Soon asks him to tell her more about the bird. Where it lives. How big it is. What it eats. Old Man answers everything with a touch of pride, like a child who has learned his lesson well. Soon is still fascinated by his ability to memorize information, but now she sees him from another side, as if she were older than him.

She’d also been told that Old Man was retarded, but she wants to believe that’s a lie, like everything else. Or almost everything.

Precisely because of the matter of Old Man, no one was too worried about her missing school. They insinuated that it could have been Old Man who encouraged her to skip, possibly with coercion and threats. She insists it was her own decision, but even so it took them a long time to believe her, or they never did believe her, and in any case the whole thing—her truancy—ended up swept under the rug, as if it hadn’t been the root of everything, even the seed. Now Soon does go to school, she doesn’t miss a single day—her teachers must have been told to report any absence immediately. Now that Marga isn’t there and Soon is no longer a marshmallow, school is bearable. She’s still annoyed by group work, but it’s just a matter of getting used to it, her teacher says. Everything will go back to normal, she adds, though Soon doesn’t understand what she means by normal. Practically all the girls in her class have boyfriends—the ones who had them last year have now replaced them with new ones—and a lot have slept with them. She’s realized by now that sleep with doesn’t just mean lay down beside, but rather doing many other things that approach her mother’s description of obscene acts. Still, those girls are not monitored by their teachers, and if they miss school they’re not reported immediately, as she would be. Alongside these other girls Soon is still a little strange, and it’s possible that she’ll have to find a boyfriend soon so she won’t stand out so much. The day she starts going with someone her age she will start to forget about Old Man, about what they call her Stockholm syndrome, how in reality she was in love with him, and how she forgives him and even makes excuses for him, how she’s been traumatized ever since it happened, how her attitude is unhealthy and abnormal. The toll she will have to pay, though, will be high. She’s not sure she wants to go with anyone, much less sleep with them. In her diary she’d nonchalantly written that she’d slept with Old Man, but she meant lay down beside him and let him touch her. Writing that was horrible, it seems, but doing it with anyone her own age, that’s apparently fine, and is apparently what’s expected of her.

Retarded is not the word they used when they talked to her, but Soon heard it several times, especially at first, when her parents were so worried and so, so angry that they didn’t even bite their tongues in her presence: moron, idiot, crazy, interchangeably. Mentally challenged, they called him later, and also a person with mental retardation, which is less insulting than retarded. Of all their accusations, Soon thinks this one is the most absurd. Old Man has an intelligence that other people don’t understand, that’s all. How many of them are capable of retaining the names of thousands of birds in Latin, and of listing their characteristics one by one? Could they recognize and distinguish those birds’ songs—do they have an ear for those subtleties? And Nina Simone’s songs, word for word, all the lyrics without even knowing English? And her life in detail, her biography broken down month by month? Old Man runs circles around them all.