I put the tissue in my pocket, leaned over the desk, and opened the book. “You won’t get my cold; I took a vitamin C,” I said, still trying for a winning note of lighthearted and tolerant reason. “What page are we on?”
“It’s not like I’ll ever have to know this stuff when I’m grown up,” she grumbled.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But you have to know it now.” She clamped her jaw and didn’t say anything, so I pushed a little. “Astor, do you want to be in sixth grade forever?”
“I don’t wanna be in sixth grade now,” she hissed.
“Well, the only way you’ll ever get out of it is if you get a passing grade. And to do that you have to know this stuff.”
“It’s stupid,” she said, but she seemed to be winding down a bit.
“Then it should be no problem for you, because you’re not stupid,” I said. “Come on; let’s look at it.”
She fought it for another minute or so, but I finally got her to the right page. It was a relatively simple problem of graphing coordinates, and once she calmed down I had no problem explaining it to her. I have always been good at math; it seems very straightforward compared to understanding human behavior. Astor did not seem to have a natural gift for it, but she caught on quickly enough. When she finally closed the book again she was a lot calmer, almost contented, and so I decided to push my luck just a bit and tackle another small item of pressing business.
“Astor,” I said, and I must have unconsciously used my I’m-a-grown-up-here-it-comes voice, because she looked up at me with an expression of alert worry. “Your mom wanted me to talk to you about braces.”
“She wants to ruin my life!” she said, hurtling up into an impressive level of preteen outrage from a standing start. “I’ll be hideous and no one will look at me!”
“You won’t be hideous,” I said.
“I’ll have these huge steel things all over my teeth!” she wailed. “It is so hideous!”
“Well, you can be hideous for a few months now, or hideous forever when you’re grown up,” I said. “It’s a very simple choice.”
“Why can’t they just do an operation?” she moaned. “Just get it over with, and I’d even get to miss school for a few days.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.
“Doesn’t work at all,” she said. “They make me look like a cyborg and everybody will laugh at me.”
“Why do you think they’ll laugh at you?”
She gave me a look of amused contempt that was almost adult. “Weren’t you ever in middle school?” she said.
It was a good point, but not the one I wanted to make. “Middle school doesn’t last forever,” I said, “and neither will the braces. And when they come off, you’ll have great teeth and a terrific smile.”
“What do I care; I’ve got nothing to smile about,” she grumbled.
“Well, you will,” I said. “When you’re a little older, and you start to go to dances and things with a really great smile. You have to think of it in a long-term kind of way—”
“Long-term!” she said angrily, as if now I was the one using bad words. “The long term is that I’ll look like a freak for a whole year of middle school and everybody will remember that forever and I’ll always be That Girl with Huge Awful Braces even when I’m forty years old!”
I could feel my jaw moving, but no words were coming out; there were so many things wrong with what Astor had said that I couldn’t seem to pick one to start on—and in any case she had walled herself into such a high tower of miserable anger that whatever I said would just set her off again.
But luckily for my reputation as an urbane negotiator, before I could say anything and have it slammed back down my throat, Rita’s raised voice came floating down the hall. “Dexter? Astor? Come to dinner!” And while my mouth was still hanging open, Astor was up and out the door and my little encouraging chat about braces was over.
I woke up again on Monday morning in the middle of an enormous sneeze and feeling like a Turkish weight lifter had spent the entire weekend squeezing every bone in my body. For that one confused moment between waking and sleeping I thought the psycho who had hammered Detective Klein into a limp pudding had somehow gotten into my bedroom and worked me over while I slept. But then I heard the toilet flush, and Rita hurried through the bedroom and down the hall toward the kitchen, and normal life lurched up onto its feet and stumbled on into another day.
I stretched, and the ache in my joints stretched with me. I wondered whether the pain could make me feel empathy for Klein. It didn’t seem likely; I’d never been cursed with t
hat kind of weak emotion before, and even Lily Anne’s transformational magic couldn’t turn me into a soft-shelled empathy feeler overnight. It was probably just my subconscious playing connect-the-dots.
Still, I found myself dwelling on Klein’s death as I got up and went through my morning routine, which now included sneezing every minute or so. Klein’s skin had not been broken; a remarkable amount of force had been used on him, but there had been no blood spilled at all. It was my guess—and the Passenger hissed its agreement—that Klein had remained conscious as every bone in his body had been shattered. He’d been awake and alert for every smash and crunch, every agonizing smack of the hammer, until finally, after a very impressive period of agony, the killer had done enough internal damage to allow Klein to slip away into death. It was much worse than having a cold. It didn’t sound like a lot of fun—especially not for Klein.
But in spite of my distaste for the method, and the Dark Passenger’s contempt, I really did start to feel the limp fingers of empathy tickling at the inside of my skull—empathy, yes, but not for Klein. The fellow feeling that sent small tendrils curling into my thoughts was all for Klein’s executioner. It was totally stupid, of course—but nonetheless I began to hear a niggling little whisper in my inner ear that my only real objection to what had been done to Klein was the use of the wrong tools. After all, hadn’t I made sure that Valentine, too, stayed awake to feel every moment of my attention? Of course, Valentine had earned it with his habit of molesting and killing young boys—but were any of us truly innocent? Maybe Detective Klein had been a tax cheat, or a wife beater, or perhaps he had chewed food with his mouth open. He might have deserved what the so-called psycho had done to him—and really, who was to say that what I did was any better?
I knew very well that there was a great deal wrong with that unpleasant argument, but it stayed with me anyway, a discontented murmur of self-loathing in the background as I ate my breakfast, sneezed, got ready for work, sneezed, and finally took two cold pills and headed out the door, sneezing. I couldn’t shake the absurd notion that I was just as guilty—perhaps far more so, since Klein was the only victim of this killer so far, and I had fifty-two glass slides tucked away in my rosewood souvenir box, each with its single drop of blood representing a departed playmate. Did that make me fifty-two times as bad?