“You don’t think it’s creepy when Charlie does that?” I asked Max.
He laughed. “Why is it creepy?”
But I couldn’t explain it to him.
It was after dinner. Max had dinner with us every night, after Callie’s big discovery. Sometimes he had a bulky video camera riding his shoulder, but he didn’t like that, you could tell it made him uncomfortable to film us. He was always jerking his face back from the eyepiece so that he could look at us directly and he turned the camera off as soon as everyone was done eating.
Dr. Paulsen was trying to be nonchalant about it, but I could tell she was excited. Every time Charlie signed behind his back, she would stop talking and just watch.
“Maybe you’re jealous,” Max teased. “Charlie’s getting a lot of attention.”
“You don’t think it’s possible he’s just fooling you?”
What was most unnerving were the things Charlie placed in the past: some were references to games and toys he had, but there was also a string of nonsense—all the signs we’d taught him, but out of order.
“That’s pretty cynical.”
“You’re going to ask Charlie about his past lives? Reincarnation?”
“Maybe.”
This was the problem with Max. He was no good to play with. I found it insulting. It made me want to poke at him more.
Max began to pack up the camera. I followed him to the door.
“Well, you guys better hurry up with all this stuff so we can move back to Boston already.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Max said. “Besides, I thought you were starting to like it here.”
“What’s there to like?”
He shook his head. “Good night, Charlotte.”
It wasn’t until closer to bed that my father noticed Max left behind his camera bag. “Just bring it up to his office and put it outside his door,” my father told me. “Hurry up, now, before you go to sleep.”
Max’s office was on the floor above our apartment. It was a wide room with too-tall ceilings with murals painted across them. It wasn’t his office, actually: it was Dr. Paulsen’s, and Max worked there at a smaller desk beside her large one.
My father told me to leave the camera bag outside his door, but when I got there the lights were still on. I pushed open the door. I put the bag on Max’s desk. And that’s when I saw it. A book titled Man or Beast? and then a semicolon holding back a spill of words I did not understand, sublimation, subaltern, a whole pool of words above the author’s name: Dr. Frances Gray. Printed across the very top of the book, in block letters UNCORRECTED PROOF. I probably would not have picked up the book if it didn’t have that portrait of Julia Toneybee-Leroy as its cover.
I flipped through the pages—a lot of chapter headings with more confusing words, like liminal space and hegemony and appropriation. In the middle of the book was an insert of pictures. It was hard to tell what they were supposed to be at first. Each one had underneath it, written in tiny, cramped script, Study of Nymphadora by Dr. Terrence Gardner.
At first I thought it was a drawing of two enormous peach pits, side by side. They were done in carefully wrought red ink, the lines sharp and small and eager and frantic. In the corners, up and down the sides, were equations: sines, cosines, brackets.
I stared at them for a long time until I knew. I recognized the slope of a back and the insides of legs. And then I felt sick. I looked and I looked, turned more and more pages, and then I began to cry.