A Broken Kind of Life (18 page)

SPENCER:
Your mom sounds amazing
.

AARON:
She really is. I couldn’t imagine growing up without her
.

SPENCER:
I had Dad and my Aunt Nelle. My dad was everything to me growing up, mom, dad, interpreter, everything. He and my Aunt Nelle learned sign language with me. They studied everything they could about ASL so that they could help me. It took me a long time to realize how hard that must have been for my dad, taking care of a premature deaf baby on his own after his wife had been murdered
.

AARON:
What happened to her? You said she was mugged
.

AARON:
I’m sorry. You don’t have to talk about it
.

SPENCER:
No, it is okay. She was a nurse. One night as she was leaving the hospital where she worked, a guy attacked her in the parking garage. He raped her and then shot her and left her for dead
.

Aaron’s insides froze, and he was thankful Spencer couldn’t hear the pained sound that came out of his chest. Adrenaline and tortured memories screamed through him, filling his body with fear. His hands shook on the keyboard, and every rational thought disappeared like a flash of lightning. A deep throbbing he recognized as his heartbeat echoed through his head until there was nothing left.

The computer beeped with another message, but he couldn’t force himself to look. Shocked into horrified silence and nearly incapacitated by the mention of the word “rape,” Aaron stared unseeing at his desk and tried to will the panic attack creeping up his spine to wait… just wait until Spencer left. Another long, deep breath and his frantic heart slowed enough for him to stay upright.

“Aaron.” Spencer’s voice, clear and strong, filtered through the fog of panic and pain. Aaron raised his head to meet Spencer’s message on the screen.

SPENCER:
What did I say? Please tell me so I do not say it again. I do not want to upset you
.

Aaron stared at the screen as his throat closed around the breath trapped in it. No force in heaven or on earth could make him utter those words to Spencer, even electronically. He could not talk about it—ever—not to Spencer, not to anyone. His parents knew; he could see the shame in his mother’s eyes. They’d found… well, evidence when they’d taken him to the hospital. She asked him about it exactly once and decided his reaction wasn’t worth getting him to talk about it. It was the closest he’d ever come to ending his own life, and his mother would never take that chance again.

AARON:
I can’t
.

AARON:
I can’t talk about it
.

AARON:
Please
.

Before Spencer could respond, his mother stuck her head in through his bedroom door. Something in Aaron’s face made her pause, and she looked at him for a long moment and then glanced at Spencer.

“Boys, dinner is ready,” she said quietly, making sure to look at Spencer when she said it so he would understand. Aaron closed his laptop, and Spencer did the same. They both sat quietly as Aaron’s mother left, unsure what to say to each other in the awkward silence. When Aaron looked into Spencer’s face, he saw the pity he hated so much.

S
PENCER
’
S
chest ached. When he’d looked back through the conversation to see what he could have said to set Aaron off, one word stood out among all the others—raped. His father had been right. Aaron’s sympathy aside, only that word would have caused his extreme reaction to the story of his mother’s death. God, he felt sick.

Aaron unfolded himself from the desk chair and walked over to the bedroom door like he was going for his last meal. Spencer wanted so badly to hug his friend and take away every bit of his pain. The depth of it remained in his eyes, those fathomless blue eyes that hid nothing from the world. Not as eloquent as his father nor as empathic as his aunt, Spencer said nothing as Aaron wrapped his frail arms around himself.

He followed Aaron downstairs to an open dining room situated between the kitchen and family room. Two boys sat on the couch just beyond the dining room table and played a video racing game with tiny little characters in primary colors. Steering wheels in their hands, they held them out like weapons, crashing into each other on particularly wild turns. Their smiles and silent laughter made Spencer envious.

He turned to watch Aaron help his mother set up platters of hamburger patties, packages of buns, a bowl of fries, and a load of other serving dishes on an island in the center of the kitchen. It looked like a tiny buffet, with plates and silverware on the counter across from it. Spencer saw Aaron’s mother call the other two boys for dinner just as their father, who looked remarkably like an older Aaron, came into the room.

“You must be Spencer. Aaron has told us so much about you,” he said as he held out his hand. Spencer took it tentatively and had to swallow hard before he answered. Meeting this many new people in one day made his skin crawl.

“It. Is. Very. Nice. To. Meet. You,” Spencer repeated, just as he had with Aaron’s mother, giving the minimum his aunt would allow him to get away with. He hovered in awkward silence near the table as the family milled about in the open space. Aaron’s father wandered over to grab the boys, who, heedless of their mother’s instructions, continued to play their game. His whole life, it had been just him and his father. Spencer had never played sports, wasn’t in band, and had few real friends, so his house had been calm and quiet growing up. He never had the rowdiness and chaos of three boys and two active parents. He wondered what it was like.

A hand touched his arm, and he jerked from his thoughts.

“Here, honey, just fill this right up and take a seat next to Aaron,” Mrs. Downing said as she handed him a plate. He looked over to see Aaron drop into a chair on the far side of the table with a plate half full of food. A harsh growl rumbled through his stomach, and he wondered briefly if Aaron’s mother heard it. In his family, cookouts were reserved for family get-togethers and Dad’s professional friends. They didn’t even own a grill. Spencer took the plate over to the island, which nearly overflowed with food, and began to fill it.

“It’s good to see a boy with a healthy appetite,” Aaron’s mother said after tapping him on the arm to get his attention. He could tell by the way she looked at her son that the comment was more directed at Aaron than at him. Aaron glanced up at the comment but didn’t say anything. The pain still lingering in his eyes from their earlier conversation tore at Spencer. Carrying his plate carefully with both hands, he set it down at the place next to Aaron on the far side of the table.

“There are drinks in the refrigerator. Take whatever you want,” Aaron told him as he looked up briefly from his plate to make sure Spencer could see his mouth. Aaron’s brothers and father came in from the other room, and Spencer squeezed in around them to grab the first soda he could from the refrigerator. The shorter boy elbowed the taller one in the ribs and said something Spencer didn’t catch, but the older boy moved out of his way with an apologetic grin. The camaraderie between them made his heart ache for Aaron, who sat alone at the table.

He sat next to Aaron and pulled his plate closer just to keep an arm from going around his friend, who looked so lost Spencer couldn’t bear to see it.

“Hey, Spencer, are you….” The rest of the older boy’s statement was lost to Spencer as he crammed a handful of french fries into his mouth. He looked at Aaron, who studied his food like he had an exam on it later that night.

“Allen, for goodness sake, swallow before you talk,” Mrs. Downing said after setting her plate at one of the heads of the table. Mr. Downing put his plate at the other and affectionately bumped his middle son on the head with his hand.

“Allen, he has to read your lips. He can’t understand you if your mouth is crammed full of food. Show some respect,” Aaron admonished and finally looked up, and for a long moment the entire family stood perfectly still, frozen in place as they stared at Aaron. Spencer had no idea what was happening but remained quiet until the moment passed.

“I’m sorry. I just asked if you were a programming major like Aaron,” Allen said with an empty mouth and a glance at his older brother.

Aaron didn’t talk much during dinner, but he did put in a few words every now and then, mostly in response to something Spencer had said. Even Spencer could tell he was making a sincere effort to be social. It made things so much easier. While he still felt a little self-conscious when he spoke, no one at the table batted an eye at the way he must have sounded. Living with Aaron and his panic attacks, they must be used to people being different.

They had accepted him effortlessly into their lives, and he couldn’t tell them how much that meant.

After dinner, Allen and Anthony went back to their game, but not before reminding Aaron that they had four controllers and asking if Spencer and Aaron would play too. Spencer took one look at Aaron’s tired and drawn face and decided maybe he should go. He didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay and play games with Aaron and his brothers, but he could see Aaron had hit his social limit for the day.

“Maybe. I. Can. Come. Back. And. Play. Sometime,” he told Allen with a meaningful look at Aaron, who was staring passively at the floor.

“You’re welcome anytime,” Mrs. Downing told him with a hand on his shoulder and a quick look at her eldest son. The longing in her face was unmistakable.
Please come back. Please be a good friend to him. Please, just… please.

Spencer followed Aaron to the front door, away from the boisterous activity of the house. Picking up his shoes, he sat on the stairs leading up to the second floor as he put them on. Aaron shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he waited with Spencer’s book bag in his hand.

“Thank you,” he told Spencer as he handed him the bag. Even through his deafness, Spencer heard so much in those two words, and he understood. Friends were hard for him too, and he knew he had made one of the best of his life that night, simply for knowing when not to push.

AARON
:
No, we need to turn this into an object and use an instance. We can reuse it for other kinds of messages
.

SPENCER:
How
?

AARON:
By making the API names and local file names properties of the object
.

SPENCER:
That’s brilliant! Have you heard anything from Mayer
?

AARON:
Oh yeah, he e-mailed me earlier, and we have a green light. He said he’s “intrigued.”

SPENCER:
Hell yeah!

AARON:
The e-mail he sent you is probably sitting in your school account. You know, the one you never ever check
?

Aaron laughed, which he had done more and more often over the past week. In fact, it was starting to feel normal rather than foreign. Spencer was a great partner, bright and efficient, and was turning out to be a great friend as well. They hadn’t talked any more about their pasts after dinner with his family, but they were starting to learn each other’s eccentricities. Aaron knew, for example, that Spencer got very frustrated having to sit in the back of the class. He felt like a spectacle, but the school administration had forced the interpreter on him in an effort to avoid any appearance of discrimination. What he really wanted was for the instructors to use voice recognition software, but the school said they weren’t going to burden their professors with the time needed to train the software with their voices, not when there were interpreters available.

After all—it was Spencer’s problem, not theirs.

Spencer, on the other hand, had learned that if it looked like rain, he needed to take careful notes for his friend. He’d once asked Aaron about it, but Aaron couldn’t really explain why he just couldn’t get out of bed when it looked like it might storm.

Aaron felt their project was going very well so far. They had coded all the back-end classes, error handling, and security. It had been accessed through a very simple command line interface, but they were to the point now where they needed to work on a pretty user interface. After that, they could put it on the Internet and start beta testing.

AARON:
We’re going to have to do this part in person. Do you want to stay in the lab for a while
?

SPENCER:
We can’t. There is another class after this one
.

AARON:
I don’t want to go into the main lab. Do you want to come over to my house
?

SPENCER:
Well, my house is quieter, and my desktop is better for interface work. It will be easier to see the design on my huge monitors. There’s more space to work than on a laptop
.

Aaron looked at his friend as he sat next to him in the lab. This was a big step for Aaron, and they both knew it. What if something happened? Spencer was right about his computer at home, though. It just made more sense to go to Spencer’s. Aaron could bring his laptop and work from anywhere.