Thump, thump. My eyes return to the clock. A sinking feeling grows in the pit of my stomach as I watch the minute hand reach 2:46. In this moment, the room above me goes silent. I can picture Dylan staring at his bedside clock, holding my volleyball tightly in his hands. Oh, he knows.
I remember I had been figuring out the last calculus problem, eager to stuff my vid-binder in my backpack and get to my locker before Ryan Mitchell arrived to hover over me with that sick grin. As I punched the numbers into my holographic calculator, something made me look up. The door opened, letting in a wave of sweltering June heat. A few papers flew up from Mr. Hanover's desk and lighted on the floor. I felt a sudden rush of premonition, seeing my father standing inside the door, searching the room for my face and clearly afraid to find it. In a millisecond I knew disaster had struck.
As my dad stood next to my teacher in silence and let his eyes wander the room, I stuffed my binder, stylus, and calculator into my backpack and slid back my chair. I winced at the scraping noise and cringed under stares of puzzlement in my classmates' eyes. Surely the sense of doom and catastrophe was so palpable they all felt it. I could sense those stares following me out the door and even down the staircase to the parking lot.
My first thought was Dylan! Had he wandered out of the house while Debby was manicuring her stick-on fake fingernails? That was Mom's greatest fear-that he'd take off in a daze down the street and end up dodging traffic all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She has never forgotten the day he figured out the dead bolt at age three and crossed town, traversed the interstate-yes, all eight lanes!-and ended up in Millville, two miles away by the time she woke from her nap, searched the yard, and called 911. Dad was out of town at the time, giving a lecture at Princeton, and after Dylan was deposited on our doorstep by an irate and scolding police officer, Mom turned to me-nine years old at the time-and made me swear I would never tell Dad. I never saw her that scared before or since.
And I never did tell Dad. That was our little secret. We just tightened security around Dyl, but as he got older, he showed less desire to explore his outer world. His inner world began to consume him, pulling him inward like a satellite losing its orbit, drawing him down to a lower atmosphere where no rescue was possible. Mom and Dad knew he had "issues." They had comforting labels for him: different, unique, brilliant, savant.