Be in the Real

by Denise Mathew

  She trailed off.

  “If you had of gotten the staff there’s no telling what they would have done with her,” Derrick said reasonably.

  Kaila tilted her head to the side, confused. She remembered that they had mentioned that she was not breathing.

  “Did I die?” she asked plainly.

  Pauline and Derrick who had been locked in a mutual glare brought Kaila back in their sights.

  Derrick shook his head definitely. “No…or at least I don’t think you did. I figure I panicked a little and probably couldn’t find your pulse because I was too freaked out…”

  “That doesn’t explain why she stopped breathing,” Pauline countered.

  She placed her hands on her slim hips, now concealed in black jeans that hugged her thighs as if someone had painted them on her.

  “I’m not exactly sure if I didn’t panic there too,” Derrick said, running a hand through the longer lengths of his dark locks.

  “Then why did you give her mouth to mouth?” Pauline said, glaring at him.

  His response was merely a shrug. He slipped on a yellow graphic tee with a green raised symbol of infinity on the front.

  “Better to be safe than…whatever, it doesn’t really matter much does it. She’s okay and that’s all I care about.”

  “What does the infinity symbol mean to you?” Kaila said, completely derailing the conversation between Derrick and Pauline.

  Derrick dragged his gaze away from Pauline. Despite her irritation with him his extended stare seemed to indicate that he was still very much into her. Kaila wondered if he had seen her scar and whether it mattered to him.

  “That everything is infinite, and that nothing that is created can really be destroyed, it just changes form but continues to exist,” he said simply.

  Kaila nodded, slightly surprised that he and Trillian were so close in their opinion. Kaila agreed with Derrick, but still believed that there was more to it than his simple explanation, because how could something so ancient and meaningful be summed up so succinctly. There had to be more to it, of that she was sure. And because Kaila’s thoughts never worked in a linear fashion, she moved on to the next subject that was weighing heavy in her mind.

  “Why were you and Pauline together like that? Pauline is supposed to be in love with Janelle.”

  Derrick opened his mouth to speak. Before he could say anything Pauline piped in.

  “I made a mistake. If I had been thinking I would never have even looked at…” Her voice faltered then she went quiet. She cast her eyes to the floor as if ashamed. Her body bowed down like a tree with a thick coating of snow on its branches, adding credence to the sentiment.

  Derrick’s face didn’t reveal his feelings, despite Pauline’s harsh words.

  “Yeah, whatever, I’m out of here.”

  He limped to the door of the room, his walking cast made a soft tapping sound as he moved. He paused and stared at Pauline for a beat; she remained focused on the floor. When his eyes met Kaila’s she caught the briefest glimpse of sadness in their depths, but as soon as she had seen it, it was gone and so was he.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck…” Pauline said, landing with a bounce on the thin mattress of her bed. Kaila noticed that the bed was still rumpled from the recent activity, a testament that Pauline and Derrick’s encounter had really happened. Pauline shook her head, sighed hugely then trapped her bottom lip between her perfectly straight teeth.

  “I can’t believe I was actually about to fuck him,” she said, releasing an exaggerated groan. When Pauline snapped her head up suddenly Kaila realized that her roommate’s eyes were filled with tears. In this position her hair had shifted, once again showcasing her scar. Kaila understood Derrick’s interest in Pauline, because even with the scar marring half of her face, she was breathtakingly beautiful. She was however at a loss for how he had somehow managed to finagle her roommate into a position where the two were destined to consummate a relationship that should never have existed.

  “You saved my ass Kaila. If you hadn’t interrupted I might have…and then Janelle and…” She shook her head violently, willing the thoughts away.

  “What’s wrong with me? Why do I sabotage anything that’s good in my life, I mean it’s cra…”

  “Crazy,” Kaila finished. “That’s exactly what we are, right?”

  Pauline nodded. “There’s a crazy in all of us Kaila, some people are just better at hiding it than others.”

  She pushed back against the wall, mirroring Kaila’s position. The two stared at each other in silence.

  “I think they lock us away in here and call us crazy because we know too much,” Kaila said breaking the quiet.

  Pauline nodded introspectively. “You might be on to something there,” she said with a lopsided grin, then shrugged.

  “Well I better go see Janelle, see if I can salvage our relationship.”

  Pauline lurched to her feet, her tears forgotten; a reticent expression clouded her face.

  “Why can’t you keep it a secret?” Kaila asked.

  As far as she knew Derrick and Pauline’s almost sex wasn’t public knowledge, not yet at least.

  “You know this place, word travels, besides I have to come clean, if I don’t I know it will make me a little loopy. I may not have a lot of scruples especially not based on my most recent screw up, but I’ve never been much of a liar. Though half the time I really wish it was one of my talents.”

  Pauline tossed her hair to the side with a flip of her head then drew in a long breath.

  “I care too much about Janelle not to be up front about what happened, but I have you to thank for it being a whole lot less of a fuck up than it could have been.”

  Before Kaila had realized what was happening, Pauline swept in and planted a soft kiss on her cheek. Her roommate was out of the door before Kaila could react to the touch; oddly, the spiders that were always waiting to invade didn’t seem to care much in this instance.

  CHAPTER 11

  Janelle shot up from her seat, tears blurring her tiny eyes. She spun toward the door, raced across the cafeteria and almost toppled Kaila as she rushed by and out. Kaila watched Janelle’s bulky frame until she disappeared around a corner. All she could think was that it was never good when these kinds of predictions came true. From the look on Pauline’s face, who was still sitting in a chair at a table, she was as distraught as Janelle was. She buried her face in her hands; her hair fell forward into a puddle on the smooth surface in front of her.

  Kaila moved to the tray stacks, grasping a bright orange plastic tray in her hand. Tuesday was lasagna day, and if she was lucky there might still be some garlic bread available. She closed her eyes for a moment, testing her prediction skills. Though she knew her odds in this situation were around fifty-fifty, give or take, she still decided to give it a shot. Using all available predicting tools she had at her disposal, she swept her gaze across the cafeteria. The room that seated at least one hundred at a time, but usually was only half-filled most days, was as expected, half-full. Based on previous data she had collected of the roughly fifty people in the cafeteria, only half of them liked garlic bread. She also knew that the cafeteria always made one hundred and twenty slices of garlic toast, and based on the number of patients that she knew…

  “Hey.”

  Derrick appeared out of nowhere, completely throwing off her calculations. She was angry at his interruption, but a bit of warmth worked through her because his insistence on being noticed by her once again reminded her a little of Norm. The next flash that entered her mind was of him and Pauline rolling around on the bed half-dressed, her original irritation quickly resurfaced.

  “Leave me alone,” she snapped, bringing her thoughts back to the garlic bread.

  She shifted her focus away from Derrick, staring through and around him, as if he were a pane of glass.

  “You don’t have to be so pissy, I just wanted to see if you were okay, you were really fucked up before,” he said, drawing h
er attention back to him. Kaila didn’t usually hit people who weren’t Norm, but she was beginning to think that Derrick might be an exception.

  “I said leave me alone,” she repeated, a razor edge of menace colored her voice.

  “Screw that,” Derrick said, crossing his arms over his chest like a petulant child. Kaila felt, more than willed, her right hand form into a tight fist; all the tendons in her forearm were immediately taut and ready. She predicted that it would only take one quick crack to his nose and Derrick would be finished. Unlike Norm, there was no iron in Derrick, he was a man-boy. No matter how old he got, she knew he would always be in the middle, somewhere between an adult and a teen.

  “Come on Kaila.”

  Kaila hadn’t noticed that Pauline had left her place at her table and was standing directly beside her. Pauline’s voice had been enough to diffuse Kaila. She allowed her hands to go slack at her sides.

  Kaila glowered at Derrick, an act that would have incited fear in most but didn’t seem to affect him at all. He stood his ground, unmoving. The way he was so steadfast in his stance made Kaila wonder if he too could predict the future, if he had determined that there was no threat at all and that he would walk away from their interaction unscathed. This thought interested her enough that her garlic bread musings were lost completely.

  “Do you have predictive skills too?” she asked.

  Derrick’s expression remained smooth, as if he had expected the question, as though he had been waiting patiently all along for that very query to be posed.

  “Maybe,” he said with a smirk that showed a sliver of his white teeth. Then he shrugged indifferently. “Maybe not.”

  Kaila felt the ire rise in her at his cavalier dismissal of a question that was beyond reproach. Never in her life had she asked anyone about their ability to predict. Even Trillian was abhor to the discussion of precognition and such. After the risk she had taken, the man-boy was poo-pooing her as if she were an infant or a half-wit.

  Her hands found his throat and she was squeezing before she even knew what she was doing. A part of her wondered if it was Trillian taking over, making her presence known, but Kaila knew the truth; Trillian had no part in this. Derrick’s smug expression fell away and as Kaila’s huge hands tightened around his neck, his eyes popped wide like a pond frogs. Pauline’s voice urged her to cease and desist. Derrick’s face was a deep shade of puce as he pulled at her hands, attempting in futility to free himself from her grip. She almost laughed out loud that in his skewed perception he would in fact believe that he had any dominion over her. Spiders skittered up and across her arms and hands, but for a change her fury trumped all of that. It was a blissful moment knowing that even though the world around her had been shredded into tiny pieces she was still focused and aware.

  By the time she felt the needle poke her skin he had stopped struggling. Utter quiet followed soon after.

  CHAPTER 12

  Kaila spent another indeterminate amount of time in the White Room, where higher doses of medications, more poking, prodding, and such, ensued until one day they deemed her fit to return to her world, and she did.

  CHAPTER 13

  “He had quite a bit of bruising around his neck, and he’s still all gravelly voiced when he talks, but I say it serves him right. He’s a prick. I know that now,” Pauline said, filling in the details about Derrick to both Kaila and Janelle.

  She paused in her diatribe long enough to lean forward and plant a sensual kiss on Janelle’s parted lips. As the kiss deepened, Pauline tugged the girl’s doughy body closer until they were chest to chest, something that looked quite absurd given the vast differences in their body structures, and of course their breast sizes.

  Pauline worked a hand through Janelle’s stringy hair. It was marginally less oily than normal. Obviously the two had mended their relationship in Kaila’s absence. Though normally she would never have cared about such a thing, Kaila found that she was inexplicably pleased at seeing the two girls together again. Love was still a foreign word and concept to her, but if there was any meaning in it all, it might have been found somewhere in Janelle and Pauline’s relationship.

  Both girls were flushed and breathless when they finally broke apart. Pauline gazed at Janelle as if she was the most beautiful being in the universe. Seeing her glazed expression made Kaila’s stomach flip a little. She couldn’t help but imagine Norm staring at her in that very same way.

  Kaila stretched out on the bed, frustrated that even after what seemed like years, she still thought, dreamt, and fantasized about Norm. She remembered how it had felt to hold him, and not for the first time she wished that they’d had a chance to have sex like they had planned. Though at times she was relieved that they had been interrupted because if they had completed their task it might have been that much more difficult to shake Norm from her being. She wasn’t sure if she would ever forget Norm. He was like a hard-covered book that was shelved in a space too high for her to reach; she would remember his story but would never ever read the words again.

  “I heard he’s a med student who got kicked out for stealing drugs from the hospital,” Janelle said when she had regained her ability to speak. Kaila rolled onto her side, listening. She had absolutely nothing to add to the conversation since she knew little to nothing about Derrick, but for some strange reason she was eager to learn all she could about the man-boy.

  Pauline nodded. “Yeah, that’s true, I had a chance to read his file when I was in the office helping with the paper work the other day,” she said.

  For patients who would eventually be released back into the world, work experience was an option and was offered; Kaila had never been offered anything other than her daily routines of Wildwind.

  Janelle made a ridiculous tittering sound that was intended to be a giggle.

  “I love how sneaky and devious you are Paul,” she said. She threaded her thick fingers through Pauline’s fingers. Another passionate kiss followed.

  “What else was in his file?” Kaila asked, surprised that she actually cared. She knew there was a deep loathing for Derrick within her, still there was something…

  Pauline brought her gaze to Kaila as if she had just been made aware of her presence. She smiled, showing half of her perfect teeth.

  “Well he’s a child genius, got an IQ of about 220 plus. He finished an undergrad in Biochemistry by the time he was just fifteen. He’s had a lot of social issues since he’s always been younger than everyone else…”

  “How old is he?” Janelle said, cutting Pauline off mid-sentence.

  “Twenty-two,” Pauline said. “He was almost done with med school when he got caught stealing pain killers, at which point he decided that he was going to kill himself. He jumped off a train trestle that was about thirty feet high. Obviously he’s a lot like me, failure to achieve, because he only got a broken leg for his troubles and a lovely all expenses paid stay in Hotel California, AKA, this dump.”

  “A genius,” Kaila mused.

  This fact in itself far surpassed anything else that Pauline had said. Kaila now questioned if her unusual interest in Derrick was based on her ability to read the intelligence that he held, she wondered if she had divined the magnitude of his brainpower. Her heart sped at just the notion that there might have been more to her odd connection to Derrick then just passing interest. Before that exact moment she had perceived her interest in Derrick much as if he was a beautiful flower or piece of art, something that was visually appealing that drew your eye then your intrigue. Yet this notion didn’t add up.

  The man-boy would never have graced the cover of the GQ magazines that a girl named Darla Sinclair studied day in and day out. Every time Kaila laid eyes on Darla, who like Kaila, had resided in the confines of Wildwind for the better part of her life, she had a magazine a few inches in front of her bespectacled face. Darla had been diagnosed early on with a mental malady that Kaila refused to acknowledge, or even name. Kaila had never aspired to the diagnosis labels tha
t followed every patient in Wildwind. She reasoned that if she did accept these labels, she would be agreeing to the concept that once an individual was brought inside, they ceased to be a human and became a diagnosis. Even so, she understood the rationale behind the labels. A diagnosis could be healed, fixed even, but a human was something entirely different.

  But understanding the process didn’t mean that she could slip into the mindset that those who ran the facility aspired to. For them, Wildwind was like any other business. Only this business wasn’t a business at all, it was an attempt to fit all the square pegs of society into round slots. With enough effort and time, a carving knife, lots of medications, and a will to change the shape, a square peg might eventually be forced into a round slot, but it would never be a perfect fit.

  Darla’s mental differences rendered her completely out of touch with most parts of the world around her. In Darla’s narrowed reality anything that didn’t fall into two distinct categories, handsome men and luxury cars, was ignored as though it were an illusion. For this fact alone, Darla’s days were spent carefully turning the pages of magazines that contained the images that she was drawn to, photos that somehow calmed and soothed her. No matter how many people surrounded her she was always alone; Darla was in her own personal space and time, never daring to step outside its familiarity.

  “That must be it,” Kaila said to no one in particular.

  “Must be what?”

  Suddenly both Janelle and Pauline were keenly interested in what Kaila had to say. With just a few words she had stepped out of the grey into the light. Not willing to divulge her secret musings about Derrick she shook her head definitively.

  “Nothing.”

  Knowing that nothing more would be given to them in the way of explanation, Pauline and Janelle went back to their conversation. They had smoothly shifted to what the activities for the impending Easter holiday would be this year. Despite Easter being a Christian celebration, Wildwind usually did an egg hunt on Easter morning. Wildwind owners reasoned that any occasion that broke up the monotony of the routine at the facility was welcome. To this end they celebrated the most obscure events, like Ground hog day, Earth Day, Songkran, a Thai holiday where people apparently threw colorful water at each other, and many other events that Kaila mostly ignored.