Eliza is staring at the scene a few seconds before she realizes that the thing that is not a dog looks a lot like her brother. Aaron has a shirt like the torn one of the boy on the ground; Aaron has skin that would contrast that disturbingly with the deep brown dirt. Mark and Billy, backs turned and engrossed in what they are doing, haven’t noticed her but there is a sickening moment of clarity when Eliza realizes that the boy who almost looks like Aaron has been watching her the whole time. His eyes, wide with fear, are the exact shape of Sucker’s when the dog is running in a blind panic, slamming into trees to the sound of jeering children.
For what seems like years, Eliza stands staring. Almost-Aaron’s face remains frozen, not once leaving Eliza’s, his body passively accepting its punishment. It is as if, having been thrown from a window, he has realized that relaxing every muscle will reduce the damage upon his inevitable impact with the ground.
Marvin and Billy can’t afford witnesses to such a suspendable offense. Eliza could call out for Gina and Holly, pretending she is just nearing the bushes to look for them. Marvin and Billy would be forced to stop and the poor boy would be saved. Eliza mentally loops the scenario, looking for flaws and finding none. It would work.
Bestial joy beams off Mark and Billy like cold light. Eliza is mesmerized by the incongruity of action and reaction, reluctant to relinquish her stolen glimpse of such rare animals. Ultimately, however, her inaction is spurred by the revulsion that sweeps through her at the sight of the boy on the ground. His absolute stillness, his silence, his wide-open eyes. Even a half-blind stray dog would be struggling. Even Sucker wouldn’t lie there, soundlessly accepting his fate. If Eliza intervenes, she will have to touch her almost-brother. He will need help getting up. And there’s no way she’d be able to help this boy who can’t possibly be Aaron. Aaron, who knows all the secret moves of the ninja and Jedi. Aaron, who saves Eliza from bad dreams. Aaron, who would never allow himself to be reduced to this.
Eliza will never mention that Marvin and Billy are grinding berries and evergreen needles into almost-Aaron’s chest, laughing that they are curing his paleness once and for all. Or that pricks of blood from the evergreen needles are indistinguishable from lumps of berry pulp on his almost-skin. Eliza doesn’t know what her almost-brother is thinking as, without a word, she returns to the swings, stubbornly facing away from the bushes until the whistle blows and she returns inside without looking back.
The calm voice of the school nurse (“Your son has had an accident. He says he’s all right, but he needs a change of clothes. Could you please come in?”) evokes Norman Rockwellian images of mud puddles and torn pants. When Saul arrives at the school to find a pale marble statue of a son with a bandaged chest, he demands answers.
“What the hell happened here?” he growls at the nurse, face red, eyes bulging.
“I fell,” Aaron says too soft for anyone to hear.
“He says he fell,” says the nurse, who is constructed like a high school gym teacher and not at all intimidated by Saul’s presence.
“Aaron.” Saul spins around to face his son. “Tell me what really happened. Who did this to you?” Fall definitely doesn’t cover it. Though Saul can tell there’s no serious damage, the scratches and bruises — already purpling — are too specific to have come from a benign source. Aaron’s explanation is as unlikely as his insistence that the tack he sat on last month fell off the class bulletin board halfway across the room from his desk.
“Aaron,” Saul says in a softer tone that he hopes will prove more persuasive, “it’s okay to tell who did this. They need to be taught that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. You deserve to be able to play at recess without worrying about being bullied.”
But Aaron knows better than that. Aaron knows that telling now will haunt him later. If not this year, then the next, or the one after that. Aaron knows that he’s stuck with Marvin and Billy until high school, by which time they will be shunted into either reform school or shop class, removing him from striking range. His best strategy for now is to keep quiet and stay out of their way as much as possible.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” Saul sighs. Aaron shakes his head, keeping his eyes on the floor. Underlying his righteous parental outrage, Saul takes peculiar pride in his silent son. A voice, not quite his own,
My son’s no tattletale,
wells up from the same amorphous source of Saul’s occasional urge to read the sports page, drink a beer with dinner, or change the oil in his car. These fleeting fancies are what remains of Saul’s conflicted feelings for his dead father, a man who definitely would have respected Aaron’s decision not to squeal.
Saul watches his son change into the clothes he brought. “You don’t have to go back to class if you don’t want to,” he offers. “You can come home with me.” Aaron shakes his head just as Dr. Morris enters the room.
“Hello, Mr. Naumann, it’s good of you to come. Aaron, I heard what happened. I’m glad you’re all fixed up. Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
Aaron nods.
“Because I’m pretty sure I know who did this, but I can’t punish them unless you tell me if I’m right.”
Aaron shrugs.
“What if I asked you if it was Marvin and Billy?”
Aaron blushes. He hates that he blushes so easily. “I fell,” he says. He keeps seeing the change in Eliza’s face as she neared the bushes. When Aaron first caught sight of his sister he had thought, ridiculously, that the two of them could band together. That with her by his side he could put a stop to the evil B & M. He was on the verge of calling out her name when she recognized him. Suddenly she became a stranger, with a stranger’s way of looking at him. He realized that the Eliza he had been picturing was as imaginary as the Aaron he had hoped she would help him become.
“I fell,” he says again.
Dr. Morris shakes his head and sends Aaron back to class. He invites Saul briefly into his office, where he assures Saul that an eye will be kept on Aaron, as well as on Marvin and Billy, to prevent further trouble. As Saul is leaving, Dr. Morris offers two stapled pages. “The Vulnerable Child” simpers across the top page in curving, sensitive letters. Saul offers a stiff smile and a reluctant arm, this his parenting booster shot. The ghost of Saul’s father is gone. Pride has been replaced with the desire to protect his smaller, paler, and smarter than average son from the B.M.s of the world. When Aaron comes home from school that day, Saul is ready.
“You’re smarter than them, you know,” he says, catching Aaron by surprise as he walks through the door. “In the long run being smart wins out over just about everything else.” Before Aaron can say anything, he gestures to him. “Follow me.”
Saul leads his son to his study. Aaron hesitates before stepping over the threshold. This has always been a room for quick entrances and exits, a place to ask a question or to deliver a message and then to be gone. It falls into the same territory as his parents’ bedroom, a room in which grown-ups do grown-up things.
“Do you know why I like it in here?” Saul asks, gesturing to his desk and the shelves lining each wall. “It’s because this room is filled with things that make me happy. But today I realized that it would make me even happier if I could share it with you.”
Saul’s presence in the room is so strong that Aaron feels he has stepped inside his father’s body, Saul’s heart suddenly grown large enough for a door.
Saul sits Aaron down, places his hands on his son’s shoulders.
“These people who are making you miserable can tell that you are something special. It drives them crazy because they know they don’t have what you have. So they try to take it away from you, but you and I know they can’t. You and me, Aaron, we’re a team. What we do in here cancels out double whatever they do out there. Deal?”
Aaron pictures his father by his side as he, the Jedi ninja, attacks a legion of Marvin Bussys. Together, they can make the world safe for Aarons everywhere.
“Deal,” Aaron says.
Saul is unable, on such short notice, to accompany his daughter to Norristown Area High School; he is already committed to helping Adam Lubinsky prepare for his date with Jewish manhood next month. Miriam has already left the house, Saturday often as not a workday. Aaron and Eliza are sitting beside each other in the car, this the first time she has ever sat in the front passenger seat. Eliza is un-used to the shoulder strap across her chest or a view of the road unobstructed by the back of her father’s head. When she looks to her left, the sight of Aaron behind the actual steering wheel of an actual car strikes her as somehow absurd. The last time they were in a similar position, he was piloting a spaceship headed for Pluto.
Which, as far as Elly is concerned, isn’t so different from where they are going now.
“What’s Norristown High like?” she asks, trying to sound casual. Eliza really hopes Aaron’s answer will fill in the huge empty black space that enters her head whenever she tries to think about the area bee.
“I don’t know,” Aaron says to the car in front of him. “It’s bigger than Abington.”
Aaron doesn’t understand how anyone can look away from the road while driving. When Saul drives, he darts his head between the road and his conversational partner as though he’s watching a turbocharged Ping-Pong match. This didn’t make Aaron nervous until he got his own license and realized how much could happen in the split second a head was turned. Aaron wonders if he should explain to Eliza why she shouldn’t expect him to look at her. A deer could rush into the road, or a car could suddenly stop or change lanes, and then he wouldn’t be able to get her to her spelling bee which, the more he thinks about it, the more he doesn’t understand how she got into in the first place.
You’re not helping,
Eliza wants to say. She knows that this is no big deal to Aaron, who does Olympics of the Mind and Science Fair, which have been at Norristown before so she knows he could tell her what it was like if he really wanted to.
Eliza remembers the first Saturday Aaron stopped playing with her. Her selective memory has isolated this event in her mind, removed it from its larger context. She no longer connects it with the fire drill earlier that same week, halfway through kindergarten. All she remembers is walking up to her brother and asking if he wanted to play and Aaron rolling his eyes. “What’s the point?” he says. “You’re too little. It’s stupid. I’ve got better things to do,” at which point he walks right into Saul’s study like it is no big deal. They’ve been told over and over not to bother their father in there unless it is a real emergency, but Aaron walks in and he stays. That first Saturday, Eliza tries to play alone, making herself pilot, monster spotter, and head Jedi ninja all rolled into one but it isn’t the same. “It’s stupid” keeps repeating in her head.
Aaron is thorough in absenting himself from his sister’s life. When not with Saul in the study, he practices guitar in his room or, occasionally, goes to the park. Eliza isn’t invited on these outings. She initially mourns her exclusion, but her growing distance from Aaron allows her to observe more clearly his humble rung on the social acceptance ladder. The few times Eliza spots Aaron in the lunchroom, he is eating alone. When she secretly follows him to the park, she watches his attempts to join pickup basketball or soccer games with a combination of fascination and dread. If he is picked at all, it is reluctantly. Once during a basketball game the ball is slapped out of his arms so soundly that he falls sideways onto the pavement, his arm skidding against the asphalt. No one seems to hear him say foul. Eliza tells herself she is lucky to have learned the truth before her brother’s social standing rubbed off on her. The only really hard part is weathering her nightmares alone.
At a stoplight, Aaron looks over at Eliza. He tries to regard her objectively, the way he examined his chest, to determine if she looks intelligent, but she looks the same as always. He remembers what the smart girls looked like in his fifth-grade class: Denise Li and her purple plastic glasses frames, Jenny Howlitzer with her corny decal T-shirts. Eliza doesn’t look like those girls.
“Are you nervous?” he asks, neck craning toward the windshield, hands clawed onto the steering wheel.
“I don’t know,” she answers. “I wasn’t sure I’d be going until this morning.”
They’ve been stuck behind a truck for a while now, but Aaron won’t switch lanes even though Eliza’s checked a few times and it’s been completely safe. Underneath a cartoon picture of a grinning chicken wearing ear muffs and a scarf are the words “The Smart Frozzen Parts People,” and Eliza can’t help but think it’s a bad omen to be in such close proximity to such a stupid spelling error.
Aaron shakes his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you thought Dad knew about the bee and was
ignoring
it. I mean, Elly, he’s been waiting for something like this to happen ever since — ”
Eliza knows he is about to say, “since you got skipped for
TAG
,” before he stops himself. After her father’s fateful visit to Parents’ Night,
TAG
became a word no one said in front of her, just as the word “puberty” became scarce when, by ninth grade, Aaron’s voice still hadn’t changed. When everything happened all at once for Aaron a year later, the p-word magically reintroduced itself into common parlance as if it had never been banished.
TAG
, however, has remained taboo. Aaron manages to switch to “since you started school” in time to think that Eliza hasn’t noticed, but Eliza hears “stupid” in her head as clearly as if her brother had spoken the word aloud.
Aaron is eight years old when he sees God. He is on a night flight home from his grandfather’s funeral, a man he never met while living. He has a window seat and has spent the entire flight staring at the tiny lights below which, intellectually, he knows correspond to buildings but which seem more like sequins on an endless black blanket. When the plane flies into a cloud, Aaron’s sense of unlimited span and distance disappears. His window is swathed in white. A pulsing red light emanates from the cloud’s whiteness. Aaron stares, awestruck. With each pulse of light the cloud is transformed into something magical. Aaron wonders if God lives in all clouds, or if his plane just happened to pick the right one. The experience is so intensely personal that it never occurs to Aaron to share it with anyone, thus extending his belief in an all-knowing, all-present God five years longer than if someone had had the opportunity to inform him he’d only witnessed the red blinker of the plane’s wing.