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“Still, it has to sting.”
“As I mentioned, I’ve gotten used to it. You don’t get where I am in life without learning to not care what other people think of you.”
“That’s something we haven’t discussed,” I said. “Your life. Your childhood.”
“You already know it was bad. I don’t hide that. Foster care until my mother adopted me...”
“I know.” I leaned forward, studying him. “But I wonder...what happened in your past that caused you to be...to be like this.”
“Like what?”
“Determined. Focused.”
Landon stared right back at me, and a few seconds ticked by. “Okay, I’ll bite.”
I braced myself, sensing a revelation was about to come; he was about to discuss something big. Instead of prompting him, I took a deep breath.
“I had a stutter as a kid,” he finally said. “A bad one. One of school psychologists said it probably grew out of the trauma of moving around, of things I saw when I was young, things I still don’t want to remember.” He shook his head, as if to brush that away. “I had a hard time speaking for a long time.”
“You don’t have a stutter now.”
“Not a trace. My mother made sure I got the help I needed after she adopted me. Elocution lessons... The whole bit. She was determined to stamp it out.”
I glanced at my phone, making sure the app was still recording. It had been running for almost two hours, and I knew the file would be huge. Transcribing it later would be a beast. I sent up a silent thank-you for the extra cloud storage I bought two months earlier.
“I got bullied a lot for the stutter,” he continued, “at almost every school I attended. And it was the worst at Harding Elementary School down in Boca Raton.”
“Harding Elementary?”
“They closed it about ten years ago. Tore it down and consolidated a few schools.”
I nodded.
“Group of boys used to tease me every day. I hated going there. It was like...like the stutter gave them an opening. They picked on me for everything. Not having enough lunch money. Shoes with worn-out soles. Wearing the same jeans every day for a week. And then one day...they cornered me in the stairwell, and things got out of hand. It turned into a fight, four kids and me.”
“And you were the underdog.”
He gave me a tight smile from his place on the other side of the coffee table, in the chair matching the sofa. “I fell down the stars.”
I gaped at him. “What?”
“Actually, somebody probably pushed me.” He adjusted and almost squirmed in his seat, as if he could physically feel the memory. “Those big metal stairs they put in schools. The other boys ran away, of course. Fled. We were all about seven or eight and they...they were kids. My mother...my mother found me at the bottom.”
“She did?” My question was more of a gasp. No wonder I hadn’t found out much about his childhood.
“She was the part-time school speech therapist at the time, and I’d been seeing her for a couple of weeks. The stairwell was next to her classroom, and she heard the commotion. Found me seconds after it happened. And she...she later said that was it for her.”
“She adopted you after that.”
He spread his hand. “Took a while, but yes.”
“Did you get hurt?”
“Two broken ribs. A concussion. A gash across the top of my head. The doctor said I was lucky I didn’t break my neck. Or die.”
His final sentence hung in the air between us.
“Did they do anything to those kids?” Now he’d told me about this, I wanted to know more, to understand every detail. This wasn’t just traumatic, this was... “I mean, that was criminal.”
