Colin Fischer

ASHLEY EDWARD MILLER & ZACK STENTZ

An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

From Zack:

For Sophia and Dash, and all they’ve accomplished.

For Ian, always there to help and guide them.

For the real Mr. Turrentine, who accepted no excuses.

For my mom, a more effective therapist than even she realized.

And for Leah, who showed me that empathy comes from a place beyond understanding.

From Ashley:

For my mother, educator and creator of a book-eating, story-spitting monster.

For Caden, my monster-in-training.

And for Jennifer, who believes in monsters.

Lev Grossman, bestselling author of
The Magicians

For most people
, crime scenes are places to avoid. You see that yellow police tape and all you can think is: thank God I’m on this side of it. You look, of course—everybody looks, though usually you don’t see anything more interesting than a couple of men or women in blue with serious expressions on their faces, and maybe someone in plain clothes who looks like they’re wishing they were on your side of the tape too. But then you keep on walking. You leave it behind, like a bad dream.

A crime scene is another world—it’s a bit like Narnia. Past the yellow tape you become a new person: you’re recast as a victim, a suspect, a witness, a detective. Things aren’t things anymore, they’re evidence, to be pieced together into a story according to the principles of forensic science and logical deduction. They’re clues to the question on everybody’s minds, which is: what the hell just happened here?

That’s if you’re you. Or me. If you’re Colin Fischer, forensic science and logical deduction are the principles you use to get through everyday life. The scene of the crime is where he lives, all the time. For Colin the entire world—his home, his school, his neighborhood—is a mystery. And he is the detective.

He isn’t really a detective, of course. Colin is fourteen years old. He’s just starting his freshman year at West Valley High in the San Fernando Valley. It’s not a situation where the techniques of criminal investigation would ordinarily apply. But Colin isn’t an ordinary kid; he suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. “It’s a neurological condition, related to autism,” he explains to his gym teacher, with characteristic precision. “I’m diagnosed as high functioning, but I still have poor social skills and sensory integration issues that give me serious deficits in areas of physical coordination.”

He’s not exaggerating—because Colin only ever says exactly what he means—but he might be slightly underdramatizing the issue. Colin is different. He doesn’t like to be touched, even by his parents. He can’t tolerate loud noises. He has a hard time reading facial expressions; he keeps notes on what faces correspond to what emotions, so he can match them up with the people around him and tell what they’re feeling. He has an amazing memory and prodigious reasoning skills, and he’s extraordinarily knowledgeable in certain areas—game theory, for example, and the history of the U.S. space program—but he also has trouble grasping things a five-year-old would know automatically, without trying. Watson once said about Sherlock Holmes, “His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.” You could say the same thing about Colin.
It won’t surprise you to hear that Colin keeps a framed portrait of Sherlock Holmes over his bed.

Colin’s high school experience isn’t a typical one. This isn’t a Judy Blume novel. You don’t read
Colin Fischer
and think, “Yeah, I remember that time a cell phone rang in math class and I got so freaked out I had to bark like a dog ’til it stopped.” Colin is more like an alien anthropologist stranded on Earth, with no choice but to master the local social codes and try to pass as human, or perish.

But that’s what makes Colin’s story so important, and so interesting. Because maybe we’re not quite as human as we like to think we are, either. Maybe we’re a bit weirder than we like to pretend. We like to believe that everything about our lives is neat and clear and unambiguous, but it isn’t. Look at the faces of the people around you: how often do you really know what they’re thinking and feeling? How often does something happen that you can’t explain—a book that isn’t where you left it, a question you should know the answer to but don’t, a friend who walks by without saying hi? We like to believe our lives aren’t bizarre, that we always know what to do or say, that we know what the hell is happening all the time. That our lives are in no way like a mystery.

But of course we don’t always know what’s going on. Life is confusing. We’re constantly trying to piece together a coherent story out of the clues all around
us, and the evidence doesn’t always fit. In that sense, mysteries aren’t unusual; they’re not the exceptions, they’re the rule. We’re not all Sherlock Holmes, or Colin Fischer, but the difference is not one of kind, just one of degree. We’re all on the same scale; they’re just a couple of standard deviations out from us.

So what happens when a boy for whom everything is a mystery, for whom an ordinary classroom is a crime scene, comes across a real mystery? A real crime, with a real suspect and real evidence, and a real gun, right in the middle of his high school cafeteria?

Suddenly the tables are turned. Suddenly everybody around Colin is freaking out. They’re out of their element—but Colin isn’t. This is his element. He’s been preparing for this role, the role of the detective, his whole life. We’re in his world now, the world on the other side of the yellow tape, and for once in his life Colin is right at home. This is where he lives, this is his home planet, and it’s the rest of us who are aliens here. “Life,” Holmes once said, “is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” We like to forget that. Colin is here to remind us.

Part One: Birthday Cake and a Gun

Chapter One: Shark Behavior

Chapter Two: The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Chapter Three: Deterrence

Chapter Four: The Kuleshov Effect

Chapter Five: Primate Behavior

Part Two: The Fool and the Freak

Chapter Six: Eyewitness Interviews

Chapter Seven: The Battleship Potemkin

Chapter Eight: Dupin’s Detachment

Chapter Nine: The Parking Problem

Chapter Ten: Rogue Predators

Part Three: The Olympic Trampoline Team

Chapter Eleven: Hell is Other People

Chapter Twelve: Test Bites

Chapter Thirteen: What the Tortoise said to Achilles

Chapter Fourteen: Hans Asperger

Chapter Fifteen: Two Doctors in Vienna

Epilogue: Human Behavior

Acknowledgments

About the Authors