Dear Edward(56)

Dr. Mike would want Edward to tell him all this, but Edward is disinclined to talk. He keeps his eyes on the window and has the sense that the tree is watching him in return.

John stays up every night now, until Edward is in bed in the basement. He sticks his head through the door, checks to make sure his nephew is lying under sheets on the pullout bed. “Everything okay?” John says, and Edward nods and rolls over.

An hour later, when he’s sure his aunt and uncle are asleep, Edward gets up, pulls on sweats and his Converse—his orange parka if it’s really cold—and goes outside. He walks around the block several times, careful to stay out of view of Shay’s bedroom. He counts the houses he passes, the number of windows, the patchwork of stars overhead. He craves motion and likes the near-darkness of the night sky and the black air between the trees. Sometimes, when the numbers begin to jumble in his head, he walks with his eyes closed. He never lets himself sit or lie down, though, in case he falls asleep and freezes, thus proving the grown-ups’ fears valid.

At some point, when something inside him has eased, he returns to the basement and the pullout bed. The basement isn’t quiet, but the noises are completely different from the noises in Shay’s room. Perhaps because he’s at the bottom of the house, the structure seems to shift and wheeze above his bed. He can hear the rasp of dry leaves through the closed windows. At least twice every night there’s a loud crack, which makes him sit upright in bed, and stare into the shadows.

Inside, he doesn’t want darkness. He keeps the light on in the adjoining bathroom, and a diffuse glow from the streetlight travels through the high basement windows. The only positive to having his own bedroom is that he doesn’t have to be quiet in order not to disturb Shay. He doesn’t have to pretend to sleep. He can cough, hit the mattress with his fist, talk to himself. He can roll from one side of the bed to the other. Eat a granola bar at 2:00 A.M. because his stomach is rumbling.

He hears Mrs. Tuhane’s shrill whistle, recalls overhearing Shay—her voice spiky, excited—talking to a girl in French class about maybe going to a party this Friday down by the lake. Edward is staring through the high, narrow windows when the sky lightens and another day begins.

Mrs. Tuhane is obsessed with what she calls “form” and has him move his right foot a centimeter, push his hips back an iota, extend his arms until they are 100 percent straight. The football captain—a stocky red-haired kid—enters the weight room during a session. He grins at the sight of Edward in a deep squat.

“Nice look, Adler,” he says, and takes a photo with his phone. Mrs. Tuhane tells the kid off and orders him out of the room, but Edward knows it’s too late. The image has already been texted to his friends. By the end of the day, kids on the football team drop into a squat when they see Edward, their faces mocking great concentration.

When Edward and Shay turn a corner and a shy boy with hair the color of wheat lowers into the squat position, Shay says, “You? Why are you doing this? You’re not an asshole. You’re better than this.”

The boys goes pale, stands up, and runs away.

Edward sits through his three afternoon classes with his notebook open and a pen in his hand, but never writes anything down. His teachers seem to be talking from a great distance. He and Shay walk home from school, and he pretends everything is normal between them. He knows Shay’s irritable because she senses something is wrong too, something beyond Edward moving out of her bedroom, but she can’t put her finger on the glitch. What’s between us is dying, he thinks. We won’t be friends for much longer.

She says, “Did Arundhi ask to see you too?”

“No. Why?”

“Hmm. I think my grades dropped. He’s probably going to give me a talk about needing to do my best to get into college.”

“No, too young. Not college.” Edward is too worn out to speak in full sentences. “Something else. My grades dropped too.”

“Well, he wouldn’t give you that talk, because you can get into any college you want, even if your grades suck. All you have to do is write about the crash in your personal essay.”

Edward shakes his head. He has a sudden wish for it to be the middle of the night, when he walks with his eyes shut under stars. He doesn’t want to be in daylight, itchy inside his skin, listening to Shay talk about things she knows nothing about.

He closes his eyes for a few steps now and then has a thought that makes him open them. “How come none of the kids at school like me?”

“What are you talking about?” Shay pauses. “Some of them like you.”

“I’ve hardly spoken to them.” How has this not occurred to him before? He’s lived in this town for two and half years, and he’s been so relieved that most of the students leave him alone that he’s never thought to wonder why. He pictures the football captain, his awful friends, Margaret, the girls with the scented ChapStick whose lockers are near his own. Then there are the kids who never look at him—as if on principle—and turn away whenever he approaches.

“Oh,” Shay makes a face. “They’re total idiots, and you should ignore them. They think you’re lucky. Some of them are jealous.”

He thinks he must have misheard. “Lucky?”

Shay gives him a sideways glance as they step onto their street. “There are three kids in our grade who have a parent in jail. A bunch are on food stamps and, you know, everyone has some sad story. But you got famous for yours.”