Colin Fischer Read online

  COLIN

  FISCHER

  COLIN

  FISCHER

  ASHLEY EDWARD MILLER & ZACK STENTZ

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Colin Fischer

  RAZORBILL

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © 2012 Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz

  ISBN 978-1-59514-578-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  Printed in the United States of America

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  From Zack:

  For Sophia and Dash, and all they’ve accomplished.

  For Ian, always there to help and guide them.

  For the real Mr. Turrentine, who accepted no excuses.

  For my mom, a more effective therapist than even she realized.

  And for Leah, who showed me that empathy comes from a place beyond understanding.

  From Ashley:

  For my mother, educator and creator of a book-eating, story-spitting monster.

  For Caden, my monster-in-training.

  And for Jennifer, who believes in monsters.

  INTRODUCTION

  Lev Grossman, bestselling author of

  The Magicians

  For most people, crime scenes are places to avoid. You see that yellow police tape and all you can think is: thank God I’m on this side of it. You look, of course—everybody looks, though usually you don’t see anything more interesting than a couple of men or women in blue with serious expressions on their faces, and maybe someone in plain clothes who looks like they’re wishing they were on your side of the tape too. But then you keep on walking. You leave it behind, like a bad dream.

  A crime scene is another world—it’s a bit like Narnia. Past the yellow tape you become a new person: you’re recast as a victim, a suspect, a witness, a detective. Things aren’t things anymore, they’re evidence, to be pieced together into a story according to the principles of forensic science and logical deduction. They’re clues to the question on everybody’s minds, which is: what the hell just happened here?

  That’s if you’re you. Or me. If you’re Colin Fischer, forensic science and logical deduction are the principles you use to get through everyday life. The scene of the crime is where he lives, all the time. For Colin the entire world—his home, his school, his neighborhood—is a mystery. And he is the detective.

  He isn’t really a detective, of course. Colin is fourteen years old. He’s just starting his freshman year at West Valley High in the San Fernando Valley. It’s not a situation where the techniques of criminal investigation would ordinarily apply. But Colin isn’t an ordinary kid; he suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. “It’s a neurological condition, related to autism,” he explains to his gym teacher, with characteristic precision. “I’m diagnosed as high functioning, but I still have poor social skills and sensory integration issues that give me serious deficits in areas of physical coordination.”

  He’s not exaggerating—because Colin only ever says exactly what he means—but he might be slightly underdramatizing the issue. Colin is different. He doesn’t like to be touched, even by his parents. He can’t tolerate loud noises. He has a hard time reading facial expressions; he keeps notes on what faces correspond to what emotions, so he can match them up with the people around him and tell what they’re feeling. He has an amazing memory and prodigious reasoning skills, and he’s extraordinarily knowledgeable in certain areas—game theory, for example, and the history of the U.S. space program—but he also has trouble grasping things a five-year-old would know automatically, without trying. Watson once said about Sherlock Holmes, “His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.” You could say the same thing about Colin. It won’t surprise you to hear that Colin keeps a framed portrait of Sherlock Holmes over his bed.

  Colin’s high school experience isn’t a typical one. This isn’t a Judy Blume novel. You don’t read Colin Fischer and think, “Yeah, I remember that time a cell phone rang in math class and I got so freaked out I had to bark like a dog ’til it stopped.” Colin is more like an alien anthropologist stranded on Earth, with no choice but to master the local social codes and try to pass as human, or perish.

  But that’s what makes Colin’s story so important, and so interesting. Because maybe we’re not quite as human as we like to think we are, either. Maybe we’re a bit weirder than we like to pretend. We like to believe that everything about our lives is neat and clear and unambiguous, but it isn’t. Look at the faces of the people around you: how often do you really know what they’re thinking and feeling? How often does something happen that you can’t explain—a book that isn’t where you left it, a question you should know the answer to but don’t, a friend who walks by without saying hi? We like to believe our lives aren’t bizarre, that we always know what to do or say, that we know what the hell is happening all the time. That our lives are in no way like a mystery.

  But of course we don’t always know what’s going on. Life is confusing. We’re constantly trying to piece together a coherent story out of the clues all around us, and the evidence doesn’t always fit. In that sense, mysteries aren’t unusual; they’re not the exceptions, they’re the rule. We’re not all Sherlock Holmes, or Colin Fischer, but the difference is not one of kind, just one of degree. We’re all on the same scale; they’re just a couple of standard deviations out from us.

  So what happens when a boy for whom everything is a mystery, for whom an ordinary classroom is a crime scene, comes across a real mystery? A real crime, with a real suspect and real evidence, and a real gun, right in the middle of his high school cafeteria?

  Suddenly the tables are turned. Suddenly everybody around Colin is freaking out. They’re out of their element—but Colin isn’t. This is his element. He’s been preparing for this role, the role of the detective, his whole life. We’re in his world now, the world on the other side of the yellow tape, and for once in his life Colin is right at home. This is where he lives, this is his home planet, and it’s the rest of us who are aliens here. “Life,” Holmes once said, “is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” We like to forget that. Col
in is here to remind us.

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Birthday Cake and a Gun

  Chapter One: Shark Behavior

  Chapter Two: The Prisoner’s Dilemma

  Chapter Three: Deterrence

  Chapter Four: The Kuleshov Effect

  Chapter Five: Primate Behavior

  Part Two: The Fool and the Freak

  Chapter Six: Eyewitness Interviews

  Chapter Seven: The Battleship Potemkin

  Chapter Eight: Dupin’s Detachment

  Chapter Nine: The Parking Problem

  Chapter Ten: Rogue Predators

  Part Three: The Olympic Trampoline Team

  Chapter Eleven: Hell is Other People

  Chapter Twelve: Test Bites

  Chapter Thirteen: What the Tortoise said to Achilles

  Chapter Fourteen: Hans Asperger

  Chapter Fifteen: Two Doctors in Vienna

  Epilogue: Human Behavior

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  PART ONE:

  BIRTHDAY CAKE AND A GUN

  CHAPTER ONE:

  SHARK BEHAVIOR

  In the open ocean, fish often swim together in schools. This is typically a strategy to find food or evade predators. But in the waters off the Galápagos Islands there is a school of fish like no other in the worldg….

  Thousands of hammerhead sharks congregate and swim in intricate patterns, the only species of shark to exhibit schooling behavior. Scientists still don’t know why.

  Have they come here to feed and take refuge in a hostile ocean? Are they selecting potential mates? Or are they engaging in mysterious social behaviors that an outside observer could never understand?

  My name is Colin Fischer. I’m fourteen years old and weigh 121 lbs. Today is my first day of high school.

  I have 1,365 days left until I’m finished.

  Colin clutched his precious, dog-eared Notebook to his chest. The Notebook had seen better days, though it had been fastidiously cared for. Its red cover was faded, the metal spiral down its side showed the wear of a slow but inevitable unraveling, and the holes in the cardboard were worn down from constant opening and closing.

  The Notebook, in Colin’s way—unspoken, but demonstrated—was loved.

  He pushed his way through the sea of humanity around him, sometimes bobbing, sometimes swimming, eyes downcast to avoid the gaze and attention of any predator that might hunt the hallway. Collisions with other students occurred, though infrequently, in spite of Colin’s best efforts. “Excuse me,” he would say without looking as someone brushed his arm. “Please don’t touch me,” as elbow met elbow. “I’m sorry.”

  Colin’s eyes flicked upward, having counted every step before this last one, knowing there were precisely twenty-seven between his locker and the Boys’ Room. The heavy wooden door dwarfed him, and for a moment Colin fixed on the blue triangular sign just next to it. Colin didn’t like the color blue. It made him feel cold.

  Still, he pushed against the door, taking care to protect the Notebook from coming into contact with any part of it—especially the blue triangular sign.

  The Boys’ Room was dimly lit and dirty. Colin carefully set his Notebook on a narrow black shelf and stood at the white porcelain sink. He noted with a wince that the sink itself was not very clean or well-cared-for, and after a moment’s hesitation turned on the faucet (one turn–beat–two turns–beat–three turns, now wash). Two drops of soap from the dispenser—blue, which Colin didn’t like, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  It was only after rinsing his hands, when his bespectacled eyes met his own in the decaying mirror, that Colin realized he was not alone. Wayne Connelly stood behind him.

  Wayne was a beast, Colin’s opposite in every way. He was broad, thick, giving the impression that he might have been carved out of solid rock rather than born from flesh-and-blood woman. Colin turned toward him, and Wayne smiled.

  Colin scrutinized the smile. Analyzed it. What did it mean? He pictured a series of flash cards, each with a different sort of smile drawn on it, each carefully hand-labeled for proper identification:

  FRIENDLY. NERVOUS. HAPPY. SURPRISED. SHY. CRUEL.

  “Hello, Wayne,” Colin said, as if he were reading from a script. “How are you today?”

  Wayne’s smile widened as he grabbed Colin, quick for someone of his size. His indelicate fingers twisted the material of Colin’s striped polo shirt, then hoisted him into the air and carried him toward a bathroom stall.

  “My shirt,” Colin observed. “You’ll ruin it.”

  “Bill me, Fischer,” Wayne answered. He kicked the stall door closed with a loud clack that made Colin shudder. “After you say hello to the sharks.”

  CRUEL, Colin decided as his head went into the toilet, thrashing but helpless. The smile was definitely CRUEL.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA

  I want to tell you about a problem.

  It is called “The Prisoner’s Dilemma,” and it’s very interesting because it is a math problem about telling the truth. The problem does not concern real prisoners, just hypothetical ones. “Hypothetical” means it is a logical construct, a scenario to help illustrate the problem space.

  It goes like this: Two criminals collude on a robbery. They are arrested and taken for questioning by the authorities. The problem concerns how they answer, and the consequences of the information they choose to provide. The prisoners have two possible strategies to deal with the police: They can “cooperate” with each other, or they can “defect.” “Cooperate” means they lie, and “defect” means they tell the truth.

  I think it would be simpler to say “lie” and “tell the truth,” but I did not make up the problem.

  If both prisoners lie, they both get a minimal sentence. If one lies but the other tells the truth, the liar gets the maximum sentence and the honest one goes free. If both tell the truth, both receive a minimal sentence with early parole.

  This means it is better to tell the truth. A lie will never pay off, and it may cost you a lot.

  The Fischer house was in every way ordinary.

  Nestled in the northwestern corner of the San Fernando Valley, it more or less resembled every other house nestled in the northwestern corner of the San Fernando Valley: two stories, a beige exterior, and architecture that attempted (halfheartedly) to evoke Spanish colonialism.

  The backyard contained one unique feature: a trampoline, well-used, bought for Colin when it was discovered that bouncing helped him relax, focus, and think. Here, reassured by intermittent weightlessness, he was free to imagine himself unbound by earthly concerns. Up-down, up-down, up-down…usually for hours, and always alone.

  Colin stood at the gate, eyes fixed on the trampoline, his hair matted and his clothes soaked. In his hand, he clutched his Notebook, which had mercifully been spared Colin’s unexpected and unwanted encounter with the toilet. For a moment, he considered losing himself to the trampoline’s elastic embrace—but then he thought better of it. His wet clothes would in turn make the trampoline wet, and that simply would not do.

  Instead, Colin hurried up the walk and burst into the kitchen.

  He barely registered the presence of his parents and younger brother gathered around the breakfast table, so he did not see their looks of surprise and concern, or in Danny’s case, the look of weariness, exasperation, and vague dread. Even if he had seen them, Colin would have had neither the time nor the inclination to process or understand them. Colin was on a very particular mission, on his own particular timetable.

  Mrs. Fischer checked her watch: eight A.M. “That was a quick first day,” his mother observed, her irony as lost on Colin as it usually was. “Taking ‘homeroom’ kinda literally, aren’t we?”

  Mr. Fischer nodded as he rose from his place at the table. He started after Colin like a border collie off to round up an errant sheep. “Whoa there, Big C.”

  Colin stopped in his tracks,
a learned response to his father’s kind but commanding voice. He turned toward his father, head tilted down, avoiding his gaze—not out of shame, but because Colin avoided any gaze unless absolutely necessary. It had the effect of making the boy seem perpetually sad, although he almost never was.

  “Lose a fight with a fire hose?” Mr. Fischer asked, watching the water drip from Colin’s soaked polo shirt onto the tile floor.

  His mother didn’t wait for the answer. She was already halfway up the stairs. Fourteen years of the unexpected had trained her to swing into action on a moment’s notice, even in the absence of complete information or explanation. “I’ll get a towel.”

  Danny shook his head as he realized Colin’s predicament and what had likely brought him to it. “Holy crap,” he said. Then he saw his father’s reproachful look and turned back to his pancakes. “Yeah, yeah. ‘Eat your breakfast, Danny.’ I know.”

  His mother reappeared a moment later. Colin took the towel she offered, careful not to touch her, and began to run it through his hair.

  “So we’re waiting for the story,” his father said. He leaned against the kitchen wall with his arms folded, fixed on Colin with his particular, patient CONCERN, letting the suggestion hang there. You couldn’t push Colin to do or say anything, but if you made your expectations clear, he invariably gave you what he felt you needed—if not precisely what you asked for.

  “I got wet,” Colin said, as if that explained everything. Which in Colin’s mind, it did. Then he turned and climbed the stairs toward his room.

  “Way to crack the old whip,” Danny said, and went back to his breakfast.

  The first thing a visitor to the Fischer house would notice about Colin’s bedroom was the portrait hanging over his bed. It was a framed, black-and-white photograph of Basil Rathbone in a deerstalker cap and a houndstooth cloak with a long, curved pipe perched on the edge of his bottom lip. His pose was thoughtful and distant, as though he were aware of the photographer but possessed of greater concerns. He was in this portrait not Basil Rathbone at all—he was Sherlock Holmes.1