gave no indication.
She just stood at Eddie’s locker, frozen, evidently lost in thought. Colin crept closer, as though he were bird-watching and Sandy was a particularly skittish sparrow. He was about to record his further thoughts and observations on teenage relationship dynamics when he heard the school doors open and the
thud
of familiar, heavy footsteps. Wayne Connelly.
Wayne approached, silhouetted by the midday sun through the wide front doors. Colin noted the cool air blowing up the hall and realized the door behind Wayne was not quite closed. He was coming in from outside. Colin looked back to his Notebook. Sandy was forgotten. He barely registered the metallic
clank
of Eddie’s locker slamming shut or the staccato
squish
of Sandy’s tennis shoes against the tile as she hurried away. He frowned as he considered Wayne and noted the strangeness of the moment:
Wayne, 3rd period. Comes in from outside. Very interesting. Investigate.
Wayne stopped, gaze fixed on Colin. Colin’s eyes met Wayne’s; he was surprised to see no
MALICE
on his usual tormentor’s face, just
HESITATION
.
Colin closed his Notebook and put away his pen. He was on step number forty-three when he heard Wayne’s voice.
“Where’re you going?” Wayne asked.
Colin faced Wayne, reminding himself which step he was on so he would not lose count. “Hello, Wayne. I’m going to algebra. I’m missing a lecture on identity matrices, which I think are very interesting.”
With a last look into the sunlit, open parking lot behind Wayne, Colin continued on his way. He hated to miss anything interesting—especially math.
3
The problem is an illustration of fundamental principles of algebra. To determine the time
X
, one needs to plug in values for distance and speed, then resolve for both sides of the equation. What matters is not when each train leaves the station, but the distance between the two trains at the start of the problem and the end of the problem. Finding the solution is a simple matter of calculating the moment when the distance covered by each train relative to its speed is exactly equal. Colin once illustrated this to his parents by placing two electric trains on a track and predicting the exact moment he would crash them together. His father was impressed with Colin’s math, but less so by the damage to his favorite trains.
THE KULESHOV EFFECT
My parents say it’s hard to know what I’m thinking because most of the time I maintain a very blank expression. This is not something I try to do; it is just the way that I am. My father jokes that I “play my cards close to the vest,” but this isn’t true. It is just my face, whether or not I am playing cards, or any other competitive game.
As it turns out, however, the hardest facial expression for another human being to read is a perfectly blank face. This was demonstrated nearly a hundred years ago by a Russian director. After the 1917 Revolution, film stock was hard to come by in Moscow, so filmmakers would experiment with short pieces of scrap film. One director used his bits and pieces to demonstrate how editing could be used to manipulate human emotion.
First, he filmed an actor after instructing him to keep an absolutely neutral expression on his face. When the director followed the image of the actor with a shot of a roast chicken, audiences said, “Look how hungry that man is.”
When he substituted a picture of a coffin, audiences thought the man was sad. If the image portrayed a beautiful woman, they said the actor was pining for his beloved.
This phenomenon is called “the Kuleshov Effect,” after the director who conducted the experiments. What it demonstrated is that you can never tell what a blank face means until you know the context.
Colin smelled the inside
of the gymnasium before he saw it. Stale human sweat, mildew, the faint aroma of urine from a leaky toilet in the boys’ locker room, all unsuccessfully masked by an acrid, pine-based cleaning product. Colin tried to breathe through his mouth instead of his nostrils as he entered, but realized he could taste the cleaning solution on his tongue. An unfortunate consequence of the close relationship between the senses of taste and smell.
Colin focused instead on his sense of hearing as he padded across the empty gym.
Scrape
.
Scrape
. A tall, lean teacher hauled a massive net filled with basketballs across the hardwood floor.
“Mr. Turrentine?” Colin’s voice echoed in the
gym’s hard acoustics as the teacher looked up and met Colin’s blue eyes with his own gray ones. Colin studied Mr. Turrentine’s impressively bristly mustache. It reminded him of a silent movie cowboy villain or perhaps Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
“You’re early,” Mr. Turrentine said, “and you’re scuffing my floors with those shoes.” He pointed to Colin’s black dress shoes, the laces double-knotted for safety. “We’re not off to a good start.”
Colin handed Mr. Turrentine a carefully folded slip of paper—a note from his parents. Colin was counting on it to exempt him from PE class. Mr. Turrentine scanned the note once, then twice, his face perfectly blank.
“Asperger’s syndrome.” Mr. Turrentine pronounced the words slowly but correctly. When most people said it, it came out sounding like “Ass-burger” (an endless source of amusement to Colin’s younger brother and—until his mother put a stop to it—Danny’s preferred nickname for Colin), but Mr. Turrentine was careful to make the “s” sound more like a buzzing “z,” an artifact of the name’s Austrian origin.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s a neurological condition related to autism,” Colin explained patiently. “It was discovered by Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger in Vienna in 1943, but not widely diagnosed until—”
“Autism,” Mr. Turrentine interrupted. “You mean
like
Rain Man
?
4
You don’t look like the Rain Man to me. Are you the Rain Man, Fischer?”
“I’m diagnosed as high functioning, but I still have poor social skills and sensory integration issues that give me serious deficits in areas of physical coordination.”
Mr. Turrentine’s mustache twitched slightly. Did he not like what he heard, or simply not understand it? Colin opted to explain it a little further. “That’s why my parents and therapy team say I should be excused from this class.”
Mr. Turrentine remained silent and impassive. It was as though the man had turned to stone. Finally, he spoke, his voice even and his words precise. “I can’t accept this note.”
Shock crept into Colin’s usually even voice, causing it to go up a register. “But it clearly explains—”
“I know what it says, Fischer,” Mr. Turrentine said. “I can read. And if I let everyone with two left feet skip out of my class, I’d be a very lonely guy. You don’t want me to be lonely, do you, Fischer?”
“You’re lonely?”
Mr. Turrentine’s mustache twitched again. “I
assume you thought that little note of yours would do the trick, so you didn’t bring gym clothes.”
Colin nodded, impressed with his teacher’s powers of deduction as he turned and moved briskly toward his cramped office at the far end of the gym. “Follow me,” Mr. Turrentine said. “I’ll see what I can find for you from the lost-and-found bin.”
Colin froze. “These clothes don’t have synthetic fibers, do they?”
“Only the best here at the house of Turrentine.”
Colin wanted to feel relieved, but he suspected that Mr. Turrentine was making a joke—and at his expense to boot.
Twelve and a half minutes later
, Colin marched onto the asphalt basketball courts of West Valley High, where the midday sun of the San Fernando Valley beat down on him with the relentless heat of the high desert. He had changed into his gym clothes alone in Mr. Turrentine’s office, having rummaged through the discards for anything remotely clean and mostly cotton that might fit him. To Colin’s dismay, even the best at the house of Turrentine assaulted his skin with petroleum-based fibers and his nostrils with the rancid, stale sweat of students long departed for college and the workplace.
Regardless of his current physical discomfort, Colin had a long-standing dislike of gym class and playgrounds. Putting aside the usual dangers of overly
personal contact, the distasteful smells, and the unsettling, almost animal sounds of human play, Colin did not consider himself particularly coordinated. He could not throw; he could not catch. His only real physical gift, the only one that brought him joy (other than bouncing on his trampoline), was running. Colin loved to run. He learned to love it the first time he closed his eyes and felt the wind on his face, his body in motion, the sweat evaporating off his skin. Running made Colin feel alone and alive.