AFTER THEIR LAST lunch together in fifth grade, Cara lost the courage to open her mouth in Kevin’s presence, though she continued to watch him as they moved from one classroom to another, from elementary school to the junior high up the hill. In the fall of ninth grade, Kevin stunned everyone by coming back to school with a beard so full it looked as if he had fashioned a costume for himself. Though the beard didn’t last long (guidance counselors protested, pointed to grooming rules no one had ever heard of before), that was the year Kevin became a regular notation in Cara’s diary, not as a crush or a friend, but as an example of someone carrying on in the face of obstacles larger than she could imagine or claim. In December, he got pneumonia and was out of school for four weeks, only to return in January so thin his clothes looked empty, his face creased with new age lines. In tenth grade, the one kidney he had left after the accident began failing. She knew this from Kevin’s aunt, who was still a secretary for Suzette’s father. From this same woman, she also learned that Kevin struggled with depression, that winters tended to be hard for him, sometimes requiring medication. This was the first time Cara ever heard the word antidepressant, and she thought of it every time she saw him at school, laughing with his friends, standing by his locker, thumbing through a guitar magazine, balanced on his forearm, his bad hand hanging uselessly below. She was fifteen by then, and, in all that time, strangely, they’d never spoken to each other since that last fifth-grade lunch.
Perhaps it wasn’t that odd. Each new school they moved into had been double the size of the school they left. Though Kevin talked now, his words came slowly, weighted, like an old person with an immigrant’s accent. Because Kevin had learning disabilities, his courses were a scattershot of special ed and regular classes. Surprisingly, he took and dressed for regular gym, then sat beside the teacher recording statistics, a role he must have liked, because in eleventh grade he became the unlikely football statistician.
Cara watched Kevin, thought about him, privately cheered his progress, but never, in all that time, expected what happened the first day of their senior year in high school: to walk into her English class and find him sitting there. They stared at each other for so long it would be impossible not to speak, or pretend they didn’t recognize each other. “Oh my God,” she finally said. “Hi.”
He looked down, and blushed. “Hi,” he whispered.
That morning, Cara had made a conscious effort to change her look from the baggy shirts and overalls she’d come to school in all her life, to a tight spaghetti-strap T-shirt and tiny shorts. “Jesus, Cara, I can read your bra label,” Suzette told her—and did, to prove it. Over the years, they had stayed friends in spite of their differences. While Cara still pined for nods of approval and party invitations from the popular table, Suzette floated obliviously, above it all, her bank account stuffed with the money she made babysitting every weekend. More and more, Suzette cared little about the classes she so easily aced, and instead spent hours in the school art studio, painting canvases Cara had a hard time thinking what to say in response to. Suzette was obviously a good artist—she won awards, everyone said so—but her primary interest was abstract expressionism, which always left Cara nervously trying to guess what the pictures were of: “Wow,” she’d say. “I love this one. Is it flowers?”
Suzette would roll her eyes. “It’s Teddy,” she’d say, her younger brother and frequent subject of her paintings. Three years ago, Suzette’s life had been turned inside out when her father fell in love with another woman, leaving her mother to fall apart in the privacy of her bedroom, spending most days in her nightgown, sleeping and flipping through the magazines she kept scattered across his side of the bed. “I don’t even want to talk about my mother,” Suzette would say, shaking her head. And she wouldn’t. Instead she took over the lion’s share of the cooking and other household chores, packing Teddy’s lunch every morning, and, even though he was eight years old, waiting with him at the bus stop so he wouldn’t be alone with the fifth-graders who scared him.
“Teddy is a sensitive soul,” she said to explain constructing their after-school schedule around Teddy and his bus drop-offs. “I don’t want his life to be any harder.”
That was the year Suzette started making and keeping rules. “We have to go to my house. I don’t want Teddy to be home alone,” she’d say. And though of course their mother was home, Cara never pushed the matter. She knew the divorce had taken a toll on Suzette, had left her scared of anything that suggested change. Cara knew this about Suzette and also knew her own new clothes weren’t a mistake. She’d seen it in several surprised faces, saw it now in the half of Kevin’s face that revealed emotions.
“Why don’t I sit in front of you and it can be just like we’re in fifth grade? I can talk on and on and embarrass myself all over again.”
Kevin laughed and Cara slid into the seat in front of him, thrilled with her own daring. When they spoke again after class, his voice, soft and halting, surprised her: he breathed between words, like someone with a stutter. “I wanted to try a regular…English class. I don’t know, though. Reading can give me…very bad headaches. My eyes…” He seemed to search the sky for the words he needed. “Aren’t strong.”
“I can help you,” she said, simply. Meaning: real help, what he needed, not the showy help of the past, where she peeled the tops off yogurt containers and dipped his spoon in for him. “I could read the books aloud. Make tapes for you. Would that be good?”
He shut his eyes, smiled in his old crooked way. “Yes. It would.”
Was it friendship, exactly, what they moved into? The exchange of tapes was always furtive, as if they were both slightly embarrassed, he by the need, she by the effort she unaccountably put into it. She told him it wasn’t a big deal, that she was such a slow reader, doing it aloud took no more time, but this wasn’t true. Reading aloud, page after page, was a laboriously slow task. Doing it this way, she learned how little she had actually read of these dense books. Dialogue, scenes, first and last sentences of every paragraph. This effort to help left her trapped, not with him, but with the endless descriptions of Puritan life in The Scarlet Letter. Finally, after two weeks, she abridged the text. “There’s a whole bunch of stuff in here about dresses and what they wear, but I swear it doesn’t matter, Kevin,” she said into the tiny microphone.
The next day he passed her a note, smiling. “I want to know about their dresses.”
She wrote at the bottom, “The weird part is they all wore bathing suits underneath. Little red bikinis.”
Soon they had two secrets: the tapes she never mentioned to anyone, including Suzette, and the notes they wrote steadily, all through English class. They were always funny, and maybe the best part was that she was a little funnier. Not by a vast distance, but a little. “How would you describe the hair today?” he wrote, with an arrow pointing to the teacher, Mrs. Green, whose hair was an ever-changing terrain. Some days it was curled into a dramatic flip that separated over her shoulders like individual sausage links; that day, it was piled on top of her head, high enough to clear the chalkboard. “Conical,” she wrote back.
On paper, she learned why he had friends—he was a good straight man, he set up jokes, let the other person tell them—but after a while, she began to worry this had gone too far. He wrote too much, saved their notes. He labeled her tapes Cara, Part One, as if she were the book. It felt like a mistake to let him go on, get the wrong idea.
“So, Kevin,” she wrote after a month or so of note exchanges. “I don’t think I can read the next book for you. I’m getting kind of swamped these days.”
For the whole period, the paper didn’t come back. Then as they packed up, he dropped the rectangle in her lap. “No prob,” it said.
Cara decided it was better not to discuss it. When partners were needed for a class project, she leaned forward in her seat, to a girl named Yolanda, and said to herself, It’s kinder this way. I’m thinking of him. And it was, presumably. Scott, the one football play
er in the class, who, owing to his size and his prematurely deep voice, seemed as out of place in the room as Kevin, leaned across two desks and said in the surprising voice they rarely heard: “Kevin, dude, you and me.” Cara exhaled in relief. He’s not my responsibility, she thought.
Suzette was the one who pointed out, weeks later, after Cara thought the whole business behind her, “Have you ever noticed how Kevin Barrows stares at you?”
Cara flushed, swiveled around in her seat. “No he doesn’t,” she said, feeling her stomach turn to rock. She’d done this herself, created something terrible.
After that, Cara stopped talking to him completely.
At the semester break, when Mrs. Green suggested changing their seats to break up the monotony, Cara took one across the room and left Kevin to sit in behemoth Scott’s hulking shadow. She focused all her attention on her new crush, Peter, who she’d met working props on Guys and Dolls, the musical he was the star of. Before this, Cara had only dated one boy, Robbie, who had never been a particularly dutiful or attentive boyfriend. Some weekends went by without any calls, and when they were together, Robbie was often restless, wishing their town had more to offer, which left her scrambling for ideas: “My parents will be gone. You could come over,” she’d offer, her voice suggestive of things he never picked up on. Sex wasn’t nearly as interesting to him as it was to her.
“That’s because he’s gay,” Suzette declared after Cara and Robbie had been dating for three months. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”
Cara blinked, dumbfounded by the possibility. “Robbie’s not gay,” she said, new doubt opening a vortex of worry in her stomach.
Robbie was gay, as it turned out, a fact revealed six months after they broke up and he came to school one day in a dress polo shirt and a pink triangle sticker on his backpack. Cara had learned her lesson: she tried to hold back this time, let the boy make the effort, come to her, and from the start this one felt different. Peter flirted with her all through rehearsals, until their last performance, when he whispered backstage, “So what are you going to do after this? Go back to being Cara, pretty girl with one friend?” She blinked up at him, shocked that he’d noticed the one defining truth of her life so far—she only had one friend. That night they kissed in the darkened back row of the auditorium seats, and a week later they became the couple that surprised everybody. She saw it on their faces: Why’s Peter with her? Props girl and star? A month later, she understood the answer when he broke down and confessed, with teary uncertainty, about a friend he’d met at tennis summer camp. “He’s just a friend,” Peter said, but she was old enough now to recognize these tears and know she’d heard enough.
The weekend after she broke up with Peter, Kevin went into the hospital. His kidney was failing, they were told; he was flying up the organ donor lists. “I think anyone who knows him ought to visit him in the hospital,” Mrs. Green told the class. “In these situations, you want to make sure you’ve done everything you can.”
Cara felt as if the whole class were staring at her.
“Look, I’ll go with you,” Suzette said later. “I think our insane teacher might be right, actually.”
Cara hoped the visit would resolve the terrible guilt she felt, that she would stand alone with Kevin in the room, hold his good hand, and whisper apologies as his eyes opened and closed peacefully. Instead, his mother stood in the doorway when they walked up, her forehead corrugated into creases of worry. “What are you doing here?” she said, a greeting that so stunned Cara, she said nothing, leaving Suzette to fill in the gap.
“We’re friends of Kevin’s from school. We just wanted to say hi.”
His mother shook her head. “I don’t remember him ever mentioning any girls.”
“We’ve known him a long time. My father’s secretary is his aunt Joanne.”
His mother pursed her lips and shook her head. “I don’t like Joanne. She talks too much. She tells everyone our business.”
“Actually, you’re probably right,” Suzette said. “She does talk too much.”
With this, the older woman seemed to soften. She let them into Kevin’s room, but only with the promise that they wouldn’t stay longer than five minutes and wouldn’t talk about anything that might upset Kevin. “He’s exhausted and he needs all his strength right now. The most important thing is, he doesn’t need any distractions.”
When they walked in, he opened his eyes and smiled with the good side of his face. He looked pale, thinner than he had three weeks ago.
“Hi,” Cara whispered, unsure what to say with his mother standing there. “So you’re not missing much in English. Right now we’re writing different introductory paragraphs. Like for essays you’re just pretending to write. Argumentative, personal, analytical, whatever.”
After this, a silence fell over them and Kevin closed his eyes again. “My body is finally falling apart,” he said, and the three of them stood, paralyzed by the truth of this simple statement.
Cara reached for his hand. “No it’s not,” she whispered, as if it were possible for her to control such things.
After they walked out, Suzette surprised her. “You’re right about Kevin,” she said, in response to nothing. “All these years I hadn’t realized, but he’s interesting, isn’t he?” Cara turned and looked at her. She couldn’t remember Suzette saying even this much about a boy before.
Two weeks later, on the eve of Kevin’s transplant, Cara got a letter in the mail, one sheet of notebook paper folded into a white envelope with only her name and address on the front. Inside she found a note, handwritten in large, unevenly spaced letters: Here is my introductory paragraph. For seven years, I have loved you.
Kevin survived the operation, though barely. This time, Cara’s information came from Scott, the football player, who visited Kevin in the hospital and told everyone that for three days his fever ran so high he spoke gibberish. “I heard it, too. It was wild,” Scott said.
As he spoke, Cara thought about the letter she hadn’t answered, though Kevin’s hospital address was still written on the chalkboard, double-boxed with DO NOT ERASE printed above it. Mrs. Green still pointed to it occasionally: “In these situations…” she’d say, and Cara now understood what she meant by this—in matters of life and death.
She bought two cards, one with flowers on the front, one with a cartoon drawing of a woman with what looked like an animal on her head that said inside, “Better hair next time.” She drafted different messages: “We’ve been friends for a long time. I wish I knew you better. I wish it was possible to know people better.” This one struck her as the most honest and also, potentially, the cruelest. Perhaps she could say, I feel the same way, which occasionally she did, until she considered the awkwardness a full recovery would precipitate, seeing each other at school again, faces frozen in expectation.
Eventually, she sent the flower card with a single sentence that tried, as best she could, to incorporate Suzette’s sentiment: “I am thinking about you and so is everyone else.” She hoped that would at least mitigate his mother’s distrust of her. She imagined his mother reading it aloud, balancing it on his bedside table, thinking to herself, Well, that’s something anyway.
Now Cara sees everything from the mother’s perspective, how a young girl might have left her feeling terrified, powerless. Maybe she tore it up in fury.
Eventually, Kevin recovered enough to go back home and, though there was talk of getting assignments to him, Cara never raised her hand to volunteer for the job. He never returned to school. At graduation, his name was read and greeted with a thunderous applause he didn’t hear because he wasn’t there.
“YOU WANT TO hear what I think about autism?” Martin says, sitting at a tiny bar table across from June.
No, June thinks. I don’t. It has been a day full of unimaginable horror, and now she finds herself at the end of it, sitting across from Martin, a school guidance counselor she has never particularly liked, though the kids all do, especially the bo
ys who horseshoe around him in the hallway to talk about sports scores. He works hard at his own popularity, dresses in jeans that bag a bit in the way the older, sixth-grade boys wear them, and his lunch-hour talking groups fill up so quickly that other adults sometimes wonder—is it appropriate for kids to be so eager for counseling? In the last year or so, June has avoided lunches and long hallway chats with him. That they are having a drink now is a testimony to the way this day has unmoored them all. They both live alone, and both—she suspects—are afraid to go home tonight.
“I think about this guy my buddy took care of for a while. He was an adult, okay? Nonverbal. Incontinent. Pretty out of it. But one time I visited my friend at work and a child started crying outside the window of his apartment and, I swear to God, the guy did everything he could to get to that kid. Rocking, moaning. My friend had to hold him in his lap. Both grown men. You ask yourself, did the guy have a connection to other people—to that kid, to his caretakers? My God. They loved each other. No sex, no words, all the stuff that jumbles it all up. I sat there watching and I thought: This is the purest love I’ve ever seen.”
It’s odd that Martin is thinking more about Adam when everyone else has been thinking about Amelia.
“When I was in college, I worked for a summer at a camp for autistics. You want to know what I used to think?” She doesn’t answer. He leans forward to tell her anyway, his thumb and forefinger pinched together. “I used to think: Here are a bunch of kids so brilliant, so truly ahead of us all, intellectually, they came out of the womb, took one look around this screwed-up world and said to themselves, ‘Good-bye. I’ll go on living but not here. Not on this planet.’”