Tyler spent a lot of that September looking in mirrors.
He had never been a mirror person. He brushed his teeth, he dragged his fingers through his hair, he left. Now he found himself standing in front of the bathroom sink for long minutes with the fan running, studying his own face as if it belonged to someone he had been asked to identify. His eyes were brown, a deep brown that went almost black in low light. His hair was dark and thick and had a wave in it when it got long. His skin tanned easily and deeply; every summer he went a shade his sunburned cousins envied. He had never once thought about any of it. He had thought, if he thought anything, that he took after Grandma Carol's father, the mysterious black Irish great-grandfather that no one had ever met.
Now he looked at his face and thought: whose is this?
In biology, Ms. Okafor moved on from heredity to cellular respiration, and Tyler did not hear a word of it. He sat in the back row and drew Punnett squares in the margins of his notebook. Big B, little b. Blue and brown. He drew them over and over until the page was gray with them. Almost never is not the same as never. He wondered if it would have been better, somehow, to be the exception. To be the one-in-a-thousand blue-eyed couple's brown-eyed son. A fluke of biology instead of a fact of history.
After class one day, Ms. Okafor stopped him at the door.
"You've been somewhere else for two weeks, Mr. Dawson," she said, not unkindly. "Everything all right?"
He almost lied. Then he heard himself say, "I did the test. The DNA one. For the extra credit."