I thought about Sebastian, the way I felt talking to him on the phone tonight, like some truer version of myself, if that were possible. Sebastian was making me feel things, and I didn’t want that. But I also did. I so did.
The lights dimmed to black, and the previews started. I suddenly felt exhilaration and fear. This was nothing like the easy feeling I had with Chris, and it was nothing like the urgent need for sex I’d had with all the guys before Chris. This was something different.
I’d never believed in the concept, but was this what it felt like to discover your soul mate? Whoever Sebastian was to me, my feelings were only getting stronger. I actually put my hand on my chest to feel my heartbeat speeding along. The previews ended, and the crackly crack of the feature movie started. I took a moment to listen to myself, to realize that something was happening. And, for the moment at least, I was okay with that.
CHAPTER TEN
“Glad you’re back,” Rashanna said, ushering me past the community room. I saw through the glass that everyone was pretty much where they were the last time I’d been here. The anorexic girl and the huge overalls guy were playing a game at the table. Two kids were watching TV, and the blond boy, who I now knew was Sebastian’s roommate, Luke, was sitting on the window ledge scribbling in a notebook. A man stood in the corner, probably another nurse or some sort of attendant. Maybe one of the kids was on suicide watch.
Rashanna led me into the visitors’ room, which was bathed in bright sun.
“Hi,” Sebastian said, standing up. He was wearing jeans, a soft-looking white T-shirt, and Converse—the kind with no laces. He looked good. Really good. I felt a tingle travel through my body.
“Hi,” I said. We both sat down.
“I’ll be in the nurse’s station,” Rashanna said, closing the door.
“I went outside today for a walk,” Sebastian said. “Outside privileges are hard to come by. You have to be extra good.”
“So you’ve been extra good then?” I asked.
“It was my reward for opening up some in group yesterday.”
We looked at each other. There was a new comfort level between us after the last visit, after talking on the phone. Something about this place accelerated our friendship.
“Was it hard?” I asked. “Opening up? Talking about personal stuff to strangers?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Big time hard. Strangers or not, I don’t like to talk about personal stuff that much anyway.”
I nodded.
“But I promised Rashanna and my mom that I’d try, so I did.”
“Was it like what you see in the movies? The therapist and everyone sitting in a circle and they keep making you talk until you just break down and start crying?”
He laughed a little. “Actually, it wasn’t that far off. I didn’t cry, but once I started talking, they didn’t leave me alone. Man, they just kept at me like I was their onion to peel.”
“Did they get through any layers?”
“Maybe one or two,” he said. I wanted to know what he’d told them, but I didn’t ask.
He lifted his hands to put in his hair, and they were shaking. Really shaking, like an old man. He held them out in front of him.
“Wow,” he said. “Jesus, look at that.”
“Are they always like that?”
“Just the last couple of days. Maybe still withdrawal from the drugs, maybe the new antidepressants, just, everything, I don’t know.” He put his hands back on his lap and they seemed to still again. “I haven’t been sleeping well. Luke was up all night.”
“Did something happen?” I asked.
He shrugged. “He’s so messed up. He makes me feel like a poseur for even being here. He’s paranoid schizophrenic or something.”
“So, what does that mean? Does he see things?” I asked, staring at his fingers, which were now resting comfortably on his knees. Though still grayish, they looked long and strong, like they would play a mean bass or something.
“Yeah, sometimes,” Sebastian said. “He told me about when he was sent here. His parents went out of town, and he refused to sleep because he had these terrible nightmares. He bought paint and stayed up painting the inside of his house bright orange to keep it sunny even at night, so it would never have to be night and he’d never have to sleep. He didn’t sleep for five days straight. When his parents showed up, he was sitting there in this bright orange house, babbling and going nuts.” Sebastian looked at me now, his eyes filled with wonder and sadness. “He’s really smart, though. It’s sad when you see someone like that and you know it’s like, the chemicals in his body are just totally out of whack.”
“That sucks,” I said, which seemed like a stupid thing to say.
“It was the poster,” he said, “of the solar system. Last night. He started seeing things on it. He thought that aliens made me put the poster up as a way to get to him. He thought they were coming for him and that I was in on it.”
“Holy shit.” My throat felt hollow. “Did he do anything to you?”
“No. He was just yelling a lot. They sedated him. He doesn’t remember any of it.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t brought it,” I said. I put my head in my hands and tried to erase the image.
I heard him shift in his chair. He put his hand on my knee.
“I shouldn’t have told you. It was sweet that you brought the poster. I love it. Come on.”
I looked up at him.
“He’s really sick,” he said. “It’s a sickness.”
“Do you think you’re sick?” I asked.
He shook his head slowly. He took his hand away from my knee—I missed it.
“Maybe a little. I think sometimes all this mental stuff is chemical and sometimes it’s more about what’s happened in your life. I know I’m more prone to depression and using drugs to cope, but I don’t know.”
“So, what’s happened in your life then?” I asked.
“What’s happened in yours?” he snapped.
I wished I could take it back. I wanted to be Sebastian’s breath of fresh air, not another one of his pushy counselors. But I also hadn’t come to be treated badly. I stood quickly, and my chair made a loud scrape on the floor.
“I’m sure our time is almost up. I’ll go find Rashanna,” I said.
Sebastian took my wrist in his hand. There was no anger, no desperation in the gesture. Only warmth and apology.
“Please sit down. I’m sorry.”
I sat down, fighting the urge to cry. I felt so damn vulnerable with him.
He turned to face me. His body was so long, thin, beautiful in its unique way. I instinctively turned toward him too. He put his elbows on his knees and bent his head down so our faces were at the same height.
“My dad was the asshole I told you about on the phone. A mean alcoholic. It’s no story you haven’t already heard a thousand times. He used to hit my mom when he got really drunk.”
I cringed.
“When I was seven, he threw a chair at her and I ran in front of it, and it got me in the head.” He pointed at the scar on his eyebrow, the one I’d noticed the first time I met him under my oak tree.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Like I said, not really an original story.”
“Is anyone’s?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It just seems so cliché.”
“So now you’re critiquing your life like it’s a plotline in a movie?”
His lips turned up a bit in a half-smile. “Anyway, my mom had enough. So we left Madrid. Now I realize how brave that was. My mom didn’t know anyone here. She had one distant cousin living in Queens, and he set her up with all the right paperwork and everything to get through the legal stuff and transfer her nursing degree. Then she ended up getting the job at the hospital, so we moved here.”
“Have you heard from your father?” I asked.
“Nope. Never.”
“Wow. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “
I’m really okay with that. I realized that I could wish and wish, but he would never change. I know we’re better off not hearing from him.”
I nodded.
“I used to get in these moods when I was little,” he continued. “My mom would call them my ‘little funks.’ It made sense, given the way we were living back then. But then we moved here. It was kind of like we were this team, taking on the world. She worked a ton, but it was still just us and I felt so free. And then she married my stepfather. When Sofia was born, I was excited. I never had a brother or sister. I loved having this smart, little person who was completely connected to me. But my mom and stepfather worked full time, and Sofia wasn’t an easy baby, and they just didn’t have a lot of time. It wasn’t their fault, but I was odd man out…. This is so dumb.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s not dumb at all. Go on.”
“My moods came back. And they weren’t so little. They felt like heavy blankets that I couldn’t shake off. I started taking painkillers from my stepfather’s medicine cabinet from when he broke his toe. I guess it was my way of self-medicating. The pain meds kept me numb and made me feel sort of looser and free. After that, I found a guy by the train station who could get them for me. For a while, it wasn’t hard to get. And then when it got harder, I did some stupid shit to keep up my supply. The kind of stupid shit you could go to jail for.”
I could tell from his expression that asking specifics about the stupid shit he did was out of the question, so I didn’t.
He let out his breath and closed his eyes. I wanted to touch his face, right at the top of his cheekbone, but I kept my hands in my lap.
“Is that what you shared in group?” I asked.
“Pretty much. I thought I started doing drugs because I was bored and felt sorry for myself, and it was fun to get high. But the therapists and the people in group say that I have depression, and I always have. We just didn’t realize it when I was younger because when you see your mom getting the crap beaten out of her every day, being depressed seems like an inevitable outcome. But leaving Madrid didn’t make it go away. It’s not just a bad mood I can get over.”
A fly buzzed by my ear. It moved over to Sebastian, so I waved my hand over by him, and my finger brushed his face, near where I’d been itching to touch him. He smiled at me.
“Thank you for telling me,” I said. “I know that wasn’t easy.”
“Do you ever feel like you’re completely alone?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Sometimes it’s lonely even when you’re in a bigger family,” I said. “Lonelier even.”
“The asshole-slash-not-asshole cousin?” he asked.
“Well, yeah, I guess. I mean, we’ve always gotten along pretty well, but my mom lets him off easy. Unlike me. I can’t do anything right in her eyes.”
“I doubt that,” he said.
“It’s true. He sucks up a lot of air whether he’s in the room or not, you know? And I get it, he’s cool; he’s pretty cool to be around, but it makes me feel kind of, um, second-rate, I guess.”
“Hard to imagine,” he said. “You seem pretty first-rate to me.”
He smiled, and I felt fluttery in my stomach.
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked. Now I was panicked. He seemed to be able to read me so well. Did he guess something about me?
“You can ask,” I said, quietly. “Can’t guarantee I’ll answer.”
“Smartass,” he said. “Why are you coming here to see me?”
I was relieved that he hadn’t asked more about Scott, but then I felt nervous, like I had to give a speech at school and I hadn’t prepared. I had no answer.
I shrugged.
“Is it because you feel sorry for me?” he asked.
“No. It’s not that at all.”
“Do you feel obligated?”
“No! Do you want me to stop coming?”
“No way,” he said. “I just feel sort of guilty, like you have your life out there, so why are you coming here?”
I owed Sebastian honesty. I felt like that was really the only thing he asked of me.
“At first, I think it was because I was afraid I was the last person to see you and I could have stopped you, so I wanted to know. And, also …” I started fiddling with one of my dreads, pulling at it, twirling, faster and faster.
“What?” he asked, so quietly I almost didn’t hear.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was like that day when we talked. You understood parts of me even I don’t understand. And I didn’t get how. Is that weird?”
He smiled. “No. I felt the same way about you.”
“Since that night, things are different. I don’t know, I can’t explain it,” I said.
“Me too.” He put his hand on mine. I never felt warmth like this when Chris touched me.
Just then Rashanna came in, and Sebastian quickly took his hand away. Shit, we’d broken the no contact rule. Would I be allowed back?
“Did you have a nice visit?”
We both nodded. Our moment was over, but it lingered in the air. Rashanna pretended to ignore it.
“One sec,” she said and stepped into the hall to talk to another nurse.
“I can come again on Friday, if you want,” I said to Sebastian. “After babysitting…. Ugh, what was I thinking? I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“How old?” he asked.
“A four-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy.”
“There’s only one thing you need to know,” he said. “Pay very close attention to what I’m about to tell you.”
I nodded.
“If crying, insert ice cream,” he said.
I rolled my eyes and laughed. “Thank you so much for that sage advice.”
Rashanna returned to the room.
“Okay, Sebastian,” she said. “Lunch is in ten minutes. Come on, Macy.”
Sebastian veered off into the community room, and I heard someone say to him, “Hey, man. Is that the girl?”
What did he mean by the girl? Did Sebastian talk about me?
I followed Rashanna down the corridor and through the double doors to the reception area.
I sat in my car and felt the sun on my face through the windshield. It was the same sun as the one that had been in the visitors’ room, but it felt different here. Bigger. Inside the psych ward, even the sun seemed imprisoned. But Sebastian was happier today. Despite the poster disaster and his lack of sleep, some of the dullness had lifted from him. I closed my eyes and tattooed his flirtatious smile onto my memory. There was no doubt in my mind that we felt exactly the same way about each other, and that was an amazing feeling.
I reached behind my neck to untie my bandana. I shook out my dreads and caught a glimpse of my eyes in the mirror. They looked different somehow. Same color—greenish-brown—same dark eyeliner and mascara, but something was different. There was something extra—a lightness, or maybe it was an absence of heaviness. I felt the change now, rising in me from my chest and spilling out through my pores.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I pulled into Darren and Kevin’s driveway at 12:57 p.m. on Friday. Their house wasn’t right in town like Sebastian’s; in fact, it was only a few minutes from mine, but it still seemed worlds away. It was a real family neighborhood with paved roads and houses far enough apart to be private but close enough together to feel like you’re not alone. Almost every house on the road had a swing set in the backyard, and there were no electronic gates like mine at the end of driveways.
I knocked lightly. Darren opened the door almost immediately and put his finger to his lips.
He was holding the baby, who was asleep on his shoulder.
“Let me just put him down. Avery’s in there.” He gestured toward a room off the kitchen as he crept up the stairs silently. The glory of gay-party-Darren was long gone. Instead of leather couches and sleek glass tables, the sitting room had bright primary-colored plastic chairs and toys that sang nursery rhymes when you tou
ched them. A wooden coffee table that once may have been nice was now camouflaged in soft smushy material to protect the kids’ heads from pointy corners. Mom probably hadn’t been here since Avery was born. If she had, she’d probably run out screaming.
Avery was lying on her stomach on the floor, turning the pages of a giant encyclopedia of snakes. Her hair was in a messy bun—more hair out than in—and she was wearing blue shorts and a yellow T-shirt. She’d told me at camp that she never ever ever wore pink. Pink was silly.
“Hi, Avery,” I said. She looked up at me.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“He’s upstairs with Ben. What are you looking at?”
She didn’t answer. She kept flipping through the book. She wasn’t the same kid as at camp. Here, she was in her own territory. She was boss. I could tell right away I had no control here. I knelt down next to her. I liked snakes about as much as I’d like getting stuck with a hot poker in hell, but she’d thrown down the gauntlet and now I had to win her over. I wanted the Avery who’d snuck her way onto my lap the other day.
“Wow,” I said. “That one is gigantic. Is that an anaconda?”
Avery looked at me and rolled her eyes. Yes, this four-year-old actually rolled her eyes at me.
“Cobra?” I asked.
“An anaconda is a constricting snake and a cobra is a poisonous snake,” she said, matter-of-factly. Okay, we were warming up here.
“Huh,” I said. “So then, by definition, anacondas aren’t poisonous?”
It seemed like she was trying to figure out whether I was teasing her or was actually just an idiot. She must have decided on the latter because she began to explain.
“Constricting snakes squeeze their prey until they die.” She balled her hand into a fist very dramatically. “Poisonous snakes bite their prey with their fangs and the venom comes out of the venom sac and kills them.” Now we were getting somewhere. I could learn a few things from Avery. Could I get my hands on a venomous snake and put it in one of Mom’s spandex capris? I was deciding whether it would be appropriate to ask Avery which way she’d prefer dying when Darren walked into the room.
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