And then there is a hand on my arm, but who can say if it belongs to my brother or to one of the strangers, the ones who want to cut my veins lengthwise and bleed me dry, the ones with headlight eyes and cavern mouths who want a piece of me to stick into their pockets and take away, until there’s nothing left.
I do what any ordinary person would do when faced with a horde of wild animals gnashing their teeth and wielding microphones: I run.
It feels fantastic.
Keep in mind I have been in a cage that’s twenty by forty feet, two stories high. I may not be as fast as I’d like to be, because I am wearing dress shoes and also I am a natural klutz, but I manage to get far enough away to not hear their voices anymore. I can’t hear anything, really, but the wind whistling in my ears and my breathing.
And then suddenly I’m knocked off my feet.
“Fuck it,” Oliver wheezes. “I’m getting too old for this.”
I can barely speak because he’s lying flat on my back. “You’re… twenty-eight…,” I grunt.
He rolls off me, and for a moment we are both sprawled on the pavement underneath a sign at a gas station. UNLEADED $2.69.
“I’m sorry,” Oliver says after a moment. “I should have seen that coming.”
I push up on my elbows to look at him.
“There are a lot of people who want to see what happens with your case,” he says, “and I should have prepared you.”
“I don’t want to go back there,” I say.
“Jake, the judge is going to put you back in jail if you don’t.”
I run through the list of rules in my head, the ones Oliver gave me for court behavior. I wonder why he didn’t give the reporters the same rules, because clearly shoving a microphone up my nostrils doesn’t qualify as good etiquette. “I want a sensory break,” I announce, one of the appropriate responses to Oliver when we are at the trial.
He sits up and draws his knees into his chest. A car pulls up to the gas pump a few feet away, and the guy who gets out looks at us strangely before swiping his credit card. “Then we’ll ask the judge for one as soon as we get inside.” He tilts his head. “What do you say, Jake? You ready to fight with me?”
I roll my toes in the bells of the dress shoes. I do it three times, because that’s lucky. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” I answer.
Oliver looks away from me. “I’m nervous,” he admits.
This doesn’t seem like a great thing to hear from one’s attorney before going into a trial, but I like the fact that he’s not lying to me. “You tell the truth,” I say.
It’s a compliment, but Oliver interprets it as a directive. He hesitates. “I’ll tell them why you’re not guilty.” Then he gets up, dusting off his pants. “So what do you say?”
This phrase has always seemed to be a trick question. Most of the time it’s uttered by a person when you haven’t even said a damn thing, but of course, the minute you point out that you haven’t said anything, you have.
“Do I have to go through all those people again?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Oliver says, “but I’ve got an idea.”
He leads me to the edge of the parking lot, where Theo and my mom are anxiously waiting. I want to tell Oliver something, but it fades in the face of this more immediate problem. “Close your eyes,” he instructs, so I do. Then I feel him grab my right arm, and my mother grabs my left. My eyes are still closed, but I start to hear the humming of the voices, and without even realizing it, I make the same sound in the back of my throat.
“Now… sing!”
“I shot the sheriff… but I didn’t shoot no deputy-” I break off. “I can still hear them.”
So Theo starts singing. And Oliver, and my mother. All of us, a barbershop quartet but without the harmony, up the stairs of the courthouse.
It works. Probably because they are so surprised by the musical number, the Red Sea of reporters parts and we walk right up the middle.
I’m so amazed that it takes me a while to remember what was stuck like a fish bone in my throat before we walked up the steps of the courthouse.
1. I said to Oliver the verbal equation we’ll call p: “You tell the truth.”
2. He replied with q: “I’ll tell them why you’re not guilty.”
3. In the logic equation of this conversation, I had made the assumption that p and q were equivalent.
4. Now I realize that’s not necessarily true.
Before Jess and I started to work together, I had to go to social skills class at my school. This was largely populated by kids who, unlike me, were not particularly interested in joining the social scene. Robbie was profoundly autistic and spent most of the sessions lining crayons from end to end across the room. Jordan and Nia were developmentally disabled and spent all their time in special ed instead of being mainstreamed. Serafima was probably the most similar to me, although she had Down syndrome. She wanted to be part of the action so badly she’d crawl into the lap of a stranger and hold his face between her hands, which was cute when she was six but not so much when she was sixteen.
Lois, the teacher, had all sorts of interactive games that we had to participate in. We’d role-play and have to greet each other as if we hadn’t been sitting in the same room together for the past half hour. We’d have contests to see how long we could keep eye contact. Once, she used an egg timer to show us when we should stop talking about a topic so that someone else could have a turn in the conversation, but that stopped quickly when Robbie went ballistic the first time the buzzer went off.
Every day we had to end with a circle time, where we each gave a compliment to the person next to us. Robbie always said the same thing, no matter whom he was placed beside: I like terrapins.
(He did, too. He knew more about them than anyone I’ve ever met since and probably ever will, and if not for him I’d still be confusing them with box turtles.)
Jordan and Nia always gave compliments based on appearance: I like that you brush your hair. I like that your skirt is red.
One day Serafima told me that she liked hearing me talk about mitochondrial DNA. I turned to her and said that I didn’t like the fact that she was a liar, since she had just that very day used the hand signal we agreed on as a class-a peace sign raised in the air-to tell Lois that she was tired of the topic, even though I hadn’t gotten to the part about how all of us in this world are related.
That was when Lois called my mother, and my mother found Jess.
I worked on compliments with Jess, too, but it was different. For one thing, I really wanted to give them to her. I did like the way her hair looked like the stringy silk you pull out of a corn husk before it goes into the boiling water, and how she drew smiley faces on the white rubber rims of her sneakers. And when I went on and on about forensic science, she didn’t wave a peace sign in the air; instead, she’d ask more questions.
It was almost like that was her way of getting to know me-through how my mind worked. It was like a maze; you had to follow all the twists and turns in order to figure out where I started from, and I was amazed that Jess was willing to put in the time. I guess I didn’t really think about the fact that my mother must have been paying her to do that, at least not until that idiot Mark Maguire said so at the pizza place. But still, it wasn’t like she was sitting there counting down the minutes she had to suffer with me. You would have realized that, if you’d seen her.
My favorite session with Jess was the one where we practiced asking a girl to the dance. We were sitting at a Wendy’s because it was raining-we had gotten caught in a sudden downpour. While it passed Jess decided to get a snack, although there wasn’t much fast food that was gluten- and casein-free. I had ordered two baked potatoes and a side salad without dressing, while Jess had a cheeseburger. “You can’t even have French fries?”