Tim Mazzone is Dead

      Ms. Lindsay Chaverre, the school social worker, looked up as Annie came into her office. The short, stocky girl always moved so quietly, although more unsteadily now that she had exchanged her Birkenstocks for more fashionable wedge-heeled sandals. She was almost a senior, and Ms. Chaverre- ‘Ms. C’, as most of the students called her- had first started seeing her regularly at the start of tenth grade, after Annie had refused to reenter the resource room that had dealt her her special education services during freshman year. “I cannot deal with that condescending witch of a teacher anymore,” she had announced at that fateful meeting. “I’m not even learning anything I didn’t already know. All we do is play freaking board games. As if normal teens do that.” Ms. Chaverre privately agreed; the obsession of the resource room teacher, Mrs. Degnan, with board and card games as social therapy for teens, in this age of online and video gaming, bordered on the irrational.
      She was impressed with how far Annie had come- her grades were good, although they always had been, but in extremely tough courses. Socially, she had friends and had started dating at the end of last year. She had become more aware of her appearance and wore more feminine, age-and weight-appropriate clothes, and washed her hair every day, despite her hatred of the sensation of water on her skin. She had even lost weight, her parents said, soon after she had started dating her boyfriend, Matt. In all honesty, she found it hard to think of Annie having autism at all, even the mild form that was Asperger’s Syndrome. Annie was so different from the cases the social worker had studied in college and grad school, and totally alien to the only other autistic person Ms. Chaverre really knew, her cousin Jamie.
    Now, Annie settled herself in a chair, folding her hands in her lap. This, Ms. Chaverre knew, was to prevent the tics known as ‘stimming,’ which were a common physical side effect of Asperger’s Syndrome; a side effect of most types of autism, really. Looking into Ms. Chaverre’s face- not the eyes, eye contact was near impossible for people with autism- Annie began the session. “Did they tell you about Tim Mazzone?” she asked.
    “I heard. It’s very sad. He was so young.” Ms. Chaverre rubbed her eyes. She personally was being blamed by the Mazzones, even though she counseled over two hundred students- not counting walk-ins- and even though Tim had only requested a session once, a year ago. It had been about his English class, and he hadn’t seemed at all suicidal. The worst part was, emotionally if not intellectually, she found herself agreeing with them. There might have been some detail- a facial tic, a cadence to his voice- that could have been a warning; a warning she had missed. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but…as a social worker, I feel as if I should have seen it coming.”
    “Of course not.” Annie shook her head. “I mean, you’re not telepathic or anything. Did you ever even see him? I mean, did he even try to talk to you about it?”
    “Well…no.”
    “Well, then, there you go.” Annie sighed, looking tired. She often went to bed too late, she had once confessed to Ms. Chaverre, but now she seemed tired in a more profound way, as if she was carrying some heavy weight, and was anxious to set it down. “He was in my English class, tenth grade,” the teenager remarked. “It was, like, the only honors course he ever got into, I think. You know, most of his classes- so I heard, I mean- were remedial. Like, I think he was smart, because when he talked in that class he would say stuff that never even crossed my mind.” She shifted. “Tenth grade- that was the year we read 'Catcher in the Rye', and they started with all that crap about ‘unreliable narrators.’” Her fingers formed somewhat awkward air quotes. Their nails were lacquered in silvery, metallic gray polish, also in vogue. They had once been painted black, Annie’s favorite color. “I always found that concept full of crap,” Annie continued. “I mean, it’s the narrator. You’ve got to trust the narrator. That’s the whole point of being the narrator- so that people will listen to you and your story and what you think. Just because someone has some issues, like Holden Caulfield or that guy from 'The Sound and the Fury,' that's no reason not to believe what they say or assume they’re wrong.” She shrugged, closing back up, like the petals of some types of flowers once the sun has set. “Anyway, he was the only one in the class aside from me who liked the book, and Holden Caulfield. We agreed with him about the phonies. Everyone else thought Holden was whiny and delusional.”
    “And Tim, he was in your resource room, too, your first year. Right?”
    Annie nodded. “Yeah.” There was something subdued about her, thought Chaverre. Again she was reminded of a flower of some kind, wilting slowly due to a lack of some crucial ingredient of life- air, water, or sunlight, she couldn’t be sure which. Despite the bright petals of her clothes, glossy hair, and makeup, Annie was in some way curling in on herself, growing dry and brittle at the edges, like a day-old cut rose. “He never spoke in that classroom,” the girl recalled. “He just did what they said. He was smarter than me- he knew it wouldn’t do any good to argue.” Her painted lips twisted into a caustic smirk. “Degnan even gave him grief over that- over not talking. He played her stupid board games all year and she still said he wasn’t participating, just because he wouldn’t pretend he was happy to do it. Sorry,” she added, apparently realizing she was not using school-approved language. Chaverre didn’t feel that that was particularly important at this point. Annie’s anger had been present since day one of their therapy, but where it had once been born of passion, it now seemed infected with bitterness.
    “Tim’s death dredges up a lot of feelings for you,” she observed carefully.
    “Yeah…You know, he asked me out once.”
    “Oh really? When?”
    “Start of this year. I was seeing Matt, you know, so I said no. He asked me to Homecoming. I remember- I thought he must be kidding, because my hair was all greasy that day, and I had on this black T-shirt from the boys’ department, and these shorts that made my thighs look huge.” She bit her lip. “I wonder if he liked that- me looking the way I did then. You know, I hope it wasn’t because of my saying no that he-“
    “I doubt it, Annie. I think it had more to do with him than any of us.” Chaverre decided to change the subject. “Did you see him there with anyone else?”
    “I didn’t end up going. Matt didn’t want to, and at the time, I thought it would be too loud and crowded. Of course, Matt never took me anywhere until I lost weight…” Annie sighed. “You know, in art history, we just finished the Italian Renaissance. And I was thinking about those paintings by Botticelli and Titian and all of them. You know…” She smiled ruefully. “I used to look like one of those women that they painted. Back when I was fat. I used to look like a woman from a Renaissance painting.”
    “Is that good?”
    “I always thought so. But Matt acted like he wanted me to lose weight and my parents encouraged me with the diet- and I know they just did it because they thought I wanted their support, but sometimes I think…maybe they like me better now. Now that I’m not fat and I don’t dress like some depressed goth. Now that I’m not…now that I’m different.” She rubbed an eye. “Those paintings were so beautiful, though.” She blew her nose on the tissue that the now-silent Chaverre offered her. “And he’s cheating on me, you know. Matt. One of my friends saw him with this other girl in his car. She doesn’t go to this school. I don’t know her. But apparently she’s…big. Like I used to be. Of course,” she added bitterly, “he probably doesn’t take her anywhere, either. I guess I’m the one he wants to be seen with, but she’s the one he’s attracted to.
    “You know what else? The night of Homecoming, Matt and I watched 'V for Vendetta'. And I showed him my graphic novel. He said I was so talented. He still does say that, I guess. Did you ever see that movie, though? Or read the book?”
    Chaverre’s voice echoed distantly in her own ears, after being quiet for so long. “No, Annie. I don’t think I ever have.”
    “It’s great. The book is better than the movie, of course, but they’re both good. But V, the main character, talks about integrity. How important it is. How it’s better to die than to give it away. And I wonder if I should have stayed in the resource room. If I shouldn’t try to stop myself from stimming. If I shouldn’t have lost the weight, or not so much of it. If I should still wear black- I still want to.”
    “But you hated the resource room.”
    “Yeah, but now I feel like…like some person who grows up poor, and then gets all rich and never comes home again, and buys all this stuff to cover for the fact that he used to be poor. I take classes all day with normal people, I’m friends with them, people say they can’t even tell I have Asperger’s. But I can tell. I feel it all the time. I’ll always have the Asperger’s, and inside I’ll always be who I was then. And if I let it, my body will go back to being the way it was. Everyone wanted me to change, and everyone likes me this way…but I don’t like me this way.” She took another tissue.
    “And everyone will talk about how selfish he was,” she added. “How wrong suicide is. How tragic. But he didn’t leave a note, so they won’t know exactly why he did it. None of us can know. But I wonder- maybe he felt this way. Maybe he felt like everyone wanted him to be something he didn’t want to be…normal, or something. But he didn’t give in, like I did. He didn’t care about school because he knew we weren’t learning anything real, and he stayed in the resource room. I mean, sometimes in history, when people know they’re going to be defeated…they beat their enemies to it. Like Cleopatra or whoever. I mean, not that I don’t wish he was alive…I wish I had helped him, too. I wish I had done something, just like you, Ms. Chaverre.” Annie had never called her ‘Ms. C’.
    After Annie left, Lindsay Chaverre looked out the small window in her office for a while. She did not move or make a sound. The room around her, which she had worked in for almost ten years, felt remote and alien. Her mind had drifted to the things she wished. Primarily, she wished to be back in her college psych course, or back in graduate school. Back where everything made clinical sense, where there was a type of person who was healthy and the other types weren’t, where every problem could be cured, and where curing people made them happy, the way it was supposed to. And she wished, once again, that she had done something to help Tim Mazzone.