And then Sylvie saw it, under a tree just twenty feet away: a bunch of flowers, a lit candle, a photo. It was the same photo of Christian they’d had at the board meeting, his sour expression, those innocent freckles, that green hair. The photo was eight by ten, cut out from a contact sheet. When Sylvie circled the tree—looking over her shoulder again, pricking up her ears to listen for snaps of cameras or gasps of onlookers—she saw that someone had stuck the photo to the tree trunk with a wad of fluorescent-yellow gum.
She stared at Christian’s picture. She’d recognized him instantly the other day; she always noticed boys like him. Not long before James died, Sylvie had been driving home from the mall one weekend and noticed two boys standing at the edge of a yard near an intersection. One boy looked normal enough; Sylvie barely noticed him. But the boy next to him had that green hair. He’d painted his face white. There was heavy eye shadow around his eyes and red lipstick sloppily applied to his mouth, so one corner of his mouth was an exaggerated grin, stretching up to his cheekbone. His face had almost caused her to crash. But he was talking to the other boy as if he looked perfectly acceptable, almost as if he was daring people to think otherwise.
The Joker, she’d realized later. From Batman. That’s who he was dressed as. But it had been nowhere near Halloween.
She next saw him marching with the Swithin team at one of Scott’s wrestling meets. Someone must have made Christian wash the hair dye out, though tinges of green still showed on his scalp. This time he wore a cape. Or perhaps cloak was a better word; the thing was brown, possibly made of a potato sack. A ripple went through the crowd, followed by a few giggles and jeers. Christian was trying to dress like someone or something this time, too?a character from a Tolkien book or a creature from a sci-fi movie. Sylvie quickly searched for Scott, who was standing by the line of chairs set up for the wrestlers, watching them march in. Scott clearly saw Christian, but his expression hadn’t changed. He seemed neither intrigued nor annoyed by the boy. It was almost as though he didn’t see him at all.
In a funny way, Christian reminded her of Scott. Not that Scott dressed in costumes, but he had his way of challenging who and what he was expected to be. At the match, Sylvie wished she knew who Christian’s parents were. She wanted to ask if it was hard for them to have a son who didn’t act like everyone else. You give them so much, you send them to the best school, and they just spit it all back in your face, she would say. Do you feel that way, too?
Sylvie gazed at Feverview’s square, dirty windows, trying to imagine Warren Givens waking up this morning, the reality of his son’s death raw and unrelenting. Passing by the bathroom where he found him. Or perhaps it had been in the bedroom or maybe at the bottom of a dingy stairwell. Wherever it had happened, it was probably somewhere Mr. Givens had to see every day.
Maybe he still held conversations with his son. Maybe he was able to forget the negative things about Christian, all of that irrelevant after death. Maybe he could now say all the things to Christian he hadn’t been able to get out when the boy was alive. Maybe he made all the wrongs right, misunderstandings understood. Maybe the father’s leaden heart lifted when he found something personal of Christian’s—a torn-off note wedged inside a book he was reading or an inscription on a mix CD left in the downstairs stereo. Maybe he would find warning signs, too, indications of deep, unspoken torment. A quickly scribbled poem mentioning names of all those who hurt him, including the name of a consenting adult. A name that was recognizable, hyphenated.
A door to the apartment complex opened, and a man paused under the awning. He wore a gray Windbreaker and shabby blue pants. When he noticed the collection of items by the tree, he winced but then settled down on a bench nearby.
At once, Sylvie knew. She didn’t know how, she just did. She had nothing to go by except instinct. No pictures, no memory of him at any of the school functions, where she and the other board members were supposed to say hello to all the parents but usually concentrated on a select, deep-pocketed few, and yet, she was sure. It was in the way he slowly trudged along. It was in how his fingers nervously played with the lapel of his jacket.