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eat in peace, but I had to catch
him before he took off for somewhere.
    My parents adopted Ben just before they found
out they were having me. They didn’t know he had Asperger’s. It’s a
high-functioning form of autism. But they were good parents for an
Asperger kid. They were patient and understanding and, to top it
off, Rhoda was a professional psychologist.
    Ben and I didn’t look much alike. I was a
middle European type with brown hair and green eyes. He was more a
southern type, olive-skinned with hair almost black and eyes a deep
chocolate. He had the kind of looks that set girls swooning. All
except one, Kelsey Fritz.
    Ben didn’t eat bacon, which left more for me.
He was an on-again off-again vegetarian. When he first started
that, Rhoda obliged him by planning special dishes that could be
adapted either way. But the habit became so erratic, she lost
track. He now had to do his own adapting, but he let it be known
that it would benefit the rest of us to eat a more plant-based
diet. For health reasons, he emphasized, if not out of regard for
animals.
    Daddy had no intention of changing his ways.
He figured that six non-bacon days a week was good enough for his
health.
    Ben lingered over a second cup of coffee, so
I started right in. “Guess who was at the Brandons’ party last
night.”
    “Can’t possibly.”
    “Kelsey Fritz. I understand she’s been in
therapy. Maybe she wanted to see if she was over her hang-ups.”
    I didn’t need to explain what her hang-ups
were. He’d had firsthand experience with that.
    It all happened more than a year ago. They
were classmates then, at Lakeside. Having a lot of the same
interests, especially science fiction, they got to be great
friends. Or so he thought. People with Asperger’s have trouble
understanding where other people are coming from. To him it seemed
as though he and Kelsey were on the same wavelength. When a sci-fi
movie was playing in Hudson Hills, he asked her to go with him.
    You’d have thought he threatened her with
something ghastly. It was only an innocent movie date, but Kelsey
freaked and literally ran away
    It was the first time he ever asked a girl
out and he thought he must have made some horrible mistake. He kept
trying to find out what he’d done wrong.
    I mean kept trying. He really wanted
to know. It was part of his Asperger’s, the social awkwardness and
the wanting to wrap things up with a neat bow. He could never be
sure he was doing things right. An explanation would have helped,
but she wouldn’t talk to him. She panicked if he so much as got
near her. Being an Aspie, he had no idea that his persistence was
having that effect. And she, being the terrified wimp that she was,
had no idea that her running away caused him to persist—even though
he told her he only wanted to apologize if he’d done something
wrong.
    Finally, she went whining to the school
authorities. (If I sound biased—well heck, I am.) Even though it
should have been in their records that he had Asperger’s, they
seemed to have no clue as to what it was all about. It never
entered their pea brains that they could have solved the whole
problem if they got the two together and helped them understand
each other.
    Instead they suspended him from school,
charged him with sexual harassment (which it wasn’t), and planned a
big lawyer-oriented hearing. (Our daddy was a lawyer, but he did
real estate law, which is relatively harmless.) The whole thing got
Ben so sick and disgusted that he quit Lakeside and transferred to
Southbridge High. I had made the same transfer just a short time
earlier in a futile attempt to escape from Evan Steffers. So
goodbye, Lakeside. From both of us.
    I thought Ben would flinch when I mentioned
Kelsey’s name. He didn’t. He drank his coffee and gazed out the
window.
    “It really surprised me,” I said. “She’s such
a bashful wimp. And now she’ll have even more reason to be
bashful.”
    His eyes shifted to me. I hadn’t