Made You Up

  My mother examined Miles, obviously remembering when he’d brought me home during my episode, and Miles glanced from my mom to me, giving me a panic-stricken look I’d never seen on his face before.

  “You’re going to visit her?” my mother said with definite interest, but with that edge that suggested she thought Miles meant “visit her in jail.”

  “Uh, yeah.” He swallowed thickly. “I go once a month—and it’s nothing serious, really—but, uh, she’s in a hospital in Goshen.”

  “A hospital?”

  Miles looked at me again. “A psychiatric hospital.”

  My mother was completely silent for at least a whole minute. When she spoke again, her voice was careful, but almost . . . happy.

  “Well, I think that sounds like a good idea,” she said. Miles looked relieved, but my stomach sank to the depths of the ocean. Why was my own mother so okay with me to visiting a mental hospital? Why was that a good idea at all?

  It kind of felt like she was kicking me in the gut, and every kick said

  I don’t want you.

  I don’t need you.

  I don’t love you.

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  Chapter Thirty

  Saturday morning, Miles stood on the doorstep in his bomber jacket with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. His breath fogged the pane of glass in the front door.

  He looked me up and down. Pajamas and cat slippers. “Why aren’t you ready to go?”

  “My mom says I need to invite you in for breakfast.”

  Miles glanced over me, toward the kitchen. “I didn’t realize you were eating. I can wait in the truck. . . .”

  “No, no, it’s okay.” I grabbed his sleeve and pulled him inside. “Seriously, this’ll all go over easier if you come and eat.”

  Miles looked toward the kitchen again. I knew he could smell the food—my mother had been wafting scents toward the front door since she’d started cooking this morning.

  “Your dad is home?” Miles asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  A line formed between his eyebrows.

  “He’s mostly harmless. But you have to remember your history.” I lowered my voice to add, “Not everyone’s dad is a complete asshole.”

  That seemed to convince him. He shrugged his jacket off. When I took it from him, it nearly pulled me to the floor.

  “Christ almighty!” I heaved the unexpected weight back up. “Why is it so heavy?”

  “It’s a heavyweight flight jacket,” said Miles. “I have another one that’s lighter, but it makes me look like a greaser—what are you doing?”

  “Smelling it.” I stuck my nose in the collar. “It always smells like tobacco.”

  “Yeah, it would. Opa smoked a lot.”

  “Opa?”

  “Sorry, my grandpa.”

  I hung the jacket on the coat hook next to the door and pushed Miles into the kitchen.

  “Oh, you’re here!” said my mother with fake surprise. “I’ve already set you a place at the table, right there next to Alex.”

  Miles’s eyes glazed as they roamed over the scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, toast, and orange juice on the table. I pushed him into a chair.

  “It’s nice to finally meet you, Miles.” Dad reached over to shake Miles’s hand. Miles stared at him like he’d lost the will to speak. “Staying for breakfast before you head out?”

  “I guess,” said Miles.

  “Great! How much do you know about the French Revolution?”

  “Like what?”

  “When did it take place?”

  “1789 to 1799.”

  “June twentieth, 1789 was the . . . ?”

  “Tennis Court Oath.”

  “1793 to 1794 was the time period for the . . . ?”

  “Reign of Terror,” Miles answered, rubbing his neck.

  “And Robespierre’s full name was . . . ?”

  “Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre.”

  “Well done, sir!” Dad grinned. “I like him, Lexi. Can we eat now?”

  I filled Miles’s plate for him, since he seemed to be paralyzed from the eyes down. Dad peppered him with history questions until they made it to World War II, and then they moved into an analytical discussion of wartime tactics.

  Charlie didn’t come out the entire time Miles was there, even though my mother had set a place for her. I’d been looking forward to introducing her to Miles—I had a feeling he wouldn’t mind fueling her Word of the Week a thousand times over.

  When the meal was left in scraps and ruins, Miles checked his watch and straightened up. “We’d better go. It’s already nine.”

  I got dressed, and then we moved to the entryway to pull on coats and shoes.

  “Oh, Alex, wait. Don’t forget to take these.” My mother sorted through a pile on the hall table. “The cell phone . . . your gloves . . . and here’s some money if you stop for food on the way back.”

  I shoved all of it into my pockets and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks, Mom.” I turned back toward the kitchen. “Bye, Dad!”

  “Bye, Lexi,” Dad called back.

  Miles stepped out the front door right before Charlie came barreling out of the kitchen, aiming for me.

  She slammed into my legs. “When are you going to let me come with you?”

  “Someday,” I said. “Someday I’m going to travel the world, and you can come with me, okay?”

  “Okay,” she mumbled. But her eyes snapped up, and she jabbed a finger at me. “But I’m holding you to it!”

  “I won’t let you down, Charlemagne.”

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  Chapter Thirty-one

  I wondered how Miles made this trip every month without losing it. There was no music, no stereo, just an endless stretch of US-31 between Indianapolis and Goshen.

  My delusion detector went off less and less while I was around Miles. Had his offer to meet his mother come any earlier this year, there wasn’t an ice cube’s chance in hell I would’ve taken him up on it. I would’ve gone nuts trying to figure out if he was lying, if it was some elaborate plan, or if he was just going to leave me in the middle of nowhere and laugh all the way home. But his presence didn’t set me on edge anymore. The opposite, actually—since Tucker and I were no longer on speaking terms, Miles was the easiest person to be around. Maybe better than Tucker, even, because Miles knew. He knew, and he didn’t care.

  And he didn’t seem to mind being around me, either.

  “So what’s your mom like?” I asked when we got off 465.

  “I don’t know,” said Miles.

  “What do you mean, ‘I don’t know’? She’s your mom.”

  “I don’t know—I’ve never had to explain her to anyone before.”

  “Well . . . what does she look like?”

  “Like me.”

  I rolled my eyes. “What’s her name?”

  “Juniper,” he said. “But she prefers June.”

  “I like it.”

  “She was a teacher. She’s smart.”

  “Smart like you?”

  “No one is smart like me.”

  “I’ve got a question,” I said. “If you’re such a brainiac, how come you never skipped grades?”

  “Mom didn’t want me to,” he said. “She didn’t want me to go through the things she went through when she skipped grades. She was always excluded from groups, people made fun of her. . . .”

  “Oh.”

  “She probably won’t stop smiling the entire time we’re there. And don’t mention anything about my dad or where I live. I don’t like to worry her with stuff like that.”

  I nodded, thinking about Miles slinking across his rooftop and dropping down onto the demon dog’s roo
f.

  “That, um, that dog . . .”

  “Ohio,” Miles said.

  “Yeah. He’s your dad’s dog?”

  “Yes. My dad got him partly to keep people from getting into our house, partly to keep me from getting out. He thinks I sneak out to meet people.”

  “But you do.”

  “He has no proof,” Miles said. “Anyway, Ohio’s not that smart and sleeps like a narcoleptic, so I guess he and my dad were kind of made for each other.” He stared at the highway, then said with disgust, “I hate dogs. Cats are so much better.”

  I made my snort sound like a cough. We drove on in silence for another few minutes. I tried to burrow a little deeper into my coat.

  “You didn’t eat much at breakfast,” I said.

  “I wasn’t that hungry,” he replied.

  “Liar. You were looking at that food like a kid from a third-world country.”

  “Your mom’s cooking was really good.”

  “I know; that’s why I eat it.” After I check it for poison, of course. “Terrible deflection, by the way. You could have said, ‘Because I felt awkward eating too much at a family gathering with people I’ve never met before,’ and been done with it.”

  He coughed loudly, his fingers tapping the steering wheel.

  Eventually Miles pulled off the highway and into a heavily wooded suburb. Everything was coated in blindingly white snow. He only took the backstreets, and the more houses we passed, the more I realized that this reminded me of where I lived. These could have been the same streets.

  Maybe all paranoids had a sort of sixth sense for detecting places that wanted to lock them up. I knew the hospital as soon as I saw it. A squat, one-story brick building surrounded by a fence. Bare shrubs framed the front walk and snow-covered trees dotted the grounds. It was probably pretty during the rest of the year.

  This whole McCoy-Scarlet-Celia thing seemed silly now. Hardly substantial enough to get me inside a mental hospital. McCoy could do what he wanted and Celia could deal with her own problems.

  “Are you okay?” Miles asked, yanking my door open. I managed to unbuckle my seatbelt and slip out of the cab.

  “Yep, I’m good.” I balled my hands into fists and held them tight against my sides. Next to the front walk was a sign.

  WELCOME TO CRIMSON FALLS RESIDENTIAL PSYCHIATRY CENTER.

  Crimson Falls? It made me think of spilling blood. And in crimson lettering, no less.

  My fingers itched to take pictures, but the little voice in the back of my head told me that if I did, orderlies would jump out of the bushes, throw a pair of shackles on me, and never let me leave. I’d never graduate high school. I’d never go to college. I’d never get to do the things normal people do because normal people don’t get so melodramatic about visiting mental hospitals, you idiot!

  That voice was so ambivalent sometimes.

  It looked more like a hospital on the inside, where the floors were checked tile and the walls were exactly the right shade of taupe to make you want to kill yourself. A girl not much older than Miles and me sat behind the front desk.

  “Oh, hi, Miles.” She handed him a clipboard. Miles put both our names on the visitors’ log. “You missed morning rec time. They’re in the cafeteria right now. You can go on in and grab some food.”

  Miles handed her back the clipboard. “Thanks, Amy.”

  “Say hi to your mom for me, ‘kay?”

  “Sure.”

  I followed Miles down a hallway to the left of the reception area. We passed another set of double doors that led into a rec room being cleaned by attendants. A little farther on was a smallish cafeteria, filled with seven or eight patients.

  Miles went in first. I followed in his shadow, tugging on my hair and trying to shake the feeling that men in white coats were going to jump out and grab me.

  There was only one food line in the cafeteria, and about ten square tables in the middle of the room. Large windows let in the sun. Miles navigated through the tables without so much as a glance at the patients, intent on only one of them, on the far side of the room.

  He was right—she looked like him. Or, rather, he looked like her. She sat at a table near the windows, rolling around a few green beans on her plate and flipping through the pages of a book. She looked up and smiled a radiant smile—it was almost tooth-for-tooth the same as his, only easier, more used—and it was not the smile of a crazy person. Not the smile of someone who injured herself because of swinging moods. It was just the smile of someone who was very, very happy to see her son.

  She stood to hug him. She was tall and willowy, and the sun gave her long sandy hair a golden halo. Her eyes were the same as his, too, the same color as the clear sky outside. The only things they didn’t share were Miles’s freckles.

  Miles said something to his mother and motioned me over.

  “So you’re Alex,” June said.

  “Yeah.” My throat felt suddenly dry. For some reason—maybe because Miles had so willingly hugged her—I felt no need to check her for weapons. I didn’t feel anything strange about her at all. She was just . . . June. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “It’s so nice to meet you, too—Miles talks about you all the time.” And before I could think about that, she pulled me into a tight hug.

  “I don’t remember mentioning her before,” Miles said, but he rubbed his neck and looked away.

  “Don’t listen to him. He’s been pretending to forget things since he was seven years old,” said June. “Sit down, you two; it’s been a long drive!”

  I kept quiet and watched them go at it, talking about anything and everything. When Miles explained things that happened at school, embellishing small facts and details, I’d jump in and correct him. June talked about what it had been like when she’d been in school, the people she’d known.

  “Do you know what your senior prank is going to be yet?” she asked, face lighting up with excitement. I hadn’t immediately taken her as a person who enjoyed pranks very much. “I thought up ours when I was a senior at East Shoal. Of course, not many people followed through with the entire plan—we only got to the first part of it.”

  “Which was . . . ?” asked Miles.

  June smiled vaguely. “Setting Mr. Tinsley’s Burmese python loose in the school.”

  Miles and I shot looks at each other, then back at June.

  “It was you?” I asked incredulously. “You set the snake loose?”

  June raised her eyebrows. “Oh yes. I don’t think they ever caught it, though. That worried me a little.”

  “Mom, that snake is a myth now,” said Miles. “People think it’s still there.”

  I started to tell them that I’d seen the snake—that I’d been seeing it all year in the science hallway—but they pressed on, sweeping the conversation away.

  The more she talked, the more I realized that June knew history. Not the history my parents were having an affair with, but personal histories. She learned the events that made up a person’s life, and she used them to understand why they did the things they did. Miles knew words. She knew people.

  So when I started explaining McCoy and Celia and everything that had happened this year, she absorbed it the way my parents absorbed war documentaries: with complete seriousness. I talked and she listened. The only thing I left out was the part about McCoy having it in for Miles.

  “Celia sounds like a handful,” she said after we’d vacated the cafeteria and moved into the rec room. “Just like her mother.” June settled into her armchair, crossing her legs. Relaxed and thinking, June had the same catlike look about her that Miles did. “She was exactly like Celia sounds. Cheerleader, very high strung, very . . . what’s the word I want . . .”

  “Driven?” Miles offered.

  “Ah! Yes, driven. And stubborn. All from her mother before her. The woman was a brute, hardly gave her a moment of rest from the time she could wear heels. Both of them got what they wanted.” June shook her head. “We called her the E
mpress. Empy for short. Boys fell to their knees for her. Richard McCoy—you wanted to know about him, too? He was head over heels for her. And not in the cute puppy dog way. He had a shrine to her in his locker.”

  I snorted—it looked like McCoy was serving new mistresses now. Mainly, Celia’s mother.

  “But Empy was never interested in him, oh no,” June continued. “I remember the day she started dating the captain of the football team, because when Daniel went to his locker after school that day, all of his things were scattered in the hallway, torn up. We all knew Richard did it, but no one could prove it. And he groveled at Empy’s heels until the day he died.”

  “Do you remember that? What happened?”

  “Well, it was a few years after they—Empy and the football captain—got married. Right after our senior year, she was pregnant and used it as leverage to make him marry her. She came back for our five-year reunion, and was standing under the scoreboard, talking about her glory days and her father’s philanthropy, and it fell. They say she died at the hospital a few hours later, but I think the scoreboard caught her in the head just right, and she was gone on the gym floor. Richard was there—I heard that he still followed her around after high school—and he tried to lift it off of her. They said he looked . . . unreachable. Like his whole reason for being was pinned under that scoreboard, and nothing tethered him to the world anymore.”

  I shivered. “Do you think McCoy could be obsessed with someone else now? Like . . . he found a new tether?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Was that why Celia was doing all this terrible stuff to other people? Because McCoy was doing something to her? That changed things—I had really hoped Celia’s involvement in all this was just some byproduct of her need to be popular. Something she’d wished on herself. But more and more it looked like she was caught up in something she couldn’t control. And if that really was the case, how could I ignore it? After this semester, it wasn’t like she had any friends. Pariah was practically tattooed on her forehead.

  “I might be the only one who thinks something bad is going on,” I said.

  “Maybe you should talk to her,” June said. “She might not think she can ask for help. Or she may not know how.”