Free Colin Fischer by Zack Stentz, Ashley Edward Miller Page A

costs.
    “Colin,” Mr. Bell said, “where are you going?”
    “Dr. Doran told me if I ever needed to see her, I would be excused from class. She said I wouldn’t be told ‘no.’”
    And then Colin hurried away, deaf to Mr. Bell’s protests.
    Dr. Doran looked up from a stack of papers as Colin marched into her office unannounced and wordlessly took a seat.
    “I’m a little busy at the moment,” she said. “And by the way, you should be in class right now.”
    “Yes,” Colin answered. All of these things appeared to be true. “But it’s very important I tell you first that Wayne Connelly is innocent.”
    Dr. Doran’s nose wrinkled. Colin took note of it.
    “What makes you think Wayne Connelly is even a suspect?”
    Colin pointed to a chair in the corner of the office. “The stack of schoolbooks and homework in the corner with Wayne’s name and address on them. They suggest he’s been suspended but not actually arrested or charged with a crime yet.”
    Dr. Doran flicked her eyes toward the chair, then back to Colin. “Okay, I’ll bite. Is there something you didn’t tell the police when they interviewed you?”
    “No. I described everything that I thought was important at the time. But what I didn’t realize then was the importance of the cake.”
    “The cake?”
    “Yes, the cake. The pistol grip of the gun was smeared with frosting, but Wayne Connelly eats very neatly. So you see? The gun couldn’t have been his.” Colin took Dr. Doran’s silence to be an acknowledgment of his hypothesis. “We have to tell the investigating authorities,” he insisted.
    She wrinkled her nose again, just as she had when confronted with the trick cell phone, and just as she had at the assembly. He was beginning to detect a pattern. “There is no ‘we’ here, Colin. This is a police investigation, not mine. Or
yours
.”
    “But you heard what I said about the cake—”
    “And I’ll be sure to pass it on. Until then, ask my secretary to write you a note for your teacher on the way out.”
    “Dr. Doran, I—”
    “
Colin
. Enough. You’re a student, not a detective. Are we clear?”
    Colin considered this for a very long moment, deciding against suggesting that she had just asserted a false dichotomy. 10 “Yes,” he said.
    On his way out the door, he stopped. There was onelast thing he wanted to share. “Dr. Doran?” he asked carefully.
    “Yes, Colin?”
    “You wrinkle your nose when you know something and you don’t want to say it.”
    Colin excused himself without another word.
    Colin strode down the empty hallway, not even bothering to count his steps as his pen moved furiously across a blank page of his Notebook:
         Wayne Connelly is innocent, and I will prove it. The game is afoot.
    7 The RMS
Titanic
sank on April 14, 1912, after a collision with an iceberg in the North Atlantic, killing 1,517 passengers. Since the collision occurred during the ship’s maiden voyage, her safety record was technically spotless prior to the incident. This made little difference to the victims.
    8 Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term “uncanny valley” to describe how, as an object became more and more human-looking, it reached a point where it provoked fear and revulsion in a human observer instead of empathy. Other researchers hypothesized this phenomenon might trace to a genetic imperative to avoid diseased or dead members of one’s own species. Whatever its cause, computer animators have been aware of the uncanny valley since 1988, when audiences watching Pixar’s short film
Tin Toy
were charmed by the titular windup character but horrified by the film’s animated human infant.
    9 In the closing moments of the
St. Elsewhere
series finale, the boy (Tommy Westphall) is shown holding a snow globe containing the hospital in which the show was set. The image strongly suggests Tommy had imagined every character and situation. Because of an unusual and intricate web of connections between