My beloved boat
is broken on the rocks of daily life.
I’ve paid my debts
and no longer need to count
pains I’ve suffered at the hands of others.
The misfortunes and the insults.
Good luck to those who remain.
And suddenly Embryo is hunched over his desk staring at me with what could only be called alarm. Which means I must have said this out loud without meaning to.
His voice takes on the slow, deliberate tone of a man talking someone off a ledge. “Were you in the bell tower again today?”
“Jesus, do you guys have, like, security cameras up there?”
“Answer me.”
“Yes, sir. But I was reading. Or trying to. I needed to clear my mind, and I couldn’t do it down below with all the noise.”
“Finch, I hope you know I’m your friend, and that means I want to help you. But this is also a legal matter, and I have an obligation.”
“I’m fine. Believe me, if I decide to kill myself, you’ll be the first to know. I’ll save you a front-row seat, or at least wait till you’ve got more money for the lawsuit.”
Note to self: Suicide is not a laughing matter, particularly for authority figures who are in any way responsible for you.
I rein myself in. “Sorry. Bad taste. But I’m fine. Really.”
“What do you know about bipolar disorder?”
I almost say, What do you know about it? But I make myself breathe and smile. “Is that the Jekyll-Hyde thing?” My voice sounds flat and even. Maybe a little bored, even though my mind and body are on alert.
“Some people call it manic depression. It’s a brain disorder that causes extreme shifts in mood and energy. It runs in families, but it can be treated.”
I continue to breathe, even if I’m not smiling anymore, but here is what is happening: my brain and my heart are pounding out different rhythms; my hands are turning cold and the back of my neck is turning hot; my throat has gone completely dry. The thing I know about bipolar disorder is that it’s a label. One you give crazy people. I know this because I’ve taken junior-year psychology and I’ve seen movies and I’ve watched my father in action for almost eighteen years, even though you could never slap a label on him because he would kill you. Labels like “bipolar” say This is why you are the way you are. This is who you are. They explain people away as illnesses.
Embryo is talking about symptoms and hypomania and psychotic episodes when the bell rings. I stand more abruptly than I mean to, which sends my chair clattering into the wall and onto the floor. If I’m suspended above the room, looking down, I can see how this would be mistaken for a violent act, especially as large as I am. Before I can tell him it was an accident, he is on his feet.
I hold up my hands in a gesture of surrender, and then hold out my hand—an olive branch. It takes him a good minute or two, but he shakes it. Instead of letting go, he jerks my arm forward so we are almost nose to nose—or, given our height difference, nose to chin—and says, “You are not alone.” Before I can tell him, Actually I am, which is part of the problem; we are all alone, trapped in these bodies and our own minds, and whatever company we have in this life is only fleeting and superficial, he tightens his grip until I worry my arm will snap off. “And we are not done discussing this.”
The next morning, after gym, Roamer walks by and says, “Freak,” under his breath. There are still a lot of guys milling around, but I don’t care. To be more accurate, I don’t think. It just happens.
In a flash, I have him up against the locker, my hands around his throat, and I’m choking him until he turns purple. Charlie is behind me, trying to pull me off, and then Kappel is there with his bat. I keep going, because now I’m fascinated by the way Roamer’s veins are throbbing, and the way his head looks like a lightbulb, all lit up and too bright.
It takes four of them to get me off him because my fist is like iron. I’m thinking: You put me here. You did this. It’s your fault, your fault, your fault.
Roamer drops to the floor, and as I’m being dragged away, I lock eyes with him and say, “You will never call me that again.”
VIOLET
March 10
My phone buzzes after third period, and it’s Finch. He tells me he’s waiting outside, near the river. He wants to drive down south to Evansville to see the Nest Houses, which are these huts woven out of saplings that were created by an Indiana artist. They’re literally like birds’ nests for humans, with windows and doors. Finch wants to see if there’s anything left of them. While we’re down there, we can cross the Kentucky border and take pictures of ourselves, one foot in Kentucky, one in Indiana.
I say, “Doesn’t the Ohio River run the entire border? So we’d have to stand on a bridge—”
But he keeps right on like he doesn’t hear me. “As a matter of fact, we should do this with Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio.”
“Why aren’t you on your way to class?” I’m wearing one of his flowers in my hair.
“I got expelled. Just come out here.”
“Expelled?”
“Let’s go. I’m wasting gas and daylight.”
“It’s four hours to Evansville, Finch. By the time we get there, it’ll be dark.”
“Not if we leave now. Come on, come on, get on out here. We can sleep there.” He is talking too fast, as if everything depends on us looking at nest houses. When I ask him what happened, he just says he’ll tell me later, but he needs to go now, as soon as possible.
“It’s a Tuesday in winter. We’re not sleeping in a nest house. We can go Saturday. If you wait for me after school, we can go somewhere a little closer than the Indiana-Kentucky border.”
“You know what? Why don’t we just forget it? Why don’t I go by myself? I think I’d rather go alone anyway.” Through the phone, his voice sounds hollow, and then he hangs up on me.
I’m still staring at the phone when Ryan walks past with Suze Haines, hand in hand. “Everything okay?” he says.
“Everything’s fine,” I answer, wondering what on earth just happened.
FINCH
Days 66 and 67
The Nest Houses aren’t there. It’s dark by the time I stop in downtown New Harmony, with its brightly painted buildings, and ask everyone I can find about where the houses have gone. Most people haven’t heard of them, but one old man tells me, “Sorry you came all this way. I’m afraid they been ate up by weather and the elements.”
Just like all of us. The Nest Houses have reached their life expectancy. I think of the mud nest we made for the cardinal, all those years ago, and wonder if it’s still there. I imagine his little bones in his little grave, and it is the saddest thought in the world.
At home, everyone is asleep. I go upstairs, and for a long time I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, and I actually disappear before my eyes.
I am disappearing. Maybe I’m already gone.
Instead of feeling panicked, I am fascinated, as if I’m a monkey in a lab. What makes the monkey turn invisible? And if you can’t see him, can you still touch him if you wave your hand around in the place where he used to be? I lay my hand on my chest, over my heart, and I can feel the flesh and bone and the hard, erratic beating of the organ that is keeping me alive.
I walk into my closet and shut the door. Inside, I try not to take up too much space or make any noise, because if I do, I may wake up the darkness, and I want the darkness to sleep. I’m careful when I breathe so as not to breathe too loudly. If I breathe too loudly, there’s no telling what the darkness will do to me or to Violet or to anyone I love.
The next morning I check messages on our home voicemail, the landline my mom and sisters and I share. There is one from Embryo for my mother, left yesterday afternoon. “Mrs. Finch, this is Robert Embry from Bartlett High. As you know, I’ve been counseling your son. I need to talk to you about Theodore. I’m afraid it’s extremely important. Please call me back.” He leaves the number.
>
I play the message two more times and then delete it.
Instead of going to school, I go back upstairs and into my closet, because if I leave, I will die. And then I remember that I’ve been expelled, so it’s not as if I can go to school anyway.
The best thing about the closet: no wide-open space. I sit very quietly and very still and am careful how I breathe.
A string of thoughts runs through my head like a song I can’t get rid of, over and over in the same order: I am broken. I am a fraud. I am impossible to love. It’s only a matter of time until Violet figures it out. You warned her. What does she want from you? You told her how it was.
Bipolar disorder, my mind says, labeling itself. Bipolar, bipolar, bipolar.
And then it starts all over again: I am broken. I am a fraud. I am impossible to love.…
I am quiet at dinner, but after Tell me what you learned today, Decca, Tell me what you learned today, Theodore, my mother and Decca are quiet too. No one notices that I am busy thinking. We eat in silence, and afterward, I find the sleeping pills in my mom’s medicine cabinet. I take the whole bottle back to my room and drop half the contents down my throat and then, in the bathroom, bend over the sink, washing them down. Let’s see what Cesare Pavese felt. Let’s see if there’s any valiant acclamation to this. I stretch out on the floor of my closet, the bottle in my hand. I try to imagine my body shutting down, little by little, going totally numb. I almost feel the heaviness coming over me, even though I know it’s too fast.
I can barely lift my head, and my feet seem miles away. Stay here, the pills say. Don’t move. Let us do our work.
It’s this haze of blackness that settles over me, like a fog, only darker. My body is pressed down by the black and the fog, into the floor. There’s no acclamation here. This is what it feels like to be asleep.
I force myself up and drag myself into the bathroom, where I stick my finger down my throat and throw up. Nothing much comes out, even though I just ate. I try again and again, and then I pull on my sneakers and run. My limbs are heavy, and I am running through quicksand, but I am breathing and determined.
I run my regular nighttime route, down National Road all the way to the hospital, but instead of passing it, I run across the parking lot. I push my limbs through the doors of the emergency room and say to the first person I see, “I swallowed pills and can’t get them out of me. Get them out of me.”
She lays a hand on my arm and says something to a man behind me. Her voice is cool and calm, as if she is used to people running in wanting their stomachs pumped, and then a man and another woman are leading me to a room.
I go black then, but I wake up sometime later and I feel empty but awake, and a woman comes in and, as if she reads my mind, says, “You’re awake, good. We’re going to need you to fill out some paperwork. We checked you for ID, but you didn’t have any on you.” She hands me a clipboard, and my hand is shaking as I take it from her.
The form is blank except for my name and age. Josh Raymond, age 17. I start to shake harder, and then I realize I’m laughing. Good one, Finch. You’re not dead yet.
Fact: Most suicides occur between the hours of noon and six p.m.
Guys with tattoos are more likely to kill themselves with guns.
People with brown eyes are more likely to choose hanging or poison.
Coffee drinkers are less likely to commit suicide than non–coffee drinkers.
I wait till the nurse is gone and then put on my clothes and stroll out of the room and down the stairs and out the door. No need to stick around here anymore. The next thing they’ll do is send someone in to look at me and ask me questions. Somehow they’ll find my parents, but if they don’t, they’ll bring out a stack of forms and calls will be made, and before you know it, I won’t be allowed to leave. They almost get me, but I’m too quick for them.
I’m too weak to run, so I walk all the way home.
FINCH
Day 71
Life Is Life meets on the grounds of the arboretum in a nearby Ohio town, which shall remain nameless. This isn’t a nature class, but a support group for teens who are thinking about, or have attempted, or have survived, suicide. I found it on the internet.
I get into Little Bastard and drive to Ohio. I am tired. I am avoiding seeing Violet. It’s exhausting trying to even myself out and be careful around her, so careful, like I’m picking my way through a minefield, enemy soldiers on every side. Must not let her see. I’ve told her I’ve come down with some sort of bug and don’t want to get her sick.
The Life Is Life meeting takes place in a large room with wood paneling and radiators that jut out from the walls. We sit around two long tables pushed together, as if we’re going to be doing homework or taking tests. Two pitchers of water sit at either end, with brightly colored Dixie cups stacked up beside them. There are four plates of cookies.
The counselor is a guy named Demetrius, who is this very pale black guy with green eyes. For those of us who haven’t been here before, he tells us he’s getting his doctorate at the local college, and Life Is Life is in its twelfth year, even though he’s only been running it for the past eleven months. I want to ask what happened to the last counselor, but don’t in case it’s not a pretty story.
The kids file in, and they look just like the ones we have in Bartlett. I don’t recognize any of them, which is why I drove twenty-five miles to get here. Before I take my seat, one of the girls sidles up to me and says, “You are really tall.”
“I’m older than I look.”
She smiles in what she probably thinks is a seductive way, and I add, “Gigantism runs in my family. After high school, I’m required to join the circus because by the time I’m twenty the doctors predict I’ll be over seven feet.”
I want her to go away because I’m not here to make friends, and then she does. I sit and wait and wish I hadn’t come. Everyone is helping themselves to the cookies, which I don’t touch because I know each of those brands may or may not contain something disgusting called bone char, which is from the bones of animals, and then I can’t even look at the cookies or at the people eating them. I stare out the window, but the trees of the arboretum are thin and brown and dead, and so I keep my eyes on Demetrius, who sits in the middle where we can all see him.
He recites facts I already know about suicide and teenagers, and then we go around the room and say our names and how old we are and the thing we’ve been diagnosed with and if we’ve had any firsthand experience trying to kill ourselves. Then we say the phrase “________ is life,” as in whatever strikes us in that moment as something to celebrate, like “Basketball is life,” “School is life,” “Friends are life,” “Making out with my girlfriend is life.” Anything that reminds us how good it is to be alive.
A number of these kids have the slightly dull, vacant look of people on drugs, and I wonder what they’re taking to keep them here and breathing. One girl says, “Vampire Diaries is life,” and a couple of the other girls giggle. Another says, “My dog is life even when she’s eating my shoes.”
When it’s my turn, I introduce myself as Josh Raymond, seventeen, no previous experience beyond my recent halfhearted experiment with sleeping pills. “The Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect is life,” I add, even though no one knows what this means.
At that moment the door opens and someone runs in, letting the cold air in with her. She is hatted and scarved and mittened up tightly, unwrapping herself like a mummy as she finds her seat. We all turn and Demetrius smiles a comforting smile. “Come in, no worries, we’re just getting started.”
The mummy sits down, losing the scarf, mittens, and hat. She turns away from me, blond ponytail swinging, as she hooks her purse strap over her chair. She settles back, smoothing the loose strands of hair off her cheeks, which are pink from the cold, and leaves her coat on. “I’m sorry,” Amanda Monk mouths at Demetrius, at the table. When her eyes get around to me, her face goes completely and immediately blank.
; Demetrius nods at her. “Rachel, why don’t you go ahead?”
Amanda, as Rachel, avoids looking at me. In a wooden voice, she recites, “I’m Rachel, I’m seventeen, I’m bulimic, and I tried to kill myself twice, both times with pills. I hide myself away with smiles and gossip. I am not happy at all. My mother is making me come here. Secrecy is life.” She says this last line to me and then looks away.
The others take their turns, and by the time we get all the way around, it’s clear I am the only one here who hasn’t tried to really and truly kill himself. It makes me feel superior, even though it shouldn’t, and I can’t help thinking, When I actually try, I’m not going to miss. Even Demetrius has a story. These people are here and trying to get help and they’re alive, after all.
But the whole thing is heartbreaking. Between thoughts of bone char, and stories of wrist cutting and hangings, and bitchy Amanda Monk with her little pointed chin jutted out, so exposed and scared, I want to put my head on the table and let the Long Drop just come. I want to get away from these kids who never did anything to anyone except be born with different brains and different wiring, and from the people who aren’t here to eat these bone char cookies and share their tales, and the ones who didn’t make it and never had a chance. I want to get away from the stigma they all clearly feel just because they have an illness of the mind as opposed to, say, an illness of the lungs or blood. I want to get away from all the labels. “I’m OCD,” “I’m depressed,” “I’m a cutter,” they say, like these are the things that define them. One poor bastard is ADHD, OCD, BPD, bipolar, and on top of it all has some sort of anxiety disorder. I don’t even know what BPD stands for. I’m the only one who is just Theodore Finch.
A girl with a fat black braid and glasses says, “My sister died of leukemia, and you should have seen the flowers and the sympathy.” She holds up her wrists, and even across the table I can see the scars. “But when I nearly died, no flowers were sent, no casseroles were baked. I was selfish and crazy for wasting my life when my sister had hers taken away.”
All the Bright Places Page 20