Shades of Simon Gray (9 page)

Danny knew it was a risk, getting Charlie to do their spying for them, but none of them could afford to skip classes or do anything that might cast suspicion on them. So they had hired Charlie, who insisted on using Danny’s car since he didn’t want to call attention to his own during “surveillance.” They hadn’t told Charlie the real reason they’d hired him, only that they were worried about Simon, worried that he might be in some sort of trouble.

The two of them got back into the Mustang, where Danny grilled Charlie for information, paid him the fifty bucks, dropped him off on Main Street, two blocks over from the park, and headed straight to Kyle’s.

Danny knew Mrs. Byrnes would be at the courthouse. He only hoped Kyle was home. His head was so messed up from Charlie’s account of the raid on Simon’s PC that when Devin answered Kyle’s door, Danny thought he’d come to the wrong house.

But then Kyle came up behind Devin, rested his hands on her shoulders, and the world shifted into balance again. Danny slipped past them both without an invitation.

“Is anybody else here?” he said. He flopped into his usual place, the recliner by the fireplace.

Kyle shook his head. “Just us.” He and Devin sat on the couch. “So what did you find out?”

“Charlie said two people showed up at Simon’s. A man and a woman. They left with Simon’s PC.”

Devin pressed her fingers to her lips. “Oh my god.”

“Cops?” Kyle asked.

Danny shrugged. “Yeah, Charlie figured they were. They weren’t in uniform.”

“I can’t believe they’re on to us this soon,” Devin said. “I mean, it was only last Thursday Kyle overheard the conversation between Schroder and McCabe. No one unusual has been at the school; we’ve been checking out the computer science lab.” She looked over at Kyle. “I thought Mr. McCabe was going to handle this himself.”

“That’s what he wanted to do,” Kyle said. “Schroder’s the one who wanted to get the police involved. It looks like she got her way.”

Danny was fighting hard to keep his thoughts straight. Images of him standing in a courtroom, of the look on his parents’ faces, of being locked up in some six-by-eight cell with no windows, had him rattled and near panic. He couldn’t get the grim pictures out of his head. None of this was supposed to be happening. He had just gotten accepted by Dartmouth. He had plans. He had potential. Damn it, he had
a future
. And spending it behind bars was not part of the plan.

Kyle was going on about how the school administrators might have brought some computer consultants in over the weekend, maybe even the local police, although he didn’t think they had a computer crimes division. Danny was barely listening. He was imagining the police at his own front door, his father standing there in his black T-shirt and black pants—clothes he still wore at his print shop, even though he had long since converted his business
from letterpress to laser printing—scratching his head. A dark figure growing even darker as he listened to what the police had to say.

“Simon wouldn’t let anything happen,” he told Kyle. “He’s too smart. You said he’d cover his tracks, and I’m pretty sure he did.”

“Maybe the police are smarter,” Devin said. She had her hand on Kyle’s wrist and her grip was growing tighter by the minute. “They have their own computer experts.”

“On the state level,” Kyle said, loosening her fingers. “And maybe in a few of the counties, but I doubt our local force has that kind of setup.” He got to his feet and began to pace. Although every window in the house was open, he was sweating. His T-shirt clung to him like a damp dish towel. “If anyone comes around asking questions, none of us knows anything.”

“What if they come to us with evidence?” Danny said.

“Deny it,” Kyle told him. “Deny everything. You know nothing about anything. You have no idea who or why anyone would break into the school’s computer system.”

“But if they have evidence?” Danny insisted.

“It will point to Simon. And right now he’s not talking.”

I
F
S
IMON
G
RAY HAD NOT BEEN TRAPPED INSIDE THE
dark envelope that was his mind, he might have felt the cool hospital sheets beneath him, heard the wheezing of the respirator, seen the different colored lines on the cardiac monitor undulating across the screen, felt his father’s callused hand on the side of his face, and smelled his familiar scent—the chemical odor that clung to his clothes from the pharmaceutical plant where he worked. If Simon had not been in a coma, he would have told his father that this was not how he’d expected things to turn out. Not even close.

He would tell him how the strangest things had been happening. How he could sit on the side of Stanley Isaacson’s bed without the nurses shooing him back to his
room. How he could wander the halls of the hospital unseen. And how, at this very moment, he was shocked right down to his bare toes to find himself at home, in his own bedroom.

He wasn’t at all sure how he’d gotten there, but he now understood it wasn’t necessary to physically leave the hospital to go from one place to another. Each time, there was only the whooshing sound, the icy damp gray, and a few moments of disorientation before he realized he was no longer in his body. He also knew he wasn’t in control of his destinations. Or at least he didn’t seem to be.

He touched his face, ran his fingers across his eyes, as he had done the few other times he had found himself outside his body, and discovered, as on those occasions, that he wasn’t wearing his glasses. Simon found this astonishing. For the first time in years, he could see everything clearly without glasses. Every shadow, every line of every piece of furniture, and every object were as sharp and visible and even in some ways as wondrous as when he was four years old.

Moonlight streaked through his window, creating shadows. His own shadow, even though he was standing right in front of the window, was disturbingly absent. And so, he now saw, was his computer, although the keyboard and monitor still sat on his desk. A sense of dread crept along his spine; his chest felt tight. He couldn’t understand why he should feel this way.

This was his room. Of that much he was certain. Bare walls, no rugs or curtains. Once, when his sister told him she thought his room was totally impersonal, that even
prison inmates put things on their walls, he’d snapped back with what he thought was a pretty good putdown about people who needed to fill every ounce of empty space with meaningless junk. He was talking about Courtney, of course. But he doubted she realized that. If he were being truthful with her, which of course he wasn’t, he would have said he had no idea what to put on his walls. No idea what kind of curtains or rugs he wanted. In all honesty, he had no idea who he even was. Weren’t you supposed to have at least some idea before you stuck it all up there on your walls for the whole world to see?

He stared down at his desk and wondered if Courtney had moved the PC to her room. She was always after him about hogging it. They were supposed to share the computer. But it didn’t make sense that she would leave behind the keyboard and monitor. Still, he couldn’t imagine where else his PC would be, and he would have headed straight down to Courtney’s room to find out if the computer was there, except he didn’t seem to be able to leave his own room. He was tied to it by some invisible force, like a kite caught in a tree, and he was only now beginning to think he might be there for a reason.

Outside, it had begun to snow. Without warning, the wind grew fierce, smashing wet snowflakes against the windowpane, rattling the glass.

Faint sounds of R&B echoed from somewhere outside his door. It wasn’t the sort of music Courtney listened to; it wasn’t rap or heavy metal. Maybe his dad had the radio on.

Sometimes when there was only the hum of the refrigerator or an air conditioner, or the steady drumming of rain, Simon thought he heard a whole orchestra playing music he’d never heard before. Not inside his head, like some annoying, repetitive tune or jingle that got stuck in your brain, but soft, beautiful music gently surrounding him, kissing his ears. Whenever that happened, he would close his eyes and listen, trying to make distinctions between the different woodwinds, between the violins and violas, although he didn’t know the first thing about music, had never played an instrument in his life, and was even told by his sixth-grade music teacher that he was tone-deaf.

Over the years he had devised a theory that the music was a distortion produced by the white noise, but most of the time he didn’t try to explain it. He just listened.

He liked heavy metal and rap well enough, but as far as he was concerned, it was all background for the chaos in his head. If the music fit what was going on inside him, he listened. Otherwise he blocked it out. But the music that sometimes came to him unbidden, that was something else altogether. He wondered if it had to do with the hum of his own internal rhythms, the music his body made, music no one but Simon could hear.

This was the first time he’d traveled beyond the hospital. Yet the chill of the hospital room and the smell of bleach were still with him. He was here and not here. There and not there. He had no idea how much time had passed—days, weeks, maybe even years. He wasn’t sure
what time of year it was. The sight of the snow muddled his brain. He sat on the edge of his bed and watched large feathery flakes land on tree branches thick with sleeping black crows, turning their feathers white.

Simon lay down. His hands cradled the back of his head. He stared up at the ceiling. The moonlight had disappeared behind clouds of snow. The shadows in the room had dissolved. But Simon’s eyes were accustomed to the dark. He spent almost all his time there, except when he was dreaming or traveling outside his body.

He stared over at his desk and was suddenly reminded of Kyle. He saw the two of them in the library, Simon sitting in front of one of a half dozen computers, Kyle pointing to something on the screen, occasionally glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one else was watching them. Simon wished he hadn’t thought of Kyle because now fragments of memories were seeping back into his mind. Outside, one of the crows lifted off a snowy branch, fluttered a black wing against the window, creating a lake of clear glass in the middle of the wet snow, and disappeared into the night.

He thought of Devin McCafferty, of the soft shell-pink lining of her delicate ears. Simon’s heart began to pound. He saw her standing at the kitchen counter in Kyle’s house last summer, sliding vegetables onto long metal skewers so Kyle’s mother could grill them. When he came into the room, Devin spun around, grabbed an empty skewer, angled her arms and legs like a fencer, and thrust it toward him.
“En garde,”
she said, feigning a French accent. The skewer stopped within an inch of his
heart. So close. Then she straightened up, holding the skewer end to end over her head with both hands, and grinned.

The image almost brought him to tears. He wanted her that badly. He had since the very first time he saw her on the playground of Bellehaven Elementary leaping into the air and catching Frisbees with the ease and grace of a gazelle because she was almost a full head taller than anyone else in the fourth grade. She was only a year ahead of him, but it might as well have been a century.

The night of Rob Fisher’s party, Simon had thought he’d died and gone to heaven when Devin McCafferty came up to him in a ribbed tank top almost the color of her hair and told him she thought he looked like a younger version of Chad Lowe, except with curly hair, could maybe even pass for his son. Simon laughed because he didn’t know what else to do; he wasn’t even sure who Chad Lowe was, but he could tell by the look on Devin’s face she meant it to be a compliment. Then she had taken him completely by surprise. She asked him if he wanted to dance, gently taking his hand before he could answer one way or the other and leading him to where others were dancing.

Simon knew Devin and Kyle had been together since their freshman year. Everyone in the school knew that. He knew he didn’t stand a chance with her, knew she was probably asking him to dance because Kyle had told her to, knew he should have felt humiliated, outraged at Kyle. Instead, he found himself overwhelmed with gratitude. Glad for any crumbs Devin and Kyle wanted to toss his
way. Until that moment he had believed that no matter how bad things got at school—the body slamming, the food dumped on his head at lunch, the jocks tripping him in the halls between classes—he always had his dignity, his self-respect. He was, and always would be, his own person.

Until Devin McCafferty laid her milk-white hand on his arm.

By the end of that night he had agreed to help Kyle and the others with their “project,” the project they had begun in their sophomore year with Walter Tate as their stooge, their computer geek. Had Devin put her hand on Walter’s arm, too? Asked him to dance? And even if she had, would it have made any difference?

After the night of the party, Simon became Walter’s replacement. It had nothing to do with Kyle’s smooth voice, assuring him that none of them were doing anything anyone else wasn’t doing, although the means might be different. Nor did it have anything to do with Kyle’s insistence that nobody got ahead in life without cheating at least some of the time, or with his rationale for how—things being so competitive these days and knowing that your competition was probably cheating—you had to do it just to keep up.