Solitaire

by Kathleen Ann Goonan

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SB didn't tell his parents about Jeff but his dad followed him one day without him knowing it. He burst in on them playing cards, just stomped up the rickety stairs and said "What the hell! I might have known!" SB was surprised when Jeff was added to his class at school when it opened a few weeks later. His mother told him that the social worker had found Jeff a home with the witch woman. She had the perfectly normal name of Mrs. Johnson, and that was now the last name Jeff answered to at roll call. He was surprised again when Jeff did so well at school that they pushed him forward into another grade the next week. They had different recesses, so SB hardly had a chance to talk with Jeff, or see how he liked it, or tell him that he was sorry, and then his mom and dad moved to a new house in a place SB hated. His mom told SB that they'd been talking about it for months, ever since his dad was promoted, but SB didn't even know about the promotion, whatever that was, much less talk about moving. The new neighborhood had no creek and it had no woods and it had no ballfield, no alley, no Jeff, just endless houses so identical that at first he had to count streets to find his way home, and no trees at all. It had another bunch of kids who were even more dull than the first bunch he had known, so that all SB did was read and play solitaire and after that his mom gave up on making him play outside. Even she understood that it was dull when none of the streets held mystery, he thought, then realized much later that she had given up on mystery a lot earlier than he ever could have, and was not quite sure why. He only knew that it was not his father's fault, as she always claimed. He never told anyone that he didn't think that Jeff was the kid's real name. One day at the beginning he had found an old shredded comic book fluttering on the road by the creek. He stopped and tossed it in his basket. When he was reading it after dinner the first balloon he read started "Jeff," and Jeff kind of glowed at him for a minute, and then he realized that it was colored, like with a yellow crayon. He remembered that, later. And he never told anyone either that he thought that little Jeff was the same person as the large man he thought of as Jeff's father, made small so that he could have somebody to play with. Somebody to learn from. Someone to hold to, in the infinite reaches of space, on this small sphere, the smallness of which SB became increasingly aware the more he knew, which, eventually, was quite a bit. [next]