CopyCat Read Free Page B

uniquely shaped rocks.
    Some people called it being a savant. A friend of mine in school, for example, was a genius at Math, but had trouble tying his shoes in a knot that would hold. Another could play the piano like a virtuoso, but couldn’t read or write. As Wikipedia put it, “ Savant syndrome is a condition in which a person with a serious mental disability, such as an autism spectrum disorder, demonstrates profound and prodigious capacities or abilities far in excess of what would be considered normal.”
    Of course, not all savants are autistic, though about half of them are. Nor are all autistic people savants—actually only about ten percent of the millions of people who have been diagnosed. So there you have it. I was a fucking savant, I guess, and I didn’t know whether to be happy about it or feel kind of embarrassed. It made me a freak, you see, or that’s how it felt sometimes anyway. My grandfather told me I was looking at it all wrong. He told me I was a genius, and had remarkable focus , as he called it. He told me he was really proud of who I was.
    My art teachers had discovered my so-called talent in school and it gave my grandfather hope, I think, that this skill would provide me with some kind of vocation in life. He worried about me both because of the Asperger’s and because he was my only surviving relative since my parents’ death.
    Like I said, when I was almost twenty-one, Grandfather found Steven Oswald, a local dealer in the arts, and convinced him to look at my work. Within a month Steven Oswald had sold my first painting, which he called a reproduction . I received several hundred dollars for it and after that I worked hard on various assignments Steven Oswald would give me. Like if someone wanted a high-end reproduction of a Gauguin or a Matisse or Renoir for their living rooms. I even made a little money, though my grandfather was more concerned that I had something to hold my interest.
    It was in October of that same year that my grandfather passed away. It hadn’t been unexpected. Grandfather had spent many hours talking to me after he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a few months before, explaining to me why I needed to stay focused and not descend into a depression after his death like I had when my parents were killed.
    I’d known since I was very small that I could retreat into my mind when I wanted to and not be aware of the outside world—kind of like I did in the detectives’ office when they kept badgering me with questions I couldn’t answer. It wasn’t necessarily an Asperger’s thing—this was just a me thing , and it was what my grandfather worried about the most, my withdrawing into my own world. But I was fine after his death and for a long time after that—up until the thing with the police, actually. I missed my grandfather very much, but the depression after he was gone was manageable, and I felt like I was in control of it.
    And I was finally able to be myself in another way that I never could before too, at least not without totally freaking my grandfather out. I had always known I didn’t get excited by the way girls looked or smelled, though they smelled sweet and flowery when they tossed their hair and smiled at me. Boys, though—well, that was a different story.
    In school, I went to normal classes for the most part, and really enjoyed my science, and of course, my art classes. In those classes, the girls all wanted to sit near me and talk to me for some reason, but it was the other guys I most admired and felt drawn to in that way. Not that I ever did anything about it, of course. I was way too shy to ever approach anyone.
    But after my grandfather passed, I began to go out occasionally to a hotel bar known as a meeting place for gay men. I’d read about it online and I sometimes met men there at the bar for quick, casual hook-ups, which was all I was interested in—a nice-looking, hard body to satisfy my urges. Later on, after I met