He pats his pockets, but anything helpful would have been removed. He knocks again with his boot, whamming it as hard as he can, and the sound isn’t even loud enough to catch the attention of anyone inside the building.
I wave him to me. He comes with reluctance, looking back at the door with every few loping steps.
“There must be a fire extinguisher or something around,” he says. “Maybe I can bash it with that.”
“I looked for fire alarms as we ran. I didn’t see any of those or extinguishers. The building must not be up to code yet. One thing it would have, though, is a back door. It’ll be locked, but it might be thinner.”
He casts one last look at the door, and then he nods. We take off. We reach the first intersection and I stop short, and his hand lands on my shoulder, the first notes of irritation in his voice as he says, “You can do—”
I spin and clap my hand over his mouth. Or I try to. As soon as I raise my hand, he jerks back, his own hands flying up, as if to ward off a blow.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “I just—”
“Don’t do that,” he says. “Don’t ever do that.”
The look on his face makes me freeze. It’s anger, raw anger, and he’s rolling his shoulders, trying to throw it off, but it lingers there, underlaid with something else. Fear.
I’ve wondered why Max is in therapy. With other kids, even if they don’t talk much, I can usually figure out what is wrong: depression, anxiety, eating disorders. Max can be a jerk, but you don’t go to therapy for that. I’ve wondered about anger management—there was a kid with that in my church group, and he’d been withdrawn, like Max, and sarcastic, like Max. But the way Max reacted in the other room, when Gideon lashed out, wasn’t the response of someone with a bad temper. Now he flinched when I raised a hand.
Not a guy who lashes out in anger. A guy accustomed to being the target of that anger. Of being beaten, being abused.
“I would appreciate it if you didn’t stare at me like that,” he says, and his eyes and voice are so cold, I swallow.
“S-sorry,” I say. “I-I stopped because I heard—”
He catches the footsteps now, from down another hall, and he pushes me toward the nearest side one, muttering, “Bloody hell,” and “Can you warn me next time?”
I would have, if you weren’t freaking out because I tried to shush you.
We hurry down the hall and into the first open room.
MAX: CLARITY
Clarity: the quality of being clear, in particular: the quality of coherence and intelligibility.
Max can remember the first time he saw the word. He was five, reading something his mother brought home in a stack of books that he could read but couldn’t understand, not really, and sometimes he’d tell her so, when they’d be in a shop and he’d see some wild adventure story with a bright cartoonish cover and he’d say, “Please, Mum?” Always Mum. Never Mummy, because that was for children, just like the books with the cartoon covers, and he wasn’t a child, well, yes, he was, but he shouldn’t be, because children were loud and sticky and silly, and he saw the way his mother reacted in a room of them, forcing herself through a playdate, nearly plastered to the wall, lest one of the children do something mad, like speak to her.
She had a child of her own, but he wasn’t like others. No, no, not at all. Max was clever, much beyond his years, thank the heavens. So she brought home the sort of books he ought to read and he could read them, and if he couldn’t quite comprehend what he was reading, then he needed more practice, and if she caught him sneaking those adventure novels home from school again … well, he’d get a very stern talking-to, because Max was a clever boy and that’s all he needed: a stern talking-to. Which also meant he was clever enough to hide those books, and he did, but they were not where he first read the word “clarity.”
When he didn’t understand the word in context, he looked it up, as he should, and only when he was quite certain he still didn’t understand did he take the question to his mother. She’d tried, with growing exasperation, to explain it to him.
Clarity: The quality of being clear, in particular, the quality of coherence and intelligibility.
Max eventually came to understand, on an abstract level, what clarity meant, and to also understand that he’d never experienced it, not in any pure form. There were moments when the muddle in his head cleared, but that was not actual clarity, not the way he imagined it, like the perfect tone of a bell, everything else fading to silence. His head was never silent. Thoughts swam and swirled and leaped and sometimes howled, like babies in a cradle, grabbing the bars and screaming for his attention.
Clarity.
He’d come to hold the word as a talisman. Absurdly, perhaps, to focus on it as a way of hoping to gain it. His personal mantra. When the jumble in his head became too much, he’d concentrate on the word until he achieved some measure of it. Not a clear bell in the silence, but Big Ben over Westminster, loud enough to hear above the din.
Clarity, clarity, clarity.
He’d been doing well that evening. Apparently, fear for one’s life is wonderful for inducing clarity—a sudden gust that knocks everything else aside. Which was not to say that his head was always too noisy for him to concentrate. Otherwise, he’d never be able to pull off top grades, thank you very much. Or he had pulled off top grades until the incident, and then, no school for you, Maximus, not just yet, let’s give you time to rest, time to find some clarity, and do you know what you need? Peace and quiet, so much bloody peace and quiet that you feel as if you’re about to go mad, except you can’t, because you already have. Bonkers. Off his trolley. Crazy, crazy, crazy, only we don’t use that word. No sir, not at all.