I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. I could smell pastries and mint soap, crisp and sharp in the cold air. Miles let out a quick breath, but didn’t relax. His glasses slipped down his nose. A bruise already bloomed across his right cheekbone. His eyes flickered back to the road.
“What’s wrong?” he asked again. “What did you see? There was no one out there besides you and me and Art.”
I shook my head.
I couldn’t tell him.
He could never know.
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Chapter Sixteen
My mother opened the door.
“She just . . .” was all Miles got out before she yanked me from his arms.
“What happened?” She pushed me into the house. “What did you do?”
“He didn’t do anything, Mom.” She pushed me onto the bench in the hall. The room spun, threatened to disappear. I realized she’d been talking to me, not Miles.
“We were at the bonfire, and she said . . . she started talking to someone else,” said Miles. “She fell down screaming, and we got her up and I brought her here.”
My mother stared at him. “What’s that mark? Did she hit you?”
“Yes, but . . .”
She rounded on me, eyes flashing. “Thank you,” she said over her shoulder to Miles. “I’m very sorry for your trouble. If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.”
“But wait—is she okay?”
My mother closed the door in his face.
“Mom!”
“Alexandra Victoria Ridgemont. You haven’t been taking your medicine, have you?”
“Mom, I—I thought I was—”
She stormed into the bathroom and returned with my prescription bottle, thrusting it into my hands. “Take them. Now.” She bent down and pulled my shoes off like I was four. “I trusted you to take those on time. I thought, after years of this, I could count on you to do it yourself.” One of her nails scratched my heel. “I can’t believe you hit him. What if his parents decide to press assault charges? I can’t believe you were so irresponsible. Are you still seeing things?”
“How am I supposed to know, Mom?” I had to force the words through the knot in my throat. I wiped tears from my eyes. I clawed open the pill bottle and choked down the medicine.
“Go into the living room. I’m calling Leann.”
Leann Graves, my therapist. The Gravedigger.
My stomach convulsed.
“I’m fine, Mom, really,” I said, voice wavering. “I’m okay now. It snuck up on me.”
But she already had the phone in her hand, her thumbs flying over the buttons. How did she not have the Gravedigger on speed dial? She smashed the phone against her ear.
“I’m calling your father after this,” she said in her most severe, threatening tone.
“Good!” The strength of my voice surprised me. “He listens better than you do!”
She pressed her lips into a thin white line and disappeared into the kitchen.
I stood, hurled the pill bottle on the floor, and ran to my room. The pictures floated from the walls when I threw the door open. I tossed my camera onto the bed and ripped the nearest picture off. In it was a tree with bright red and orange leaves. The problem was, the other trees were all green. Because I’d taken the picture at the end of spring. I tore another snapshot down. This one was my first sighting of the Hannibal’s Rest phoenix. It perched on top of Red Witch Bridge, staring straight into the camera. I took another picture down, and another.
All of them still had their subjects. Nothing had changed.
I sunk down on the rug. Pictures spilled across the floor, leaving new gaps in my photograph-covered walls. The tears came on full force, wet and messy and stupid. I should have known. I should have paid better attention. Now Miles would know, and everyone would—
I stopped myself. That wasn’t why I was upset.
I was upset because I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell that Bloody Miles wasn’t real. I’d gotten—I thought I’d gotten so good at telling the difference. These pictures meant nothing. They told me nothing.
The door creaked open and a tiny body wedged its way inside my room. I opened my arms and Charlie climbed into my lap without hesitation. I buried my face in her hair. She was the only one I let myself cry in front of, because she was the only one who never asked what was wrong, or if I needed anything, or if she could help.
She was just there.
* * *
Am I crazy?
Concentrate and ask again
Am I crazy?
Reply hazy try again
Am I crazy?
Cannot predict now
Better not tell you now
Concentrate and ask again
Better not tell you now
Reply hazy try again
Cannot predict now
Ask again later
Ask again later
Ask again later
* * *
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Part Two: The Lobsters
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Chapter Seventeen
I spent the next three weeks in and out of the hospital.
By the end of the second week, I more often haunted my living room, but the Gravedigger rained medication on me like the London Blitz.
Every morning I woke up with the image of Bloody Miles burned into my memory, and every night I dreamed I stood on a gymnasium floor spray-painted red with the word Communists, while McCoy’s scoreboard cackled on the wall behind me.
Nothing felt or tasted or looked good anymore. I didn’t know if it was me or the new medication. Food made me want to throw up, blankets and clothes scratched and twisted, every light blinded me. The world had gone gray. Sometimes I felt like I was dying, or the Earth was breaking apart beneath my feet, or the sky might swallow me whole.
I couldn’t go to work anymore. Not that I cared. Finnegan hated me anyway. This would be the perfect excuse for him to fire me.
I didn’t even sneak out to Red Witch Bridge. I couldn’t risk it. And a dark part of my mind imagined Bloody Miles standing in the trees, waiting for me.
Homework came in overwhelming waves, especially chemistry and calculus, which I had a hard enough time learning even with formal instruction. My mother tried to teach me, but she sucked at it, too. Some days I thought she’d break down in the hallway or the kitchen and fill the house with sobs. I don’t know much about what my mother’s life was like before she had kids, but I think she was happier. I think she didn’t spend all her time caring for one child who was a high-maintenance musical prodigy and another who couldn’t even manage her own medication schedule.
Charlie was a little different, because Charlie did what she always did when she was afraid or not sure how to handle a situation: she hid. She stayed out of the living room, my fortress, and only ventured into the kitchen when she knew I wasn’t there. I hardly saw her at all those first two weeks, but after I had a particularly bad time with the Gravedigger, Charlie stood on the other side of the doorway, out of sight, and played me songs on her violin. Usually the 1812 Overture.
The third week turned out to be the best of the three. That Sunday, Dad came home.
Rain thundered against the windows. I sat barricaded in my pillow fort, leaning against the couch, wondering about the contents of those eighteen-and-a-half lost minutes of the Nixon White House tapes, when rain-rippled headlights roamed across the far wall and gravel crunched as a car pulled into the driveway. Maybe my mother had left without me knowing and was just getting back. But she wasn’t supposed
to leave me alone. She wouldn’t.
A car door shut. Someone pulled open the screen door.
“DADDY’S HOME!” Charlie screamed from the kitchen.
I peeked out of my fort. Mom stood right in the doorway, Charlie’s fringe of red hair visible behind her.
And then a completely soaked, suntanned someone leaned around the doorframe. He grinned when he saw me, his warm dark eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Hey, Lexi.”
I almost cracked my head open on the coffee table in my rush to get out of the fort. With my blanket still wrapped around me like a cloak, I threw my arms around his neck and hid my face in his collar.
“Hi, Dad,” I mumbled.
He laughed and hugged me back. “Lex, I’m all wet.”
“I don’t care.” It sounded more like mfffmmph.
“I came back as soon as I could,” he said when I let him go. “Did you know? South Africa is really far away.”
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Chapter Eighteen
I dismantled the pillow fort enough to make the couch sit-able again. Dad and I watched the History Channel and played chess all day, and in the evening, my mother and Charlie joined us. Charlie played behind the life-size George Washington statue in the corner, reenacting the crossing of the Delaware.
When it was just me and Dad, he’d ask about school and what I’d been doing while he’d been gone. He carefully maneuvered around the word “friends,” something I thanked him for. But I did reassure him.
“They’re my friends. I mean, really, they are. Or were . . . I hope they’re still my friends, if they know . . .”
“If they’re really your friends, they won’t care about your condition, Lexi.” Dad hugged me closer to his side. He smelled like rain. “Tell me about them.”
So I told him about the club. About the triplets. About Art and the fact that even though he could kill a small man with a poke to the chest, he still acted like a complete teddy bear. About Jetta and her French heritage. About Tucker and his conspiracies. I smiled more than I had for the past two weeks.
“Who’s the kid who brought you home?” Dad asked suddenly, throwing me off kilter. “The one you punched?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“Mom told me,” he said, smiling. “Punching? Is that how you wrangle boys these days?” He nudged me in the side. I swatted his elbow away and pulled my blanket tighter, trying to hide the blush in my cheeks. “Wrangling” boys hadn’t been on my agenda lately.
“It’s just Miles.”
“Just Miles?”
I ignored him. “He runs the club.”
“What, that’s it? Nothing else?”
“Uh, what do you want to know? He’s the valedictorian. He’s really tall.”
Dad made an approving sound at the word valedictorian.
“He knew who Acamapichtli was,” I added after a second. “Along with most of the other Aztec emperors. And the Tlatocan.”
Dad’s approving noise rose an octave.
“And I’m pretty sure he can speak German.”
Dad smiled. “That all?”
My face heated up again at the look he gave me. As if I liked Miles. As if I wanted to think about him.
Just thinking about his stupid face and his stupidly blue eyes turned me into the most confused person on the planet.
“No,” I said, burrowing into my blanket. “He can also take a hit.”
By the end of the third week, the world balanced on its axis. Dad stayed home, Mom stayed happy, and I got to go back to school on Monday. Sure, I wanted to puke from the anxiety rolling around in my stomach, but now I could get back to my (admittedly late) college search, catch up on all that schoolwork, and see my friends again.
Assuming Miles hadn’t told them everything, of course. If he had, there was a real chance they wouldn’t want to talk to me at all. But, reassuringly, I thought they had tried to contact me. The phone had been ringing more often than usual, and more than once someone knocked on the door and was turned away by my mother. I wished I had my own cell phone, but my mother probably would have taken that away from me, too.
Sunday night, as I tromped down the back hallway—I’d just finished putting up all my pictures again—to the living room, I heard my parents’ voices floating out of the kitchen. Talking about me. I pressed myself up against the wall outside the doorway.
“—that it’s not a good idea, that’s all. We can’t pretend that it isn’t as bad as it looks.”
“I don’t think we should resort to that yet. Lexi’s a responsible girl. Something must have bothered her. I don’t think she’d forget—”
My heard swelled painfully with appreciation for my dad.
“David, really,” said my mother. “You can’t know that. What if she didn’t want to take it? It was my fault for not paying enough attention, but . . . but that’s not the point. The medication isn’t the problem. This has happened before, and it might happen again, and it keeps getting worse.”
“So you want to hide her away? You really think that’s best for her? Trying to convince her to stay in some asylum?”
The word rang in the air.
“Oh, David, please.” My mother’s voice lowered to a whisper. “You know they’re not like that anymore. They’re not even called asylums. It’s a mental hospital.”
I hurried to the living room and curled up on the couch, drawing my blanket tightly around me. So much for feeling good. My mother had removed my intestines and used them to tie a noose around my neck. She just hadn’t kicked the stool out from under me yet.
She couldn’t send me to one of those places. She was my mother. She was supposed to do what was best for me, not what would get me out of her hair the fastest. How could she even think of that?
It took a while for me to notice the big blue eyes watching me from the doorway.
“C’m’ere, Charlie.” I spread my arms. Charlie hesitated, then ran across the room and climbed into my lap. I wrapped my arms and the blanket around her.
She saved me from trying to figure out how much I should tell her. “I don’t like it when your head breaks.”
I knew she was old enough and smart enough to know that my head didn’t actually break, but she’d been calling it that for so long it didn’t matter anymore. I think it made her feel better to think of it like something broken that could be fixed.
“I don’t like it, either,” I said. “You do know why it happens, right? Why my head breaks?”
Charlie removed the black castle from her mouth and nodded. “The brain chemicals make hallucinations. . . .”
“And do you know what a hallucination is?”
She nodded again. “I looked it up.”
Word of the Week, maybe? I hugged her tighter. “You know how you didn’t want me to leave for that party a while back?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And how you didn’t want me to go to the hospital three weeks ago?”
“Yeah.”
I took a breath, pulling myself together. Better to prepare her for the worst than let it blindside her. My parents would never tell her this. Not until it was too late.
Maybe, if I told her now—if I prepared myself, too—I could still avoid it.
“Well, I might have to go away again. And it won’t just be for a few hours or days or weeks.” I absentmindedly pulled a bit of her hair back and began braiding it. “Okay? I might not come back. I wanted you to know.”
“Do Mom and Dad know?” Charlie whispered.
“Yeah, they know.”
It was better if she didn’t know that it was our mother’s idea. She’d figure it out one day, but for now she could go on believing that some higher power sent me where it thought I needed to be. She could keep trusting Mom and Dad, and keep being my whining, chess-playing, crusading Charlemagne.
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Chapter Nineteen
Mono was my cover story.
Everyone believed me. Everyone except Miles, Tucker, and Art. Art, because he’d carried me during my episode. Tucker, because his parents were doctors and he could tell when someone didn’t actually know the symptoms of mono.
Miles, for the obvious reasons.
I did my perimeter check three times while I hid Erwin behind his bushes on the front walk, and my eyes were drawn again to the roof, where the men in suits monitored the parking lot. It took me a few minutes to realize that public high schools didn’t have men in suits watching their parking lots. I took a picture of them. I wasn’t sure if the pictures would help anymore, but doing it made me feel better. Like I was doing something to help myself. Like that was still possible.
I still had so much make-up work—and no clue how to do most of it. When I slouched into the cafeteria after fourth period, I spent the hour doing homework instead of eating. I didn’t have to check my food because I didn’t eat my food.
I saw that damn snake hanging from the damn opening in the ceiling again on my way to seventh period. I arrived late, but Miles had already finished the lab by himself and, by some miracle, agreed to let me copy his results. I flipped open my notebook, glanced warily at Ms. Dalton, and began copying.
Miles watched me. When I got suspicious and looked up, he just quirked his eyebrow and kept staring. Like a bored house cat. I snorted and kept writing.
He followed me after class, hovering silently on my right side. The cat waiting for attention. Anyone else would have sparked a cascade of paranoia, but he didn’t.
“Sorry you had to do that lab alone,” I said, knowing full well that it had been no trouble for him. “Those results look like—”
“So where were you, really?” he cut me off. “I know it wasn’t mono.”
I stopped, looked around, waited for some kids to pass us. “It was mono.”