Neuro-diverse, Rory thought, glancing again at Mr. Moore, catching him looking again. It was a pleasant tag doctors liked to put on kids and adults like him. The opposite of neuro-typical. But what was typical? Rory was what a lot of people still called an Asperger’s kid, even though technically Asperger’s had been erased as a specific diagnosis and was now just one slice in the larger pie of Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Once his mom had said she thought neuro-typical people were like cavemen, and kids like Rory were the future of humanity. He liked that idea, but he had a feeling someone like Mr. Moore would frown in even deeper puzzlement—and maybe a little uneasiness—if he said it in class. Sometimes he had a hard time imagining how Typicals thought, but he’d pondered this subject a lot.
He took a bite of his sandwich as he stepped up beside the board where Helen Jemisin and Ethan Hill were playing. Helen had been kicking Ethan’s ass, but now she reached for her queen.
“I wouldn’t—” Rory started to say.
Ethan scowled at him, but Helen arched a curious eyebrow and glanced up.
Which was when the world started to scream.
A minute before Helen Jemisin picked up her queen, two kids, Derek and E.J., the former wearing the mean and cunning look that would most likely carry him through life, the latter so slack-jawed and sleepy-eyed he might as well have had the word “Goon” tattooed on his forehead, had been standing in a deserted school corridor beside a fire alarm.
Glancing left and right, Derek had said, “Go on, I dare you.”
E.J. had blinked. “Why don’t you?”
“Because I dared you first.”
E.J. considered the irrefutable logic of this. Then he shrugged and curled his meaty right hand into a fist.
Rory clapped his hands over his ears as the other kids stood up from their desks. The alarm blared over and over, a rhythmic shrieking assault on his brain. Mr. Moore went to the door, forgetting Rory as he ushered the other kids into the corridor. Maybe he looked back and maybe he didn’t, but by then Rory had slid to the floor behind one of the lab tables and curled into a fetal ball with his fingers in his ears. He squeezed his eyes shut, all thoughts leaving him. Only the sound remained, tearing into his head, an intimate assault of pure noise.
He forced himself to open his eyes.
E.J. and Derek passed by, out in the corridor. The instant he spotted them, Rory stopped breathing, thinking maybe he could make himself invisible. For half a second he thought he had succeeded, but then Derek came to a halt, grabbing E.J.’s arm. Wolfish smiles split their faces as they stepped into the room.
Rory flinched. He knew, then, who had set off the fire alarm. He couldn’t prove it, of course, but he knew it as surely as he knew his own name, and that Helen Jemisin had been three moves from beating Ethan Hill in that chess match.
“Hey, E.J.,” Derek crowed. “You hungry?”
They strode across the science lab as if they hardly even knew Rory was there, ignoring him while at the same time completely focused on his presence. Their performance was bad theater and he wanted no part of it, but they’d never given him a choice before and they weren’t going to start now.
“Hell, yeah!” E.J. replied. “You know what I’m hungry for?”
Rory tensed, knowing what was coming. He could have said the next three words with them, they’d said it so many times, these shitty kids who thought they were so clever. An Ass Burger.
“An Ass Burger!” E.J. exclaimed.
Rory was half convinced the jerks thought Asperger’s was really spelled that way.
E.J. kicked him. Rory tucked into a tighter ball, trying to defend himself. He’d been kicked before, been bruised but never bloodied. These guys were dumb as a box of rocks, but smart enough not to do visible damage. Stupid to the bone, but they had a bully’s wisdom.
“Mmm,” Derek echoed. “That sounds delicious. A big, juicy Ass Burger!”
He gave a kick of his own. Rory grunted and promised himself he wouldn’t cry. He didn’t understand why bullies behaved like this, didn’t understand hardly anything about why people chose to do the things they did, but he knew enough to realize that crying would only make them happy and make them kick him even harder. His therapist said it was difficult for him to translate and learn typical behavior, but he’d learned that much.
Both boys moved in to kick him again, but the alarm cut off abruptly and the lab fell into silence. They knew it was over. Students would be coming back, and so would teachers. They would get caught. They seemed displeased at being interrupted so soon and looked around. Sneering, the boys went from chess game to chess game and knocked over every piece on every board, as if Rory had been playing in all of them. In a way he had, but they couldn’t know that, and he wouldn’t tell them.
The assholes traded a laughing high-five and marched proudly from the room.
Rory rose, taking stock of his body. He stretched a little. There would be some bruising, but those kicks hadn’t broken anything. Compared to other assaults, this one had been mercifully short.
He exhaled and let himself glance across the room, taking in each of the chessboards in turn, quickly making a mental inventory. Then he nodded—it could be done.
One by one, as fast as he could—hoping to avoid discovery by Mr. Moore—Rory McKenna put every chess piece back on every board, exactly the way they’d been before the fire alarm. It was simple, and deeply satisfying. Chaos and disorder troubled him deeply and the only thing that alleviated those feelings was to restore order.
To set things right.
On the walk home, the Ortegas’ dog, Bugsy, tried to murder Rory again. Growling and snapping, the dog raced through its yard and would have torn Rory’s throat out if not for the picket fence. At least, that was how Rory saw it. He didn’t like dogs, and he especially didn’t like ugly dogs that looked like storybook monsters. Mom said pit bulls were just like other dogs, that they’d gotten a bad reputation, but Rory still gave Bugsy a wide berth as he made his way home.
When he entered the house, the first thing he noticed was the silence. He could always feel it when his mother wasn’t there—her absence was tangible, and he sometimes wondered if that was what it might be like if he ever met a ghost. Did ghosts give off the feeling of their absence, like a hole in the world? Of course, Rory knew ghosts weren’t real, but sometimes he thought about them and it freaked him out anyway.
The front door slammed behind him. One of his mom’s paintings jumped a bit on the wall and he hesitated, wanting to make sure it didn’t fall. He supposed it was a good painting—he liked it, anyway.
In the kitchen, he dumped his backpack on the floor and then paused when he noticed a damp spot on the wall. Snatching a paper towel off the roll, he blotted the spot, erasing the bit of disorder that had irritated him. Then he went to the refrigerator, upon which hung a note from his mother. Spent 1.5 hours cleaning house, she’d written. If you mess it up, I will cut you. XOXO Mom.
Rory opened the fridge and surveyed its contents, debating what he wanted for a snack.
The doorbell interrupted his pondering, so he shut the fridge and went out into the foyer. When he opened the door, a postal worker smiled at him. The man had a handcart with the United States Postal Service logo on the side. Rory wondered how many letters it could carry, if there were only letters and not packages or catalogues or magazines. He wondered if someone could hide inside the handcart, or if a dog might hide inside, if the dog was particularly determined to kill and eat a middle school kid in his neighborhood. For half a second, he studied the handcart for any sign that Bugsy might be hiding inside.