Chapter 10
The problem with not fitting anywhere is that it happens slowly enough that for a long time you think you're imagining it.
Marcus was not bullied, exactly. Nothing that clear or nameable. He was more overlooked. Placed just slightly outside the natural radius of things. At school he was academically ahead and socially behind, in the way of children who have moved between worlds and have not yet found the translation.
He understood everything that was said to him. His English was not the problem. The problem was the frequencies underneath language the in-jokes, the references, the micro-rituals of eleven-year-old boys navigating a landscape he had not grown up inside. He missed things. He laughed half a beat late sometimes. He would reference something from home a song, a food, a way of saying something and watch it land in silence, not hostile silence, but the silence of simple incomprehension, which was its own kind of loneliness.
Jamie remained his most consistent companion, and Jamie was good genuinely good, uncomplicated, reliable. But Jamie was also part of a wider group Marcus could not quite penetrate. Not because they were unkind. Because they had history he wasn't part of and he didn't know how to insert himself without feeling like he was pushing a door that only opened from the inside.
He wrote longer letters to Leroy. He described things with particular precision the food at the school canteen, the sound of rain on the windows, the way certain English phrases meant the opposite of what they seemed to mean. Writing it all down helped him see it, and seeing it helped him feel slightly more in control of it.
Leroy wrote back with the cheerful disregard for punctuation that had always characterized his written communications. He described things in Kingston. The new building going up near the yard. A boy from school who had done something ridiculous. A girl he had decided to like, described in terms so oblique that Marcus had to read the passage three times to work out what was actually being said.
And at the bottom of every letter, in the same position, the same sentence: You're still you. Don't forget it.
Marcus kept all of Leroy's letters in a shoebox under the bed.
The Sunday phone calls with his mother were the fixed point of his week. He organized his days around them the way a long walk is organized around a known destination, each step meaning more because of what it's going toward.
Diane always asked specific questions. Not how are you, which was an invitation to perform fine, but: what did you read this week. What did you eat for breakfast. Tell me one thing that surprised you.
He learned to prepare things for these calls. He would notice things during the week with the specific thought of saving them for Sunday small things, observations, the kinds of details that were meaningless to everyone except the person who most needed to feel present in your life.
One Sunday she said: "You sound different."
He felt himself tense. "Different how?"
"Not bad different. Just" She paused, looking, he could tell, for an honest word. "More careful. Like you're choosing each word."
"I have to, sometimes," he said. "People don't always understand."
"That's alright," she said. "Careful is good. Careful means you're thinking. Just don't get so careful you forget to say what you mean."
He thought about this for days.