Free Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern Page A

year Suzette started making and keeping rules. “We have to go to my house. I don’t want Teddy to be home alone,” she’d say. And though of course their mother was home, Cara never pushed the matter. She knew the divorce had taken a toll on Suzette, had left her scared of anything that suggested change. Cara knew this about Suzette and also knew her own new clothes weren’t a mistake. She’d seen it in several surprised faces, saw it now in the half of Kevin’s face that revealed emotions.
    â€œWhy don’t I sit in front of you and it can be just like we’re in fifth grade? I can talk on and on and embarrass myself all over again.”
    Kevin laughed and Cara slid into the seat in front of him, thrilled with her own daring. When they spoke again after class, his voice, soft and halting, surprised her: he breathed between words, like someone with a stutter. “I wanted to try a regular…English class. I don’t know, though. Reading can give me…very bad headaches. My eyes…” He seemed to search the sky for the words he needed. “Aren’t strong.”
    â€œI can help you,” she said, simply. Meaning: real help, what he needed, not the showy help of the past, where she peeled the tops off yogurt containers and dipped his spoon in for him. “I could read the books aloud. Make tapes for you. Would that be good?”
    He shut his eyes, smiled in his old crooked way. “Yes. It would.”
    Was it friendship, exactly, what they moved into? The exchange of tapes was always furtive, as if they were both slightly embarrassed, he by the need, she by the effort she unaccountably put into it. She told him it wasn’t a big deal, that she was such a slow reader, doing it aloud took no more time, but this wasn’t true. Reading aloud, page after page, was a laboriously slow task. Doing it this way, she learned how little she had actually read of these dense books. Dialogue, scenes, first and last sentences of every paragraph. This effort to help left her trapped, not with him, but with the endless descriptions of Puritan life in The Scarlet Letter . Finally, after two weeks, she abridged the text. “There’s a whole bunch of stuff in here about dresses and what they wear, but I swear it doesn’t matter, Kevin,” she said into the tiny microphone.
    The next day he passed her a note, smiling. “I want to know about their dresses.”
    She wrote at the bottom, “The weird part is they all wore bathing suits underneath. Little red bikinis.”
    Soon they had two secrets: the tapes she never mentioned to anyone, including Suzette, and the notes they wrote steadily, all through English class. They were always funny, and maybe the best part was that she was a little funnier. Not by a vast distance, but a little. “How would you describe the hair today?” he wrote, with an arrow pointing to the teacher, Mrs. Green, whose hair was an ever-changing terrain. Some days it was curled into a dramatic flip that separated over her shoulders like individual sausage links; that day, it was piled on top of her head, high enough to clear the chalkboard. “Conical,” she wrote back.
    On paper, she learned why he had friends—he was a good straight man, he set up jokes, let the other person tell them—but after a while, she began to worry this had gone too far. He wrote too much, saved their notes. He labeled her tapes Cara, Part One , as if she were the book. It felt like a mistake to let him go on, get the wrong idea.
    â€œSo, Kevin,” she wrote after a month or so of note exchanges. “I don’t think I can read the next book for you. I’m getting kind of swamped these days.”
    For the whole period, the paper didn’t come back. Then as they packed up, he dropped the rectangle in her lap. “No prob,” it said.
    Cara decided it was better not to discuss it. When partners were needed for a