Chapter 16

The tutoring was a happy accident. Someone needed help. Quinn happened to be nearby.

The someone was a kid named Derek Paulson, a sophomore. Derek was a kid with wealthy parents who had high expectations. He was smart enough; he just had poor learning habits.

Derek had been memorizing theorems for the geometry test the way you memorize lines for a play--by repetition. When the test asked him to apply and solve rather than recite, he was lost. He was sitting in the library with his test paper and the expression of someone staring at their doom when Quinn sat down across from him to do his own work.

Derek hadn't asked for help. Quinn looked at the test paper, saw instantly what was wrong, and said, "You're memorizing the wrong layer."

Derek looked at him. "What?"

"The theorem is a conclusion. You memorized the theorem without understanding the logic that proved it. Problem is that the test asks you to use the theorem to solve a puzzle. If you understand why the theorem is true, you can produce answers to puzzles on demand." Quinn turned back to his own book. "That's your problem."

Derek stared at his test paper. "Can you..." He stopped. Started again. "How long would that take? To actually learn it like that?"

Quinn thought about it honestly. "Depends how far back we have to go. Maybe an hour, maybe three."

"Three hours?"

"To actually understand it. But that means you'll still understand it in six months." Quinn looked at him. "How long did you spend memorizing it the wrong way?"

Derek was quiet for a moment. "More than that," he said.

"Right."

They worked for two hours in the library that day, Quinn taking Derek back through the underlying logic of what he'd been trying to memorize. Not doing it for him but asking the questions that made the structure visible. Derek was not dumb. He'd just picked up, at some point, the wrong model.

At the end of the two hours, Derek looked at the material with an expression of annoyed recognition, the look of someone who now understood and was simultaneously pleased and pissed that it was so simple and self-evident.

"How much?" he said.

Quinn looked at him. "How much what?"

"How much do you charge? To help a person like this."

Quinn thought about spending money, how nice it would be to get a soda and a burger when Peter suggested they go somewhere.

"Fifteen an hour?"

Derek said, "Make it twenty."

Quinn looked at him.

"If you charge fifteen, everybody will think you're too cheap and not take it seriously," Derek said, matter-of-factly. "Charge twenty. Twenty is a nice round number and shows that you know your worth."

Quinn thought about this for a moment.

"Twenty it is," he said.

Word got around. By the third week of October, Quinn had four clients. By the end of November, he had seven. He'd set a cap at eight because going above eight was pushing the time he had available. He had his own studies that he didn't dare let slip, not to mention the Colonel's assignments.

If he was going to do it, he was going to do it right. He kept the tutoring professional. He was helpful, patient, and direct. He showed up on time, worked the full hour, and produced good results.

He was careful about one other thing. He did not hit on or flirt with the girls he tutored. This required more care because several of them were genuinely hot. Quinn was fifteen and not indifferent to pretty girls. But he had thought about it and concluded that it was a bad idea.

He'd grown up in places where you learned how people operated when they were afraid, when they were using, or when they just wanted something from you. He had been around girls in all these places and had learned things that most boys in this place were woefully ignorant of.

He was not a virgin. His first was a girl named Rosa during the street time. She was matter of fact about the whole sex thing. They had offered each other comfort during a week of long winter nights.

Katherine Gallagher arrived in the library in the second week of November with the resigned look of someone who had been forced to admit she needed help but really hated that she had to ask for it.

She was, objectively, hot. Added to that, she had the social sophistication of a girl who had grown up wealthy. Like many beautiful girls, she had the unconscious expectations of a person for whom every environment had seemingly been arranged to serve her.

She sat down across from Quinn in the library, crossed her arms, and said, "My parents want me to get a tutor."

"Okay. What do you think?" Quinn said.

"I think math is pointless."

"Huh," Quinn said. "Why bother then?"

"They don't agree."

"Show me your last test."

She showed him. He looked at it for sixty seconds, searching for the patterns behind the mistakes.

"When did you stop understanding it? The math, I mean," he said. "Not stop caring about it. When did you get lost?"

She blinked. "What?"

"There was a time when math stopped making sense, so you decided to stop trying. What grade was that? What topic?"

Her arms uncrossed slightly. She thought about it. "Fractions, probably," she said. "Like fifth grade. Mr. Browning's class. Something about dividing them, and it stopped making sense, and he moved on before I could catch up."

"Okay," Quinn said. "If you choose to work with me, we will be going back to fractions."

She stared at him. "I'm in tenth grade."

"So what? Math is like a high-rise building. In your building, there's a problem on the third floor. You can't add the higher floors to it until you fix the third floor." He opened his notebook to a clean page.

Katherine looked at him with a measuring expression, trying to decide whether he was worth taking a chance on.

"You're not going to tell anyone?" she said.

"My lips are sealed."

She picked up her pencil.

He got up and borrowed a tape measure from the librarian's toolbox. They went back to a basic understanding of fractions.

It took three sessions to get through the foundational work and another two to build back up through the intervening years. Katherine turned out to have a quick, precise mind. She was just behind. Once she caught up, she was good.

Midway through the fourth session, she was working through an algebra problem with the focused delight of someone finding a process that works. Quinn watched her work. When she finished, she set down her pencil and looked at him.

"Why are you being nice to me?" she said.

Quinn looked at her. "I'm not being nice to you. You're paying me. I'm tutoring you."

"You're not being professionally nice. You're being actually nice, and you haven't tried hitting on me." She said it with the matter-of-fact assessment of someone compiling accurate data. "Everyone eventually hits on me."

"Huh. Well, I'm your tutor; I don't hit on my clients."

"That's not why," she said, with the certainty of a girl who has significant experience identifying bad behavior of boys.

He looked at her for a moment. She was watching him, her clear gray eyes genuinely curious.

He sighed. "Okay. Here's the thing, Katherine. You're smart. Really smart, not just socially smart, though you're that too. But like a lot of good-looking girls, you act like being hot is a good strategy for an independent life."

She went still.

"And it's working, right now, in this school. I can see why you get hit on all the time. The problem with your strategy is that down the road, it requires you to be nice to assholes." He paused. "You have a good mind. It's worth developing to see how far you can go with it."

She looked at him for a long moment with an unreadable expression. Then she laughed.

"That's the most direct thing anyone has said to me in maybe ever," she said.

"Huh," Quinn said. "Let's go back to the algebra. Do the next problem."

"You are very weird, you know that?" She picked up her pencil, but she was smiling when she did it. From that session on, she did her best to drop the performance and simply be herself, which was a quick-minded, sharp-tongued girl with a dry sense of humor.

Katherine told her friends that he was okay. Three of his next referrals came from her.

"You know," she said one afternoon, packing up her books, "every other boy in this school would have tried something with my friends by now."

"You think?" Quinn said.

"It's actually kind of annoying. They're not happy."

"Sorry, not sorry."

She threw a pencil at him and left.

Quinn got along with almost everybody at school. It was not that he was broadly popular in the way that the school's actual popular kids were popular. He lacked the breezy, unearned confidence of the kids who had grown up in this world. Plus he didn't try.

Peter, James, and Will were firm friends. He genuinely liked Katherine and her friends. His status on the basketball team had been built through solid performance, earning the respect of the jocks. Even with the stoners, rebels, and delinquents, who skirted the edge of dismissal, nodded to him, maybe recognizing a fellow rebel.

He was not afraid anymore. That still struck him sometimes, as something close to remarkable.

Chapter 17

Peter arrived at the lunch table on a Wednesday in early October with his tablet. He set the tablet on the table, turned it to face Quinn, and pressed play.

"Look at this."

The footage was from the Safeway parking lot security camera. It captured his fight with the carjackers with a strange, cinematic quality. It showed the two men approaching, the interaction, and its conclusion. All visible in a single stream of action. Someone had found it and uploaded it. It had gone viral. Five hundred forty-two thousand views.

Quinn watched it with a sinking feeling.

Shit.

He glanced at the comments but quickly stopped reading. They were a mixture of admiration and speculation, all from people who probably had never been in a fight, assigning a narrative to someone who had.

He pushed the tablet back to Peter.

"Half a million views," Peter said.

"Yeah," Quinn replied.

"You knew about this?"

"I knew the security camera had it. I didn't know some idiot uploaded it."

Peter looked at him. "You don't seem bothered."

"I'm not unbothered," Quinn said. "I just can't do anything about it."

James was reading the comment section on his own phone with the absorbed expression of an anthropologist encountering a previously undocumented tribe. "People think you're a badass," he said.

"I'm a kid."

"People online do not let facts complicate their opinions," Will said without looking up from his notebook.

Quinn opened his lunch, Maria's special, which today contained something with chicken and avocado that he'd been looking forward to since breakfast, and ate. He let the conversation drop, which it did because they were his friends and they knew it bothered him.

The rest of the school, however, had different ideas.

He noticed the change in his third-period history class, which was where you could usually pick up the latest school drama because Ferretti's class contained a good cross-section of all the sophomore class. The attention in the room was different. Kids were looking at him way more than usual. He let it pass the way he let the weather pass. It would settle into whatever it was going to settle into and he would deal with whatever happened.

The reality was that he was always aware that he was not one of them. He had been shaped by different experiences than the kids around him. These were ice cream kids who had been sheltered from the things that had built him.

Not that their lives were peaches and cream. He had seen the results in the tutoring sessions -- the loneliness of kids who had everything material that had been given as a substitute for something else.

He cut them slack for this. He understood that unhappiness was not a function of circumstance, that you could live in a house like the Colonel's house and still be unhappy.

For himself, he was happy, or more accurately, content. This was a fact he looked at regularly with the gratitude of a person who knows what the alternative looks like.

When a negative thought or bit of self-pity arrived, he was quick to laugh at himself. Look how you live, he'd tell himself. Look where you are, dude.

It worked every time.

To the other kids, he was a puzzle.

The girls went to Katherine.

He found this out from Katherine herself.

"You have a problem," she told him one Tuesday, packing up her math that she now took with confidence.

"Huh, what kind of problem?"

"The kind where four separate girls have asked me about you this week." She held up four fingers and counted them off. "Emma wants to know if you're seeing anyone. Caroline Harris wants to know if you're gay because you haven't hit on her, which she finds irritating. Madison Cole just asked me, 'What is his deal?' and stared at me for two minutes waiting for an answer."

Quinn looked at her. "What did you tell them?"

"I told them you were an asshole." She giggled at his shocked expression. "And that you were maybe the only boy in this school who actually sees them as people. It pisses them off because they want you to see them as hot girls."

"But I'm their tutor," he said. "Three of those four girls are my clients."

"That's the other problem," Katherine said. "You're treating them too objectively."

"They're paying me good money. Tutoring doesn't work if there's flirting going on."

"Quinn." She said his name with the patient slowness of someone explaining something to an idiot. "When a girl who looks like Caroline Harris asks you to tutor her, and you actually tutor her and only tutor her, it bothers her. She can't understand you."

"That sounds like her problem," he said.

"It is," she agreed. "But it's your problem too, because now they're getting all obsessed with you, and I am the person who has to deal with it." She picked up her bag. "So manage it."

"How do I manage it?"

"I have absolutely no idea," she said pleasantly, and left.

He thought about this for a while. He was a normal teenager with normal urges, but he had a keen eye for complications. This life was way too good to fuck it up with sex dramas. He concluded that the thing to do was to ignore it. He continued to treat them with the same honest, direct, non-performing attention.

Sheila Prentiss appeared on a Thursday.

Quinn was at his usual table with Peter, James, Will, and now occasionally Katherine. His friends had finally gotten used to the hot girl sitting at their table occasionally and mostly treated her as a normal person instead of a visit from a goddess.

Lunch was its normal chaos. The guys had an elaborate fantasy war game they were building, their own version of Dungeons and Dragons. Today they were arguing about whether the historical Peter the Great would beat the historical Napoleon in a direct engagement. James held the position of that the question was meaningless. Peter and Will ignored him and happily defended their positions. Each was convinced that the other was as wrong as wrong could be.

Sheila Prentiss arrived and plopped down in the empty seat beside Katherine, across from Quinn. She set her tray down with a thump. Then she stared at Quinn with bright smiling eyes.

Quinn stared back. Something was familiar about her.

Then it came to him. The bright, blue-green eyes were the same. The stubborn set of the jaw was the same.

"Pickles, the smart mouth," he said.

Her expression broke into a grin. The cheeky grin of the nine-year-old girl who for a while had been his best friend.

"There he is," she said. "Took you long enough. But you always were kinda dumb."

"You look different," he said.

"So do you." She surveyed him with frank assessment. "You got big."

"Growth spurt."

"You apparently are a ninja too."

"That damn post."

"Half a million people were impressed." She picked up her fork. "You going to introduce me, or are you going to make it weird?"

"Hey, everybody, this is Pic..." He stopped when she frowned at him. "Sheila. Sheila, this is everybody: Peter, James, Will, and next to you is Katherine."

Katherine, whose nose was twitching with curiosity, had already turned to Sheila. Peter was doing the rapid assessment he did with all new data. James and Will were watching, stunned expressions on their faces. They said nothing. Sheila was too good-looking for them to talk to.

"How do you know Quinn?" Katherine asked.

Sheila looked at Quinn. A brief exchange, conducted without words.

"Group home," Sheila said. "Back when we were nine."

"Fourth placement for me," Quinn said. "Second for you."

"You remember?" she said.

"I remember everything," he said.

She laughed, the same big laugh that she had back then in a place that didn't give you much to laugh about. It had been one of the things he'd liked about her, that laugh. The stubborn refusal to be sad no matter what.

He'd been nine. She'd been nine. Sheila had been a real friend. She was a tough kid who would fight at the drop of a hat if you disrespected her. She had been in the system long enough to know what was what. She was the smart mouth of the house, the one with a fondness for pickles. She had impressed Quinn with her skill in making the other kids laugh when something crappy was happening to all of them. It was her own way of surviving and it was a good one.

After the incident, they'd all been transferred. Sheila had gone one direction, and Quinn had gone another. He had never seen her again until now.

"How long have you been at Crispin's?"

"Two years," she said. "Since eighth grade." She said it with the easy ownership of someone who has made a place theirs. "Got adopted. My family are the Prentisses. They're pretty good..." She made a gesture that was calibrated to communicate complicated and mostly fine. "You know how it is."

"Yeah," he said.

"I'm really not complaining. They're good. They mean well and try hard," she said, dropping the ironic distance for a moment. "Sometimes I'm a bitch and they can't quite handle it." She looked at her tray. "It's weird sometimes, the amount of trying they do."

"They sound good," he said.

"You landed okay?" she said. "I guess you must have. You're here now."

"Yeah," he said. "Turns out I have an uncle." The strange word had been finding its feet in his vocabulary since that day in the office. "I didn't know until a while ago."

Sheila nodded. "Cool," she said. Not elaborate, but full of meaning.

"Yeah," he said.

She turned to Katherine, and the two of them started talking about a cheerleader named Linda Avery. She had just broken up with one of the football players because he was cheating on her.

Peter was watching him with the expression of someone with new data he wanted to examine further, while James and Will had resumed the Napoleon vs. Peter the Great argument.

Quinn looked around the table at his friends. Sheila's coming over had reminded him again about his life.

He thought:

Look at your life, dude.

Chapter 18

The sleepover was Katherine's idea, which surprised Sheila; Katherine lived above her in the school's social stratum, but they had been getting gradually closer over the last three weeks since she had sat down at Quinn's lunch table.

Katherine asked on a Wednesday and Sheila had said yes. Friday night, she showed up at the Gallagher house with her overnight bag and the alert quality she had never quite abandoned despite getting her forever family.

The Gallagher house was big in the way that well-to-do people's houses were in this part of the city. The necessity of entertaining meant a certain kind of house with plenty of room. There was a huge living room connected to a formal dining area. She was not in awe. Her new family was, as they called it, comfortable. Plus, she was a long way from the little nine-year-old in a raggedy dress. But the house was still impressive.

Katherine's mom and dad were warm and friendly in the slightly distracted way of parents with full professional lives.

Her room was large and held the accumulated evidence of a childhood spent in one place: posters and photographs, dozens of stuffed animals. The comfortable disorder of a space that belongs completely to its occupant. Sheila sat on the floor with her back against the bed, looked around at it, and felt the feeling she sometimes felt in rooms like this--not envy exactly, just an awareness of a different kind of childhood.

They ordered pizza and wings, watched 'The Promise' on TV, and shared in the way that girls share when they are newly friends and discovering what frequency they have in common.

Katherine was quick and direct and said what she meant, which Sheila had identified in the first week as the quality of honesty that made her worth knowing. The school version of Katherine was also genuine but more managed. Here, in her room, on a Friday night with no audience, she was simply herself.

They talked about the school, the teachers, and the general operational facts of sophomore year. They talked about James, Peter, and Will with the affectionate, analytical interest of people who like their new friends but find them incomprehensible yet interesting.

Then Katherine said, "Tell me about him. He seems so different from the other boys in school."

Sheila had known this was coming since she'd first sat down at the lunch table and watched Katherine's eyes move toward Quinn, rest there, move away and come back. She was not obvious about it, but Sheila had been reading people since she was old enough to understand that reading others was a good survival skill.

"Katherine, he's as different from the other kids at our school as a Bengal tiger is from your cat Elmer."

"Go on." Katherine had her knees drawn up, hugging a pink stuffed pig.

Sheila looked at her. She thought about the video of the parking lot fight. She thought about what the footage showed and what it didn't show.

She thought about Annie.

She thought: this girl is his friend. She wants to understand him.

"You swear to keep this a secret," Sheila said. "I don't want this getting out at school."

Katherine looked at her with direct, serious eyes. "Yes," she said.

She was quiet for a moment, organizing it. She had several versions of the story: the true one that she told herself and a version she told to her therapist. She had never told it to anyone her own age. She had not found, before now, anyone her own age she trusted with it.

She began.

"The place Quinn and I lived back then was called Abernathy House," she said. "A man named Farrow ran it with his wife and his wife's sister, Miss Ella."

She started by trying as best she could to tell what it was like there. She told what it felt like to be a new kid placed in a smelly, run-down place with rats in the basement. There were five kids in the house. She and Quinn had arrived within a month of each other. They were both nine. Quinn was street smart and had showed her the tricks of surviving in a place like that. They were buddies. One watched while the other stole food when there were no meals cooked. They watched each other's backs, a necessity when you live with a bunch of mostly feral kids.

"I shared a room with a girl named Annie who was seven," she said. "She'd been there the longest--fourteen months. She was a tiny kid and was very quiet. Very needy and very scared. The thing I remember about Annie was that she wanted so badly for someone to like her. She'd been in three placements before that one, and the quiet was..." She paused, finding the word. "Trained. You understand what I mean? Not her natural quiet. Trained."

Katherine was sitting there hugging the pink pig with one arm, her other hand covering her mouth. Her eyes were glued to Sheila's face.

"Farrow had a system," Sheila said. "A lot of them do. It's not obvious at first; that's what Quinn kept warning me about. The training develops gradually. There is a simple explanation. You're already there in the house, and by the time you suspect what is going on, you don't quite trust your own reading of it. Quinn, who was at that time completely feral himself, knew about it. He made me and Annie sleep in the closet in his room on the Thursday nights the ladies would go to church bingo."

She had said this to the therapist, who had told her this was called normalization, a word Sheila found accurate and useful and had added to the vocabulary she used to organize the experience. Sheila told Katherine now and watched as she absorbed it.

"Quinn noticed things. Even at nine, he was aware in a way the rest of us weren't. He'd been in more placements, so maybe that was it. Or maybe it was just him." She looked at hands. "The boy's room was across the hall from ours. He started keeping his door open. He moved his bed around in his room so you could see both the window and the door from where he slept. He found a baseball bat in the basement and kept it under his mattress."

Katherine made a sound that was not a word.

"He told me about the bat," Sheila said. "Showed me where it was. Said if anything happened in the night, to make a lot of noise. To scream my head off." She looked at the window, the dark garden outside. "It was like he'd been living like this his whole life. Maybe he had."

The room was very quiet.

Then she explained the sound was still burned into her memory: the peculiar crooning quality of that man's voice, oh so soft and soothing. She still had nightmares about that voice.

"It was a Thursday, so I was in Quinn's closet, all cozy in a little nest of blankets I built. Annie wasn't with me. She hated sleeping in the closet. She was in our bed crying. She was scared.

"I heard the man's voice. I heard Annie crying. I didn't move; I couldn't. I was petrified. I want you to understand that--I heard her crying, and I understood what was going on, but I did not move to help." She said it, her voice flat and emotionless. "I peeked out; that's when I saw Quinn."

He was moving toward our room with the weirdest look on his face. Blank, like he was a zombie. He had the bat in his hand. Next thing, he was in the room. He hit the big man on the back with it, once, twice, then three times--so hard he grunted as he hit. The man was screaming and cursing as he lay on the floor curled up. It was the scariest thing I ever saw. I thought that Quinn was going to kill the man. Then he stopped and grabbed Annie and hustled her into the closet with me. The man was on the floor, moaning."

She was quiet for a moment.

"Then the man's wife and sister were upstairs. They had come back from bingo."

Katherine's face was twisted in horror.

Sheila realized her hands were hurting. She looked down; she had grabbed a pillow, squeezing it convulsively. She forced them to loosen.

"They held him down on our bed," she said. "The wife and her sister. He didn't fight them. He knew what was coming. I watched from the closet.

All he had on was his underpants." She stopped. "They held him down. He was looking back at me. That's what I remember. That he was staring at me calmly. They had a homemade whip. It was three long pieces of extension cord with the outer insulation taken off and then braided and attached to a cut-off broom handle. I had seen it before in the utility room and didn't know what it was for. It made a whooshing sound when Miss Ella swung it.

She beat him with it. At first, he didn't make a sound. Then after a while, he screamed. She kept beating him, screeching like she was crazy. Over and over and over till his back was all bloody."

"When it was done, they all just left him there and went downstairs. After a while, he got up." She breathed. "He got up, grabbed the bat, and limped to where we were. He put a t-shirt on to soak up the blood and sat on the floor by the closet holding the bat.

She was quiet for a moment.

"He didn't say anything, just sat there all night. He didn't sleep. I didn't either because I was scared the man would come back and get me and Annie. Annie did, eventually, because she was seven and exhausted and probably because Quinn always made her feel safe."

Katherine made a sound then. A single, choked sob.

"He went to school the next day," Sheila said. "He didn't say anything to anyone. He went to school and passed out in second period. Our teacher saw his back when they were trying to figure out what was wrong with him, and then all hell broke loose." She made a gesture that compressed the days of institutional response into a single motion. Police, social workers, all five of us transferred immediately. Annie and I were in the same intake facility for two weeks, which was actually good. She was okay. She was going to be okay. I still hope that."

She stopped.

"Quinn was in the hospital for days," she said. "The cuts got infected. I know because a social worker told me when I asked."

She looked at Katherine.

"I never saw him again until I saw him in the hallway last month at school."

Katherine was crying.

Sheila watched her with the complicated affection of someone who respects a real response.

"How are you not..." Katherine started and stopped.

"Crying?" Sheila said. "Oh, I did. A lot. I was scared all the time. My therapist was great." She paused. "And it's also just the way it was. It sounds hard, but you can't let yourself get to feeling like a victim. That's the way things were in some places. You could spend your whole life being wrecked by the way things were, or you could move on." She stopped. "I'm not saying it didn't matter. I'm saying it's not going to ruin my fucking life."

Katherine wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at Sheila with blurry eyes.

"I knew where he was for a couple of weeks," Sheila said. "I had to watch him for a while first. See who he turned into."

"And?"

Sheila looked at the window. She thought about Quinn at the lunch table. Him saying, "Hey Pickles," with his eyes doing that warm thing they did.

"He's the same, only more," she stopped. Her voice cracked a little bit before she managed to regain her composure. "Anyways, that tells you all you need to know about Quinn Norman."

She settled back against the bed and hugged the pillow. The two of them sat together in the warm room. Two girls who had become, in the space of a single night, the kind of friends you seldom find. Lifelong friends.