Authors: Ashley Edward Miller,Zack Stentz
Colin Fischer (25 page)
“He doesn’t get so much as a detention,” Melissa said. “It’s not fair.”
“Oh,” Colin said. “Is that why she is crying?”
“Of course it is. It’s not fair, and she knows it. Anyone would cry.”
“It’s not about what’s fair,” Colin said as he wrote this down. “It’s about what can be proved by the evidence. The police can’t prove the gun belonged to Eddie.”
Melissa turned to face him. She was close enough for Colin to be acutely aware that while her left eye
was blue like Colin’s, her right had a nearly imperceptible greenish tint—a condition called heterochromia. Colin wondered if she started life in the womb as a twin and then absorbed her brother or sister into her own body early in her mother’s pregnancy, a phenomenon that was sometimes responsible for chimerism.
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Then Colin felt a strange sensation. He realized Melissa was holding his hand. In fact, she most likely had been holding it for the last few seconds, as he had pondered the circumstances of her conception. He did not recall her touching him.
“You could,” she said.
With that, the first bell rang. Melissa squeezed Colin’s hand once, then headed off to her first class of the day. Colin looked down at his hand—he could still see faint impressions of Melissa’s fingers on his skin. He walked down the corridor, staring at his hand, watching the mark she had left upon him slowly fade.
All thoughts of Melissa suddenly fled as Colin felt his body slam into a locker.
The locker’s dial dug into his back, and his ears
rang from the impact. Colin winced, closing his eyes to block out the pain. He started to count. When he opened his eyes again, he saw Stan’s face, six inches from his own. Stan was
ANGRY
.
Stan breathed so hard, the bandages that covered his nose bloomed red from the blood vessel he had just reopened. Colin was fascinated by the sticky, scarlet fractal pattern spreading through the ragged weave of gauze.
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“You shouldn’t get so angry,” Colin said. “You could hurt yourself again.”
Stan grabbed Colin by his jacket with both hands and slammed him against the locker again. Colin’s teeth rattled. “You think you’re funny, Shortbus?”
“I’m going to be late to class,” Colin said, and tried to step away.
Eddie blocked his path. If anything, he looked even
ANGRIER
than Stan. Cooper and three of Stan’s other friends hovered behind him. Colin calculated the boys had positioned themselves to cut off any other avenue of escape.
“Good,” Eddie rasped. “So is Sandy. Like, for the
rest of her life.” He grabbed Colin, twisting the top of his shirt in his fists, winching him up off his feet.
“Don’t touch me,” Colin said, his breath coming faster now. “I—”
“I know. You don’t like to be touched. Well,
boo-hoo
, you little bitch—what are you gonna do, kick my ass? One sucker punch doesn’t make you Jet Li.”
Stan touched his own nose, not noticing the smear of blood that rubbed off onto his finger. “Yeah,” Stan repeated. “You’re not Jet Li.”
“He doesn’t need Jet Li.”
Wayne stepped around the corner, a half smile hanging on his face. The smile suggested to Colin that whatever Wayne was planning to do next, Wayne believed he was going to enjoy it. A lot.
Eddie laughed. “Get over yourself. You’re never gonna take all of us.”
“No, Eddie,” Wayne said. “Just you.”
CRUEL
, Colin decided. Wayne’s smile was definitely
CRUEL
. For some reason, this didn’t bother Colin in the slightest.
Eddie released Colin, letting him drop to the tile. He and Stan made fists. Wayne simply stood, his body relaxed but completely alert.
“Wayne is very strong,” Colin said as he slipped past Stan and Eddie to Wayne’s side. “His muscles have clearly developed at an accelerated rate. A combination of diet, genetics, and environmental conditions
probably forced him into early puberty. If you look at his upper lip, you’ll see that he—”
Wayne cleared his throat. “Colin. Bio lecture later, okay?”
“Okay.” In his Notebook, Colin opened to a fresh page and recorded a reminder to
explain the development of secondary sexual characteristics in early adolescence to Wayne at a mutually convenient time
.
No one on either side of the face-off spoke or even moved for the next twenty-five seconds. Colin knew this because he maintained a silent count and recorded it in his Notebook. The confrontation ended only when the tardy bell rang, which Colin found slightly disappointing—he was curious to see how long this could continue.
A history teacher with gray, frizzy hair stuck her head out of her classroom. “Get to class, you animals,” she barked, then slammed her door shut.
Eddie looked one last time at Colin and Wayne before he turned to Stan, Cooper, and the others. With a nod of his head, the other boys dispersed in silence. Colin and Wayne were left standing alone in the hallway. “Hey,” Wayne said.
“Good morning, Wayne. How are you today?”
Wayne paused for seven seconds. “You doing anything after school?”
“I have detention.”
“I mean, after that.”
Colin furrowed his brow, deep in thought as he
reviewed his schedule. Then his face suddenly brightened. He had an idea, and it seemed like a very good one. “Do you like trampolines?” he asked.
Wayne shrugged. There was really only one way to find out.
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Chimerism is a condition wherein a single organism derives traits from multiple, fused zygotes. For example, an Olympic cyclist accused of blood doping contended that blood cells found in his body with DNA different than his own were actually produced by an absorbed fraternal twin. And a woman who needed a kidney transplant discovered that her adult children who had themselves tested for genetic compatibility were not actually hers. They were the product of ovarian tissue from a “sister” who had vanished in the womb.
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Fractal geometry is a branch of mathematics that is used primarily to understand recursive processes. A “fractal” is an irregular polygon that appears roughly the same at any scale, from the infinitesimal to the infinite. This property is referred to as “self-similarity,” which refers to the repetition of statistical features. These concepts as they apply to chaos theory were popularized in the novel and movie about dinosaurs run amok,
Jurassic Park.
Colin appreciated the special effects but quibbled with the title since half the dinosaurs on display were actually from the Cretaceous period.
TWO DOCTORS IN VIENNA
While Hans Asperger did his pioneering work in Vienna’s University Children’s Hospital, another pediatric psychiatrist named Heinrich Gross was doing work of his own barely a mile away in the Am Spiegelgrund Children’s Clinic. Children at the clinic remembered Dr. Gross walking the hallways in his crisp brown uniform with the swastika armband. He took particular interest in those diagnosed with the physical, mental, and behavioral disabilities that led the Nazi authorities to designate them as “unclean.”
Gross and his colleagues were performing experiments on these children and then murdering them, usually through drug overdoses, starvation, or exposing them to the elements until they caught fatal pneumonia. More than eight hundred children died at Spiegelgrund in this
fashion—“lives unworthy of life,” as the Nazis called them.
Meanwhile, Dr. Asperger argued passionately for the social usefulness of his patients. He emphasized the extraordinary abilities that often accompanied their handicaps. Families of children whom Asperger treated were struck by his sensitivity and compassion. Many of his patients went on to live happy, successful lives, including Elfriede Jelinek, who would one day win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In late 1944, Asperger’s clinic was destroyed in a bombing raid by the Allies. His colleague Sister Victorine was killed. Most of his research was lost. Asperger’s work had been largely forgotten when he died in relative obscurity in 1981.
Fellow physician Gross escaped prosecution at the end of the Second World War. He went on to become one of Austria’s most distinguished physicians, even winning the nation’s highest honor for medicine. For several decades, Gross continued neurological research on the preserved brains of the children he had helped murder. Only toward the end of his life in the early 2000s was Gross prosecuted for war crimes—a trial that was dismissed because of the accused’s alleged senility. He finally died in 2005.
The remains of Gross’s victims were formally
cremated in a memorial ceremony in 2002, and he died free but recognized for the monster he was. Asperger’s reputation was rehabilitated when his work was rediscovered and translated into English in the 1990s. The syndrome that bears his name has become a household word.
My father says that Heinrich Gross was simply evil, and some people are like that. I’m not sure if I can accept this explanation. Try as I might, I can’t understand how so much horror can be encompassed by such a tiny word. I told my father this once, and he asked me to consider how so much good is encompassed by a word as tiny as “love.”
