by Nic Sheff
“You’re always sick,” he says.
He stands aside while I grab my bag from the floor, and we walk together back up the stairs to our first period classes. Ordell’s another one, like Preston, who I’ve been going to school with since back in seventh grade.
“Dude,” he says again, huffing and puffing up the stairs. “Candace had a party at her mom’s house on Saturday. It was off the hook. Ian’s brother brought a keg, and you know Candace’s boyfriend, Taj, from Berkeley High? His dad grows weed for the dispensaries, so they had joints of this chronic-ass shit just laying out on the table like fucking party favors.”
He rambles on about the party, and I keep my head down, looking at the carpet and all the different stains and dried pieces of gum and ground-in whatever. I notice a flyer for the Winter Formal tacked up near the railing, and I ask Ordell if he’s bringing anyone, really just to say something.
He lowers his eyes and talks low, like he doesn’t want anyone to hear.
“Yeah, man, uh . . . actually . . . I was thinking of asking Helena.”
“Helena’s a good choice,” I say, which I guess is true considering she’s pretty much as airheaded as he is.
He smiles. “What about you? You gonna ask anyone?”
I laugh at that ’cause it’s so totally ridiculous.
“No,” I tell him.
I take another step.
And then I stop.
And that’s when I see her.
I miss the top step and fall hard onto my knee.
Thankfully she doesn’t seem to notice.
She doesn’t seem to see me at all.
Ordell laughs from the back of his throat. “Dude? What the fuck?”
I’m sweating now and the heat surges through my body, so I take off my jacket and pull myself up, saying, “Hey, did you see that?”
Ordell laughs some more. “Yeah, dude. Duh.”
“No, man, not me.”
I wonder, then, is this just another hallucination? An apparition created by misfiring synapses in my brain?
But . . . it seemed so real.
“Was that Eliza?”
Ordell narrows his eyes at me. “What?”
I swallow hard. “Was that Eliza Lindberg?”
Ordell nods. “Yeah. You didn’t know she was back?”
“N-no . . . I didn’t.”
And then Ordell starts to laugh hard and squeezes my shoulder. “Oh, yeah, I remember. You hella liked her, right?”
“No,” I say. “No, I’m just . . . I’m surprised.”
“Yeah, you know her dad’s, like, some big restaurant guy.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“So they just moved to open up that restaurant.”
“In New Orleans.”
“See, you knew about it.”
I grab my backpack. “Yeah, I just didn’t know they were back.”
“Well, they are.” He laughs again. “We gotta go to class, man. But seriously, call me, all right?”
He punches me in the chest so I take a step back and almost trip down the stairs again.
“Yeah, totally.”
He walks off and I start down the hall past the still-life drawings hung up from the freshman art class, done in gray charcoal and pencil.
Bodies walk past me in both directions, and the lights are flickering overhead, and everything is all smudged around me like the drawings on the wall.
“Jesus Christ,” I say out loud.
Eliza Lindberg.
I guess I knew she’d be coming back at some point. After all, this is her home. And setting up a restaurant in New Orleans couldn’t take forever.
Two years.
I haven’t spoken to her once since that last day—that day that I fucked it all up, that day that I asked her to be my girlfriend.
Like I said, it was the end of eighth grade, and I guess I was just nervous that once we started high school she was going to forget about me or something. Behind the gym after school, I asked her if she would “go out with me.” She started crying and yelling at me that I’d “ruined everything,” which was true, though I didn’t know it at the time.
It was only a few weeks later when Preston told me she was moving with her family to New Orleans to open another one of her dad’s restaurants.
I felt sick at the thought of never seeing her again.
But then, just a month after that, I had my first episode at the beach. And then I was grateful Eliza would never have to see me like that—delusional, crazy, strapped down to a hospital gurney. She would never have to know about what happened to me. She’d never have to know what I did to Teddy. That was the one good thing out of all this fucking bad.
But now I wonder . . .
Does she know?
The question repeats itself over and over in my mind, like one of my dad’s old records, the needle skipping.
Does she know?
Does she know?
Because all I wanted was for her to never find out.
I push past a couple freshman boys whispering in the hall, and then I turn in to the classroom. Our biology teacher, Mr. Heinz, is a small man with chiseled features—Germanic-looking. He has blond hair parted to one side and he is very tan. He’s playing a classical music CD on an old boom box splattered with white paint. Bach piano concertos. The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 or 2. My dad has the same album on vinyl at home. The music is simple and clear and melodic.
“Take a seat, Miles,” Mr. Heinz whispers. “We’re solving these Punnett squares. Please try not to disturb everyone.” He gestures to the whiteboard, where a complicated genetics problem has been written out in green marker.
I nod and whisper back, “Okay.”
Mr. Heinz always starts his class exactly on time, so even if I’m, like, a minute late he acts like I missed half the period.
I go and take a seat next to this girl Alexis, who I know pretty well. She has black hair with bangs and bright red lipstick.
“Hey, Miles,” she says very quietly.
“Hey.”
My body lands heavily in the hard wooden chair. Someone has carved the words Roberta Blows into our desk. I’m not sure who Roberta is.
I nudge Alexis gently to show her the carving.
“Right?” she says, smiling.
“Did you know Eliza Lindberg was back at school?” I ask her. Alexis was in our seventh and eighth grade classes, too.
“Eliza?” She narrows her eyes at me. “No. Really?”
And then Mr. Heinz calls out, “Solve the problem quietly, guys.”
And so I put my head down. I try to do what he says.
But I’m shaking now, trembling so my writing comes out all scratchy, nearly illegible.
My mind keeps going around in circles—manic, anxious, remembering.
I feel like I might actually get sick.
My stomach seizes.
And there’s sweat all down my back and broken out on my forehead.
“Hey, are you okay?” Alexis whispers.
I stand up.
“Yeah, uh . . . no . . .”
I walk quickly out of the room, ignoring Mr. Heinz calling out to me.
When I get to the bathroom, I lock myself in one of the stalls and get ready to puke.
It’s just the medication, I tell myself, eating through my stomach.
It can’t possibly have anything to do with Eliza being back.
I think about Mr. Heinz and the Punnett squares—dominant and recessive traits. But where this fucking mental illness comes from, I have no idea. No one else in my family is crazy like I am. I’m the defective one—the mistake. And I am obviously not fit for survival. If I were out in the wild, I would’ve been left for dead long ago.
I curl up as small as po
ssible on the floor and wait for the nausea to pass.
8.
THE LIBRARY AT STANYAN Hill is pretty unimpressive for a private school.
It’s about the size of two classrooms put together, the shelves filled with big reference volumes no one ever looks at and a whole lot of paperback teen fiction like the Twilight series. There are a few classics and some oversize collections of poetry and short stories. And then there is a whole wall of different magazines.
My mom has been fighting for years to get them to expand the library, or at least to expand their collection, but it’s never been a priority. From what I’ve seen, the library is just kind of an afterthought. The school spent all this money building a big fancy computer lab and stocking it full of brand-new Macs, so barely anyone even uses the library anymore. In a lot of ways, I’m surprised my mom still has a job here. The library is pretty much empty every time I go in.
And today at lunch is no exception.
The door is propped open and my mom is sitting on a stool behind the desk reading a book herself. There are a couple of freshmen reading a graphic novel together at one of the round wooden tables in the corner by the window. They are very small and very young-looking, with pasty, pale skin. They have on preppy sweaters and loose-fitting jeans and white old-man sneakers. They are dorks. They part their hair on the sides. They hang out in the library during lunch.
But then again, so do I.
“Hey, Mom,” I say, startling her from whatever book she’s reading.
“Shhhh,” she tells me, holding a finger up. She’s wearing a thick wool sweater and a knit scarf and her librarian glasses. Her hair is cut a few inches above her shoulders.
I look over at the two nerdy freshmen again and raise my shoulder up, like, Seriously, I have to be quiet for these guys?
She follows my gaze and then smiles and gestures for me to go back into her office. I follow her along the thick carpeting that still smells new all throughout this floor of the school.
Her office is small, about the size of a closet, with a desk and no computer and a couch my mom brought in herself from Goodwill. She has pictures of me and Jane and Dad up on the wall. There’re even a couple pictures of our cat, Myshkin. But there are no pictures of Teddy—just as there are no pictures of Teddy in our house.
I can’t blame her.
Remembering is painful.
But, pictures or no pictures, I’m sure he’s with her every second, the way he is with me.
His picture is projected there on the backs of our eyelids.
So we don’t need it hanging in a frame.
I take a seat on the shiny upholstery, and the springs whine and buckle beneath my not-very-substantial frame. My mom sits in her broken office chair that’s been stuck in the lowest position to the ground, so she appears very short, even though she’s a whole inch taller than I am.
“Here you go,” she says, handing me a plastic-wrapped peanut butter sandwich and a small, roughly textured apple. “Would you like some coffee?”
The lines and creases around her mouth are deep set so that when she purses her lips together it gives the appearance of a dried-up piece of fruit.
I nod yes.
She pours black, bitter-smelling coffee from out of the large stainless steel Thermos into a metal camping mug and passes it over. I take a bite of the sandwich made on processed wheat bread with strawberry jelly that leaks out the side. I wipe my mouth on the sleeve of my undershirt.
“Thanks,” I say.
She drinks her coffee but does not eat.
“Mom,” I start hesitantly, looking down at the scuffed-up toes of my boots. “Mom . . . did you . . . uh . . . did you know Eliza Lindberg was back in school?”
My mom freezes up, the coffee mug held just inches from her open mouth.
“No . . . I didn’t.”
She completes the sip of coffee, and I take a bite of sandwich, talking with my mouth full.
“Yeah. I saw her. I guess they’re back from opening that restaurant in New Orleans.”
My mom sets the coffee down and leans forward, intertwining her fingers on her crossed knees. Her eyes narrow behind her horn-rimmed glasses.
“Miles, I promise, I had no idea. I would have told you.”
“No, no, I know. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Well, are you gonna be okay? Have you talked to her yet?”
“No, I haven’t. But, uh, yeah, of course I’ll be all right. It’s just weird, is all.”
My mother stares like she’s trying to see something hidden inside me. I stay quiet.
“Well, just be careful, Miles.”
I laugh, then, at that—though, of course, I know she’s right. Even before Eliza rejected me straight out, I was always getting messed up about her. There was this one time when we were on a class ski trip that all us kids were playing Truth or Dare up in the girls’ bunks in the lodge. Someone dared Eliza to kiss me, and she acted like just the thought of it was the most disgusting thing in the world. She told everyone it made her want to barf. So she never did kiss me on the dare, and I was so crushed, like my insides had all been torn out of me.
But then, the next day when we found ourselves alone on the ski slope, she came up to me and kissed me very quickly on the mouth. She whispered that she was just completing her dare. Then she skied off. And, of course, I was fucking elated. It’s lame, to say it like that, I guess, but I don’t care. I was elated. And I thought for sure it meant she liked me.
Of course, it wasn’t too long after that she was back being mean to me in front of everyone again.
“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, no, you’re right.”
My mom sits up a little straighter. She takes a sip of her coffee and then leans forward even closer this time.
“I’m serious, Miles.”
“Yeah, so am I,” I tell her. I look up at my mom’s weathered face. “You don’t have to worry.”
I take another bite of sandwich. That is the truth. Only I don’t know how to explain it to my mom so she’ll understand.
How could I ever let myself get involved in any kind of romantic relationship when Teddy is still out there, missing, and it is my fault? How could I ever let myself have any kind of happiness?
No, until Teddy is found, I’ll never be able to move on with my own life.
None of us will.
Our whole family is trapped in a state of perpetual suspended animation.
We are frozen, waiting.
And what will save us? What will allow us to start living again?
Finding Teddy.
That is all.
My mom sips her coffee.
And that’s when it hits me.
Something has to be done.
And I think, for the first time, that I’m the one who has to do it.
Teddy is out there. It’s up to me to bring him home.
There’s a voice whispering through my mind—like sunlight shining in, like the ocean swelling around me, like the world has broken wide-open and I am standing at the very center of the universe.
I am the one.
I have to find him.
And I will.
9.
OUR JUNIOR CLASS IS a lot bigger than our grade school class used to be, but it’s still super small compared with most high schools, and there really isn’t any way to avoid running into someone you don’t want to see.
Inexplicably, though, I managed to make it through two whole days before seeing Eliza again.
But today we’re having a whole-school assembly, so I know I won’t be able to avoid it.
We all file in together to the newly remodeled auditorium. I sit next to Preston and Jackie, but they’re busy looking meaningfully into each other’s eyes, so they don’t even seem to notice me as I scan the room—looking for Eliza.
>
And then I see her.
She walks in by herself.
Her hair is even darker than I remember, black and full and layered. She’s wearing ripped jeans tucked into calf-length boots, a gray cardigan sweater, and a loose-fitting T-shirt. She is tall and thin and beautiful.
I watch as she takes a seat at the front, seemingly oblivious to the rest of the herd moving past her. Preston leans in close to me.
“Dude, stare much?”
I’m startled a little by his sudden attention.
“What? I’m not staring at anyone.”
He laughs. “Yeah, right.”
I breathe and hold the air in my lungs before exhaling all at once as I ask him, “Well, have you talked to her?”
“Uh, yeah,” he says, averting his eyes. “I did real quick. Sorry, man, I couldn’t help it.”
My stomach knots up, and I keep glancing down at the place where Eliza is sitting. It really does seem like the more you try not to think about something, the more that ends up being the only fucking thing you can think about. That’s the way it is with Eliza. In spite of myself, and all my intentions, I can’t help but want to know.
“Did she ask about me?”
Preston coughs and looks over at Jackie. “Yeah, a little.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t know, man. She asked about you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it seems like she maybe wants to apologize or something. Like she realized how fucked up she was being to you.”
Great, I think, so she feels sorry for me. That’s exactly what I fucking need. But what I say is, “Nah, man, she doesn’t need to do that.”
Preston shakes his head. “Hell yes, she does. But if I were you, I might give it some time. I don’t want anything . . . you know . . . bad to happen.”
There’s a heat swelling in my brain. I wish that everyone would stop worrying about me. I’m not some total invalid.
But what I say is, “Of course, man. Forget it. I really don’t care.”
He laughs then. “Sure.”
“I don’t,” I tell him. “I’ve got more important things to do than worry about Eliza Lindberg.”
“Yeah? Like what?” he asks.