Then Shark came out. The woman let out a stream of excited babble and stepped forward to meet him, trailing mud. The man tagged along, holding the youngest by the hand. Those family pets do have a knack for getting lost. And getting into trouble. You might say they’re born with this talent. The girl, scratching at a zit on her cheek, was looking sideways at Scarlet One. I wondered how he was feeling. He stood there somber and silent.
Shark put all of his teeth on display and invited them to the office. They all filed inside. Except for him. Once the door slammed after them I wheeled over to it, took out the plug, which is only allowed in the most dire of circumstances, and proceeded to watch them. I’m always curious about parents. Especially of that kind.
The woman was bawling. Making crunching noises into her handkerchief, smearing lipstick with it, licking the snot off her lips, and grabbing at her face. Robustly and affirmatively. The man perspired demurely. The coat he had on was really heavy. The children pinched each other. Shark nodded thoughtfully.
“Our house has gone to hell! To hell, you hear?” the woman proclaimed, interspersing this information with incessant sobs.
Shark nodded. Yes, he heard. The House he spent his time in wasn’t much better, in fact, so could they maybe get to the point?
“He is killing us,” the woman explained. “Slowly. Day after day. He is tormenting and humiliating us. He’s a murderer! A sadistic killer!”
“You wouldn’t know, looking at him,” Shark said politely.
This statement made the woman in the red coat explode.
“Of course!” she shrieked. “Of course! Why do you think we brought him here? No one believes us! No one!”
Shark had seen some really strange people in his life, but this was a bit too much even for him.
“We do not accept youths with criminal tendencies,” he said sternly. “This is not a penal facility.”
“He’s not criminal,” the man interjected. “That’s not what we meant.”
“You see,” the woman said, realizing she’d gone overboard. She switched from crying to an intimate whisper. “He always knows everything. About everybody. It’s horrible. He is one of them . . .” She winced, searching for the right word.
“Savants?” Shark prompted, intrigued.
“If only! Worse, much worse! All kinds of things happen when he’s around. Things appearing out of nowhere. Technology breaking. Televisions . . . one, then another. And the cat’s gone mad! The poor creature couldn’t take it anymore.”
She went on, but Shark lost interest. He didn’t like crazies. His face clearly showed that he’d tuned out somewhere around the bit about the cat.
“Are you sure?” he asked perfunctorily when the woman paused. Just to be polite.
“Yes! Anyone in my place would be sure.”
And she trotted out a litany of ironclad proofs, prominently featuring her own little kids. Those underage piranhas. Apparently “they would not let pass a single word that wasn’t true.”
“Tell this nice gentleman if Mommy’s telling the truth.”
The truth detectors, busy shoving and pinching each other behind her back, took a short break from their activities and eagerly nodded a couple of times.
“And those baldies are tagging after him,” the boy added. “They’re like completely nuts. They pee in our building by the elevator. They’ll keep coming until we get him out of there. Or until they throw us all out.”
Shark goggled, but didn’t pursue it further. Apparently, though, the love of truth had its limits, because this contribution earned the boy a whack upside the head from his mommy, and he shut up.
“We are decent people, you know,” she said proudly. “We’d never invent something like this. We’ve never had any deviations on my side of the family, thank you very much.”
The man cringed guiltily. On his side of the family they clearly did.
“We showed him to the best specialists,” the woman said, dabbing the corner of her eye. “But he pretended to be normal. Made fools of us. One time they even said that it’s us who needed to be checked. The indignity of it! The humiliation!”
Crunch, sniffle, snort.
Shark scratched his head.
“I don’t see how we could be of help. Our specialization is children with diminished physical capacity. You might be better served by . . .”
“He’s epileptic since age ten,” the woman interrupted. “A horrible sight. Just horrible. Would that work for you?”
“Well, not exactly, that’s a different area altogether . . .”
This is where I stopped listening. It was clear enough. The administration was going to pump them for money and then accept the newbie. The house is full of healthy people with scary stuff in their medical histories. And others who are written up for something completely different from what they have. Boring. The Scarlet One was still by the wall. Now I knew what made him special. So I wheeled over to him.
“Ask to be put in the Fourth. We don’t have a television. Never had. And cats only come in winter. Even if you make a couple of them crazy, no one is going to make a big deal out of it. Got it?”
