Jana stares at him for a moment then abruptly turns to me. “It’s so weird bumping into you, Chloe—?I was just thinking about you on the way here, about how I needed to ask you for notes from Monday’s history class. And here you are!”
“Don’t say it’s an amazing coincidence,” David says. “Just don’t.”
“What’s wrong with saying that? It is! I mean, what are the odds?”
“On any given day, you probably think of dozens of different people at various times. But the only time anyone ever remembers thinking about someone is when they run into that person. It’s not coincidence—?it’s selective memory.”
“Whatever,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You do you, David.”
“I always do,” he says calmly.
“I’ll send you my notes when I get home,” I tell her.
“Thanks.” There’s an awkward pause. She glances sideways at Ivy and Ethan. Neither of them looks at her. They both just keep eating. “I’d better go meet my friends,” she says. “It was cool running into you guys—?even if it wasn’t a coincidence.”
“It wasn’t,” says David.
We’re all quiet for a moment after she leaves, and then David says, “Smart and scary? That’s my reputation?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Except for the smart part.”
“Shut up,” he says, and if it had been anyone else in the world, I would have sworn he said it affectionately.
On our way out, we pass the old couple sitting at a table. They watch us furtively as we pass, and the old man protectively hitches his chair a little closer to his wife.
Eighteen
“WHY IS EVERYONE so judgmental?” I ask David a little while later. We’re walking through the mall on our way back to our cars. Ethan and Ivy are lagging behind us—?she’s slow, and he stays close by her side. “I mean, the second Ivy or Ethan does something the slightest bit not normal, people act like they’re going to start serial killing everyone in sight. Where’s the compassion?”
“Okay,” David says. “I’ve thought about this a lot, actually. Want to hear my theory?”
“I do.”
“You know what the uncanny valley is?”
“It sounds familiar, but no, not really.”
“It’s a nerd term. You know how computer animation is getting really good? Like they can do individual strands of hair and fur and stuff like that? So there’s just this one problem with it: if the animation’s too good, it starts to freak people out. Which is why most animated characters still have eyes that are too big and floaty hair and stuff like that—?the goal isn’t to make the most realistic animation you can, but the most appealing.”
“Why is it called the uncanny valley?”
“Because if you graph their reactions, people like more and more realistic animation up to this one point and when you reach that point”—?he makes a dipping motion with his right hand—?“they suddenly find it creepy. It’s usually something about the eyes—?the eyes always look just a little bit dead when everything else looks totally real.”
“Got it,” I say. “So why are we talking about this?”
“It’s just something I’ve thought about.” He lowers his voice a little more as we turn a corner. “You know, if we were pushing our siblings in wheelchairs, people would be nice to them and to us. They’d be like, Oh, the poor disabled people and their wonderful siblings! Let’s hold doors for them! But Ivy and Ethan . . . they basically look like everyone else, with just these tiny differences in how they behave and move. And that bugs people. They don’t know what to do with that. It’s like people have a place in their brain for normal, and they have a place in their brain for something obviously wrong, but they can’t deal with something just a little bit different. And that makes them uncomfortable. And when people are uncomfortable, they act like jerks.”
I’m silent for a moment.
“What do you think of my theory?” he asks.
“I think you’re probably right. But it makes me sad. How do we get people to stop being like that?”
He shakes his head. “You’re talking about basic xenophobia. We’re hardwired to stay with our tribes.”
“My father would have liked you.”
He blinks. “Um . . . okay?”
“Sorry. That was a weird thing to blurt out. But he always liked to think about stuff like that—?why we do what we do, what the root biology of our behaviors probably was . . . that kind of thing.”
“Cool.” A pause. “I’m sorry about him. I mean . . . you know.”
“Yeah, it sucks that he died.” We walk for a moment in silence and then I say, “Can I tell you something I’ve never told anyone else?” I’m sort of embarrassed by the question as soon as I ask it—?it sounds more meaningful than it is. I’ve never told anyone else because my mother would freak, and no one else would care. But David will get it, I think.
“Sure.”
“I think he was autistic.”
“Really?”
“He wasn’t like Ivy or anything—?I mean, he was totally out in the world and really good at what he did and, like, this amazing scholar and researcher . . . but he was sort of hard to talk to. Mom always called him an absentminded professor type, and maybe that’s all it was, but I can remember all these times when I’d talk to him about, like, kids at school being mean or something, and he never seemed to get it. And he dressed terribly and hated social events . . .” I trail off. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking it.”
“It makes sense genetically that one of your parents would be on the spectrum.”
“He was a good dad, either way. I felt safe around him.”
“I’m sorry you lost that.” He stops, and for a second I think it’s because he wants to say something more about that, but instead he says, “Our car’s down this one,” and points to an escalator.
“Ours is on the other side. We’d better go down that way, or I’ll never find it.”
Before we separate, Ethan grabs Ivy’s hand, squeezes it, and manages to land a kiss on her cheek. Given all the sauce she splashed on herself this evening, it probably tasted nice and salty.
David and I just say a brief good night to each other, but he texts me later that evening.
I had a thought