Josiah signed, Why do you care? You didn’t have to say anything.
I didn’t understand that, thought Freddy, but it was just a reflex. She felt her hands drop from her face. Josiah signed? Since when did Josiah sign? He’d never indicated before that he knew American Sign Language. Roland didn’t seem surprised, either. Josiah had signed to him before, then, when Freddy hadn’t been there.
The giggling had stopped. Freddy knew why. The hearing kids and the Deaf kids didn’t mix. Oh, they had some classes together, and there were a few friendships that crossed the invisible boundary, but Freddy didn’t think she had ever seen a hearing kid who wasn’t related to a Deaf kid use fluent and unthinking sign language in school.
Ms. Liu should have been doing something. She was still staring at the proof. Freddy thought maybe she should do something herself. She stayed where she was.
“You’re not as funny as you think you are,” said Roland.
Not funny, signed Josiah. Bored.
“Go be bored somewhere else,” said Roland.
The bell rang. Freddy stayed in her seat, slowly packing up, as the other students headed for the door. With luck, Josiah and Roland would be swept up by the crowd, and she wouldn’t have to deal with either of them on the way out.
She had miscalculated as usual. When she started for the classroom’s one doorway, up near the front of the room, Josiah and Roland were still standing by the whiteboard, having a furious argument in sign language. She caught glimpses of it as she tried to edge past them:… None of your business … What’s wrong with you?… After I saw … That was a mistake … Through the wall … Very thin wall … Don’t talk to her!
The last was from Roland, with a vicious stab of his finger towards Freddy for the “her.” As she reached the boys, sidling around Ms. Liu, who seemed paralysed by whatever Josiah had written on the board, Josiah turned to her and said, “Goodness gracious, look at the time. We’d better get to band. I like band. Let me carry your books and pretend to be friends with you just to make this idiot mad. How do you live with him? I shall get my useless things, and we shall stop the pointless argument.” He threw Roland a scathing glance, then headed back to his seat to pick up his books.
Freddy was left being loomed over by Roland. “You need to stay away from that guy,” he said in a bullying tone that immediately made Freddy want to become Josiah’s best friend.
“You keep saying,” Freddy told him, “but you don’t say why. Am I supposed to stay away from everyone you don’t like? I’ll have to start avoiding myself.”
He wrapped his hand around her arm and, ignoring his interpreter’s meaningful gestures towards his books, towed Freddy out into the hallway. “I don’t have to like you to try to stop you from doing something stupid,” said Roland. “He’s dangerous. They’re dangerous.”
He sounded so serious about it that Freddy bit back a snarl and simply said, “Why?”
“If you don’t know, it’s better,” said Roland. “Make sure it stays that way. And stop letting Mel play detective. I’ve seen her snooping around that house. She doesn’t know what she’s getting into.”
It was true that Mel had been lurking in the lane a lot lately, not very subtly. Freddy thought Mel had more faith in the power of eavesdropping than she did. “Maybe she would if you told her,” said Freddy, “since you seem to know so much.”
Kids were arriving for the next math class now. From the looks of them, they were in grade eleven or twelve, big, rangy almost-adults who stared with annoyance at the stupid grade nines block ing their way. “You need to get your books,” said Freddy, “and I need to go to band. Let me go.”
“Stay away from the house on Grosvenor Street,” said Roland. “And stay away from Josiah.”
It was only when she was halfway to the band room that she realised Josiah had stayed in the room throughout the confrontation. She wondered if he had been lurking just out of sight, listening.
*
He caught up with her on the walk home. He usually did. Freddy, glancing covertly at him, felt almost guilty about it. Well, she hadn’t promised Roland, and besides, where did he get off telling her what to do? There was some mystery about Cuerva Lachance and Josiah, but they weren’t dangerous unless very loud organ music and a tendency to collect chairs posed some terrible, undefinable threat.
“What was all that with Roland?” she said. “I didn’t think you guys’d ever said two words to each other.”
Josiah rolled his eyes so dramatically that for a moment, the irises almost completely vanished. “I don’t pretend to understand how that boy’s brain works. I’m not sure it does work. I saw his math homework on the way past his desk. He was drawing swords on it.”
“Well, he’s not stupid,” said Freddy grudgingly, “but he doesn’t try.” It was something she’d noticed about Roland. He called her brainless sometimes, and she called him dense, but she suspected that if they had ever taken an IQ test together, they would have more or less tied.
“Swords,” said Josiah. “On homework sheets.”
She rounded on him. “You can talk. What was that thing you wrote on the board?”
“That?” said Josiah with contempt. “An unsolvable problem. It was written to be unsolvable. There’s a mistake in my solution. Ms. Spineless will find it eventually. She was a math genius in university, you know, but she had a breakdown in her third year and settled for education.”
She didn’t ask him how he knew this. She wasn’t in the mood for shameless lies. “And you sign.”
“What? Of course I sign. Why wouldn’t I?”
Freddy said, “Why would you?”
“Long, dreary experience of the world. I picked it up somewhere along the way.”
They started across the park. “You always talk as if you’re ninety,” said Freddy.
“It seems that way sometimes,” said Josiah. “I keep telling you that you need to take most of what I say as a metaphor.”
She was trying to think of something cruel to say in reply when the strains of “It’s a Small World (After All),” mixed with a little bit of “Shenandoah,” began to ring out over the park. Freddy saw the heads of the kids on the swing set turn towards the house on Grosvenor Street.
“Damn it,” said Josiah. “Is your stepdad home?”
“Is my stepdad ever home?” said Freddy, but Josiah was already running, making little yelps of irritated indignation as he went. Freddy raced after him. Cuerva Lachance had been finding it difficult to stay away from the organ. Mel said she’d heard that the neighbours had filed several complaints with the police, but as far as Freddy could tell, nothing had come of them.
Freddy was on Josiah’s heels as he crossed the street. She could see Mel standing on the sidewalk next to their side gate, one hand on the latch as she stared at Josiah. Josiah tried to run past her, but she grabbed him by the arm.
“What are you doing there?” Mel shouted over the music. “I just saw you over there!”