The reporter was on us by the end of January. That careening, desperate Thanksgiving dinner badly frightened Miss Toneybee-Leroy. Dr. Paulsen was worried, too, despite her attempts, with cookies and confidences, to hide it. For weeks, her mouth was a blush of yellow chalk dust.
My mother tried to convince the two of them that there was nothing to worry about. Uncle Lyle and Ginny were too disgusted with our family to ever talk. The whole business was just as mortifying to them as it was to us. The ultimate rebuke, for them, was silence.
But no one at the Toneybee believed her. She was not, at that point, a credible source. They decided, in another showing of Dr. Paulsen’s clammy, frenzied cunning, to scoop themselves.
After a Christmas spent watching Charlie scrape the wrapping off shoe boxes filled to the brim with Raisin Bran, after a New Year’s Eve celebrated in the dim glow of our father’s television set while Callie lit a noxious stick of incense at midnight for good luck and prosperity, the cheap oils in the stick bringing in a new year dank and far too sweet, we had a guest for dinner.
All I remember about him was his soft belly that poked through the button gaps of his dress shirt. It made me queasy whenever I caught a glimpse of it. He never announced himself as a reporter and my mother never called him that, either. She said only, “This is Paul, he’s our guest for the day. He’s here to learn more about the experiment. Please be polite, girls.”
Paul played catch with my mother and Charlie and fast-forwarded through Max’s videotapes and ate dinner with us, during which he attempted to win me and Callie over with the voice of an adult unused to children—all brightened vowels and sly teasing. I stonewalled most of his questions, but Callie, of course, helpfully and happily chattered away about her love for Charlie. She taught Paul to sign I love you and Hello, giggling when he bungled the movements.
Paul’s article came out in February, just in time for Black History Month. We saw it on a Sunday, on the front page of the science section of the Boston Globe. There was a photo Max snapped of us, unaware, months before: me and Callie and Charlie and my parents making spaghetti. To the Toneybee’s credit, they did not crop our father out of the picture. The caption read BREAKING BREAD WITH AN UNUSUAL BROTHER.
The article itself detailed Charlie’s sign acquisition, his love of my mother, Callie’s love of Charlie. There was a short paragraph about the book Man or Beast? and a brief quote from Frances Gorey, but these were buried beneath a longer interview with Miss Julia Toneybee-Leroy, who was featured in a full-length photo on the inside page, smiling gummily, the skeleton of Daisy, yellowed now, on the table beside her.
“Everyone’s going to see this,” I choked to my mother.
“I thought you would like it.” She looked pained. “I thought you would be proud.” She slowly realized her mistake. “Maybe it won’t be that bad,” she said hopefully. “How many high-schoolers read the science section of the Boston Globe?”
But she was wrong. The reaction at school was surprisingly swift. The biology teacher clipped the whole article out and tacked it to her classroom bulletin board. The history teacher did the same. The principal made an announcement over the loudspeaker at lunch: he mentioned me and my father by name. By second period I found out that a gaggle of freshman girls raided the library and cut the picture of our family out of the paper and taped it to the inside of their locker doors. The girls who did this were not the most popular ones, of course. The most popular could not have cared less. The girls who did this were the quieter ones, the studious ones, the vegetarians, the ones who stickered their political beliefs across their binders. The ones who actually read classroom bulletin boards.
I am not proud to say that I reveled in the attention. I thought it was a bit of good luck. If I couldn’t have Adia, maybe I could at least have fans. I thought those girls were outliers, the first to pick up on my value. The more popular ones would come later. Maybe, I thought, maybe I had been wrong to suppress Charlie for so long: maybe the very thing I hated was my ticket to acceptance. At the very least, at the very most, it gave me a chance to triumph over Adia. In the cafeteria, at lunch, I signed for anyone who asked.
What was most surprising was that no one in Courtland County seemed disturbed by the mention of Frances Gorey’s book. It was true that her research was only referred to in passing as “unfounded allegations.” Courtland County simply believed that this part of the story didn’t apply to them. They didn’t care about history, only biology, only the deep pleasure of gazing into another living animal’s face, only the here and now. Charlie became for them a teen idol, magnified in newsprint.
This did not devastate me. I was, in fact, relieved. I didn’t want to explain the Toneybee to anyone and I didn’t want to have to feel guilty for living there anymore. But I know it devastated Adia. We still weren’t speaking, of course. Photocopies from the Man or Beast? she owned began littering the high school: stacked on the tables in the library, left in the cafeteria. She did all this anonymously, but of course it was her work. But they were not censored, nobody swept them away. They were left out in plain sight for weeks on end, patently unread, their edges curling up in disuse.
While Adia tried to tell the world the truth, the Toneybee’s version began to proliferate. The Globe article was just the beginning: the Washington Post and the New York Times and a column in Psychology Today picked up the story. My mother started a press album where she lovingly pasted a fluttering of clippings from papers across the country. None of these articles mentioned the book, or if they did, it was only in passing. The only article that elaborated on it was the Boston Herald. She refused to clip this one: she wouldn’t even let the paper in our house. “A tabloid,” she said.
The girls at school collected as many snapshots of Charlie as they could. At first, they asked me to annotate them, provide my recollections of when a picture was taken or what happened after a lens flicked. I would oblige, trying to work in a funny story about myself or what I saw on TV the night before or what book I was reading. They listened politely and steered me back to the clippings. A few of them began angling for trips to the Toneybee, but I had enough pride to refuse this. I knew they only wanted to come to see Charlie. When it became clear I wouldn’t be introducing him to anyone, the girls backed off. I still sat beside them at lunch, stubbornly willing the conversation in another direction, any direction away from the Toneybee, but they resisted just as stridently.
So I told stories about Callie and Charlie as if they had happened to me. I did impressions. I pulled faces. I made jokes. I was a hit, for a time.
But I couldn’t stay ahead of the fad. It twisted and turned and then one day, on my way to the cafeteria to talk, once again, about Charlie, I passed some girl’s locker and I saw that she had taken a pair of scissors to her newspaper clipping and cut one straight brutal slit across the photo, straight to Charlie’s face. She’d separated his face from his surroundings by cutting it into the shape of a heart. She’d discarded the rest of us. She taped only the valentine, with Charlie’s worried, anxious face at its center, back into her locker.
The edit became popular. By the time school let out, my family was missing from all those locker doors and it was only Charlie in the center of a collection of hearts of varying size.
I slid miserably toward my father’s classroom. When he saw me in his doorway, he looked surprised.
“To what do I owe this honor?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Is it okay if I just sit here for a little bit?”
“Sure.” His expression didn’t change. He just nodded. “Stay for as long as you like.”
He turned back to his desk, began to fill his briefcase with papers. We didn’t talk until the bell rang to tell us to go home.