My Name Is Venus Black(21)

The door cracks open a few inches and Tessa peers in. She sees the boy, kneeling at the window, his back to her.

“Hello?” she calls. But the boy acts like she’s not there. And then she realizes what he’s doing. Throwing her jacks against the window. That was the sound she’d been hearing. She knew she left them on the stoop that day.



What a little thief! But she’s not prepared to accuse him, in case she’s wrong. She makes a throat-clearing sound, the kind you make to get someone’s attention. The boy doesn’t react at all, which is when she realizes he must be deaf. That would explain a lot.

She steps into the living room and says loudly, “Hello! Can you tell me your name?”

“My name is Leo,” he says in a slightly mechanical way, his attention still on the jacks.

Clearly he’s not deaf. “Hi, Leo. I’m Tessa,” she says in a kind voice. “I live next door.”

Nothing.

“I brought you cookies.”

She walks over and sets the cookies on a small gray card table that serves as the kitchen table. She’ll take them with her when she goes so Leo’s dad won’t know she was here. She notes the unmade pullout bed in front of the TV. The beer bottles that line the kitchen counter.

“Would those happen to be my jacks?” she asks in a friendly way. He doesn’t answer, so she walks over and stands right near him. His face is delicate for a boy, his nose a little snubbed, and his eyebrows are arched and thin. He’s also weirdly skinny.

That’s when it hits her. The kid probably wasn’t staring at her from the car that first day but at the jacks. And now he isn’t being rude; he’s just got something wrong with him. That has to be it. Leo probably belongs with those kids at her school who are in special ed.

She notices that the little red ball that goes with the jacks is lying nearby. She retrieves it and then gets on her knees at the wide windowsill next to Leo. When she starts to bounce the ball and catch it, the boy stops throwing the jacks. Starts watching the ball.



“Do you want the ball?” She holds it out to him on her open palm. He stares at it and then takes it from her. His eyes are metal gray and they skitter, like he might be trying to look at her but he can’t.

He begins to bounce the ball on the sill, exactly the way Tessa did, and she feels her heart fill up. “Do you know when your dad will be home?” she asks.

Nothing.

She asks how old he is. “I’m seven,” he says, in his small, robotic voice. She thought her dad had said the boy was six. She’s not sure how long she sits there watching him bounce the ball, but it’s long enough to be totally amazed that he isn’t growing bored.

He makes her think of her friend Kelly’s kitten, how it is so easily distracted by toys and loses interest in her and Kelly. She wishes Leo could at least look at her. Or talk to her.

When she reaches out to touch the boy’s shoulder, he yelps and jerks away as if she’s hurt him.

“Okay, no touching!” she says quickly.

She thinks again about the special-ed kids at her school. They rarely cross paths with the regular kids. Tessa always wants to feel sorry for them, but she can’t, because they always seem so happy. Maybe Leo is happy, too.

“Leo,” she says. “Leo is a good name.”

Suddenly, Leo stops rolling the small red ball and holds it up, turning it. He gets a look on his face like he’s just realized something. “Venus!” he says. “Venus is red.”





Leo becomes Tessa’s after-school secret. She has never had such a big secret before, and she worries it might be the same as a lie.

She’s always careful to make sure the Impala is gone before she borrows the master key and visits Leo. She’s figured out by now that Leo’s dad works afternoons and evenings. Her father doesn’t notice she’s gone, just assumes she’s doing her usual routine or visiting her friend Kelly, who lives nearby.

Because Tessa is also doing volunteer work at the old-folks home down the street, she’s busier than she would be. But every time Tessa visits Leo, he’s lying on his side, spinning the wheels on his car. Or sometimes he’s watching the TV without really seeming to watch.

Sometimes she finds him sitting quietly on the floor in a patch of sun that’s coming from the big front window. She wonders if kids like Leo get lonely, and she hopes not. Often, she brings a new toy or some other item to see if it will interest Leo or get him to speak again. She’s always careful not to leave anything behind, so Phil won’t know she was there.

So far, Leo doesn’t respond to her horse book. He shows no interest in the handheld plastic pinball machine she brought him. She tries different foods, too. No to lollipops. No to Velveeta. And then one day Leo responds to a bag of Cheetos, with strange grunting sounds that make Tessa think he’s upset, until she realizes he is excited.



“You like Cheetos, Leo?” She hands him the bag and he gently dumps its contents onto the table. Carefully, in a way that makes Tessa know he’s done it before, he arranges the Cheetos into three horizontal lines. He eats the first of the Cheetos from the left top row. “One,” he says. Then he eats the next and says, “Two.”

“Leo, you can count!” she exclaims. His voice is a little nasal, but it also sounds sweet to her. When he finally eats the last of the Cheetos, he says, “Twenty-six.” Then he carefully licks the orange dust from each finger, starting with his left pinky and ending on his right thumb.