I remember hearing, as a child, some boys talking about an incident they’d witnessed where a girl was being sexually assaulted.

The boys were talking about how she was laughing nervously through the experience and they were confused, thinking that she was enjoying it.

The conversation was so vivid, so gruesome, so appalling, and they didn’t know what to make of it, and neither did I.

In the end they assumed she was some sort of slut and I think her reputation in the school was ruined.

I remember turning away and finding the whole situation very confusing.

I couldn’t imagine anyone laughing during an experience like that…not until I grew older.

I was extremely sheltered when I was growing up.

We weren’t allowed to go to parties, or school dances or any place really that would create a sort of opportunity to be taken advantage of like that.

I just took it for granted that we weren’t allowed.

And as a result it was easy to cultivate a sort of holier than thou attitude to make up for the sense of missing out on something that looked like fun.

I didn’t understand the laughter of that girl until I grew up.

I remember one of the first schools I visited as an author was in Sudbury. I was doing my Roses in My Carpets presentation to a group of grade seven kids. It has some pretty intense moments in it, and at a particularly sad moment in the presentation one of the kids began laughing.

I was shocked.

I asked him, ‘What are you laughing at?’ I thought he was laughing at the misery of the Afghan refugee camp I was showing them. But he looked sideways, like he was looking for help and he kept on laughing, but nervously now. Like he desperately wanted to stop but couldn’t.

And I realized something else was going on.

Over the years I realized that some children, not all, but some, react to very strong emotions and even fear by laughing.

I am absolutely positive that the girl being assaulted way back then was doing that.

She was in an impossible situation. She was outnumbered and being attacked. She was scared for her life. She didn’t dare think she could fight them off. So…she laughed. Maybe she was trying to disarm her attackers. I don’t know, but I do understand now, that laughing is not always about mirth and it’s not such a strange reaction to such a horrible situation as I once thought it was.

And this boy, when confronted with pictures of this Afghan refugee camp and this story that seemed to move him, was laughing out of nervousness.

And since then, I’ve come to accept it and not be insulted by it.

Different children respond in different ways.

Such is the complexity of the human mind.

The thing about human nature too is that it’s always evolving. Even as we gain more and more insight into cues people give that they’re being deceptive etc. people will evolve, they’ll learn not to react in those ways, they’ll do something else.

They’ll zig just when we’ve come to expect them to zag.

Which just goes to prove that there’s an awful lot we still need to learn about human nature.

And by golly, I’ll keep studying and studying it to get a better understanding for I do think that the best authors are connoisseurs of human nature.