The next time I saw Julian, he sauntered into the library, beaming, his little arms weighed down with a stack of Elian Mariner books. He said his dad had gotten them for him because he was a good reader now. He went back to being cheerful-humming-Julian till the end of the year, when our buddies had to write an actual book report.
He glared at his blank page, refusing to write. After a while, I got impatient, took the glasses off his face—ones with eyeballs dangling from Slinkies—and pushed a pencil into his little fist. Sulking, he crossed his skinny arms over his chest.
I got bored and turned away, watching my friends help their buddies, till Julian tapped my cheek. “How do you spell Elian?”
“Elian? That’s easy for you.” I pressed my forefinger to cover up the E on the book’s cover. “What do you get if you put J-U here?”
He frowned in concentration, then looked comically stunned. “That’s my name!” He began to write, and he had the worst handwriting I’d ever seen. Staggered, backward letters—hieroglyphics, not English.
After a couple of sessions of working steadily, he read his paper aloud to me, since I couldn’t make out any of it. Right away I was in, just like when my mom read me actual books. At some point he must have been pretending to read, because it was way longer than the single page he’d written, but I didn’t care. His story was good—not just little-kid-good, but really good.
I said as much, and for some reason that moment—right after I told him—is frozen in my head like a photograph. His smile was enormous, and his eyes were shining like he was blowing out the candles on his birthday cake. But sometimes that smile is superimposed onto the face I saw the next time he was assigned to me. The day his parents died.
Dr. Whitlock smiles like she’s truly glad to see me, but the intensity of her gray gaze is hard to hold. Her eyes are more curious than friendly, and she’s dressed not like a teacher, but like a lawyer or a businesswoman.
“How have you been?” she asks, folding her hands in her lap.
I nod, hoping she can understand that a nod means okay.
She asks me to take a seat, so I sit on the couch across from her orange cloth chair. It doesn’t look like the kind of chair she’d choose. Actually, as I take another glance around, I realize none of the furniture looks like it belongs to her. The small coffee table is purple. Her desk is yellow. Nothing matches, and it reminds me of a living room from a show that I must have seen a long time ago on Nick at Nite.
“Julian…” That’s the tone I remember: careful, as if she’s about to give me terrible news. “Do you understand that this is a safe place, and everything you say here is confidential?”
She’s being nice, but it just makes me more nervous, because she expects me to tell her things so personal that they need to be confidential. I don’t know what to say, and it becomes awkward, like it always does. Not because she looks annoyed or uncomfortable like most people, but because she’s not filling in the space either.
I start picking at the tip of my shoelace. The last bit of plastic comes off and falls onto the floor. Dr. Whitlock lifts the wastebasket toward me. I pick up the plastic and drop it in the can, then she tells me to choose a game from her shelf.
Board games were not something we ever did at home. When Mom and Dad and I played something, it was guitar or piano or pretend. But I know Dr. Whitlock likes games, so I choose Sorry, just like last year, because it’s the only one I know how to play.
I learned it from Russell’s nieces when we visited his sister Nora’s house one Thanksgiving. They were obsessed with it, but it seemed like a mean and unnecessarily sarcastic game to me. If you draw the Sorry card, it reads something like SORRY! NOW I’M GOING TO TAKE MY PAWN FROM START AND KILL ANY OF YOURS I WANT.
I set the game onto the purple coffee table. Dr. Whitlock opens the box and asks what color I’d like.
“Any of them.”
She frowns and already I feel like I’ve done something wrong. That’s what playing feels like too: not fun, because she’s watching as if she’s evaluating me on how well I play. And the thing about Sorry is that you can’t be good at it. It’s all luck, so I don’t know how I’m supposed to do well besides counting the spaces correctly and not landing on her when I have the option to do something else.
The only time I’ve ever taken out one of her pawns was when I got the Sorry card and had no choice. Even then I took out the player farthest from her HOME, so it wouldn’t be as mean. But afterward I found her watching me, not the board, and she looked unhappy.
IT’S DARK OUTSIDE, cloudy and starless, when Russell calls me into the living room and aims one long finger down. The hardwood floor is stained, spoiled, like footprints left in wet cement.
Earlier this afternoon I cleaned my shoes using something I found under the kitchen sink. They were gleaming white by the time I set them on the living room floor, but I guess there was still some bleach on the soles.
“You have to learn to respect other people’s things,” Russell says, his voice calm and steady.
“I do.”
“You do?”