Have You Seen Luis Velez?(77)

“Not a problem, Raymond. Not a problem at all. Leave it here and I’ll take it home tonight. You can come in first thing before homeroom tomorrow, and I’ll give you my honest opinion.”

“Oh,” Raymond said. “I just thought of something.” He felt foolish for not having thought of it sooner. “I need to be able to print out”—he almost said “a clean copy,” but he changed it quickly before he spoke—“another copy.”

He didn’t want Mr. Bernstein to see his social studies teacher’s grade, or the notes she had scribbled throughout. He wanted a fresh take, with nobody else’s opinion in the back of the man’s head.

“I’ll walk with you down to the office,” the teacher said. “I think they’ll let us use their printer.”



“Are you sure I can’t talk you into going to the store with me?” Raymond asked.

Mrs. G sat slumped at her dining room table, across from Raymond. Not drinking her tea. Not eating her cookie.

“I need more time to rest,” she said. “I would be very grateful if you would go and shop for me.”

“Okay. But sooner or later I’d like to see you get out in the fresh air again.”

“Yes. Later. In the meantime we should speak of something else. Did you hand in your report today? How long will it be before you get your grade on it?”

“I already did.”

“You don’t sound happy.”

“She gave me a terrible grade.”

“Like an F?”

“No! Not that terrible. I’d kill myself. C minus. That’s terrible for me. It’s for credit. It’s going to pull my average down.”

“What didn’t she like about it?”

“She wants to think the jury was fine and upstanding, and that they listened to the facts and did their civic duty. And that reality is not subjective.”

“Oh. I see. She is a believer in the idea that there is such a thing as objective reality.”

Raymond stopped chewing and just sat a moment with a mouth full of cookie. But he couldn’t answer around it, so he chewed and swallowed quickly.

“You don’t think there is?”

“It’s hard to know. A very debatable point. But science now makes a good case that perhaps not.”

“What science? I never learned any science like that in school.”

“No, this would likely not be what they would teach you in school. Newer science. Quantum mechanics—that sort of science. Luis brought me a couple of audiobooks about it. It’s very fascinating, but then it stretches your mind until you think you might be a little bit crazy. The core idea is that a thing is not a thing until it has an observer. And the observer seems to play a role in what kind of thing it will snap into being. But beyond that—no need to be so esoteric. Let’s say I witness an accident, and I have one view, and you witness it, and you have a wholly differing opinion. And let’s say we argue and argue and argue, but in the end the truth is simply that we were standing in two different places. And that from my angle I saw things that from your angle could not be seen. Well . . . not all angles are physical or logistical. That’s all I’m saying.”

He chewed in silence for a moment longer, buoyed by the idea that the conversation was bringing life back into her demeanor. He reached inside himself and took a chance.

“Come to the market with me,” he said. “It’ll be fun. Just like the old days. We’ll talk more about this on the way.”

“Oh, Raymond. No. Please go for me. I am not feeling good, and I am just so very tired.”



Raymond was in his room, more or less minding his own business, when it all came up. And out.

It started over nothing. He placed his math textbook on the desk next to his laptop, but he had several books and stacks of notes lying around—he hadn’t been as good about organizing his desk as he normally would be—so it slid to the floor again. He sighed. Picked it up. Slammed it down on the desk again. It slid off again.

Next thing he knew, Raymond was scraping everything off his desk with one arm. The notebook computer landed on the carpet with a painful thump. Papers fluttered down.

But even that wasn’t enough. It only stoked the fire he felt inside. He lurched over to his bookshelves and scraped them clean, knocking all his books to the floor. He picked up a big handful, as if to put them back, but ended up bouncing them hard off the wall instead.

He looked up to see his mom standing in his open bedroom doorway, one hand on the knob. She had the toddler, Clarissa, on her hip. The little girl’s eyes had gone wide with fear.

Raymond stopped hurling and let the rest of his armful of books fall to the floor.

“Well,” his mother said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you how the trial went. Now I guess there’s no need.”



Raymond arrived at school more than fifteen minutes early and ran straight to Mr. Bernstein’s classroom. Literally ran.

The teacher stood by the window, leaning on the cold radiator and talking on his cell phone. He held up one finger to ask Raymond to wait.

Raymond’s report was sitting on Mr. Bernstein’s desk. He moved closer to it, then looked up at the teacher for permission. Bernstein met his eyes and nodded, then turned away to finish his phone conversation in private.