Free Silent Boy by Torey Hayden

once we were, we stayed. Kevin still couldn’t rise from the floor. He always had to remain there where he could dive for safety if he needed to. But under normal circumstances, he stopped finding it necessary to hide all the time.
    The fear began to drop away from him too. Once inside the small white room, when the door to the outer world was shut, I noticed he would sit in a fairly relaxed position and talk to me with great animation. He then would look for all the world like any other sixteen-year-old might look. However, should someone appear at the door or a noise occur outside the room somewhere, the fear would leap up and hood him. His face would go pale, his pupils dilate, his breathing quicken. And he’d go silent. That never changed. He relaxed a little but he always remained alert, always wary.
    I had brought him a joke book. Elephant jokes. They were horrid ones, so awful that you couldn’t even groan convincingly when you heard them. But Kevin relished them all. He had quite a sense of humor for a kid in his circumstances, more than I often encountered. So it was fun to joke with him. At the moment his favorite story had to do with frogs in blenders, and I had heard it at least twenty times, so I brought him the elephant joke book.
    I had snatched some pillows from the therapy room down the hall. Pushing them up against the radiator under the window, I leaned back while Kevin sat cross-legged and read me the jokes. There must have been about thirty pages in the book with a joke or two per page. Kevin read them all to me and when he had finished, he went back through and read again the ones he liked best. They were so dreadful that I couldn’t even remember the answers the second time through, so I entertained him by making up my own, equally horrible.
    ‘Where’d you get this?’ he asked me when we finished.
    ‘Out at the mall. In one of those little cardshops.’
    ‘Do they have others?’
    I nodded. ‘Not elephant jokes. But other ones with jokes in them.’
    He regarded me for a moment. ‘Would you get me one? Another one?’
    ‘Yes, maybe. Later on. They cost a lot of money for their size. But I’ll get another one when I can.’
    He continued watching me. It was a bright day and the morning sun flowed through the window. It grazed the side of his face and illuminated his eyes. Even in the sunlight, his eyes were a true gray. There was no other color in them at all.
    And still he watched me. ‘You don’t hate me, do you?’ he asked softly.
    ‘No, I don’t hate you.’
    A curious half smile touched his lips. ‘I didn’t think you did.’ His gaze wandered from my face. He looked above me to the window. Then slowly he rose up on his knees to see out. He stayed that way a minute or two before dropping back down.
    ‘You know,’ he said and then paused. He flipped through the joke book. ‘You know, I talked to you.’
    I nodded.
    ‘I talked to you. I wanted to talk to you.’ He looked up. ‘You see, I knew you didn’t hate me.’
    ‘No, I don’t.’
    ‘I knew that. Even from the beginning. You didn’t hate me and I could tell it.’ The strange half smile was back, and once again he looked over my head to the sunlight. It was in his eyes but he didn’t squint. It bathed him. He sat and stared into it like a lean Buddha.
    ‘Kevin,’ I said, ‘may I ask you something?’
    He looked back to me.
    ‘How come you talked? How come you decided to do it at all?’
    He sighed and gazed into the sunlight. ‘Well, I talked to
you
because I said. Because I knew you didn’t hate me. I said that.’
    ‘But why’d you decide to talk at all, after all these years?’
    He was silent. He remained silent so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. He just stared into the sun.
    ‘I used to have a cat,’ he said at last. ‘But it’s dead now. It’s in the ground. It’s just bones and dirt.’ He regarded me. ‘How can I talk about that?’ He looked back into the sun. ‘How can