Aaron (21 page)

and finally looked up, and for a long moment the entire family stood perfectly still, frozen in place as they stared at Aaron. He had no idea what was happening, but remained quiet until the moment passed.

“I’m sorry. I just asked if you were a programming major like Aaron,” Allen said with an empty mouth and a glance at his older brother.

Aaron didn’t talk much during dinner, but he did put in a few words every now and then, mostly in response to something Spencer had said. Even Spencer could tell he was making a sincere effort to be social. It made things so much easier. While he still felt a little self-conscious when he spoke, no one at the table batted an eye at the way he must have sounded. Living with Aaron and his panic attacks, they must be used to people being different.

They had accepted him effortlessly into their lives, and he couldn’t tell them how much that meant.

After dinner, Allen and Anthony went back to their game, but not before reminding Aaron they had four controllers and asking if Spencer and Aaron would play too. Spencer took one look at Aaron’s tired and drawn face and decided maybe he should go. He didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay and play games with Aaron and his brothers, but he could see Aaron had hit his social limit for the day.

“Maybe. I. Can. Come. Back. And. Play. Sometime.,” he told Allen with a meaningful look at Aaron, who was staring passively at the floor.

“You’re welcome anytime,” Mrs. Downing told him with a hand on his shoulder and a quick look at her eldest son. The longing in her face was unmistakable.
Please come back. Please be a good friend to him. Please, just… please.

Spencer followed Aaron to the front door, away from the boisterous activity of the house. Picking up his shoes, he sat on the stairs leading up to the second floor as he put them on. Aaron shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he waited with Spencer’s book bag in his hand.

“Thank you,” he told Spencer as he handed him the bag. Even through his deafness, Spencer heard so much in those two words, and he understood. Friends were hard for him too, and he knew he had made one of the best of his life that night, simply for knowing when not to push.

Chapter Twelve

 

AARON: No, we need to turn this into an object and use an instance. We

can reuse it for other kinds of messages.
SPENCER: How?

AARON: By making the API names and local file names properties of the object.

 

SPENCER: That’s fucking brilliant! Have you heard anything from Mayer?

 

AARON: Oh yeah, he e-mailed me earlier, and we have a green light. He said he’s “intrigued.”

 

SPENCER: Hell yeah!

 

AARON: The e-mail he sent you is probably sitting in your school account. You know, the one you never ever check?

Aaron laughed, which he had done more and more often over the past week. In fact, it was starting to feel normal rather than foreign. Spencer was a great partner, bright and efficient, and was turning out to be a great friend as well. They hadn’t talked any more about their pasts after dinner with his family, but they were starting to learn each other’s eccentricities. Aaron knew, for example, that Spencer got very frustrated having to sit in the back of the class. His interpreter was a distraction to the other students, and he favored lip reading anyway. He felt like a spectacle, but the school administration had forced the interpreter on him in an effort to avoid any appearance of discrimination. What he really wanted was for the instructors to use voice recognition software, but the school said they weren’t going to burden their professors with the time it

Aaron

 

takes to train the software with their voices, not when there were interpreters available.

 

After all—it was Spencer’s problem, not theirs.

Spencer, on the other hand, had learned that if it looked like rain, he needed to take careful notes for his friend. He’d once asked Aaron about it, but Aaron couldn’t adequately explain why he just couldn’t get out of bed when it looked like it could storm.

Aaron felt their project was going very well so far. They had coded all the back-end classes, error handling, and security. It had been accessed through a very simple command line interface, but they were to the point now where they needed to work on a pretty user interface. After that, they could put it on the Internet and start beta testing.

AARON: We’re going to have to do this part in person. Do you want to stay in the lab for a while?

 

SPENCER: We can’t. There is another class after this one. AARON: I don’t want to go into the main lab. Do you want to come over to my house?

SPENCER: Well, my house is quieter, and my desktop is better for interface work. It will be easier to see the design on my huge monitors. There’s more space to work than on a laptop.

Aaron looked at his friend as he sat next to him in the lab. This was a big step for Aaron, and they both knew it. What if something happened? Spencer was right about his computer at home, though. It just made more sense to go to Spencer’s. Aaron could bring his laptop and work from anywhere.

AARON: Okay, give me your address and I’ll see if my mom can drop me off there.

 

SPENCER: I can take you, and I’ll bring you home. It’s not a big deal. Then your mom doesn’t need to bother.

 

AARON: I thought your dad dropped you off at my house. You can drive? How can you do that if you can’t hear?

SPENCER: I’m deaf, not blind.

Spencer chuckled and shook his head as Aaron grabbed his phone from his laptop bag. Sending a quick text message to his mom, telling her that Spencer would bring him home later, he was unsurprised when she asked him to e-mail the address. He had Spencer send the e-mail, and he forwarded it to his mom, who told him to have fun. She was probably beside herself knowing Aaron had a friend and he was going someplace that wasn’t home or school. The fact that he was comfortable enough with Spencer to go to his house spoke volumes about their relationship.

Aaron followed Spencer out of the building and across the parking lot to a shiny midnight blue two-seater sports car. Aaron, who knew little about cars, just stood and gaped at it as Spencer hit the button to unlock it.

“My. Dad. Is. Loaded.,” Spencer said with a smirk, walking around the car and getting in on the driver’s side. Aaron got in on the passenger side after setting his laptop bag carefully behind the seat. Buckling up, he grinned at Spencer, who looked absolutely at home behind the wheel of his car. He could tell Spencer cherished this car by the way Spencer caressed the leather-encased steering wheel as he started the engine.

“See. This.?” Spencer asked, pointing to a small display on the dashboard. Aaron nodded, and Spencer honked the horn to make lights flash on the little box. “It. Is. A. Sound. Sensor.,” Spencer explained, and honked again. Aaron saw the display light up again, and then faced Spencer so his friend could see his face.

“So, if there is a loud noise like a horn or a siren, it will light up?” Aaron asked in a slow, enunciated way so Spencer would have little trouble reading his lips. His natural inclination was to talk louder, but that just seemed silly since Spencer couldn’t hear him no matter how loud he talked. Spencer nodded and looked carefully behind him before pulling out of the space.

“Most. Deaf. People. Do Not. Use. This., But. My. Dad. Wanted. Me. To. Have. One.,” Spencer said, threading his way carefully through the parking lot. “Most. People. Are. Just. Really. Careful..” They drove for about twenty minutes in the opposite direction from Aaron’s house, until they came to an obviously affluent subdivision. Spencer pulled into the gated community. The gates were open and there didn’t seem to be any sign of a guard, which made Aaron wonder why there were gates in the first place. Winding through curved roads and bypassing cul-de-sacs, Spencer finally pulled into the driveway of a huge copper-colored house with floor to ceiling windows in the front and a large two-car garage. It seemed Spencer wasn’t kidding when he said his dad was well-off.

Aaron trailed behind as Spencer grabbed his bag and headed for the house. Completely out of his element for the first time in a long time, he was reluctant to go in. There was no way for him to know who was in the house, and he really wasn’t up for meeting new people today, not after being in a strange place. Spencer noticed his hesitation and stopped halfway up the drive.