Colin Fischer (26 page)

Colin had only served
detention once before, over a misunderstanding involving the Case of the Talking Doll. He had been conducting a noisy experiment with the motion sensor that caused the subject doll to bark like a dog instead of say “Mama” or “I love you.” His homeroom teacher, Ms. Breyman, thought Colin was intentionally disrupting class and gave him a stern warning. When Colin pointed out that homeroom was not in fact a class, and therefore there was nothing to disrupt, Ms. Breyman gave him lunch detention. Colin didn’t think this was fair, but Marie pointed out that sometimes fairness was a difficult balancing act when attempting to maintain basic social order.

“She’s your teacher,” Marie had said. “She has thirty students to worry about. If they all talked back to her, where would she be?”

“Her classroom,” Colin replied. He didn’t understand why Marie laughed.

Today, detention was not to be served in peace and quiet in the classroom of an aging teacher who simply wanted to grade papers. Mr. Turrentine was on detention duty. Unlike many of his peers, Mr. Turrentine believed detention—as with any punishment—was an instructional opportunity. He took instruction very seriously.

Colin stood alone in Mr. Turrentine’s office. The gym itself was smelly and dirty, but Colin was beginning to admire his teacher’s sense of order. It wasn’t just the way the gym equipment all seemed to find its way back exactly where it belonged at the end of each class (every ball, for example, was numbered such that it was assigned to a specific rack and had to be arranged in a specific, ordinal sequence), but everything in the gym seemed to have a place. This was even truer in Turrentine’s inner sanctum.

Mr. Turrentine had lists for everything. Equipment, supplies, and students—it didn’t matter; it was all tracked, labeled, and categorized. There was a clipboard for every class, with every student’s name, the day in the semester, and a “
” or an “×” on a grid. Fascinated, Colin found his period and scanned the list of names until he found his own:

Fischer, C.M.
followed by seven
marks. Colin smiled. He looked for his friends and people he knew, eager to compare their performance.
Greer, M.A.
also had seven check marks.
Connelly, W.J.
had seven ×’s. It was as Colin’s finger alighted on the listing for
Moore, R.T.
that he heard Mr. Turrentine clear his throat behind him.

“Are you my personal assistant, Fischer?” Mr. Turrentine asked.

“No,” Colin replied, turning.

“Are you a helpful gnome who cleans my desk, organizes my files, and shines my shoes at night so that I don’t have to?”

“No,” Colin said. “I am not.”

“That is correct, Fischer. You are none of those things. So would you care to explain to me why, in the name of all that is good and holy, you would be in my office poking your nose in my belongings?” Mr. Turrentine stared down at him, his hands resting on his hips. Strangely, he did not look
ANGRY
.

“I’m here because this is the first of two detentions I’ve been assigned. The first was for fighting in class—you were there—the second was for proving that Sandy Ryan brought the gun into the cafeteria and not Wayne Connelly. But I’m not supposed to talk about any of that for legal reasons. You understand.”

“I do.”

“Mr. Turrentine,” Colin asked, “where do I sit?”

“Sit?” Mr. Turrentine turned on his heel. He did not beckon to Colin or do anything other than expect to be followed, and Colin complied. They marched out into the auxiliary gym, where Colin found a line of students in their regular clothes lined up and standing at attention. “Get in line, Fischer,” Mr. Turrentine barked. So Colin did.

Colin was keenly aware that he knew no one in this line. Most were upperclassmen, and physically Colin was the smallest. The boy next to him smelled like feet. Colin scrunched up his nose to keep the odor out, watching as Mr. Turrentine stepped into a closet and then back out with a bucket full of scrub brushes of various colors.

Turrentine moved down the line, handing each student in turn a scrub brush and a map. When he reached Colin, only a musty blue brush remained. The undesirable color notwithstanding, Colin was expected to take what was offered, just like everyone else.

“This is blue,” Colin said.

“Yes, Fischer.” Mr. Turrentine nodded. “I know this.”

He turned to address the others. “Today,” he said, “we give back. We will clean every bathroom in this building. We will scrub every toilet, we will scour every sink, we will mop every floor until you would be happy to lick Jell-O pudding off the tile. We will not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, or socioeconomic status. Are we clear?”

Everyone in line nodded emphatically, especially the boy who smelled like feet.

“Then what are you waiting for? Move with a sense of urgency.”

The detainees moved—all but Colin, who had been studying his map and realized the bathroom he was expected to clean was by the cafeteria. This was easily the most horrific facility in the entire school, and Colin’s head had already been in one of those toilets. It wasn’t a pleasant memory.

“Problem, Fischer?”

“Yes,” Colin said. He held up his scrub brush. “I don’t like the color blue.”

The bathroom by the cafeteria
was even dirtier than Colin remembered from the first day of school.

At least, it was that way before Colin began cleaning. He found that once he mastered his horror and revulsion, he had a real talent for scrubbing out even the most difficult of stains. It helped to think of it as a problem that needed to be solved, rather than dirt, grime, and unspeakable human detritus that had to be washed away by hand.

That night, Colin wrote:

He was working on scrubbing the last toilet in the last stall when he heard the bathroom door open behind him. At first, Colin thought to confront whomever had walked in and point out the yellow sandwich board that was supposed to warn people away during the cleaning process. Then he heard a familiar, but trembling voice and decided it would be best not to show himself. Instead, he quietly pulled the stall door shut, crouched on the newly clean toilet seat, and listened very carefully. He wished he had his Notebook.

“…I just want it all to go away,” Colin heard Eddie say. But Eddie wasn’t alone.

Two sets of footfalls clopped against the spotless tile floor as the door swung shut, leaving Eddie and his companion in apparent solitude. Colin could just make them out through the crack in the door. Eddie stood in front of the sink, and behind him—

“Pull yourself together,” Rudy said. “You didn’t even like the girl.”

“That’s not true. I love her.”

“You love her. You love her so much, you let her swing while you walk around a free man. Excuse me while I dry a tear for the overwhelming humanity of it all. But your self-delusion and hypocrisy aren’t at issue here.”

Rudy leaned in close to Eddie, uncomfortably so. Colin realized his stall was visible in the mirror and
hoped against hope that he would not be seen. He had only the scrub brush to defend himself.

Eddie slumped, bracing himself against the porcelain. “So can you help her or not?” he asked.

“My father is a partner at the most powerful law firm in Los Angeles. Of course I can help her.” Rudy’s eyes drifted across the mirror, toward Colin’s stall. It was like Rudy knew Colin was there, though Colin calculated from the angle this was impossible.

Colin’s heart slammed against his rib cage. A scream tickled his throat, demanding release. His legs and arms struggled to move—to cover his ears, to flee—but they could not. They were bound in place by force of will. Colin knew he could not be seen by Rudy, knew somehow this was important above all other things. Colin squeezed his eyes shut, a compromise with the instinct that battled his reason for supremacy.

Eddie nodded slowly. “Thanks, I guess.”

Rudy patted Eddie on the back, but there was no comfort in it. He started to leave, but stopped, as he had one final message to deliver. “Eddie? Next time, put the gun in the right locker before your girlfriend finds it and decides to do you a favor. Your laziness cost me three hundred dollars. You’re going to have to work that off.”

“Yeah, okay,” Eddie said. He sounded old, somehow. “How?”

Colin opened his eyes. He had to see. He wanted to
read the emotion on Rudy’s face when he spoke next. He had to know what Rudy was, underneath.

Rudy smiled, but not with his eyes, like a shark considering a wounded seal. There was no emotion. There was nothing for Colin to read. There was nothing at all.

“Oh,” Rudy sang, “I’m just full of great ideas.” And then he was gone.

Colin watched Eddie, waiting for him to follow Rudy so he could escape his toilet prison and report back to Mr. Turrentine. But Eddie didn’t leave. Instead, he entered the stall next to Colin and slammed the door closed. He didn’t do any of the usual things Colin associated with someone going to the bathroom; Eddie simply sat down.

And Eddie wept.

Moments later, Colin burst out of the bathroom, clutching his scrub brush. He ran straight into Mr. Turrentine, who said nothing. He just looked at Colin, expecting some sort of report on the status of the task, but Colin was at a loss. They could hear the soft, muted sound of Eddie’s sobs coming from inside the bathroom.

“Fischer. Is there something you want to tell me?”

“Yes,” Colin said. He looked back at the bathroom, noting the yellow sandwich board. It was a warm color, much better than the scrub brush. “Do not go in there. Eddie needs privacy.”

Mr. Turrentine nodded, thinking he understood. Perhaps he did.

“Can I go?” Colin asked.

“I don’t know, can you go?”

It took Colin a moment to realize the question was rhetorical. Then he returned to the gym, grabbed his backpack and his Notebook, and ran home as fast he could. As he ran, he scribbled furiously in green ink, over and over again: