Page 111 of Taking Turns

And he didn’t. I feel so much nothing inside my heart, there’s an echo in there.

I sit up and rub the water out of my eyes so I can open them.

Smith is still standing in the bathroom doorway. We stare at each other for a few seconds and then he says, “Do you know why I liked you so much?”

“When?” I ask. “When did you like me so much?”

“That first night. After I took you home I looked you up on the internet.”

“Oh,” I say, looking away.

“There’s not much about you online. Before you took this job at the gallery, anyway. There’s plenty about you recently. But it’s the stuff that came before that intrigued me.”

“I’m not talking about it.“

“Just listen to me, Chella. OK?”

I shrug and start playing with the thick, frothy white bubbles.

“When I found all the gaps in your childhood I was excited.”

I give him a sidelong glance from the corner of my eye. “Why?”

“Because my childhood is the same way. Did you look me up, Chella? On the internet?”

I nod. “Yes.”

“And what did you find?”

“Not much.” I shrug.

“Don’t you think that’s kinda cool?”

When I glance up at him this time, he’s smiling. “What’s cool about it?”

“That we were both secrets.”

Secrets.

“I don’t know if that’s true about you, but I was a secret. My parents couldn’t have children. They tried for years and years. They considered a surrogate, adoption, all that IVF stuff. And just when they were about to give up, my mother got pregnant. She was forty-three years old.”

I sit up in the tub, unable to curb my curiosity, and stare at him as he talks. He’s still smiling, like all of this is a happy memory.

“And even though they did all the tests and they came back with good news—their child was normal. Perfect—I wasn’t, Chella. I wasn’t even close to perfect.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, looking down at my bubbles again. “You look pretty perfect to me.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” he replies softly. “Perfect on the outside is only half the story, right?”

I swallow hard and nod at him. “What happened? With your parents?”

He’s frowning when I look up. Shoving his hands in his pockets as he leans against the doorjamb. “They sent me away. To special schools.”

“But there’s nothing wrong with you, Smith. Why did they send you away?”

He sighs, but it doesn’t come out like regret. Or sadness. Maybe resignation. “I didn’t talk until I was four. And then no one could understand me. Language was hard. It didn’t make much sense. And even when it did start making sense and the words came out, I stuttered so bad, it didn’t matter. They still couldn’t understand me.”

I draw my legs up and hug them to my chest. “How old were you? When they sent you away?”