Free Accomplice by Eireann Corrigan

chance to be someone different.
    He was a sweet guy. And we weren’t being mean. Chloe kind of liked him, and it seemed like the one way you could get to know him was through writing things down.
    The notes were a project Chloe and I worked on together. We’d gotten gift cards to the Craft Shack for some community service prize, and we spent most of them on fancy paper and crazy stickers and stuff like that. We bought a paper punch and filled one note with tiny snowflake confetti so that when Dean opened it, it would look like a miniature snowstorm. That was one of my favorites, because when we checked the school message board to see if he’d picked it up, we saw some tiny snowflakes on the floor in front of the office window.
    Mostly we copied song lyrics or poems and things. We hardly used our own words at all. Later on, Chloe wrote a couple notes by herself and posted them for him and caused one of the biggest fights we’d ever had. It just felt like she was keeping secrets, like she turned something we’d worked on together into her own thing.
    Chloe and I had figured it would unfold like one of the trashy paperbacks my mom reads—finally the young hero would have the chance to pour out all his pent-up emotion in poetry. When he didn’t respond to the first two notes, we realized that Dean wouldn’t know who to leave messages for. It’s not like he could put up some random blank note on the office window.
    In our next message, we left instructions to leave us notes by the old encyclopedia set in the library. A couple days later we found a muffin on one of the dusty shelves. We didn’t think it was Dean at first, but then a week later there was a bag of homemade peanut-butter cookies. There was a carrot-cake cupcake once and another muffin, too. It was like Boo Radley was into baking.
    He might not have left us love notes, but Dean changed a little, just in how he carried himself. When we all sat around talking before class started, Dean still sat back. But he didn’t sit back like he was afraid to join in. It was more like he was so satisfied with himself that he didn’t have to. One time we wrote something about his eyes and then Dean started wearing a lot of blue. He stopped slumping beneath his gray hoodie all the time.
    We weren’t jerks about it. We didn’t write anything that wasn’t true. If anything, Chloe ended up actually a little wrapped up in him. But he was still Stuttering Dean. However good he looked in a blue buttondown shirt, he still went into palsied mode anytime a teacher called on him in class.
    We had this demented substitute teacher at the very beginning of school. I heard that people actually complained to Guidance about her. Subs are supposed to just sit there, leave us to concentrate on whatever busywork the teacher left. But this twitshit sat there dissecting uslike we were lab rats or something. Honestly. She took notes.
    And she had a blast with Dean. She called on him to read the directions on our worksheet, and of course it took him a good three minutes just to work through the first two lines. So that was it. Anything we had to read, she called on Dean. Sometimes when he was struggling with a word, she’d interrupt him and coo, “Relax. Relax. Just breathe.” It was awful. Once she brought a newspaper clipping about the genetics of stuttering. She scurried right over to Dean like a little rat, screeching, “I’ve had this folded up in my purse. You have to tell me—do you have siblings that stammer? Does your father have the same impediment?”
    When Dean looked up at her, it looked like he was bracing himself for execution. I saw his Adam’s apple move when he swallowed. He said, “No, ma’am.” He faltered a little on the ma’am part, but the rest of it was clear as day.
    “See? There you go—look what a little concentration can do.” Dean’s jaw set harder, because it’s not like the problem had just been that he was lazy. For years. “Don’t you want to