Free Shades of Simon Gray by Joyce McDonald Page B

feathers white.
    Simon lay down. His hands cradled the back of his head. He stared up at the ceiling. The moonlight had disappeared behind clouds of snow. The shadows in the room had dissolved. But Simon’s eyes were accustomed to the dark. He spent almost all his time there, except when he was dreaming or traveling outside his body.
    He stared over at his desk and was suddenly reminded of Kyle. He saw the two of them in the library, Simon sitting in front of one of a half dozen computers, Kyle pointing to something on the screen, occasionally glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one else was watching them. Simon wished he hadn’t thought of Kyle because now fragments of memories were seeping back into his mind. Outside, one of the crows lifted off a snowy branch, fluttered a black wing against the window, creating a lake of clear glass in the middle of the wet snow, and disappeared into the night.
    He thought of Devin McCafferty, of the soft shell-pink lining of her delicate ears. Simon’s heart began to pound. He saw her standing at the kitchen counter in Kyle’s house last summer, sliding vegetables onto long metal skewers so Kyle’s mother could grill them. When he came into the room, Devin spun around, grabbed an empty skewer, angled her arms and legs like a fencer, and thrust it toward him.
“En garde,”
she said, feigning a French accent. The skewer stopped within an inch of hisheart. So close. Then she straightened up, holding the skewer end to end over her head with both hands, and grinned.
    The image almost brought him to tears. He wanted her that badly. He had since the very first time he saw her on the playground of Bellehaven Elementary leaping into the air and catching Frisbees with the ease and grace of a gazelle because she was almost a full head taller than anyone else in the fourth grade. She was only a year ahead of him, but it might as well have been a century.
    The night of Rob Fisher’s party, Simon had thought he’d died and gone to heaven when Devin McCafferty came up to him in a ribbed tank top almost the color of her hair and told him she thought he looked like a younger version of Chad Lowe, except with curly hair, could maybe even pass for his son. Simon laughed because he didn’t know what else to do; he wasn’t even sure who Chad Lowe was, but he could tell by the look on Devin’s face she meant it to be a compliment. Then she had taken him completely by surprise. She asked him if he wanted to dance, gently taking his hand before he could answer one way or the other and leading him to where others were dancing.
    Simon knew Devin and Kyle had been together since their freshman year. Everyone in the school knew that. He knew he didn’t stand a chance with her, knew she was probably asking him to dance because Kyle had told her to, knew he should have felt humiliated, outraged at Kyle. Instead, he found himself overwhelmed with gratitude. Glad for any crumbs Devin and Kyle wanted to toss hisway. Until that moment he had believed that no matter how bad things got at school—the body slamming, the food dumped on his head at lunch, the jocks tripping him in the halls between classes—he always had his dignity, his self-respect. He was, and always would be, his own person.
    Until Devin McCafferty laid her milk-white hand on his arm.
    By the end of that night he had agreed to help Kyle and the others with their “project,” the project they had begun in their sophomore year with Walter Tate as their stooge, their computer geek. Had Devin put her hand on Walter’s arm, too? Asked him to dance? And even if she had, would it have made any difference?
    After the night of the party, Simon became Walter’s replacement. It had nothing to do with Kyle’s smooth voice, assuring him that none of them were doing anything anyone else wasn’t doing, although the means might be different. Nor did it have anything to do with Kyle’s insistence that nobody got ahead in life without cheating at