Fixer by Gene Doucette

Author:Gene Doucette
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: The Writer's Coffee Shop
Published: 2013-03-19T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Corry didn’t visit McClaren hospital more than a couple of times for the rest of the summer. He told Violet this was because the summer camp had more fun trips than usual, and while this was sort of true, it was also true that the less he saw of Mr. Nilsson, the better.

It was quite a problem for a young man to have to deal with. On the one hand, he’d never met another person who could see things like he could, which was a big deal, especially since that person was so much older than he was. Older people knew a lot about a lot of things. Even crazy old people. Especially crazy old people. And Corry had so many questions he wanted to ask that it kept him up some nights. On the other hand, Mr. Nilsson had turned out to be not just crazy but also creepy and paranoid. Being alone with him in the bathroom for those few minutes in July had driven home the point about Bad Touching that Violet was always trying to make. It wasn’t that Mr. Nilsson had actually touched him in a bad way, but Corry understood now how helpless he would feel should an adult try to do so. He didn’t like that feeling at all.

When he did visit, he stuck to card games with Mr. Pierce. Mr. Nilsson was always there in his chair, but he didn’t try to talk to Corry—secretively or otherwise. Corry, in turn, did not try to talk to him. He did make several attempts to “speak” in the future, like Mr. Nilsson had done, but found it impossible. If he knew he wasn’t going to speak, then he didn’t speak, no matter how much he insisted to himself that he did. It seemed he couldn’t figure out how to fake out the Secret Future.

And now school was about to start again. He had petitioned Violet to let him spend more time at home, even though she preferred he go to McClaren every day and work on his homework there at the beginning of the year to get off on the right foot before the snow came and made it effectively impossible for him to do the work anywhere but at afterschool or at home. His argument was that since he was going into eighth grade, he was only one year away from high school, and in high school he surely would have to be more self-motivated about his homework, so wouldn’t it be a good idea to practice doing it without help before he got there?

The truth was, by the last week of August, as the Fastest Boy Alive raced down the Trapelo Road hill, he was expecting this to be his final trip to McClaren.

* * *

The first indication that things were a little bit off at the hospital was when Corry found the front gate attendance box empty. Carl wasn’t there. A couple of times in the past he’d found a different guard at the gate, but this time there was no Carl, and nobody else either.

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