Could Max have written this?

It was an extraordinary poem, a poem about a family that was extremely polite, as long as everyone stayed upstairs. When they went down to the basement they tried to murder each other.

THE POEM FAMILY BY DONNA SPECTOR 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 21

For two years Max did not open his eyes. Or, if he did, we couldn’t tell. When I first saw him, he was 14, a small, delicate boy who sat at the cafeteria table with his head bowed as though he were praying. His straight, light brown hair was cut like a bowl, the bangs reaching almost to the tip of his nose.

“If that boy is blind,” I said to Janice, a colleague who was supervising the study hall with me, “why doesn’t he use a cane?”

“No, no,” she said. “That’s Max, and he’s not blind. He’s just extremely shy. But He’s only a ninth grader. He’ll get over it.”

The next day I looked for Max in study hall. Dotted around the sunny cafeteria students were playing tic-tac-toe and covert card games forbidden in school, twitching to the tinny music coming…