Free Dear Edward: A Novel by Ann Napolitano

chocolate bars. Crunchy, caramel-filled, nut-buttered, dark chocolate, white chocolate, milk chocolate. He chooses Jordan’s favorite: a Twix bar. Lacey’s shoulders drop slightly when he places it in the basket. Chips: ranch, barbecue, nacho cheese, dill pickle, jalapeño, salted, baked, ruffled, flat, sour cream and onion. He chooses a bag of his mother’s favorite: salt and vinegar. The next aisle is Fruit Roll-Ups, meat jerkies, and a coffee setup. Nothing goes in the basket. Then there’s a long row of cereals. Edward thinks, Maybe without milk it would be okay . He can’t bear the idea of food that changes form in any way. Sloshing is intolerable, and he doesn’t want anything with bubbles. Soup, stew, smoothies, and sodas are out. Ice cream melts, and that makes him uncomfortable too.
    He chooses the cereal with the least colorful box. “Is this enough?” he asks his aunt.
    “It’s a start.”
    When they get home, she spreads the food out on the coffee table. Then she leaves the room and comes back with a plate and spoon. Edward sits on the couch and watches. His leg is throbbing, even though it’s elevated on a pillow. The muscles and tendons above his knee pulse, as if they themselves are a heart.
    Lacey unwraps the Twix first. She breaks off a section and puts the piece on the plate. Then she opens the box of cereal and puts a spoonful of the O shapes on the far side. Then two potato chips.
    The aunt and nephew regard the plate in silence.
    “I want you to eat all of this in the next hour,” she says. “Then I’m going to replace these amounts. Understood?”
    Edward nods. He switches the television on; there’s a talk show with a table full of women interrupting each other. He starts by nibbling the edge of a potato chip. When his mouth feels like sawdust, he scrapes a small amount of chocolate off the bar with his front teeth. He remembers cramming potato chips in his mouth with his brother, to see how many could fit. He remembers sitting at the dining room table with his family, the sun setting behind them, Bach playing on the stereo. Then he bites an O in half and wills himself to remember nothing, think nothing, until all that exists is a flatness—a flatness he now identifies as himself.

10:02 A.M.
    The plane weighs 73.5 tons. The wingspan measures 124 feet. It is constructed of metal sheets, extrusions, castings, ingots, bolts, and wing spars. It has 367,000 individual parts and took two months to build; 280,000 pounds of thrust are required to power this bus through the sky.
    Bruce peers past Eddie, out the window.
    “I was about your age when I took my first flight,” he says. “We were going to a funeral for an uncle, whom I’d never met. And when I saw what the clouds looked like from the sky, I wanted to get out of the plane and dance on them.”
    Eddie looks into his cup of orange juice. He seems annoyed, but it’s not real annoyance. Bruce has noticed that as Jordan becomes a more combative teenager, his younger brother tries, at moments, to project similar anger, irritation, or indignation. He’s not much good at it, though; neither his heart nor his hormones are in the right place.
    “This is my third flight, Dad,” Eddie says.
    This time, Bruce thinks, I want to understand the composition of the clouds. I want the clouds contained and understood. When did that switch happen? When did I go from wanting to dance to wanting to write dimensions down in a notebook? He scans his adolescence: his thirteen-year-old self, a shyer version of the twelve-year-old. Each year he sank more deeply into awkwardness and silence. But there was a jolt of excitement when he realized, much later than he should have, that inside himself was a brain that aced tests easily, that he could use, really use, to make sense of the loud noises and strange customs and unpredictable people around him. Math was the deepest pool in sight, so he dove in. Numbers and equations led to theorems and binomials and