Mr. Legs

One of Miguel’s tics is to shake his head back and forth like he’s always saying no. His foster sisters torture him: Do you want a million dollars? Look, he doesn’t want it! Miguel feels the shape of a fuck you welling in his mouth, but his tongue is a lazy slug, fat and unwilling. He sees the laughing girls without depth, like paper dolls pinned to a paper room. Lacey, the oldest, her cleavage sparkling with pink and silver cosmetic dust, asks, Want a kiss, honey? The little ones shriek, He doesn’t want it!

On his first day at Aunt Meredith’s, the social worker taped pirate eyepatches over the girls’ right eyes and made them walk around shaking their heads so they would understand how Miguel sees the world. The whole house trembled with their giggling. “He’s not disabled,” the social worker told the girls. “He’s differently-abled.”

The house is only a mile from the state fairgrounds, so Lacey goes on foot. Her fingernails are like pressed cherries and she has ironed her blond hair straight so the ends swing when she moves, teasing the naked skin of her back above the corset top that looks like leather but isn’t. All night she will want to scratch that impossible-to-reach middle place; she will back up against brick walls and rub. It is August, and twilight comes late, purpling the farmland greens and driving the cicadas to an ecstatic roar. Beyond the cornfield rise the Ferris wheel, the exhibition tents, the Big Ben drop tower, lights winking on, a garish glowing sky. Dark bruises float on the air where fireworks have detonated. Lacey hikes up her jean skirt and rolls the waistband now that she’s out of the house.

She hears the screen door whine behind her and there is Miguel trying to catch up, running in little zig-zags. She breaks into a run, making for the farm road. Miguel is the new foster, sixteen, slack-lipped and quiet, always knocking glasses of milk off the counter. The list of things he has is a page long, so they just say dyspraxia. Lacey doesn’t buy it, though; you can’t blame everything that’s wrong with you on some word, like you have no control. A speech therapist comes to the house every Thursday, and Lacey hears them going at it in the living room, Miguel’s weird, low voice repeating after her, stuff like “Who has the spoon?” or “A bee stung me.”

Miguel is gaining on her, so Lacey changes course and bolts into the corn. Tonight is not a night she will let him fuck up. Taylor is waiting for her at the midway beer garden. Taylor, whom she loves with a jealous fury, who has finally asked her out again after a whole year wasted on some churchy girlfriend. As she runs, the wind on her skin feels like his hands tracing her collarbone, the memory of that one sweet week, drifting to sleep in his pine-smelling bedroom with the saltwater fish tank and a model of the solar system spinning slowly above them.

When Miguel reaches the place where Lacey vanished, his running straightens out. He is guided by the precision of the row, the even spacing of the tall arching stalks. These things help him to orient himself in space: wall tiling, fence posts, sidewalk squares. Miguel gets A’s in math, where he can work everything out to its logical conclusion in the clean, lonely space of his head. The world, though, is riddled with human error and shifting illogic. He can’t read facial expressions. Sometimes he crouches when a plane flies above him. Rules are never clear—what to say, what is meant by laughter or a hand gesture, how loudly to speak in a library, a house, a hospital. What people want and when they want it.

He knows it could be worse. In therapy rooms and state facilities, he’s met dyspraxic kids who can’t talk at all, kids who go wild with frustration from...