figures in his train set all had different-colored eyes, they had been that carefully finished.
She had loved him so, then, looking down at a tiny suited figure with a tie so small that you had to look under a magnifying glass to see the design he’d painted on it. And then you would hear him deep in the night talking to himself, and you would realize that he was reciting a book he’d read, maybe even years ago, all from memory, just to enjoy it again.
Conner and Dan had celebrated the completion of the room by putting a plaque on the door: THE CONNER ZONE.
She and her husband had celebrated in quite a different way, later that night. This was your garden-variety tract house, as isolated as it and its three neighbors were, and the walls were tract-house thin. They did not feel that this extremely sensitive child needed to overhear the sounds of sex in the next room. And on that night, at last, they had been able to use their bed the way a bed was meant to be used, instead of being as still as possible, wincing at every squeak, and keeping their cries to a whisper.
“Dan,” she said, walking into the kitchen where he had begun trimming ribs, “there’s something kind of ugly going on. Paulie’s having a party and Conner’s not invited.”
“Jesus.”
“They’re actually outside playing with flashlights, which I kind of have the feeling is on purpose.”
“Kids are cruel.”
“Listen, incidentally, I had an e-mail from Marcie Cotton about you.”
“Oh?”
“They’ve reached the point of asking general-faculty opinion.”
“Oh, God.”
“I gave you a great report.”
“What a relief.”
“Come on, what else would I do?”
“Tell the truth like everybody else. I’m dull as dishwater in the classroom.”
“No, you’re actually interesting. It’s physiological psychology that’s dull. In the hands of most profs, it causes birds to die in the trees outside their classrooms. At least yours just fly off.”
“Dull is dull. I should’ve used puppets or worn costumes.”
“I would have preferred almost any other referee, frankly.”
“Yeah, you and me both. But I can handle her… maybe.”
“Not too much.”
Dan went to her, embraced her. “You’re my girl.”
There came a sound from below—a crash.
“He just kicked the wall,” Katelyn said. “Like father, like son.”
“Maybe a mano a mano would be good.”
One of the most precious things about this Dan Callaghan whom her heart had whispered to her to marry was that he was a genuinely good father—not an easy thing to be for a boy as challenging as their son. But Conner’s brilliance and demanding personality also made him fascinating, and she thought that the rewards for loving their boy were substantial. “Maybe a mano a mano would be very good,” she said.
As he went downstairs, he noticed that the Conner Zone sign had been removed from the door, leaving some areas of peeled paint that would have to be repaired. But not right now. He started to open the door, thought better of it, and knocked.
A moment of silence was followed by a grudging, “Okay.”
The room was dark and the trains were running. Conner loomed over the board like some kind of leering godlet, an image that Dan found oddly creepy. In fact, he found Conner, in general, oddly creepy—a great kid, he was crazy about him… but there was something sort of fundamentally creepy about somebody who was probably smarter than Shakespeare, and certainly smarter than you—way smarter.
“Hey there, I see you’ve abolished the Conner Zone.”
“It’s stupid.”
A streetcar, wonderfully modeled, shot around on the tracks, racing through intersections, wheeling out into the forest and then returning to the town, passing Andy’s Garage and Sill’s Millinery and Carter’s Groceries, racing along as crossing guards whipped up and down and the figures inside sat as still as if frozen in terror.
“Isn’t it going a little fast?”
“I’m exceeding the speed limit and maybe they’re all going to die.”
“It hurts, buddy. It’s meant to. Only, we need to get in front of it. Figure out what we’re doing wrong and not do that anymore. That way, we don’t lose our friends.”
Conner turned the transformer up a notch and the streetcar shot off the tracks, tumbled through the woods, and crashed to the floor. The roof broke off and half the figures came out. Conner leaped around the table, grabbed the remains of the car, and smashed it to pieces against the tiles.
“Hey. Hey! You’re killing the floor, here.” Dan went down to him, but he was up again and off across the room.
“I’ve gotta get rid of this whole kid setup,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m an asshole, Dan. I’m a
Dan went over to the bed where Conner had thrown himself. “Conner, your mom and I both felt you needed to skip grades. You were bored silly in third grade. You could do all the problems, you could read all the books.”
“I can still do all the problems and read all the books. Only the difference now is, I’m the class freak, Dan. The
“You’re not a freak. You just happen to be somewhat smarter than most people.”
“You know who I really relate to? I really relate to Junior Hamner. Do you know who that is?”
Dan thought that the Hamners had a little boy with Down syndrome. “He’s that mentally disabled child, isn’t he?”
“Exactly. Another freak. We should be joined at the hip.”
“Except that your mind—who knows what it might do one day? And Junior Hamner’s always gonna be eleven years old.”
“Actually, he’s four. Mental age.”
“Okay, let’s get down to it. What, exactly, happened to cause you to get ditched?”
“I told you, I’m a little boy. Little boys aren’t allowed.”
Dan had, to be honest, been one of the bullies. He’d had a childhood full of nightmares, so many and so intense that he now speculated that he might have been an abuse victim. He’d often been taken night fishing by an old man who lived down the block. Most of the time, his uncle Frank had been with them, and Frank was to this day as straight an arrow as had ever been carved, but there had been times when he and Mr. Ehmer had been out there alone all night, and he wondered what had transpired then.
He remembered strange violence. Screaming. Being swarmed by flies. And maybe those were screen memories for things Mr. Ehmer had done, that should not have been done.
Dan had been angry and big, so he used to push the little kids around—whip their butts, take their money, you name it. So he could understand the ugly frustrations of Paulie Warner and the other boys as well as he could his own boy’s hurt. He put his arm around Conner’s shoulders, gave him a friendly squeeze. “This was not like this a week ago. Two days ago.”
“Let me tell you what they’ve done. They have created a club called the Connerbusters. Clever name, do you get it? Everybody in the seventh grade is supposed to be a Connerbuster except me, of course—” He stopped, his voice cracking.
Dan looked over to see the young face twisted in pain. Agony.
“I’m sorry, Dan, here I go being a
“Look, I was a class bully. I would’ve been a Connerbuster. For sure. But I cried, too. And you can be sure that Paulie Warner and the rest of them are just as vulnerable. You’re a little behind them physically, Conner, but mentally, you’re on another planet. In another universe.”
“Aye, and there’s the rub. So listen, my friend, and you shall hear, of the careful humiliation of Conner the queer.”
