Kaylan Wake | District 4 | fin

KAYLAN WAKE | 13 YEARS OLD | DISTRICT FOUR

He is the kind boy, gentle boy, the one who bandages the wounds of feral creatures too hurt to flee him. He is the boy who's got no common sense, the boy whose heart always, always shouts louder than his mind. He used to cry, in elementary school when they cut worms in half on the playground, he used to cry like it was him they meant to torture next. Maybe it would've been, if they'd thought they could get away with it. Pain follows weakness like sharks follow blood in the water; when they called him Wailin' Kaylan, when they put mud down his shirt or threw his stuffed toys over the schoolyard fence into the street, he thinks maybe they only did it because they were so desperate to save him. Only he's never known how to be saved.

Aileen has always understood that about him. It's one of the reasons she's his favorite person in the whole world, his big sister with her bouncy black curls and her wild, ferocious loyalty. He's not much like her, in looks or in temperament. His bangs fall flat down his forehead like he's always just been swimming, and he stands half a head taller than her grown-up self. Most of all he can't scream like she can, her voice a red whirlwind filling the world, her teeth bared like she means to tear out the throat of anyone who would threaten his welfare or her own. If Kaylan tries to scream like that he scares only himself. But his sister scares everyone else and not him. She knows he isn't like her, and she doesn't try to make him change. More than that, she likes that he is the way he is. She says so. She says it makes him strong.

He thinks she's wrong about that, but he loves to hear her say it even so.

It's a good thing Aileen is so fierce, so willing and able to fight for both of them - because there's nobody else to fight for either of them, nobody to look after them except each other. It's not that they've got no family. They've got lots of other siblings, only they all died - most of them before birth, one very shortly after. Their mother had bad luck with having babies. Really bad luck, because when she got pregnant again when Kaylan was three she died too, along with the new baby. Their dad looked after Kaylan on his own for a little while after that, but then Aileen came and said she was taking him, and that was that. Aileen says Dad isn't any good at taking care of kids, and she didn't want Kaylan to go through what she went through. Kaylan's not sure what it is she went through, exactly, but whatever it is, he's glad he has Aileen to protect him from it.

Aileen was nineteen when she took him in. She's twenty-nine now, and they live all right - much better than they did when he was little, when she had to leave him with neighbors all the time while she worked, and there was never quite enough to eat. Even now she still worries about money, but she's always refused Kaylan when he's suggested he could get a job and help support them as well. She tells him his job is just to be a kid. She tells him that the best thing he can do for her is to stop worrying and let her take care of him.

He does his best. It's not worrying that's his problem, exactly; it's not the future that preoccupies him but the here and now. He still hates, hates, hates to see anybody upset or in pain, just as much as he did when he was little, and seeing Aileen struggling is worst of all. He does his best to make things easier for her in the ways she'll let him - folding the laundry when she brings it home from the laundromat, cleaning his room without being asked. But he's not always very good at remembering to do these things, and that makes his stomach twist with guilt. It would be easier if he could help by having a job, something that would happen at the same time every day and absolutely couldn't be put off. Maybe some sort of manual labor - he'd be good at that, he thinks. He's big for his age, and maybe he's not very strong right now but that's just because he hasn't built up his muscles, isn't it? He could change that, if he had a job that meant he needed to. And then he'd be bringing home money, helping Aileen in a way that really mattered.

In a few years, Aileen says, and he tries to be patient.

In the meantime, at his sister's encouragement, he spends time on his own pursuits. He loves to read, though he's slow at it; something in his mind won't let him skim, forces him to backtrack when he realizes he's let his attention wander and missed the sense of a sentence or two. So it takes him a long time to finish anything, but - except when he's reading for a school assignment - he honestly doesn't mind. Wading sluggishly through every detail of every description, stopping now and again to chew over his own thoughts on the story or the characters... it's peaceful. It makes him feel like his own world, too, is a place that might be possible to understand.

He's tried writing his own stories now and again, but the words never pattern themselves on the page the way he wants them to, the way he knows they can when someone with actual talent is guiding them, and so far his failure has always frustrated him into giving up.

When he was little he used to just sit in his room and read until Aileen dragged him out for school or supper or a bath, or else told him that he was going to turn into a cave fish if he didn't get some sun and banished him outside for a while. But now that he's older, and allowed to venture out of his immediate neighborhood without supervision, he's gotten into the habit of reading elsewhere than his own home. He finds places where others don't bother to come - paltry stands of young trees whose roots crisscross to form something that approximates a comfortable seat; crannies round the back of his school building that are barely big enough to fit one person, and have therefore not been claimed by students cutting class to smoke; mediocre climbing trees along whose low branches he can lounge like a leopard, arm crooked at an uncomfortable angle to hold himself in place and his book within view at the same time.

Animals love these kinds of places too, momentary sanctuaries from the perils of the world, and they never love them more than when they are wounded. The first hurt creature Kaylan found in one of his private refuges was a baby raccoon, its flesh rent apart in evidence of an escape too dearly bought. It was nearly dead already, but Kaylan was ten years old and so sick with compassion he could hardly think, and he picked the creature up in his bare hands. It bit him, and he dropped it, and it died. He went home crying, and his sister took him to get a rabies shot and scolded him fiercely and told him what felt like five hundred times that he must never, never, never do that again.

So when he stumbled on a rabbit whose front leg had been well-nigh torn from its body, he dithered frantically for a few moments before dashing home to fetch a pair of gardening gloves. By the time he returned the rabbit was nowhere to be found. He cried over that too, and put the gloves in his jacket pocket and kept them there.

The third creature was a kitten with a hurt paw, and this one he carried home in gloved hands and put in a box which he hid in the neighbors' garden shed. He poached bandages from the first-aid kit his sister kept to wrap up the injury, and leaving the kitten with a dish of water he went to the library to find out how to look after it. He came back with three books and sneaked out in the middle of the night to bandage the paw the way the books said he ought to have done it. When he'd finished he didn't think the bandage looked like it was meant to look, but if he gave up just because he was no good at this then there'd be nobody to even try to help, so he told himself he absolutely mustn't give up.

He refilled the kitten's water and went to bed, and in the morning his sister woke him up to ask him why the neighbors said they'd seen him stealing from their garden shed.

So he had to tell her. He brought the kitten with its box into the house and showed it to his sister, and she shook her head at him and hugged him and went to explain to the neighbors. When she got back they had a long talk, and she said he couldn't keep doing things like this, and he said he had to, and she said well then he should at least tell her when he does them and let her help. Then she redid the bandage, which was falling off, and gave the kitten some scraps of meat.

So that one went well. Kaylan wanted to keep the kitten, but almost as soon as its paw was healed and they let it out of its box, it ran away. Kaylan cried for it, but Aileen said it was born wild and it would probably be all right. She said Kaylan had already helped it as much as it would let him, and that would have to be enough.

That was when he was twelve. Now he's thirteen, and he's found no more hurt animals since then. But he keeps his eyes open. He knows not everyone cares about rabbits and raccoons and things. He knows he's weird, that he doesn't fit - he's reminded of that often enough at school even now, though he's grown better at evading the bullies than he was when he was younger. But he can't change. He just can't - he used to try when he was younger, thinking stoic thoughts, imagining that he was building thick walls around himself to block out every emotion that didn't originate with him. But feeling so keenly what he sees others feel isn't a choice he makes. It's just something that happens to him. His walls crumble at the lightest touch, and he has no idea how to build them stronger.

So since he can't be strong, he's settled into being weak. It would be a stupid decision if it were a decision at all, he thinks - but since it's not, maybe this is just the way he's meant to be. Maybe some people are just made to do stupid things that hurt them, like picking up that baby raccoon, and that just occasionally do some good, like with the kitten.

At the end of the day, he thinks, doing something that's stupid doesn't necessarily mean you're doing something that's wrong.