Chapter Text
“Our first Christmas together. Are you excited, Kaz?”
Grant was beaming. He expected Kaz to answer.
“It's…” Talking was more difficult these days because there were rules now. He had to answer questions in sentences. He forced them into a line in his head the way Miss Debra had taught him and spoke. “It's my first Christmas without Dad and Jordie.”
Grant winced visibly and his wife, Hazel, stepped up behind him and put a hand on his arm.
“It's all right to feel sad, sweetie,” she said in the crooning voice that Kaz didn't like. But you weren't supposed to tell people you didn't like things about them. He swallowed and nodded. It wasn't a question, so he didn't have to answer.
Remembering what he was supposed to say and do was easy. Kaz could remember all the states and their capitals, thirty four different card tricks, every word of the behavior plan Miss Debra had made for him, and his foster parents’ computer passwords. (He wasn't supposed to know those, but they didn't know he knew them, and one of the rules Miss Debra hadn't needed to teach him was that people couldn't get upset about things if you didn't tell them.)
But talking properly and following the behavior plan all the time was exhausting . He wanted to go back to his room, but it was Christmas Eve and they were having guests. He'd have extra alone time tomorrow. They had promised.
“Are you listening?” Hazel asked, and he started. He'd gotten stuck inside his head again. He wasn't supposed to do that.
“I'm sorry. Can you please say it again, Hazel?” She'd said that when he was ready, he could call them Mom and Dad, but Mom was only a faint memory of comforting arms and Dad was a mangled body beneath a tractor plow. Pretending he had new parents wouldn’t make his real parents any less dead.
“Of course, love. I was saying that– can you look at me instead of the wall?– that Elaine and Michael have kids your age. Maybe you can make friends with them.”
Kaz nodded. She cared about Kaz making friends a lot more than Kaz did. He didn't like the kids at school. They made fun of him and hit him and messed with his stuff. But the counselor and Miss Debra talked a lot about self control and not hitting them back. When other people “made poor choices,” that didn't mean Kaz should do the same.
Hitting back wasn't the only thing he could do, though. There were quieter, meaner ways to get back at them that adults wouldn't notice. As much as everyone kept reminding Kaz to pay attention, they really sucked at paying attention themselves.
He looked at Hazel’s forehead instead of the wall and faked a smile.
“What are we having for dinner?”
“Ham and green bean casserole and mashed potatoes,” Hazel said, and he let out a breath of relief. He could eat all three without hiding them in his napkin, though the green bean casserole was on thin ice.
He occupied himself until the guests arrived by doing coin tricks in his bedroom, making the quarter appear and disappear between his fingers, then practicing with an eraser from his backpack to give himself more of a challenge. The eraser was harder. When he heard the doorbell ring, he shoved it in his pocket to practice with later and trudged out to greet the guests like he was supposed to.
The grown-ups were just regular grown-ups, and their kids Amy and Taylor weren't awful. Amy was twelve and not interested in talking to him, but Kaz liked people who didn't try to talk to him. Taylor was a year younger and wanted to tell Kaz about his new racing game, so Kaz pretended not to be bored as well as he could. He showed Taylor some card tricks and tried to teach him the easiest one, but Taylor said he'd rather play a card game instead, so they did that. He was such a bad player that Kaz barely had to pay attention to the cards, but the grown-ups were smiling at them approvingly.
Then Amy joined in and it got fun. Amy was great to play cards with. She was quick and smart and good at guessing what people were about to do. Her weakness was that she wasn’t keeping track of the cards they’d already played to work out which ones were still in the deck. Kaz hadn't won yet when the grown-ups called them to dinner, and he had to bite back his frustration at the game being interrupted.
He'd like to be Amy's friend, he decided, if Amy wanted to be friends with a boy. A lot of girls didn't, as if being a boy meant something big and weird and not just that he went to a different bathroom and didn't have unicorns on his notebooks.
Grant had laughed at him when he'd said that once, winked, and told him he'd understand in a few years. Like he thought Kaz didn't know about puberty. He wasn't stupid. He just didn't see how people's bodies changing had any more to do with who could be friends with who than bathrooms and glitter pens did. Amy had boobs, or was starting to, anyway. That didn't make her play cards any different.
Dinner lasted exactly forty-one minutes, which was forever because the grown-ups wanted to talk about every Christmas they'd ever had when they were younger. When dessert finally came, Kaz separated the ice cream from the pie like the surgeon removing a diseased organ that he'd seen on TV the other day before Hazel changed the channel. He snuck his piece of pie onto Amy's plate so it wouldn't get crumbs in his ice cream. She grinned and ate it with a whispered thank you. Maybe they would be friends.
There were presents to open after dinner, and Kaz didn’t really want to. He didn't like being given stuff he hadn't chosen himself and wasn’t expecting. Dad and Jordie had let him go shopping for his presents with them and then wrapped them and put them under the tree, and that had been good. But most people liked surprises, so Kaz had to pretend he did too. He had to open them and say the thank you script and pretend he had wanted it and that it was really cool.
The kids opened their presents from youngest to oldest, so Taylor was first. He did the thank you script kind of badly. He forgot to use the word appreciate and looked at his new Pokémon cards instead of their faces, but he was only nine, after all. Then it was Kaz's turn. He opened his neatly instead of tearing up the paper. He thought he did okay with the thank you part and with not asking them why they thought anyone would want a remote control tank or books about people turning into animals. He liked the kit that let you put together different plastic airplanes though, and when he opened the box, the instructions were complicated enough to be interesting. Amy was getting her presents now, but no one had ever told him if he had to pay attention to that part, so he didn't.
He was interrupted from his careful inventory of the parts by Michael, who cleared his throat in the way that meant ‘I'm going to say something you're supposed to listen to.’
“I've actually got another present for all of us. I won year-round tickets to the water park in the holiday raffle at work and I thought we could all share them. There's four, so we adults could take turns with one of us bringing the kids. It's still winter, of course, but when summer hits, the cool water will–” Kaz felt his heart start pounding in his chest. Wet skin, water going up his nose and into his mouth. No. He grabbed fistfuls of his shirt and held onto the fabric tightly, trying to remember where he was, that he was dry and in a warm room and everyone here was alive. They wouldn't force him to go just because there were tickets. Another of the adults could go instead and he could stay home where the only water he ever had to be in was a shower. They hadn't tried to make him take baths, not after the mirror incident.
“Doesn't that sound like fun, Kaz?” Hazel prompted him, and he swallowed hard.
“Thank you for sharing your tickets with us.” He recited the words while staring at Michael's ear. “I appreciate it. It's really nice of you.”
“He's so strange,” Elaine whispered to Grant quietly enough that she probably thought Kaz couldn't hear her. “Is he… you know, okay? Mentally?”
“He's a little autistic, but he's in therapy for that. He's getting good grades in school, though. You'd never guess there was anything wrong with him if not for the way he talks sometimes. And he really seems to get along with your kids.” Grant was even worse at whispering than Elaine because Amy was looking at them and then at Kaz, frowning.
Now she wouldn't want to be his friend. People didn't, when they found out something was wrong with you. And it wasn't fair. He'd followed Miss Debra's script perfectly for every gift. He'd gotten it right. Elaine's kids were the ones who weren't saying thank you properly, not him. Did they have a different script? How did Elaine expect him to know their script when he'd never even met them before?
Miss Debra said that kids like him had to work harder to communicate in a proper way that earned people's respect, but sometimes it seemed like the things she said would work didn’t really.
Kaz would find other ways, though. Elaine and Michael would respect him when they saw how much better he was at cards than their kids were. Grant would respect him when he got better at staying still and paying attention when people talked. And Hazel would be very respectful about not making Kaz go to the water park if it meant that Grant wouldn't find out about the dirty text messages she'd been sending to that guy she worked with.
We'll survive all of this bullshit, Jordie had told him when he'd been too feverish to remember not to curse around Kaz. Things will turn around. We'll make our own luck, just you wait.