Stranger
From the moment they let him out of the box, Lenny, who had seen so few people in his life for his first eight years, due to his sequestered conditions, could not seem to get enough of them. Each time they took him out in public he openly stared at the variety of human beings that passed before him, often turning in circles just to give himself ample opportunity to take in as many of them as he possibly could. He pointed and asked questions, often aimed directly at the person as well as at his siblings, and he sometimes actually followed people he found particularly interesting, eager to learn about them, to look and look at them until he had established them as a definitive memory in his mind.
He didn't seem to notice that not everyone took this fascination well, that some people edged away from him or gave him irritable looks, that some people were offended or impatient with his approach and some of the more outrageous questions he came up with. And while the twins thought his behavior was funny, often going so far as to encourage it by pointing out more unusual-looking people for him to take notice of, Francis and David were embarrassed by it, and David was even concerned that it might endanger them. A little boy like Lenny, going out of his way to ask personal questions about people, was memorable, which for their family, wasn't such a great thing to be.
"Lenny, you can't do that," he had tried to explain to him repeatedly. "I know you like to see people and find out about them, but you can't do that with strangers! It's rude, and, and it's…it's dangerous!"
"But how?" Lenny would ask with genuine puzzlement, frowning. "They can't hurt me."
And what he said was perfectly true. Before the average person could even begin to make a move to harm Lenny, he would be able to move fast enough not only to block them from doing so, but to inflict considerable damage and pain to them instead, even death, if he so chose. And so David would sputter through an attempt to explain the safety of the family's anonymity, all concepts that were dull and unimportant to an eight-year-old boy still awed by everything he saw in his newly widened world.
There was no need to warn about or protect Lenny from the possible ill intentions of strangers and their danger. No, what they really needed was to protect strangers from Lenny.
.