by Kari Luna
ELEVEN
And she gave away the secrets of her past and said I’ve lost control again.
—Joy Division, “She’s Lost Control”
“Sophie?”
The door swung open and Finny stood there, not Drew. People had been banging for a while, trying to get in. Callie knocking, talking about a master key. I knew I was supposed to get up. I knew I should answer the door and walk out, and everything would be okay, except I couldn’t. Walking into the world made it real, and I’d have to admit, whether I wanted to or not, that I was turning into my dad.
Finny bent down beside me. I was curled up in the corner, by the sink. Back to the wall, head bowed, arms hugging my knees.
“Are you okay?”
In my head I said yes, but it never left my mouth. Only grunts and moans, the sounds of a wounded animal.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Finny’s hand hovered above my back like he wanted to touch me, but he wasn’t sure it would be okay. But it was—and it was the only way I was getting off the floor. I grabbed his hand and started to pull myself up, pretty much forcing him to support me under my arms. I leaned on him as we left the bathroom, winding down the hall and out the back door. He propped me up against the back wall of the café.
“If you want to make it to your house, we’ll need chocolate,” I said.
“Back in a sec,” he said.
I looked at my hand and wiggled my fingers. They looked bad but didn’t seem to be broken. Not like my insides.
Finny returned with a brown paper bag full of Café Haven’s infamous (according to him) brownies. He broke one in half, put half in my mouth and the other half in his. We leaned against the wall, chewing. We ate another one the same way. And then another, passing a bottle of water back and forth, swigs in between bites. By the third half brownie, I felt my strength return. And not just in my body but in my mind, too.
Sometimes you faced the truth because it was time, because you waited or did the work or whatever it took to get there. But other times you were forced into it. Something happened, and you couldn’t stand in the dark anymore, not knowing what you knew. All the saint cards and shaman pandas in the world couldn’t help me if I wasn’t willing to help myself.
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Finny and I squeezed through a chain-link fence three doors down from his yard and trekked through the grass to the little house I’d only heard about, nestled up high inside of a tree. It used to belong to the Peterson kids, but when they went away to college, they gave it to Finny.
“Watch your step,” he said, climbing up the small ladder to the top of the tree. I followed him.
“Welcome to The Lab,” he said, waving his arm around. “Like it?”
It was unbelievable. Most tree houses are just slabs of wood, but this was like an actual house—smooth, stained wood walls with real windows. There was even a fake fireplace with a white fake fur rug in front of it, plus fluffy orange floor pillows, empty soda cans and an old wooden desk. And a red and orange cartoon owl hung over the fake mantel with a word bubble that said “Whooo’s there?” It was cozy and cabiny and as far away from science as you could get.
“Why do you call it The Lab?” I said. “It looks more ski lodge to me.”
“Because it’s where I do my most important work,” Finny said. “Over there.”
He pointed to the desk covered with test tubes and measuring cups, note cards and Hershey bar wrappers. Clutter, just like in my head.
“Excuse the mess,” he said, opening a drawer and shoving wrappers into it. “If I’d known you were coming, I would have cleaned.”
I grabbed a big orange pillow and leaned against the fireplace, hands behind my head. If I turned just right, I could see the bluest parts of the sky.
“I need your help,” I said, looking at the clouds for courage. “This is going to sound weird, but I see things.”
“Me too,” Finny said, leaning back in his chair and looking around. “I love it when the leaves turn. Even the sky is a different color right now.”
This was going to be harder than I thought.
“No, I mean I see things other people don’t see.”
“I know,” Finny said. “You have a different point of view. That’s what makes you so awesome.”
I sat up and put the pillow in my lap, hugging it.
“Let’s try this again,” I said, frustration winning out over fear. “I see things other people don’t see. I call them episodes, but those in the medical profession prefer the term hallucination.”
“Wait,” Finny said, looking away from the sky and directly at me. “What?”
“I hallucinate,” I said.
“Are you schizophrenic?”
“No,” I said. It was the first place people always went.
“Okay, then you have bipolar disease,” he said.
“Wrong again,” I said. “It might help if you had more information—”
“Do you have a personality disorder?” Finny asked. When he was nervous, he went into Super-Solve-It mode, even though he didn’t really understand the problem. “Is it epilepsy? Do you have seizures?”
“No,” I said. “And I’m not mentally ill. At least I don’t think I am. Could you stop for a second?”
Finny walked circles around the tree house. You could almost see his scientific wheels turning, his head filled with interlocking gears.
“You have hallucinations that aren’t hallucinations,” he said. “Could you be a monk and not know it? When monks become highly evolved, they can travel through consciousness.”
“I can barely meditate for a second,” I said, closing my eyes, which popped right back open. “I doubt I’m enlightened.”
“Maybe you’re psychic. Or maybe they’re auras. Do you have migraines?”
“No,” I said. “But keep asking me these questions, and I’ll get one.”
“I’m a scientist,” Finny said. “Questions are my go-to, like an automatic setting.”
He was wearing a vintage Boy Scout shirt with band buttons on it instead of badges. In all of his walking around, the New Order button had fallen to the floor. He finally stopped pacing, and I picked it up.
“Hold out your hand and close your eyes,” I said.
He sighed as I pressed the button into his palm and then closed his fingers around it.
“I don’t need you to worry,” I said. “I don’t need you to look like I did in that bathroom. I don’t need you to put a label on something that hasn’t had a label since it started, two years ago, either. I just need you to be who you’ve been the past few weeks. My friend.”
I knew he’d still want to solve me, which was one of the reasons I’d told him in the first place. I wanted to be solved. I just didn’t want him to have a nervous breakdown doing it.
Finny opened his eyes, looked down at the button and smiled.
“You said you needed my help,” he said. “How may I be of service, Ms. Sophia?”
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Over the next half hour, I told Finny the specifics of what I saw and when, where it started and how often it happened. I started with the first thing I’d ever witnessed: the heart rolling off that guy’s sleeve. Then I skipped ahead, telling him about seeing stockers perform Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” in a grocery store and witnessing my wallpaper come to life, giant sunflowers peeling off, waving their arms at me. I told him about the lunch ladies covering the Ramones, and by the time I got to the marching band pandas, I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head. I decided to save The Cure, Walt and Turning into My Father for another afternoon.
“Why now?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Maybe for the same reason you haven’t told me something,” I said. “I had to wait until I was ready.”
Finny stood up and looked out one of the windows. A red leaf blew in and landed on his shoulder. Maple.
“I’m gay,” he said.
“Awesome!” I said. I almost clapped, but that felt inappropriate. “Really.”
“Wait, you knew?”
“I guessed,” I said. “You gave me, like, a thousand clues.”
Finny wore wing tips, never talked about girls and used more hair product than I did.
“Do you think anyone else knows?”
“Doubtful,” I said immediately. “I picked up on it because I’m from New York. Our gaydar is much more advanced.”
He giggled, and I joined in. We laughed until we fell on the floor, rolling around the tree house. Leaves blew in, so we threw them at each other, red, yellow, gold. Maybe it was the chocolate that made us giddy or maybe it was the truth, sneaking out of the shadows and into the light. Ready to play.
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“Episodes, you’re going down!” I said as Finny scribbled on the butcher paper hanging by the fake fireplace.
I was less concerned with why they happened and more concerned with stopping them, but Finny said the two were connected. He also said if I wanted his help, I had to listen to him. And stop using catchphrases.
“Not even Sanity or Bust?”
Finny shook his head.
“I’m just excited,” I said. “Instead of wishing my episodes would go away, I’m actually doing something about it.”
“We’re doing something about it,” he said, smiling. “Besides, I needed a final science project, anyway, so this works out great. And don’t worry—the subjects are always anonymous.”
I wasn’t thrilled about being the topic of an experiment, but I also knew Finny couldn’t leave a puzzle alone. So if helping his science project meant helping me, I was in.
“Let’s do it,” I said. “What’s first?”
“Establish a constant,” he said.
“I don’t have one,” I said. “My life is totally random.”
“You are, but your episodes are not,” he said. “They’re consistent. They’re the constant.”
“Okay,” I said, even though hearing it out loud made me cringe. “What’s next?”
“We gather data, recognize patterns and develop a theory.”
I remembered Dad doing the same thing, working on problems he never seemed to solve. Developing theories that never went anywhere. Maybe I would be the exception.
“So here’s the deal,” Finny said. “You live your life the way you always would, listening to music, hanging out with me, making cool clothes, having episodes, normal stuff. I just need you to do one thing.”
“You just called my episodes normal,” I said. “I’ll give you my KLM Airlines bag if you want it.”
“I love that bag, but no,” he said. “Just buy a journal and document everything: what you ate for breakfast, how you’re feeling, what you see, that kind of thing. Then I’ll analyze it and hopefully identify a pattern.”
“And if we identify a pattern, we can prevent it, right?”
“In theory,” he said. “That’s why they call it an experiment.”
“Experiment Sophie?”
“More like the Normalcy Project,” he said, smiling. “Based on the idea that everyone is abnormal until proven normal.”
“I love it,” I said, feeling like I could breathe again. “I could totally see that on a T-shirt.”
I could also see myself without episodes one day, with Finny to thank for it. He was a genius at science. But as he paced around the tree house, stopping to scribble on the butcher paper, I noticed something else. Finny was also a genius at being my friend.
“It’s getting cold up here,” I said. “Want to take the big experiment to my house?”
“The Normalcy Project,” he said, drawing his hand across his shirt like it was printed there. “Also known as your life. And yes, let’s get out of here.”
Finny threw a few things in his bag, I grabbed mine, and we climbed down the stairs, one rung at a time. One step closer toward normalcy. When we got to the bottom, we linked arms and headed down the street, dusk at our backs.
TWELVE
I unlocked the door of my house, ready to endure whatever Mom was going to dish out. Since I was, like, three hours late and hadn’t bothered to call, it was going to be major. Good thing I had Finny as a buffer.
“Mom?” I said, looking around. “Hello?”
“Is she here?” Finny said.
“Nope,” I said, pulling him into the kitchen. “Let’s take advantage of it.” I grabbed a bag of carrots and cans of ginger ale out of the fridge and headed upstairs, Finny and Balzac following. I flopped on the bed, and Finny stood in front of the collection of black and white postcards, staring.
“Warhol and Nico,” he said, touching one of them. “That’s new. How is it I could notice that but totally miss that you hallucinate?”
“Have episodes,” I said.
“That’s not a scientific term,” Finny said. “Can we say hallucination, just for the sake of the experiment?”
I traced the circles on my bedspread with my finger. “As along as you understand that’s not what they are,” I said.
“You’re going to have to help me with that,” Finny said. “But first: when are we going to redo my room?”
I called my bedroom New York Meets Everywhere Else because it was full of found things like a sad-eyed dog painting, a floppy red felt hat and a collection of vintage sunglasses hanging on a ribbon on the wall. Anything that inspired me, basically. My favorite was a sculpture Dad made out of tin cans, bicycle gears and broken bits of an old Supremes 45 record. It sat next to his beanbag, which was now occupied by Finny, who flipped through a stack of cassettes on the floor.
“Want to listen to Black Holes vs. Sunday Afternoons?”
“Sure,” I said as he put it in my boom box. If we were going to discuss my mental state, we might as well have music to go along with it.
“So what are hallucinations like?” Finny asked, pressing Play and then sinking into the beanbag chair. “Do you see a bright light? Step through an opening?”
“It’s not Narnia,” I said, throwing a pillow at him.
“I don’t know,” he said, ducking. “That’s why I asked.”
I lay on my back and hung my head off the side of the bed, letting all the blood rush to it. Making my face turn red.
“Sometimes I get a headache,” I said. “Or hear things. My body reacts more post-hallucination than pre-hallucination.”
“So there are no warning signs,” he said.
“Nope,” I said. “Welcome to Randomland.”
“Does stress make them worse? Can you leave whenever you want? Can you control them at all?” Finny asked.
I remembered the time Dad tied cans of chili to his ankles with rope. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he was trying to weigh himself down so he could stay with me. At the time, I didn’t understand—I just knew that no matter what he did, he’d disappear anyway. I thought about that instead of the words that were coming out of my mouth.
“I can’t control them, but I’m not alone,” I said. “Dad couldn’t control his hallucinations, either.”
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I was jumping on my mini trampoline when it happened.
Bounce. Bounce. Up in the air, face to the sky, then face-to-face with Daddy holding a red paper parasol, floating in the air. He popped out of nowhere, like in cartoons, and then he landed on the grass.
“Hi, sweet pea,” he said. “Having fun?”
“Hi, Daddy,” I said, still bouncing. “Where did you come from?”
“Somewhere too far for little girls to go,” he said.
“Like Chinatown?”
“Something like that,” he said, twirling his pa
rasol. “I brought this for you.”
I hopped off the trampoline and took the parasol, spinning it above my head.
“It’s magical,” he said. “They call it a Dream Director.”
“Why?”
“Because, according to legend, it directs your dreams.”
“How does it work?” I wanted to know how everything worked.
Dreams have a system, Daddy said. They started in the sky and moved toward our heads, but direction determined whether the dreams were good ones or bad ones. Good dreams were creative and happy and traveled like a triangle, sliding down the side of our heads and going into the ears. But bad dreams were angrier; they shot down out of the sky like rain and headed straight for the middle of the forehead.
My hands flew up to my own forehead. “Does it hurt?”
“Of course not, silly,” he said. “You’re asleep. But that’s why we have the Dream Director. We’ll hang it upside down over your bed so it can catch the bad dreams before they go in.”
“So I’ll only have good dreams?”
“I hope so,” he said, ruffling the top of my head. “Just because I travel a lot doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the best dreams possible.”
“Why can’t I go with you?” I said, tracing my finger along the edge of the parasol. It was the color of cherries.
“Who would do your job?” he said, kissing my cheek. “You have to stay home so I have someone to bring souvenirs to.”
“So you can remember where you’ve been?”
“Yes, pumpkin pie,” he said, pulling me close and almost crushing the parasol. “But also so you can remember me.”
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Finny stood and looked around my room, his eyes stopping on the parasol in the corner.
“Is that it?”
“Yes,” I said. “One and the same. And no, I’m not going to hang it over my bed.”
Finny touched it and withdrew his hand quickly, like it was on fire.
“You know this changes the game, right?”
“Dad hallucinating or the fact that he brought something back?”