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“I’m sorry,” he says finally. He still isn’t looking at me. “I know I’m not… giving this my all. It’s just… I didn’t expect Dylan to… to be so…”
“To be so what?” I ask when he trails off.
Nick sighs. “To be so weird.”
He said it before, but it feels worse now, when we’ve had a chance to get to know him. I know that to most people, Dylan is weird. Really weird. But I still don’t like Nick saying it.
“If you’d had a childhood like his, you might be weird too,” I reply, whispering even though Dylan is asleep upstairs. It doesn’t feel right, to talk about him like this.
“But we don’t even know what childhood he’s had. Monica hasn’t told us a single thing, and that feels wrong.”
“She will, if his mother loses the court hearing.” At least, I’m assuming she will, that she’s waiting to find out if this will be a longer-term placement or not. That’s the only reason I can think of why she hasn’t given me more information. I still don’t even know his last name, and that has to be wrong.
“Whatever.” Nick shrugs. “Look, I know I haven’t been as involved as I should be. As I want to be. But I thought… I thought we’d be getting a kid I could do things with. Throw a ball in the backyard, or even build something out of Lego—”
“Dylan loves puzzles.”
“Dylan doesn’t speak. I’m sorry, Ally, but it’s just all a bit too weird for me.” He shakes his head, as if that’s the end of the matter.
“So what, we send him back?” My voice isn’t quite shaking, but almost. “‘Too weird for us, sorry’?”
“I don’t want to send him back,” Nick protests, but he doesn’t sound convinced. I think if we could get away with it, he would.
And wouldn’t you too?
I can’t ignore that damning voice, because part of me would. Dylan is hard work, no question, but he needs help. He needs love.
“You know,” I say after a moment, when I trust my voice to sound level, “I was pretty weird as a kid, too.”
“Oh come on, Ally.” Nick rolls his eyes in exasperation. “I know you say you were a bit of a geek, but you were nothing like Dylan.”
I don’t reply, because what Nick says is true, but not entirely true. I really was a misfit as a kid—a brainy geek in a school of quarterbacks and cheerleaders. I had one good friend, Chenguang, a Chinese girl with limited English and a good heart. I still send her a Christmas card every year.
But from sixth grade onwards school was, for the most part, pretty miserable—the kind of Breakfast Club stereotypical misery that you might not think actually happens in real life. Being tripped in the hall, gross things shoved through the vents of my locker, peals of hard-edged laughter from the back of the classroom when I came up with the right answer—again.
I haven’t told Nick all those unpleasant details, because who wants to admit what a nerd they were, especially after a much-needed college reinvention? We’ve been back to my hometown of Moorestown more times than either of us can count or remember, and we’ve even run into some of my former classmates, but time is the great leveler, especially when you’ve got a handsome, charming, well-connected guy on your arm. I’m no longer the nerd, at least not on the outside.
Yet part of me still marvels at the children I’ve produced—Josh, the double varsity star, Emma the valedictorian, popular and pretty. I’m amazed that they came from me, that they have half of my genes. And they do—Josh has my toes, Emma my dimples.
I’ve outgrown the shy, stammering geeky girl I was, and when I’ve laughingly told people I was a nerd in high school, brushing it off in an instant, they always looked surprised. You, Ally? No…
“Anyone who peaks in high school is going to be disappointed later in life,” I’d quip blithely, but part of me would always feel hot with both shame and triumph at my admission, and I never want to go into it too much, to tell people how I was bullied, marginalized, made to feel like a freak.
Perhaps that’s why I am able to empathize with Dylan now, in a way that Nick doesn’t seem to be able to. I was the weird kid, too.
And yet so was he, surely, at least in a way? “Can’t you sympathize,” I ask him now, “considering your own childhood?”
Nick gives me the same sort of double take he did when I asked that question hypothetically, back during our training. It feels far more loaded now. “I don’t know what kind of childhood you think I had,” he says in a final-sounding voice, “but that wasn’t it.”
What was it, then? I almost say the words, but I’m too tired, and we haven’t even resolved the issue of Emma’s family weekend, not really.
I sigh and sip my wine, making no reply, and after a couple of tense seconds, Nick clicks play on the remote, and the opening credits of the TV show begin to roll.
11
BETH
The morning of the court hearing, I wake up with a gasp and a jerk, staring at the ceiling as I try to reorient myself in reality. I’d been having one of those strange dreams where you’re awake enough to control what’s happening, and everything makes total sense, although as soon as you regain consciousness it absolutely doesn’t.
