Chemistry Read Online Free PDF Page B

like a horse through his mouth. Poor kid.
    “You wanna tell me why you’re here?” I said.
    He just stared at the floor.
    “I won’t call the cops.”
    Still nothing.
    I wanted to leave him—go to the kitchen and fix myself dinner, read a bit, and then head to bed—but I didn’t dare. I didn’t know who he was or what he wanted. If something happened to the church because I let him in here, I would lose my job and my home in one shot. His stubborn silence tried my patience.
    “Look.” I frowned at him. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, and frankly, I don’t care. But I’ve got to know you’re not going to damage the building. Okay? Can you at least assure me of that? I mean I didn’t have to bring you in here, did I? I could have left you outside.”
    At some point during my speech he looked up. He didn’t say a word until I finished, and then he said very few in a thick accent. “Sorry. I’m deaf.”
    We spent the rest of the evening learning to communicate. He could usually read my lips if I made sure he was looking at my face and didn’t try anything ridiculous like over-enunciating every syllable. And he could speak, though he hated to do it. He much preferred to write and sign, which meant I would have to learn some basic ASL. That was fine by me. I knew, as soon as we started talking, we were going to be in each other’s lives for a long time.
    He was a ward of the state, like me. Though not yet aged out, he was unlucky enough to have snagged the world’s worst foster parents. Because he was a “special needs” case, they got an extra stipend to care for him. Of course, the stipend was their primary interest, so when he finally ran away, they never reported him, which was fine with him. He’d been in the system since he was a baby, and he was tired of it. It was win/win: he got out, and they got their monthly allowance, as well as the pleasure of rarely having to deal with him. The trouble was, as an underage deaf boy with a frightening face, where the hell was he supposed to go? So he ended up loitering across the street from our school, taking shelter in the eaves of my church.
    I heated a microwave dinner for him, which turned out to be far less than he needed—he has an impressive appetite—so we ended up at an all-night diner. There, I saw the way he existed in the world. He was utterly visible, a huge bubble of look-at-me, when all he wanted to do was disappear. Everyone saw him, but no one spoke to him. They all spoke to me instead, like I was the master and he was the dog.
    “Would your friend like anything else with that?” they would ask. And if I had any courage, I would have answered, Why don’t you ask him? Do I look like I have a psychic link to his mind? But I didn’t. Because I did have the closest thing to a psychic link: I had his complete confidence.
    I don’t know why he chose me. Probably I never will. He never got along with anyone else. He’s an ornery guy with a short and violent temper. If he weren’t so physically intimidating, that might have been beaten out of him at a young age. As it is, people just tend to avoid him. Best to leave the beast in peace. He must have been starving for real human attention by the time I came into his life.
    I once asked him, “Do you ever get tired of the way people stare at you?”
    And he answered, “Do you ever get tired of being invisible?”
    Yes. Yes. Yes. It must be true for everyone. At some point in life, we are all exhausted by having encountered the same situations over and over again. Let something new happen, we think. Anything. But it never does. By the time we reach high school, we’ve learned that nothing ever changes, and all our efforts will only perpetuate whatever endless cycle we’ve been living in since they day we were born. We are what we are because we don’t know how to be anything else.
    Even now…
    Valentine is a monster on the outside and an angel to his core.
    I am the devil in a