Round Stars and Dead Stones Ch. 2

Caerwyn Cain - talk about a unique name - had a mouth full of small, white teeth that too easily formed a smile when he introduced himself and assured Ari that 'Wyn,' was just fine. His hair was bleached close to orange and too long to be tidy, though the untidiness could be blamed on the humidity turning it both stringy and frizzy at the same time. He had skinny, pale hands that threatened to disappear into the sleeves of his sweater whenever he wasn't sipping from his cup of chai or waving Ari into his seat. He was probably of mixed Japanese, or mixed Korean like Ari's dad. This made Ari wonder if Zoe saw some phenotypical similarities and decided, 'Yeah, they probably know each other, that checks out.'

It wouldn't have been typical of Zoe specifically, but it was the kind of blithe prejudice he'd come to expect in Vermont.

"You don't have to wait for me to explain how we know each other, if that's why you're so quiet," Wyn said. He'd noticed the expectant face Ari hadn't even realized he was making. "We don't, except through mutual experience."

Ari narrowed his eyes and leaned back to look over Wyn's head. "Okay."

"We were in the same accelerated learning program. Well, you didn't make it in." Wyn turned to rifle through the stiff, black messenger bag he had plunked down in the booth beside him. He set his phone, which was even newer and dearer in price than the one Blake had gotten for Ari, and a notebook that bristled with pasted clippings and sticky tabs. "Do you remember anything about that?"

Ari frowned, his gaze fixed on the book. "I guess." There had been something when he was ten, but that never materialized and his parents had been resigned to pack him off to normal, prestige-free summer camp that year. Worse, he'd been introduced to playing guitar at camp. "So, what?" There were so many slices of newspaper poking out of that notebook. "Are you trying to get a class action lawsuit going or something?"

"Nothing so simple." Wyn flipped through his little book until he came to a folded newspaper trimming. This, he held shut in one hand even after he'd dislodged it from the book. "But you remember the Lepkoff Program reaching out to your family, I take it?"

"I guess that's what it was called, yeah." Ari wanted to swat one hand out and snatch that clipping away, but the fear of causing a scene held him in check. "You're right, I didn't make it in." He felt, but didn't think: 'So if anything happened, whatever it was, it's got nothing to do with me.' Wyn's weird animal-brown eyes looked through him, or seemed to, triggering a part of Ari's brain that prompted him to keep talking. "I mean, I wan't too far above average to begin with. I understand if something happened there you wanna meet as many of us as possible but-"

Wyn put up the hand holding the paper, holding it to his palm with his thumb. The backside displayed an advertisement for hot tubs. "There's no need for that, thank you." He put the paper to the table and pushed it toward Ari like a note passed in class. "Take a look at this before you try to deflect me with cheap shows of sympathy."

"Fine." Ari pried the deeply creased paper open and skimmed it. To his own chagrin, the first words that sprang automatically from his mouth were, "I don't know this guy."

Sad Conclusion to Railway Overpass Mystery

By Norman Boyd - Staff Writer at Pike People's Paper

The body of a man discovered on Tuesday morning by a man taking a shortcut to his place of employment through McComb's historic rail yard has been identified as that of Richard Michael Clay, formerly of Summit. Clay had travelled from Washington state, where he had worked as a freelance nature photographer, to visit his cousin's family in Summit over the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

That cousin, Monica Dean, reached out through e-mail to the People's Paper to share her impression that Clay, who died by what investigators have determined to be a self-inflicted gunshot, was in high spirits over the course of the weekend visit and excited to return to Washington and undertake a new project over the summer.

An obituary statement provided by the family, as well as information on making donations in Clay's name to the World Wildlife Foundation, can be found in the usual section of our upcoming Sunday edition.

"Know him or not, you do share a connection," Wyn said. He opened the book to its very back and opened the little built-in folder in the cover to produce a folded printout. "You were both screened for potential enrollment in the program in Seattle, Washington, in the summer of 2001. So was everyone else on this page."

"Oh, yeah? What about you?"

"Nagoya, a year earlier."

That cleared that up, even if it wasn't satisfying.

"Did you make it in?"

Wyn shrugged. "I quit."

Ari grunted. They were both dropouts of one kind or another, so they had that in common. He skimmed the names like he'd skimmed the article and recognized none. Eight stood out to him, and only because they were underlined in the same orange pen as Richard Clay's name.

Martin Springsteen

Zachary Hollis

Nadav Sherman

Kimberly Barnard

Jordan Piers

Gregory Yu

Nancy Bryce-Chambers

Ryanne Dailey

Ari swallowed nothing and reached for the mug of coffee he'd forgotten even existed up to that moment. It was plain and black and, by that time, cold. When he was younger, he would have pretended to like it. It had been a thing of his for a little while, like playing guitar. It hadn't stuck, though.

Nine out of what the column of numbers alongside the names told him comprised only twenty seven people was a lot.

"So, what?" The words tried to catch themselves on the contours of Ari's throat on their way up. "They're the ones who made it in?"

"They are nine of twelve who passed assessment and successfully enrolled," Wyn said. He sat back with his cup in his hands. Looking at him in that space between sentences, Ari became very aware of the diffuse noise and disturbed light of people moving around them in the cafe. Blood was pooling in the soles of his feet and leaving the rest of him cold. "I considered showing you the smaller list, but a ratio of nine apparent suicides to three living people is even harder to process."

Ari's feet were sweating from having absorbed all the heat in his body. He started to push off from the table in an attempt to escape, but his chilled joints locked up and dropped him back in the booth. His body didn't like this. It didn't like hearing about this and smelling food and hearing the auditory jostle of energized bodies going from place to place, because it remembered having been in the dining hall when his academic advisor - whose name he'd overwritten at some point - had come to walk him out and into the sunlight and back inside into the cramped office where his entire life would get torn down.

"If you're messing with me, you need to stop right now before this gets really bad for you really fast."

"That isn't the kind of person you are, Ariel."

The skin behind Ari's ears tightened. His brain, against his will, skipped tracks into another social script. "Ari's fine."

Wyn smiled like an animal flashing its teeth to warn you, all glimpses of sharp white and no bowing under the eyes. "I'm not asking you to believe me right away, but I know it's of interest to you. Richard's death is the most typical of them. White men tend to isolate themselves and use a gun, but compared to the rest his is the atypical death. Nadav climbed a fire escape on a public building and jumped into the parking lot. They're all like that, jumpers. A few of the kids in my cohort grew up to throw themselves underneath trains."

"Yeah, well, gifted kids tend to be troubled." Ari's body was putting his mouth on cruise control, his brain retrieving snatches of language people had used to excuse or explain what Maya had done. He tried prying himself out of the booth again. "Anyway, I'm done doing this now."

"Feel free to stay." Wyn was already packing his pricey phone and the haunted notebook away in his bag. "I'll leave my card and you can contact me if you find yourself curious before we meet again. I have work to finish and an early start with a client in the morning, so I'll be off."

Ari slumped back into his seat and watched Wyn slip out. "What's somebody like you even do for work?"

"Housecleaning," Wyn said. He took a shiny plastic baton from the gap between the booth's back and the wall and tapped one end on the floor. The umbrella expressed a few drops and splatters of water from its cellophane tape shaded folds. When Wyn made his way to the entryway to pop it open, Ari found himself not at all surprised when a bright red ring sprung up around his head.

And then he promptly forgot about it.