“Here you go,” I say, trying not to sound too excited. He twirls it between his fingers like he’s going to snap the pencil in half as he stares at the worksheet in front of him.
“Start at number one”—I point to it—“then go to the first letter, A, then go to the next number, two”—I point with each standardized instruction—“and then the next letter, B, and so on. Try not to lift the pen as you move from one number or letter to the next. Work as quickly and accurately as you can.” I show him how to do it on the one in front of me. “Now you go.”
“Now you go. Now you go.” He waves his pencil wildly in the air, then tosses it on the table. There’s an old sports watch on his wrist. “Now. You. Go.”
All the numbers and letters on Trail Making B are in a different pattern than the pattern on Trail Making A. He doesn’t know how to respond to the change. I busy myself with the things on the table so he can’t see me staring at him, observing his every move. Within seconds, he’s breathing heavy through his nose. Quick, short breaths. He jerks his head up and back down three times. Opens and closes his mouth twice.
Just as I’m about to give up and move on, he picks the pencil off the table and grips it tightly in his hand. His forehead lines with stress as he begins making lines. He’s painstaking in his process, pressing down hard on the paper as he connects the dots. I’m scared to breathe in case I snap his attention away.
There are twenty-two minutes to take the test, and he finishes with a minute to spare. Beads of sweat line his forehead. My office reeks of his exertion. Raw and pungent. I reach across the table and take his worksheet, sliding it in front of me. He’s still breathing hard.
His design on Trail Making B is identical to the design he typically creates on Trail Making A. None of the numbering or lettering sequences are right, but if the numbers and letters were just numbers like they usually are for him, the drawing would be perfect, flawless.
“Let’s move on to the next test.” But we don’t need to move on to the next section or do a different test because I already know what I’ll find—someone trained him to take these tests and to look a certain way on them. I can’t imagine the amount of time and attention it requires to do something like that. Why would anyone want to make him look intellectually disabled? And if they created his intellectual disability, did they create his autism too? What kind of a cruel person does that?
“It was unbelievable,” I gush. Detective Layne and I are back at the coffee shop. Same table. Same spot. Looking as out of place as before, but I don’t care. “I can’t believe I was right!”
I’m still giddy from the rush of my hunch leading to such a huge discovery about Mason. So much so that I can’t keep the grin off my face. It’s been years since I felt this alive. Dad kept teasing me about it when I picked up Harper yesterday after my testing session with Mason, but he’s getting a kick out of this whole thing too. I’ve never understood why people would want to be on this side of the law, but I’ve begun to get a glimpse these past few days.
“Take me through it again,” Detective Layne says.
“Again?” We’ve already been through it twice. He nods. “Okay, well, like I said, he did a lot of hysterical laughing throughout. We’d be in the middle of something, and he would suddenly burst out giggling uncontrollably. At one point, he jumped out of his chair and ran across the room with his hands out, giggling and squealing. He grins and smiles all the time, but when you ask him why, he can’t explain why he’s smiling or even identify that he’s happy. He often just repeats questions back when he either doesn’t understand it or doesn’t want to answer it. I’m not sure which is the case yet.”
Everything about his clinical picture looks different now that I know he doesn’t have an intellectual disability. Not one that’s been accurately diagnosed, anyway. He could be really smart. I was blown away by Harper’s IQ score when she was tested. Hers is higher than mine. His could be the same for all we know.
“He’s really talented at imitating. He can imitate tone and multiple dialects. In the few hours we spent together, he mimicked his mom’s voice, his preschool teacher’s voice, and another female voice that I’m assuming is Savannah’s. He repeats key phrases that he’s heard over and over again. Always. Like he’s copying the person who originally said it. He picked up on me almost immediately, and his delivery was spot on.”
Halfway through our session, my phone rang with a reminder I’d forgotten to shut off. “Oh shoot,” I said, hurrying to my desk to shut it off.
“Oh shoot,” he said from behind me, and it stopped me midstride. I never would’ve guessed the voice came from a boy if I hadn’t known he was behind me.
“Why does he do that?” Detective Layne interrupts my memory.
“All kids do it in the beginning of their language development, and it disappears as they age, but that’s not what happens in kids with ASD. It can become their primary form of language. Other times it only happens when they’re upset or anxious as a way to soothe themselves. That’s definitely the case with Mason. He does it regularly, but anytime he got anxious, there was a dramatic increase.”
“And the tests. Back to the tests.” He motions to the papers spread out in front of me on the table. I brought some of Mason’s protocols so he could easily walk through them with me.
“Like I said, it was fascinating. He tried to follow the same response patterns from his previous testing situations, but that was impossible when things were so different. He was fine until I veered from the standardized protocol and didn’t follow the typical path. He was completely thrown off, and his anxiety increased dramatically.” His rocking grew more pronounced, like a steady current moving through his body. He smacked his thigh so hard once that I had to stop him. “It shouldn’t have been so distressing, but he was aware things weren’t going how they usually did and that he was ‘failing,’ even though he wasn’t. He just was in uncharted territory and didn’t know how to answer. He got lots of things right that he never should’ve been able to answer if all his other tests were accurate.”
He shakes his head. “Wow, so he’s faking it?”
“I’m not sure he’s intentionally faking anything or how much awareness he has as to what’s going on. But I do know one thing—someone trained him to take those tests and look a certain way on them. That’s one thing I’m sure of.” Everything else is questionable, but I’m confident he was coached and not just once, multiple times. He couldn’t have performed like he did otherwise. “And I’m almost certain it had to be Genevieve.”
“What makes you say that?” he asks as he flips through the testing protocols again.
“Because it’s ongoing. Maybe John could’ve been in on it from the beginning, but other than his first evaluation, the rest of them happened after he passed away.”
“But you said that he repeats things from other people that happened years ago, right? Like his preschool teacher’s voice? That was more than ten years ago. Couldn’t the same thing be happening here?” He cocks his head to the side and raises his eyebrows at me. “Is it possible that the way to answer and respond on the test in a certain way is just cemented in his head from the first time he took it?”