Colin Fischer by Zack Stentz, Ashley Edward Miller

way, an attempt to make good on the promised interview at this time seemed ill-advised.
    Colin carefully put his lunch items back into their bag, then moved toward Melissa’s table. As he approached, Melissa’s friends stopped their conversations. They each shot him with silent, HOSTILE stares. Melissa didn’t share her friends’ hostility, but she did seem uncharacteristically WARY .
    “Hello, Melissa,” Colin said. “How are you today?”
    A silent, awkward moment followed, as Melissa debated whether to acknowledge Colin in front of her friends. Other conversations, too, trailed off. It seemed as though everyone across the entire cafeteria was watching them now.
    “I’m fine, Colin. Is there something you need?”
    Muffled titters erupted from the rest of Melissa’s table. Colin ignored them.
    “Actually, yes, there is,” he continued. “Can I ask you a question?”
    “Wait. I have a question for you first,” Sandy declared. Her friends covered their mouths. Colin wondered if they had food stuck in their teeth and were trying to disguise it. “We hear you totally hulked out in first period PE and started whaling on Stan Krantz like he stole your pocket protector or something. True or false?”
    Abby and Emma laughed aloud, confirming Colin’s suspicion that Sandy’s question had been rhetorical rather than literal. Melissa looked away from him. Her face flushed red from her delicately pointed chin to the tips of her ears. EMBARRASSED .
    “I don’t have a pocket protector,” Colin replied. “Also, there is no pocket on my gym shirt. It’s a T-shirt, and it’s from Caltech. I like it much better than the one I wore yesterday because it’s one hundred percent cotton and not polyester, which is a synthetic fiber. I don’t like synthetic fibers because they’re scratchy.”
    Abby and Emma laughed even louder.
    “That’s true. Also, if synthetic fabrics ever catch fire—”
    “
Colin
,” Melissa cut him off. This was also an uncharacteristic behavior. Melissa was usually very considerate about letting Colin finish his thoughts, regardless of the odd directions they would sometimes take. “Ask your question.”
    “If I wanted to lie to my parents, what would be the best way?”
    In seventh grade , Colin noticed an unusual phenomenon. Melissa would arrive at school in long skirts or sensible, dark trousers, then disappear into the girls’ room. A few minutes later, she would emerge in ripped jeans, short skirts, or whatever the popular fashion of the moment might be. At the end of the day, the process would reverse itself. Melissa always changed back into her original outfit before leaving for home.
    After six months of observing this odd behavior, Colin pointed it out to Marie. He could not fathom why Melissa needed to wear two sets of clothes to school, and she refused to answer Colin’s direct inquiries. Her dismissals were the closest she had ever come to demonstrating ANGER with Colin, which deterred him from pursuing it further.
    “She doesn’t want to wear what her parents want her to, and she doesn’t want them to know,” Mariehad suggested to him then. The apparent deception still made very little sense to Colin, but it acceptably explained what had otherwise seemed inexplicable. It also made Melissa the ideal teacher in the art of lying.
    That afternoon Colin lied to his mother for the first time.
    When the call came, Mrs. Fischer was folding laundry into careful, sorted piles while leading an online teleconference with engineers from NASA facilities at JPL, Houston, Washington, DC, and Florida. “So if we drop the infrared imaging package and stagger the inspections with the final prep work, we can still make our launch window,” Mrs. Fischer said, holding up a shirt and squinting to determine its owner. Her sons were getting to the age where it was becoming hard to distinguish their clothes from each other’s, or her husband’s. “Now—”
    Her cell phone chirped.
Colin
.