He hears her voice, his mother is here.
“Baby, we’re going home. I’m taking you home,” his mother says.
When she pulls him into her lap, he can feel his pants are wet, which she doesn’t notice for a while and then she does. “Oh, sweetheart,” she says. “This is my fault. I shouldn’t have let you come. You were just so determined, weren’t you?”
He wants her to explain to everyone what he needs to say but can’t. He needs to find the girl and stop her. His mother knows, she must, because she found the rabbit’s foot.
Then, instead of explaining, she stands up, carries him out of the classroom, the wrong way down the hall. He tries to get her to stop with his body, to turn around and carry him the right way, out the back door to the playground. He screams again, louder this time. In the open tunnel of the hallway, the noise travels without walls to stop it. He hammers his head on her shoulder. Scream, pound, scream, pound, so the noise and the feeling become the same thing and he feels his mother start to run. There are people running around her; someone shouts, “Should I call 911?”
Someone says, “No, no, no.”
He realizes it’s him, saying No, screaming into the empty space above her shoulder that jiggles as the world dissolves into nothing, faces that wobble and disappear, until he’s outside the building, then inside the car and then, when he breathes, he listens and hears: there’s music again. His opera.
Hansel and Gretel. He stops screaming because he knows this one, remembers it all from a few notes of music. He needs to listen carefully to every piece of it, hear the whole story again, because all he remembers is a boy and a girl go into the woods and never come out.
“Okay, so I’ll tell you what happened,” Chris says to the group. “But then I’d just like to please drop the subject. I’m a little bit tired now of everybody mentioning it all the time. I don’t see why people can’t just let it go.”
Chris has a new habit, Morgan has noticed: leaning over in his chair so he can step on his own hands.
“You were in a garbage can, Chris,” Sean says.
“Right, right. I know that already. I was in a garbage can. Big deal.”
“You crawled in yourself.”
“I was looking for cans. In science class we get ten points extra credit for bringing in recycling. That’s it. End of story. I was not in there eating my lunch, as everyone likes to say I was. Let’s just get that straight.”
“But, Chris,” says Marianne, “do you understand now that your science teacher never meant for you to go through the trash?”
“Yes, yes.”
“That going through the trash is probably not a healthy or safe thing to do?”
“I’m hardly going to do it again now, am I? After the whole school has gotten their jollies out laughing at me. I may look retarded, but I’m not, okay?”
“I think maybe you’re exaggerating, Chris. The whole school wasn’t laughing at you.”
Unfortunately he isn’t exaggerating. The whole school has been talking about it all day, most of the kids laughing. Morgan doesn’t want to think about this, though. He doesn’t want to think about anything except his after-school plan to go over to the elementary school and find out whatever he can about Amelia. Even Marianne coming up to him, asking if she might speak with him after group today, hasn’t distracted him from thinking about his mission.
When Chris is finished, Marianne asks how people are feeling about Amelia and the investigation. This is their first meeting since the murder, and she looks around the room. For a long time, no one speaks. “It’s like the only thing anyone wants to talk about,” Sean finally says.
“Well, that’s pretty natural, Sean.”
“But what are we supposed to say?”
“When something bad like this happens, sometimes people say ‘I’m sorry.’”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Right, we know. But even if you didn’t do it, you can feel sad that it happened. Saying ‘I’m sorry’ can mean ‘I wish it hadn’t happened.’”
Sean shrugs. “I didn’t know her.”
“No, that’s right. A lot of people didn’t know her. Does the idea that it happened so close to this school scare people?”
Chris huffs forward in his chair. “It doesn’t scare me, but that’s because I have so many other things weighing on my mind right now.”
“Like what, Chris?”
“Just things. In four weeks it’ll be Thanksgiving vacation, and three weeks after that will be Christmas, which means I’ll get vacation, then I’ll have to come back to this dump hole and feel like killing myself all over again. There’s state testing in December, which I’ll probably fail, and geometry, which I’ll for sure fail. There’s PE, where they give you like one foot of room to change your clothes and if you bump into anyone they yell at you and call you a fag.”
“Chris.”
“Yeah?”
“We’re talking about Amelia Best. Remember the importance of staying on topic.”
Lately Morgan has been wondering if Chris is getting worse. There’s something he does with his mouth and cheeks, a kind of scrunching that’s meant to reposition his glasses, but never works. His glasses stay balanced on the tip of his nose, and his face looks like he’s undergoing electroshock therapy.
After group is over, Morgan stays in his seat. When everyone has left, Marianne picks up her tote bag and carries it over to the chair beside Morgan. “It’s actually Chris I wanted to talk about,” she says. “I’m a little bit worried about him, and so is his mother.”
Morgan nods and tries to picture Chris with a mother, but he can’t. He’s always had a hard time picturing anyone else’s life.
“He’s alone quite a bit after school, and his mother worries that that might be a problem. I’m wondering if you would consider bringing him with you on one of your visits to Adam’s house? When I originally spoke with Adam’s mother, she welcomed the idea of having more kids. She requested it, actually.”
Morgan doesn’t want to do this, but he doesn’t see how he can say no. If he wants to get a sleepover invitation, he’ll need to keep surprising Cara with everything he’s capable of—getting information on Amelia, producing friends to come with him. He pictures Cara’s face, her smile when she opens the door. “Sure,” he says. “Yeah, okay.”
In PE that afternoon, Chris doesn’t dress for volleyball. He tells the teacher he has an ankle that’s bothering him and is maybe sprained, and he limps from lineup to the bleachers, where he sits down, bends over, and sticks his fingers inside his shoes. After teams are drawn up, Morgan volunteers to be out first and joins Chris at the bleachers. From experience, he knows it’s possible he’ll be forgotten for twenty minutes or more, longer if his team has any players on it serious about winning. “So, Chris, what’s wrong with your ankle?”
Chris sits up and shrugs. “Nothing. I’m faking. I had to.”
On certain matters, Chris is braver than Morgan, who dresses every day for an hour of getting hit by balls, without believing he has any other options. “Are you okay?” Morgan asks softly, because he doesn’t look like he is. His lips scrunch up, his eyes dart around the room.
“No, I’m terrible. Some people’s lives are okay, mine isn’t. I’m thinking about never coming to school again as long as I live.”
“Wow.” Morgan nods. “Really?”
In front of them, a girl calls out zero-zero service and swats her ball into the net.
“Here’s the thing,” Chris says. “I had to go through the garbage. I was looking for something. Everyone wants to talk about this murder, but no one wants to do anything about it.”
“What do you mean?” Morgan whispers, low, as an example for Chris to follow: People like us, we whisper in places like gymnasiums. We don’t talk loud, don’t let ourselves be overheard.
“Just never mind.”
“Do you know something, Chris?”
“Yes, okay. Are you satisfied? I know something, bu
t I’m not going to tell you because if I do, they’ll kill me—and if you know, they’ll kill you, too.”
Morgan knows this probably isn’t true. In group Chris likes to talk this way, about everyone who wants to kill him and who should be in trouble but isn’t. Morgan watches his team rotate without him. One boy looks up and notices Morgan, who half stands in response, until the boy raises his hand to say, No that’s fine. You stay there. He turns to Chris and wonders if he should ask now about coming to Adam’s with him. Maybe if Chris comes with him, he’ll find out whatever Chris thinks he knows about the murder. “So, Chris, Marianne said you might like to do something after school sometime.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve started my volunteer project, where I go to this guy Adam’s house and visit with him. She thought you might like to try that sometime.”
“Are you kidding? You want me to go over to that kid’s house?”
Morgan isn’t sure what to say. “Yeah.”
“Do you know who he is?”
Morgan wants to explain this right, convince Chris to come with him today, after he’s gone to the elementary school. “Yeah, Adam saw the murder, but that’s what makes it interesting. There’s police involved and clues, and he’s got this mother who goes to the crime scene, even though that’s against the law.” Morgan stops because Chris looks as if he’s maybe having an asthma attack. “Are you okay?”
Chris looks around the gym and leans closer to Morgan. “Trust me, okay? You don’t want to know this stuff.”
For the rest of the period, Morgan tries to imagine if it’s possible that Chris really knows something. Just before the bell, Chris squints over his glasses as if he’s just thought of something new. “Come to think of it, though, maybe I should go to Adam’s house. What difference does it make if I’m never coming back to school again, right?”
Morgan has no idea what he’s talking about. He wants to ask, but then two boys walk by, say “Faggots” loud enough for everyone to hear, and that’s that.
“He had an episode this morning, but he seems to be better now,” Cara tells Lincoln over the phone. Oddly this is true: Adam does seem better. After the terrifying fit he threw in the school hallway, he was fine in the car and by the time he got home, he’d recovered enough to ask calmly for a ham sandwich. Her hands were still shaking, her breath ragged from the ordeal, though she should remember this is how it could be with Adam—a terrifying eruption could arise as inexplicably as it passed minutes later, with no evidence beyond the shattered nerves and broken plates it left in its wake. But never before had it been quite like this: Never had it drawn such a crowd of worried faces, never had someone offered to call 911.
“Of course,” she said. “But, sweetheart, can we talk first, about what happened at school?”
“Don’t want to talk.”
This is her old Adam. With enough words to say that he hates words. “I know, baby, but we have to. That was very scary what happened at school. You getting so upset like that. It scares people and worries them. I got scared and worried. People think you might be hurt. They don’t know why you’re screaming that way. Can you say why you were screaming?”
He doesn’t answer. Don’t tell anyone what we’re doing, she said. It’s a secret. His mother knows, though. She must. He doesn’t need to tell her. He tries this: “Did Phil say library or resource room?”
“Is that what Phil said?”
“Library or resource room.” He rocks, happy with those words.
“Was that a bad choice? That sounds pretty good to me.”
“Library.” Now he’s stuck on these words, and can’t find any others. “Resource room, recess.” Because they’re all Rs he can get them out. It’s okay to say recess with other Rs.
“You don’t have to go outside for recess. I told Ms. Tesler maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Rain,” he says. “Red.” Coming out of his mouth, the words surprise him. “Wrinkle. Right. Wrong. Rhinoceros.”
She laughs, claps her hands together. “Lot’s of Rs, Adam! What does it mean?”
Nothing. He can’t say. He closes his mouth. He doesn’t know where the Rs came from.
“Can you tell me what they mean?”
No, he can’t. He doesn’t know.
“Well, anyway. We have something we have to do after lunch.” His mother stands, moves around the kitchen. It’s hard for him to watch and hear at the same time. He hears this part: “Dr. Katzenbaum will be at the police station.” Then she says something about a tape recorder, but he can’t hear what, can’t listen anymore because there’s a knife in her hand going straight down into the mustard.
Because of bus scheduling, the elementary school gets out forty-five minutes after the middle school, which means there’s time for Morgan to go back, find Leon, ask him his questions. It won’t be easy, he fears, and it isn’t. Outside the front door to the elementary school, five adults wearing neon orange name tags, stand guard as part of the new Parents on Alert program he’s heard about on TV. He walks up to a tall man. “I have to go inside. I need to speak with someone in the SPED room,” he says, because lying hasn’t occurred to him.
The man looks him over and nods. “Fine. Hurry, though. School’s almost out.”
Walking down the hall of his old school makes Morgan think about the past and wish he’d appreciated all this while he had it—bathrooms everywhere, thigh-high water fountains. Outside the SPED room, the door opens and Ms. Daly, his old friend, steps out. “Oh, Morgan, good. I have to check on the vans, there’s been some problem. Do you mind coming in for a sec? There’s only ten minutes left. You can keep an eye on things while they’re finishing some worksheets.”
“Sure,” he says, nodding.
Inside, it’s obvious why he’s been entrusted with this job: there are only two students, one of whom is Leon, who would sooner wet his pants than leave his seat without teacher permission. He doesn’t recognize the other one, a small black kid wearing a green-and-white shirt with Patriots written on it.
“Morgan!” Leon says. “Do you want to play checkers?”
Morgan smiles. “Okay, sure,” he says and crosses the room to the shelf of battered game boxes, pulls down checkers. He knows he doesn’t have much time, that Ms. Daly will be back any minute. “So, Leon, you must have known this Amelia girl, right?” He divides up the checkers, half of which are pieces of red and black paper, cut into circles.
Leon’s mouth rounds to an O. “Oh yeah. She’s dead. They killed her.”
“Who killed her?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you knew her, right?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“What was she like?”
“Girly. That’s what Jimmy called her. Girly-girly.” Leon looks like he wants to laugh, and then he does. “Jimmy knows all about her.”
From across the room, the boy who must be Jimmy turns around and looks at them. “Shit, Leon, I don’t know anything. All I know is that I saw her go out to those woods a bunch of times. No one wants to say that, but it’s true. The police and the teachers, they’re all like, we don’t know how she got out there and I’m saying, I know, okay? She walked. Once I followed her, so I know where she went.”
“What happened when you followed her? Was anyone else in the woods?”
“Nah.”
“So she was just out there, by herself?”
“Yeah.”
“What was she doing?”
“Shit. I don’t know. Just being herself. Singing, I guess. That’s what she did.”
“She sang?”
Leon nods his large head up and down. “A lot.”
“There was one thing that freaked me out, though.” Jimmy leans way over, his voice low. “It was like there was something singing with her. At first, I thought it was birds, and then it was like uh-uh, that’s not a bird, that’s a flute.”
“There was someone in the woods playing a flute?”
“That’s wha
t I thought. Then it stopped. It freaked me out a little bit and I left.”
Leon seems eager to get in on this conversation. “You want to know what else she did?”
“Sure.”
“She drew. She wasn’t supposed to. The teacher said no drawing, but I watched her.” He points to a chair in front of his.
To Morgan this seems like a less interesting revelation than the one about the flute playing in the woods, but Jimmy has turned back around, is bent over his work again. He looks at the desk Leon points to. He wants to go over, see if anything is drawn on it. “Where are her pictures?” Morgan asks, just as the door opens and Ms. Daly appears.
“Your van is going to be ten minutes late, Leon. I’m sorry about this. About the last thing we need at this point is confusion and disorganization, but there you have it. You can stay with me until it comes. Thank you, Morgan, for stepping in. You can go now—do whatever it was you were doing.” Does she remember that he no longer goes to this school? That technically, he isn’t supposed to be there? Apparently not.
“Sorry, Leon, but I gotta go.” Morgan holds up a flat hand because high fives are big in the SPED crowd and it’s a way to avoid a hug from Leon. “See you later.”
Leon hooks two fingers onto his bottom teeth and leans into Morgan’s ear. “Her pictures are in Candy Land,” he says, wrapping Morgan up in the hug he was trying to avoid.
Later, Morgan waits in the bathroom and watches until he sees Ms. Daly walk Leon to his van, and then he slips into the room. Candy Land is on the top shelf, meaning he needs to get a chair to pull it out, but once he does, he knows he’s got them. He doesn’t stop to look. Jackpot, he thinks, sliding the stack of papers covered in line drawings into his backpack.
They went to Dr. Katzenbaum twice around the time Adam turned four. Mostly their sessions were demonstrations of play, the doctor down on the floor, crouched with Adam in front of a marble run. It had been inspiring to watch—how Adam darted peripheral looks at her, how he tried once to look down her blouse, to touch her bracelet, signs of sincere interest on his part. Once, she got him to help her water plants. “First it’s my turn, then whose turn is it?”