Weird thing though:

Often, when I was looking at the blank white ceiling of my hospital room, one of those ceilings made of square panels of thin board, as if the whole building was made to be disassembled quickly if necessary, often, at those times, counting the white panels or watching a fly buzzing across them, what I would be thinking about was …

You.

You, climbing the stairs to the apartment. You, smiling.

I didn’t really get it at the time, though I let it happen because when I was seeing you, strangely, I tended to feel calmer, more in control, more like some hand wasn’t going to reach down and take apart all those panels and the bricks of the walls, like children’s building blocks, and leave me defenseless on a bed propped up only by air and teetering scaffolding.

It puzzled me though, because, like I said, you didn’t make a big impression on me when we met.

Yeah. Right.

 

DR. REZWARI:	You understand now that the voice is not real?
THE VOICE:	(dim, like a person speaking in another room) Don’t listen to this *****. Don’t—
ME:	I don’t know.
DR. REZWARI:	It’s a hallucination. A product of your brain.
ME:	(crying) But I hear it from outside. Like any other voice.
DR. REZWARI:	I know. It’s difficult. But, like I said, I can help you. Are you still hearing it?
THE VOICE:	Cut her. Slash her face. Slash her ******* face, cut out her—
DR. REZWARI:	Cassie?
ME:	You could say that.

 

Dad visited, a couple of days later, and I couldn’t even muster the energy to speak to him at first. He sat in the plastic chair in the corner of my room. There was a copy of a Graham Greene novel on my bed. Dr. Rezwari had given it to me, but even though I didn’t hear the voice anymore, I didn’t have the energy to read it.

I was lying on my bed, which was what I did much of the time. There wasn’t even a view of the ocean out my window—just a redbrick wall.

Dad handed me a local newspaper, like, I don’t know, he thought I had been really missing out on all the news about traffic zoning and the plan to build more community housing in Linklater Heights, and really needed to stock up on coupons for 99¢ BURGERS.

“I’ll read it later,” I said.

“The regulars have been asking about you,” said Dad. “Fat Joe. The Greek. Marty. They send their regards.”

There was not even an echo of a thought in my mind about this information. Fat Joe, who liked to sit at the bar by the wood-fired oven of the restaurant and drink grappa, was no longer a part of my world.

“Dad,” I managed. “I just want to sleep.”

He nodded. It looked like there were more lines around his eyes and mouth than I remembered. “Okay, honey,” he said. “Okay.” He came over and lifted the sheets at the bottom of the bed and laid them over me, like I was a little kid. Then he reached out his hand to stroke my hair.

“I’m sorry, Cass,” he said.

“Sorry for what?”

“I don’t know. For whatever I did wrong. For whatever … has made you like this.”

“Nothing made me like this,” I said.

Silence.

“I just …” He paused. “You’re my life. I would sell my soul if it would make you better.”

A wheel came off the mechanism of my breathing; it rasped and scraped in my chest, loose, broken. I hugged myself.

I wanted to cry, but the risperidone wouldn’t let me.

 

Okay, so that’s basically the bad stuff out of the way. I mean, apart from me trampling all over your heart but … Okay, that’s not all the bad stuff out of the way.

I mean more: that’s the important bad stuff from before you. And I’m going to have to start summarizing a bit now; otherwise I’m never going to get this finished before Wednesday, and I figure I have to give you two days to read it. Your dad said you were going to college Saturday, so Friday is my last chance.

So …

Hmm …

JUST SKIP TO WHEN YOU WENT HOME, CASSIE.

That was the voice, speaking to me right at this moment, as I type this. I hear the voice again these days, but she’s my friend now. I know, I know. I’ll explain. Honestly, this will all make sense.

Anyway, she’s right.

So:

I went home from the hospital some number of days later. Maybe ten days. I had a prescription for risperidone and another for paroxetine, which is an antidepressant that has a super-high incidence of suicide in those trying to come off it—a fun little fact the doctor didn’t tell me at the time. You can just assume that I met with Dr. Rezwari quite a few times when I was in the hospital but we didn’t really talk about anything. She just gave me risperidone and referred me to a counselor in the town to talk about my mother, when I was ready to.

And that was it. They discharged me.

Luckily, when I came back from the hospital, you and Shane weren’t there. It would have been amazingly awkward if you had been. You were out somewhere, working on the piers, I guess. I don’t know what my dad told you about where I had been; maybe he didn’t tell you anything, I mean, it’s not like he is accountable to the people he rents the apartment to.

Anyway, I was glad you weren’t there.

No offense.

 

From the side window in my room, I could see a small corner of the beach. Just a sliver—between the roofs of two houses, crisscrossed by telephone wires. A V-shaped fragment of ocean. I sometimes used to focus on it and pretend I was on a ship floating over an endless ocean. It was something Mom taught me to do, when I was worried about something.

I tried it, that first day home, but I didn’t have the energy.

That day and the next, I just lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. I also tried reading—there was no voice to tell me not to, or at least the voice was quiet now; muffled—but I couldn’t get past page one of any book I tried.

I heard Shane come home at sunset. Dad was still at Donato’s. I looked out the front window of my room. Shane set himself up in the yard—he unfolded a lawn chair, sat down, and cracked open a beer. There was a six-pack by his feet. He didn’t do anything; he didn’t read or listen to music or call anyone. He just sat there and slowly drank the beers. Shane has the kind of mind that people who have had a mental illness envy.

A couple of hours later, a white Ford F-150 with the Piers branding on it pulled up to the sidewalk. I saw you get out of it and walk over to Shane. He stood up, walked over to the pickup, and spoke to you for a bit. Then he gave you a high five. You joined him—he pulled up another lawn chair—and he handed you a beer. You were wearing a Piers uniform—khaki chinos, a pale denim shirt with the logo showing the two piers on the pocket. A CB radio was clipped to your collar.

He’s not gutting shrimp, I thought. Because you wouldn’t have been driving that branded pickup truck if you were. I wondered what job you had gotten at the piers. I was interested. I watched you and Shane, drinking your beers, chatting. It was calming, somehow. But then you saw me at the window, and I ducked down, ashamed.

You must have thought I was such a weirdo.

The next morning I had my first outpatient appointment at the hospital. Dad was coming back from the restaurant to drive me at eleven. I went downstairs and out onto the porch. Five minutes later, I got a call from Dad on my cell. He’d insisted on getting me a new one to make sure he could contact me when he needed to. I didn’t mind so much—I wasn’t hearing the voice as often since taking the drugs, so the idea of invisible people speaking in my ear wasn’t as scary as it had been. It was a cheap cell; it didn’t even have the Internet. But I didn’t care.

I pressed the Answer button.

“Honey,” said Dad. “Chef has cut himself bad. There’s no one else here; I’ve got to take him to get it sutured.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, sorry. Can you ride the bus?”

I closed my eyes. “Um, yes. I guess.”

“There’s five dollars on the hall table. Sorry again, honey.”

“He hates you,” said the voice, matter-of-factly. It was quiet now, the voice, and I hardly ever heard it, but occasionally I would get these bursts, like a radio catching fragments of speech from the ether. “He wishes you were dead, like your mother.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Huh?” said Dad.

“Nothing, Dad. Nothing.”

I hung up. Then I started walking to the street. I’d have to take two buses, I thought. The 9 and the 3. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make my appointment at eleven thirty.

I turned left on the sidewalk and walked to the bus shelter. I leaned against it to wait. No one else was there. I could see joggers and Roller Bladers passing, one block closer to the ocean, but here in the residential layer, layer three, nothing moved. There was a time I would have listened to music or something, but I didn’t. It was weird: there were moments, like then, when I almost missed the voice talking to me. I mean, it had made me do terrible things, mostly to myself. But it had been company, you know?

Now I had no one, and I was living in permanent mist, obscuring everything, making it woolly and still.

I was just thinking that when I saw a gleam of white, and then you were there, sitting in the driver’s seat of your Ford pickup truck.

“Hey,” you said.

I nodded. I didn’t know what else to do. I noticed, close up, that your eyes were a shade of green I had never seen before: river green. But flecked with gold. A slow river, dotted with ocher leaves.

Sorry. But it’s true. You have amazing eyes.

“You need a ride?” You made a face. “Sorry, that sounds creepy. I mean, it’s not a pickup line. It’s just, you looked kind of down. I thought you might need a lift.” You swallowed. “I’m on break. I have till—”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t need a lift.”

A pause.

“Uh, but, thank you,” I added.

“S’cool,” you said.

You didn’t drive away, and admittedly I had just been thinking about how I was lonely, so even through the fog I was living in, some glimmer of desire for human contact obviously shone. At the same time I was kind of surprised that the voice, even though it was mostly gone, didn’t say anything about you. Usually the voice hated if I spoke to someone.

So …

I figured I would speak to you.

When I say it like that it sounds ridiculous, makes it sound like such a radical decision, but it was. But also, I’m telling you this for a reason, because I think you thought I was being standoffish, and I wasn’t, not deliberately.

“What’s with the truck?” I asked in a lame attempt to make human contact.

You smiled. Then you opened the door and got out. You stood by the Ford and did a little bow, kind of showing off but mocking yourself at the same time. When you straightened up, I watched the muscles in your neck move. “You’re looking at the Assistant Plush Manager for Two Piers,” you said.

“What?” I said. I flashed back to meeting Paris at the hospital, how I had said the same thing. It was like a tic with me.

Suddenly you looked self-conscious. You straightened up. “Oh, uh, it’s stupid,” you said. “I just … I’m delivering plush.”

I looked at you blankly; at least I assume I did, because you had an uncomfortable expression on your face.

“Stuffed toys, you know? For the stands. Prizes. I get them from a warehouse in town, and I drive down onto the beach. Throw them up to the guys on the piers. To restock.” You gestured with your thumb toward the open back of the pickup truck.

I looked: there was a plastic bag in there, the size of a person, full of Angry Birds.

“After my break, I’m taking those to Pier Two,” you said, filling the silence nervously.

“They have an assistant manager for that?” I asked.

You shrugged. “Like I said, it’s stupid. Really, I’m just the plush delivery guy, but they gave me that title. You wouldn’t believe how quick the stands run out of prizes. And there are a lot of stands.”

I wasn’t really interested in the stuffed toys, which is sucky of me, I know. I was still amazed that the voice had said nothing about you. I hadn’t even had my risperidone that morning; it made me too tired to do anything, so I’d skipped it, which I knew Dr. Rezwari would bust a gut about if she knew. The voice had stopped with the threats. It didn’t seem to tell me to hurt myself anymore or that it would kill Dad or whatever—I don’t know if that was the drugs—but it would still sometimes insult me, sometimes curse about stuff.

I thought for sure it was going to say something like, “He knows you’re ugly,” or whatever. That would have been its style.

But that’s the thing about you—you’re an insulator. A muffler. You silence the voice.

Then the little mike on your shirt buzzed.

“714, come in,” said a crackly voice, sounding reedy through the small speaker.

You reached up and pressed a button. “714.”

“What’s your 20?”

“On my break for another half hour,” you said. “Then I’ve got a delivery to Pier Two.”

“Okay,” said the voice on the other end of the radio. “I need five medium Tweety Birds and ten large SpongeBobs to Pier One, when you’re done.”

“10-4,” you said, and signed off.

“10-4?” I said. “Seriously?”

You held up your hands defensively. “I think all the guys on the piers wish they were cops. They believe they’re characters in an Elmore Leonard book or something.”

“A lot of them eat in my dad’s restaurant,” I said. “The real cops too. I’d say they’re more Carl Hiaasen than Elmore Leonard. They’re the kind of guys who wear novelty socks.”

You leaned your head to one side, intrigued. “You like books?”

I shook my head. “Used to.”

I could see the curiosity on your face, but you didn’t press. I think you heard something in my tone. “Well, okay,” you said, backing away.

Me: repelling people since seven years old.

I saw the 9 bus then and jerked my head at it. “That’s my bus,” I said.

“You sure I can’t drive you? In a noncreepy way?”

“I’m sure. Thanks.”

You smiled a tentative smile. That was one of the things that impressed me about you: another guy faced with what I’m sure was a pretty frosty demeanor from me might have felt hurt, rejected. But you stayed nice. I think you really did just want to help. “Catch you later,” you said.

“Yeah,” I said.

I KNOW: It’s like Romeo and Juliet all over again, isn’t it? Dialogue FOR THE AGES.

Of course, I didn’t feel anything though. I didn’t have, for instance, butterflies in my stomach. I couldn’t feel anything, because of the drugs.

No. No, that’s not true. I think I did feel something for you, even then, but it’s like when I was sedated—I know I felt it, but I can’t remember it. Which sucks in a whole other way, as if my memory is taking you away from me, erasing you. When I look back on myself in those days I see a dead person walking around, dressed up in new skin. Even then, standing at the bus shelter, in the light, with you by your truck, it was as if everything was a little too shiny and unmoving, like everything was behind glass, even the sun.

Then you drove off and I got on the bus and went to my appointment, where Dr. Rezwari asked me if I was hearing the voice anymore and when I said no, not really, she pretty much just shoved me out of her office right away. She’d given up even on offering me books by this point.

Here is the thing: if you hear a voice, it is very important to those like Dr. Rezwari to make it stop, and keep it stopped. This is because they are afraid the voice will tell you to hurt other people. And yourself, of course. So they load you up with risperidone until you’re nothing but your own shadow, and they call it a day.

I don’t blame them for this. I get it.

It’s just—if she had, only once, asked me when the voice started. Or why I thought I heard it, or anything about it. What it sounded like. Who it sounded like.

If she’d asked those questions, then maybe I would have gotten better sooner. Would have been spared a trip to the ER.

Anyway.

You probably remember that whole conversation at your car differently, of course. I am quite sure you were confused and maybe even a little hurt by my flatness, I mean; in those days I could barely motivate the muscles of my mouth to smile. That’s the thing. Our versions of reality always differ, even when we’re supposedly sane.

But I thought you were cool, even right then at the start. I want you to know that.

I think it was maybe a week later that I saw Paris again. I hadn’t really seen you in that time. I mean, I’d passed you and Shane on the lawn a couple of times, drinking your beers, and I’d seen you drive past in your truck, sometimes laden with bags full of Elmos or Beanie Babies. We’d said hello and stuff. Had some epically awkward interactions in the laundry area—Dad and I used the same machines—some painful false starts.

“Oh, you wear T-shirts too!”

That kind of thing.

Awful.

Anyway, I was on my way out of the hospital from seeing Dr. Rezwari and Paris was standing there smoking by the revolving door. It was hot, and she was wearing a string vest. I mean like an old man’s mesh tank top; you could see everything.

“Hey, Fortune Teller,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

She was leaning against the wall right by the door, in the cool blast from the air-conditioning inside; the air in town was muggy, full of rain that needed to fall. “Appointment?” she said.

“Yeah. You still here?”

“No. Outpatient too now.”

“Good,” I said. When they let you out it means they don’t think you’re in imminent danger of doing something stupid. “You got an appointment too?”

“Done. Now I’m waiting for a ride.” She examined me. “You look ******* terrible, BTW.”

“What?”

It really was a tic, see?

“Your skin, your eyes, everything. Diazepam? Valium?” She peered at my eyes. “No. Haldol. Wait, no, that’s kind of a big gun, you’d be drooling more. Risperidone. Yep. Risperidone. I’m right, yeah?”

I stammered. “Y-yes.”

“You feel like you’re wrapped in cotton?”

Fog was how I thought of it, but, yes, close enough. “Uh, yeah.”

“Me too. You have to stop that shit, seriously.”

I shook my head.

Paris flicked her cigarette; it exploded on the concrete, sparking. “Afraid of the voices?”

I nodded. Then I shook my head. “Just one voice.”

“Same thing. Anyway, I stopped it. You can too. ’Course, the docs go ape if they find out. But the docs think drugs are the answer to everything.”

“You … heard voices too?”

She made an equivocal motion of her head. “Kind of. Visual phenomena. Apparitions. Which would sometimes speak as well.”

“Like ghosts?”

“Like ghosts.”

“And you still see them?”

“There’s a woman standing behind you right now. Half her face is missing.”

I whipped around, heart jumping.

“Kidding,” she said. She gave a wicked smile. “But yeah, I still see shit.”

“I don’t want to hear my voice. It … It wasn’t nice.”

She waved a hand, dismissing this. “You have to learn to deal with it, is all,” she said. “Dr. Lewis can help with that.” Then she leaned closer. Suddenly she was conspiratorial, serious. “Here,” she said. She handed me a card. On it was printed:

NEW JERSEY VOICE SUPPORT GROUP

Under it was a number and an e-mail address.

“Thursdays, at the bowling alley on Elm,” she said. “There’s a room at the back. If I’m not there, tell them Paris sent you.”

I looked at the card. “Is it … safe?”

She laughed. “It’s not a cult. It’s run by a super-respected guy. Dr. Lewis. It’s just … they’re psychologists, mostly. The docs aren’t on the same page as them. Though there are a couple who are coming over to the light.” She paused. “Who are you seeing? Rezwari? Yeah, she’s not one of them.”

“And the people in this group … don’t believe in drugs?”

“They begin with the principle that the voices are real, and are created by trauma, and must be accommodated, not silenced.” It sounded like she was reciting something.

“My voice scares me,” I said. Admitting this out loud seemed major.

Paris glossed over it though. She waved a hand. “Thursdays, seven p.m. You don’t have to go. But give it a chance. Those drugs they’re giving you are just putting a lid on things. They’re not turning the heat down on the range.”

I glanced at the paper bag she was holding, which obviously contained prescription drugs.

“These are antidepressants,” she said. “Different ball game. Without these, my life isn’t worth living, seriously. I’m not, like, antipsychiatry. Just the way they deal with people like you.”

“Which is?”

“Tell you you’re schizophrenic, or whatever. They did that, right?”

I nodded. It was one of my three possible diagnoses.

“Fill you with drugs. Treat the symptom, not the problem. Most people who hear voices, they’re not mentally ill. They’ve just suffered something. Lived through something really bad. And it manifests itself as a voice that seems to come from outside.”

My legs suddenly shook. There was an image in my head: blood pooling around a head, small white tiles. A baseball bat.

I put out a hand and grabbed her wrist.

“You okay?”

I gasped. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry.”

She looked at me, and her eyes were lit with intelligence. “I would hazard a guess”—she talked like that sometimes—“that something bad may have happened to you when you were younger. Am I wrong?”

“No. I mean, yes, you’re wrong.”

My veins and arteries were alive, thin snakes writhing within me. I was so freaked out I didn’t even think to ask the obvious question.

Can you see what the obvious question would have been?

Take a moment.

Yes.

The obvious question would have been:

If that’s true, if it comes from trauma, then what happened to you?

“Okay, then,” she said. “Fine. You just remember what I said.” She thought for a second, then she flicked some invisible hair from her ear and looked right at me. She was wearing no makeup at all and was pale and skinny, but I still almost had to look away from her; it was painful, her beauty, like looking at the sun without those weird shades that have a slit in them that people wear for eclipses. “Pop quiz,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Obamacare: Pro or con?”

I closed my eyes. “I’m tired. I can’t—”

“Oh please,” she said. “I aced an Anthropology midterm at Rutgers on Xanax and methadone. On which note: Marcel Mauss.”

“What?”

“Marcel Mauss,” she said, stressing it this time.

I thought for a second. My brain was so slow. “Uh, magic. Or sacrifice?”

“Both, actually.” She gave a soft clapping mime. “Back to the start. Obamacare: Pro or con?”

“Pro?”

“Good. Word association. Pro.”

“What?”

“What word do you associate with the word ‘pro’?”

“Choice.”

“Good answer. ‘Life’ would also have sufficed. Next one: leather.”

I hesitated for a moment. “Notebook.”

“Martin.”

“Amis.”

“Eleanor,” she said.

“Rigby.”

“Good. I would also have accepted ‘Roosevelt.’ ”

“I think you might be crazy,” I said.

“Wiser minds than yours would agree,” she said. “Next one: procrustean.”

“Bed.”

“Pan.”

“Echo.”

She frowned. “Echo?”

“In one version, Pan wanted her, and she said no, and so he had his followers tear her apart. But the earth loved her, so it kept her voice in the stones and the trees and the caves. To cut a long story short.”

“Wow,” she said. “You taught me something. Doesn’t happen often. I was going for pipes, or Dionysus.” She looked at me funny.

“What is it?”

“I knew I recognized you, that first time. You go the library, right?”

“Ye-e-e-s. You?”

She did a comical big-eyes thing. “Are you serious? No. But I pick up books for school sometimes. Books are expensive shit. Anyway, you’re a big reader, huh?”

“Yes. I mean, I was.”

“Risperidone stop you reading?”

I nodded.

“Told you, you have to get off that stuff. Yeah, I saw you, I remember now, you had a load of books … about murder or something?”

“Yeah.”

“Light reading.”

“It was … you know what, forget it.” It had made so much sense at the time—the idea that the voice was a victim of the Houdini Killer, a remnant left behind. If I said it now it would just sound insane.

“Well, anyway, I like you,” she said. “You’re okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah.” She reached into a front pocket of her skinny jeans and handed me another card. Her dark eyes were warm on mine, like black asphalt heated by the sun. “E-mail me if you want to hang out.”

I glanced down at the card. It had a silhouette of a girl sitting on a chair, legs wide. Under her, embraced by her legs, was:

CAM GIRL. GLAMOUR. PRIVATE PARTIES.

INSTA: @jerseygirl95

There was no phone number, just an e-mail address: jerseygirl95@_____.com

I looked up at her.

“She’s a ******* whore,” said the voice, but not loud, as if it were coming from the other side of the parking lot, by the Dumpster and the trees, shimmering in the heat.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I forgot to mention, I’m a glamour model. Or, you know, aspiring. It would drive my dad crazy if he knew. Which is a big part of why I do it.”

 

 

 

DR. REZWARI	(making notes on her pad) Do you ever hear the voice now?
ME:	(lying) No.
DR. REZWARI:	You’re sure?
ME:	(lying) Yes.

 

 

 

 

 

So, you see, it wasn’t just you I lied to.

 

I checked out Paris’s Instagram feed—I know how to do that; I’m not a total Luddite. It was basically photos of her in bikinis and underwear, sometimes modeling things that had obviously been sent to her free, and I was surprised to see that she had 39K followers.

Paris liked to take her clothes off, clearly, but she was smart. Or maybe I should say, and she was smart. To avoid any implication of contradiction.

She loved books. She loved knowing stuff. She was a college student.

I liked her.

The voice did not like her. It called her “that ******* whore” and other stuff that was even worse. But it didn’t say much when she was around, and it didn’t threaten me about seeing her; it didn’t say much ever those days, and when it did it was kind of dulled, as if coming from the other side of a window. Looking back, I think that was not just the risperidone working, it was also because the voice knew that Paris was offering a different way of dealing with things, one that didn’t involve drugs. The voice hated the drugs, because they muffled it, suffocated it, a pillow over a mouth.

EDIT: I hated them. The voice is me. I understand that now. Even you probably do, just from reading this. But I didn’t then of course.

I guess it was maybe a week after I saw her at the hospital that I e-mailed Paris. I hadn’t seen you much—even though Dr. Rezwari kept telling me to get to know you. It wasn’t easy. You were working most of the time, or you were hanging out with Shane. You would wave to me, but I didn’t feel like you were interested in me or anything; in fact I was convinced I had offended you by being cold when we spoke, and not accepting your offer of a ride.

So I just lay in bed or sat in the kitchen or whatever. I’d just spent a whole day sitting in Dad’s study watching millipedes crawl all over a log, and my brain was mush. I had the impression that I was locked out of my own body, floating somewhere above it.

I wanted to feel stuff again.

I set up an address: echo@_____.com

And I e-mailed Paris one word:

HELP.

It was a Thursday. The day when the voice support group met. I think unconsciously I knew that. Paris e-mailed me back exactly fifty-seven minutes later. When you are watching millipedes crawl, you are very conscious of the passage of time. Her e-mail said:

CALL ME. 800-555-5555

I took out my cell and dialed the number.

“Jerseygirl95 here, I’m wet and in front of my camera and—”

“It’s me, Cass.”

“I know. I was just ******* with you.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry. Tell me. What’s up?”

“The drugs.”

“Yeah, I thought so.” The kindness in her voice made me almost want to cry. Dr. Rezwari wasn’t kind. I mean, she wasn’t some kind of monster. But she didn’t really care. You could tell. I could tell.

“You said there was a guy, a—”

“Already done. Dr. Lewis doesn’t think you’re ready for group, but he’ll meet you before. Massey Bowling Alley, six p.m.”

I looked at my watch. Two hours. “Okay,” I said. I must have sounded pretty bummed because Paris said:

“Come see me now. I’m close to there.” She gave me the address of her condo.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes! Come hang out. Meet my roomie.”

I wrote a note for Dad. It took me a while to think what to put in it. I couldn’t say I was meeting a friend; he knew I didn’t have any friends, and I didn’t think he would be cool with me hanging out with someone I’d met at the mental hospital. He and I had been living together like two people made of bone china, scared to bump into each other.

In the end I wrote:

Gone to see a movie. Love you. Cass.

Most likely he wouldn’t be back from the restaurant before me anyway. I left the house. I passed your apartment, but of course you and Shane were working. I walked the whole way—Oakwood is a small place, as you know, and Paris didn’t live far away.

Her condo was just back from the boardwalk; a fifties building like a pink iced cake, with white balconies like wings. I rang the bell, and she buzzed me up.

When I got to the door, another girl opened it. She had red hair, but I thought it was probably dyed—it was a really bright color. There was a tattoo on her arm of a kind of pinup woman from the forties or something, and she was wearing a vintage dress and her hair was swept up with bobby pins.

“I’m Julie,” she said. “Paris is in the kitchen, making cookies.”

I must have looked surprised.

“She bakes,” said Julie. “I know. Go figure.”

“I’m Cass,” I said. “Um, hi.”

“Nice to meet you, Cass. Go on through—I’m heading out. I have a team meet.” She picked up a pair of roller skates by the door and slung them over her shoulder.

“You do roller derby?” I asked.

“Yep.”

I’d watched a movie about roller derby with Mom once. So I knew a tiny bit about it. “What’s your, like, player name?”

“Player name?” She raised an eyebrow.

I felt stupid then. “I don’t know what you call it … but don’t you have, like, crazy names that you put on your shirts and stuff?”

“I was messing with you. I knew what you meant. And, yes, I do. One Thousand Mega Joules. ’Cause I’m Julie, and I study—”

“Physics?”

Julie smiled. She wasn’t pretty—her face was a little blunt—but her smile was like the sun when it hits the ocean on a gray still day, and even though the water is flat, matte, it flashes. “Close. Chemistry.” She turned to face back into the apartment. “Hey, Par, this one is smart.”

“I told you,” said Paris’s voice, from an unseen corner of the condo.

“Kitchen’s on the left,” said Julie. “See you soon, I hope.” Then she whisked out. She was someone with her dial always turned to full, Julie. She still is.

I followed the sound of Paris’s voice, across a smooth wood floor. There was a small hall that went straight into the main living room. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked over the beach and ocean, like you were sailing over it. Just to the left, I could see the first pier jutting out over the wide expanse of sand, the Ferris wheel slowly turning. There were a couple of armchairs like you see in magazines—curved metal bases, leather stretched over them. A coffee table made of polished driftwood. It did not look like a student’s condo.

I turned left and into the small kitchen. Paris banged the oven door shut. “I’m baking cookies,” she said. “For the occasion. They’ll be ready in a half hour.”

“Wow,” I said. I was worried about cookies and my allergy, but I didn’t want to put a downer on things.

“I know. I will make someone a fine wife one day.”

I smiled. “Someone eligible, I hope,” I said.

“Oh, Mother!” she exclaimed, in a surprisingly good British accent. “He hath two hundred a year, and a good house.” She did a curtsy. “I ****** love those old books. Austen and stuff.”

“Me too.” I would have said more. I would have said that I had loved Austen anyway, or I would have asked her if she knew that Jane from the library was actually Jane Austin, but I was wiped out from the walk. I just waved vaguely at the living room and reached out for the countertop to stabilize myself, and Paris looked stricken.

“Sorry! Sorry! Go sit down.” She ushered me ahead of her.

I sat on one of the armchairs. It kind of cradled me.

Paris sat opposite me; hooked her leg over the side of her chair. She fidgeted for a second, then leaned over and grabbed a piece of purple paper from a pile on the end table. She started folding it—some kind of origami.

When it was done, she held it up in front of her, and it obviously passed inspection because she smiled.

“What’s that?” I said. My best guess was some kind of bird—pointed head, arched wings.

“Crane,” said Paris.

“Cool. You like origami?”

She shook her head. “Not really.”

“So …”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s this thing. The thousand cranes? You have to make a thousand of them, and when you do, you get one wish. It’s like this old Japanese—I don’t know what you would call it—folk tale or belief or meditation or some kind of mix of all of them.”

“A thousand?”

“Yeah. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth a wish.”

“I guess not. So how many have you made?”

“Two hundred and sixty,” she said. She glanced at the purple crane in her hand. “Two hundred and sixty-one.” Abruptly, she got up from the chair—a motion like a spring uncoiling, quick and elastic. “Come look,” she said.

Paris led the way to a door at the other end of the room. She opened it and flicked a switch—bright electric light burst into being, illuminating a room that was obviously hers. Mess of clothes on the floor, a king-size bed nearly disappearing under books and magazines and plates of food—just a kind of tunnel to climb under the covers like a rabbit.

And all over the shelves on the walls, in among the beer glasses and photos and teddy bears, standing on every available surface: cranes. Paris pointed up and I looked; there was a string from the light shade to the wall, and on it more cranes were hanging. It seemed like more than two hundred and sixty. They were all colors—mostly white, but also red and green and blue and silver and gold.

“Whenever I get the chance, I make one,” she said. “Should hit a thousand in … I don’t know. A year, maybe?”

“Serious commitment.”

“I know. Worthy of an Austen heroine, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

I imagined a thousand cranes, in all colors, filling the room. It was going to be beautiful. I could understand why someone would want to do that.

She picked up a small white crane and pressed it into my hands. “This was the first one I made,” she said. “See how it’s not folded so crisply?”

I looked down at it. I nodded. It was a little misshapen.

She took it back and put it down, gently, on the bookshelf where it had been.

“What will you do with your wish?” I asked.

“If I said, it wouldn’t come true,” she said seriously.

“Oh. Yeah, of course.”

She smiled, and for a second I was dazzled by her smile: it was so warm, so beautiful, so totally unguarded, as if it for no single second occurred to her to think about what anyone else thought of her; very few people smile like that. “A lot of people would have laughed at me there. Probably even Julie, even though she would feel bad about it afterward. But not you.”

“Why would I laugh?”

“Because it’s stupid, believing in wishes. Childish. Crazy, even.”

“I hear a voice that isn’t there,” I said.

She laughed. “Touché.”

A pause.

“Are you okay, Cassie?”

“Huh?” I said. I felt like the world had blinked—a fraction of a second gone, some gap in the film, a shudder. It was disconcerting. I was leaning against the wall of the room now, and I felt light-headed. What happened?

“You look pale,” said Paris.

I closed my eyes. And when I did I saw a bowling alley, a bowling alley of my imagination, yawning open in front of me, front wall peeling up, to reveal the lanes stretching back like tongues into darkness, the pins standing up like teeth.

“Uh … I think I’m just nervous,” I said, when I opened my eyes. “About the … you know. The meeting.” My heart was beating wildly.

Her eyes grew.

I mean, of course they didn’t grow. But they seemed to. “Oh, ****,” she said. “Of course you are.” She reached into a cupboard and took out a bottle with a white label—vodka. She handed it to me. “Here. Take a gulp of that. Liquid courage.”

I held the bottle in my hand. “I can’t. I don’t—”

“You’re worried about the risperidone? Because—”

“No. I’m just … well. Underage.”

She rolled her eyes. “Drink. You need to calm down a little.”

“Don’t even think about it,” said the voice. “I will make you whine like a dog.”

I hesitated.

“Yes. Give it back,” said the voice. “And then go home. Or you will pay.”

Oh, **** it, I thought. I’m going to pay anyway, for going to this group thing.

I tilted the bottle back; swallowed. It was like swallowing fire: it seared down my throat and warmed my stomach. A beeping came from the kitchen.

“Time is up for you, *****,” said the voice. “I swear I’m going to—”

“Ah!” said Paris. “Cookies.”

 

Paris put the vodka back in the cupboard, took my hand, and dragged me back to the kitchen. She opened the oven, slipped on a flowery mitt that I never would have pictured in her apartment, and took out a tray of huge chocolate cookies, perfectly browned.

“Ta-da!” she said.

I mimed clapping.

Paris expertly slid the cookies onto a plate and then led the way back into the living room. She indicated for me to sit down again.

Right. The moment I’d been putting off. The awkwardness.

“Eat,” said Paris. She pushed the plate at me. They looked good—soft in the middle, the chocolate still molten.

I swallowed. “Um. Sorry … I should have said before … I’m allergic,” I said. “Peanuts. I’m really sorry. They look amazing.”

“No peanuts in these.”

I gave a half smile, embarrassed. I hated this, I always had. “It’s more complicated than that. What about the flour?”

“What about it?”

“Is it made in a facility that handles nuts? The chocolate?”

Her eyes widened. “Really? It’s that serious?”

“Yep.” I held up the bag I always carried with me, the one my mother had embroidered my name onto, and showed her the two EpiPens inside, the bronchodilating inhaler. “The smallest trace, and I could die.”

She went to the kitchen and came back with a bag of chocolate chips. I turned it over, showed her the label: MAY CONTAIN NUTS.

“Sorry,” I said.

She shrugged. “Don’t be. Next time I’ll get the right stuff. Can’t have you dying on me.”

I smiled.

She started carrying the plate of cookies back to the kitchen.

“You’re not having one?” I asked.

“Carbs? Are you kidding me?”

I frowned. “But you baked them.”

“Yeah. I like the distraction. It’s therapeutic.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Paris was wearing a long bodycon dress with vivid neon flowers all over it. Her hair was piled up, secured with chopsticks. She looked much better than she had at the hospital. She threw herself down on the chair opposite me, splayed herself—she had a way of sitting down like a cat; her limbs didn’t seem to have the same bones as most people.

“Your condo is beautiful,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“Is it … um … do you …”

“Do I pay for it with the ill-gotten gains from taking my clothes off on a webcam?”

THE VOICE: ******* slut whore.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Partly. But my dad pays too. Sends a check in the mail. His signature on those checks is pretty much the only communication I ever have from him.”

“You’re not close?”

She smiled. “You could say that.”

“Does he live in Oakwood?”

She shook her head. “New York. Mom too. But, I mean, in separate apartments. They can’t stand each other. I went to high school there, but as soon as I could I got out.”

“Headed to the glamorous Jersey Shore,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Paris, grinning. “But with the checks from my dad, and my work too, I got this sweet pad. So I’m happy.”

“Do your parents know about … you know. The cam stuff?”

“No, thank God. They don’t check up on me, which is good, because they have some serious problems with my lifestyle choices as it is. We are, what would you say? We are somewhat estranged.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry what?”

“That you’re, I don’t know, estranged.”

She waved this away. “Only one of my many issues.”

“How does it work?” I asked. “The modeling. I mean … do you have, like, an agency?”

Paris laughed. “Cass! It’s the twenty-first century. I have Instagram for promotion, and then I have a website. People subscribe, and they can watch me when I decide to stream a video. Or book me for an event or whatever.”

“People? You mean men?”

“Well, yeah. I guess.”

I remembered her card. “And the bachelor parties?”

“Stripping, basically,” she said. “Private parties. Way more lucrative than the clubs. Five hundred bucks a pop. Julie hates it.”

“Because …”

“Because she thinks it’s not safe. But these are birthday parties, you know? College graduations, bachelor parties.”

“But … what about … safety? Don’t you get scared?”

“I have a no-touching policy,” said Paris. “That puts off the worst creeps, I figure. And Julie drives me if I go to a party. Plus, there’s kind of a network, you know? Someone gets a bit rough, one of the other girls will e-mail about it. Post it on one of the forums—his e-mail address, that kind of thing. We watch out for one another.”

“Wow.” I seemed to keep saying that.

She looked at her watch. It was a men’s Rolex—I recognized it because it was like the one my dad got from the Navy stores, but much newer. A black-bezeled Submariner. A diving watch.

“You dive?” I asked.

“What?”

I pointed at her watch. She laughed again. “No. I just like shiny things. Like a magpie.” That was Paris—always a bird. Light bones, mind flitting from place to place, acquiring things. Something tailored from wind, unanchored in the sky. She walked over to a big flat-screen TV. “Anyway, we have forty minutes. Just enough time for Project Runway before we go. I DVRed it.”

 

We walked to the bowling alley. The place was kind of run-down. There was an empty lot next to it, full of weeds, cordoned off by a wire fence. I guessed it had been built when Oakwood was still a tourism boomtown, before people started flying to Mexico. A long, flat edifice, warehouse-like, squat.

There was a neon sign out front, still lit, one of those ones with three images kind of overlapping so it looks animated—a guy holding up a ball, then kneeling, then releasing it. Except the third batch of tubes was busted, so the guy was just standing and then kneeling, standing and then kneeling, like he was proposing or something.

Or having a stroke.

Inside, we walked past an empty reception area. The place was closed; I mean, it was closed for bowling. Behind the desks were rows of compartments holding white-soled sneakers in different sizes. We cut right and went past the lanes; the lights above them were off, but screen savers cycled on the computers above them, showing cartoons of shocked-looking pins tumbling end over end, creating flickering shadows. It felt like an introductory scene in a horror movie.

“Spooky, isn’t it?” said Paris.

“Uh-huh.”

The balls gleamed in their racks. Green and blue and black and red, the colors pearlescent, swirling like gasoline in a puddle. They gave me a sick feeling. They reminded me of bruises. I could smell stale popcorn.

“In here,” said Paris. She opened a utilitarian fire door with a letter-sized piece of paper taped to it, saying PRIVATE MEETING IN SESSION VSG SOUTH JERSEY BRANCH.

I followed her in. There was an oldish-looking guy sitting on a cheap plastic chair with steel legs; ten or so empty chairs were arranged in a circle in front of him. The room was bare—against one wall was a table with a paper cloth over it, and a coffeepot and cups.

“I’m hoping someone’s going to bring cookies,” he said. He had gray hair, twinkling eyes. Kind of handsome, in a scruffy, old-guy kind of way. He was wearing Nike sneakers with jeans and a polo shirt. He looked like the antidoctor. He looked like, I don’t know, an advertising executive or something. Not that I know what an advertising executive looks like.

“****,” said Paris. “I baked some. I swear. Then we were watching Project Runway.”

“A valuable use of your time, no doubt,” said the old guy. But he was smiling as he said it. He turned to me. “Dr. Lewis,” he said. “But you can call me Mike. And you must be … what do you prefer? Cassandra? Cass? Cassie?”

I shrugged. “Whatever.”

The voice said,

“Manners, Cass. For ****’s sake.”

“I mean, I don’t mind,” I said. This was weird. The voice wanted me to be polite to this guy? Suddenly I felt scared. I mean, this was the thing that had made me slap myself and inject myself with epinephrine, and it wanted me to play nice with the doctor?

Anything the voice wanted had to be bad, didn’t it?

But I squashed this thought down, jumped on it, like Daffy Duck jumping on Bugs Bunny when he’s trying to get out of his hole. I didn’t want to be taking the drugs either; I didn’t want to be a zombie all my life.

“Cass?” said Paris. “Earth to Cass?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m here.”

“That you are,” said Dr. Lewis. Mike. “And it’s an important first step. So. Why don’t you take a seat and tell me about it. Paris, you mind giving us the room?”

A nervous voice inside me spoke up then, not the voice, but an instinct voice. It said,

You want to be alone in here with this guy you don’t know?

Then the actual voice said,

“Shut the **** up, *****. Stop being so pathetic.” It was quiet from the risperidone, but it was still pretty forceful.

I closed my eyes as my inner voices argued. “Can she … can she stay?” I said.

Paris looked at the doctor.

“Why don’t we leave the door open?” he said. “Paris can wait in the main hall. She could even bowl a few rounds.”

“Bowl?” said Paris, like he was suggesting necrophilia or something.

He shrugged. “The balls are there. Might as well use them.”

Paris smiled. “The philosophy of every male,” she said. “Okay, fine. You need me, Cass, you call for me.”

And then she swept out the room, long legs tick-tocking. I watched her go, amazed as I always was by her, by her self-possession and her grace, despite her illness. She was like a machine in tight-fitting clothes, engineered to hold the eye, but she had charisma too, blazing out of every pore.

“She shines like a star, doesn’t she?” said Dr. Lewis, more succinctly. “I just hope she doesn’t turn out to be meteor.”

“Why?” I said.

He looked sad all of a sudden, thoughtful. “Because they fall to the earth. And they burn.”

DR. LEWIS:	Take a seat. Sorry about the plastic chairs.
ME:	That’s okay.
DR. LEWIS:	Paris has told me a little about you. But why don’t you tell me something.
ME:	Like what?
DR. LEWIS:	I don’t know. How about your favorite music.
ME:	Oh. Uh, I used to like hip-hop stuff. But now I mostly listen to, I don’t know what you would call it; electronica. Stuff without voices. Just … beats and bass, you know?
DR. LEWIS:	(Rolls up his sleeve. There is a tattoo reading COME AS YOU ARE in gothic script down his forearm and an anarchy symbol.) I listen to a whole load of stuff. When Kurt Cobain died, that was the day I decided to be a psychologist. Sounds stupid, but it’s completely true. I was, what, seventeen?
ME:	(inside my head) Oh, he’s not as old as I thought. It’s the gray hair, I guess.
DR. LEWIS:	I just thought, what a waste, you know? I thought if I could stop one person from doing what he did, then my life would be worthwhile. It’s like … a world ending, every time. Do you know what I mean?
ME:	(thinking of my mother, her likes and dislikes, her opinions, her favorite foods and movies and her jokes and smiles and angry days, the songs she liked to sing, reduced to a red puddle of blood on a tiled floor) Yes.
DR. LEWIS:	The loud music helps?
ME:	With?
DR. LEWIS:	Your voice.
ME:	Oh. Yes. It does.
DR. LEWIS:	This voice, do you have any idea who it might be?
ME:	(puzzled) I don’t … I don’t think I …
DR. LEWIS:	I mean, is it someone you know? Someone you knew?
ME:	It’s a voice. It’s not real.
DR. LEWIS:	The shrinks told you that, right?
ME:	(nods)
DR. LEWIS:	(sighs) The voice is real to you, is it not? I mean, you hear it, like any other voice? With your ears?
ME:	Uh, yes.
DR. LEWIS:	So it’s real. It’s a real phenomenon. It doesn’t matter if you can see it or not. It’s real to you.
ME:	I guess.
DR. LEWIS:	It’s possible to do scans, you know. Functional MRI. Electrical signals. What we know is that a person who hears voices, when they do hear them, the exact same brain areas light up as when they hear real speech. It is, for the purposes of the brain, exactly the same experience as hearing an actual person speaking.
ME:	Okay.
DR. LEWIS:	Anyway. Your voice, it isn’t someone you know.
ME:	(suddenly too hot, suddenly itchy all over) I don’t think so.
DR. LEWIS:	History of mental illness? Other hallucinations?
ME:	No.
DR. LEWIS:	And what does it say, the voice?
ME:	Horrible things.
DR. LEWIS:	Like?
ME:	To hurt myself. To not talk to people or it will punish me. Stuff like that. But not so much now.
DR. LEWIS:	Drugs?
ME:	Yes.
DR. LEWIS:	Hmm. And when did the voice first speak to you?
ME:	The police precinct. I’d just found a foot on the beach.
DR. LEWIS:	That was you?
ME:	Yes.
DR. LEWIS:	Wow. And what precise words did it use?
ME:	I think … it said, “You’re disgusting.” I think.
DR. LEWIS:	Interesting. Did you agree?
ME:	Um, with what?
DR. LEWIS:	Did you agree with the voice that you were disgusting?
ME:	(Thinking how weird this is, how Dr. Rezwari never wanted to know anything about what the voice said. Only that it threatened stuff, and that meant it had to be stopped.) Um. Yeah. I guess so.
DR. LEWIS:	Gender? Age?
ME:	The voice?
DR. LEWIS:	Yes.
ME:	A woman. I don’t know how old. Forty? Not young.
DR. LEWIS:	Hmm.
ME:	Does that mean anything?
DR. LEWIS:	Do you think it means anything?
ME:	I thought … it’s dumb, but I thought maybe the voice was a ghost. Of one of the dead prostitutes, you know? And that it wanted me to solve the murder.
DR. LEWIS:	Imaginative. But I doubt it.
ME:	You said the voice was real.
DR. LEWIS:	Real to you. Because it is you. On some level. Often, the people I talk to, their voices say things that deep down they think about themselves. The voice says they’re dressed like ****, or whatever, and the person looks in the mirror and thinks, yeah, I’ve become a bit of a slob. Or the voice bans contact with other people, but actually the sufferer really, unconsciously maybe, believes that they don’t deserve contact with other people.
ME:	(blank mind)
DR. LEWIS:	It’s a lot to deal with. We have to take it step-by-step.
ME:	You think I’m … doing this to myself?
THE VOICE:	Who is this man? What are you doing? You ******* worthless piece of ****. When you get home you’re going to bleed. I’m going to—
ME:	(screams)
DR. LEWIS:	I’m sorry. I don’t mean to distress you.
THE VOICE:	******** ***** this ******* ******.
ME:	(puts hands over ears)
DR. LEWIS:	The voice is speaking to you now?
ME:	(nods)
DR. LEWIS:	Okay, okay. Let’s leave it there. Listen. I don’t know if I can help you. But I would like to try. Would you accept that?
ME:	(nods)
DR. LEWIS:	I’d like to think we can get you off the meds too. They’re not necessary, if you can cope with the voice. Control it.
ME:	(looking up, feeling the voice recede into quietness) You think?
DR. LEWIS:	Oh, I know it. There are many in this group who take no drugs at all, yet their voices, if they still hear them, are managed. They come when the person wishes it, and not otherwise. They are no longer aggressive.
ME:	(inside: This sounds too good to be true.)
DR. LEWIS:	I promise it’s true. If you’re willing to try. And to talk through some things. Wherever this voice comes from, it is most likely in your past. Some recent studies say that in somewhere around sixty percent of voice hearers, it’s triggered by a past trauma. Usually childhood. Not an underlying mental illness. You might be in the other forty percent of course, those who really are schizophrenic, or what have you. But I suspect not. And then, some of my colleagues would argue that even those who are ill are often made so by abuse. Or neglect. Or whatever. Sorry. I am rambling. It’s a tendency of mine. What I mean is: you can help yourself. I assure you of that.
ME:	So what do I do?
DR. LEWIS:	Come here. Once a week. You can talk or you can listen or you can do both. That’s it.
ME:	And that’s going to help? Just talking?
DR. LEWIS:	It’s a support group. It will support you.
ME:	Like … therapy?
DR. LEWIS:	No. This isn’t a treatment. It’s a circle of survivors. The source of therapeutic change is the social contact itself. The talking about the problem. A problem shared, et cetera.
ME:	Right.
DR. LEWIS:	I’d also like you to come fifty minutes before the group starts for the first few weeks. So we can get a handle on your particular voice experience.
ME:	We’d … we’d have, like, one-on-one sessions?
DR. LEWIS:	Yes. To begin with.
ME:	And … what would that cost?
DR. LEWIS:	Cost?
ME:	What would you charge?
DR. LEWIS:	(laughing) I don’t charge.
ME:	Seriously?
DR. LEWIS:	Seriously.
ME:	Oh. Okay. Why not?
DR. LEWIS:	Well, for one, as I said, this isn’t a treatment group. It’s a support group. And I am a support facilitator, not a clinical psychologist. Or rather, I am. But not in this context.
ME:	Oh now I’m clear.
DR. LEWIS:	(laughing) It’s just talking. And some guidelines for dealing with voices, which we have found to be helpful.
ME:	And for two?
DR. LEWIS:	Pardon?
ME:	You said, “For one, as I said, this isn’t a treatment group.” So what’s for two?
DR. LEWIS:	I think … I think I was probably going to say that the other reason I don’t charge is that I’m not here for money. I want to help people.
ME:	(staring blankly, unable to compute)
DR. LEWIS:	Turn up, we talk, that’s it. (pause) Oh, and tell your doctor you’re talking to me. You’re seeing … ?
ME:	Dr. Rezwari.
DR. LEWIS:	Inform her you’ve joined the group. She knows about us. She might not absolutely agree with us, but she can’t deny the data. The recoveries.
ME:	But you think she’s wrong to prescribe drugs?
DR. LEWIS:	Whoa! I didn’t say that. I think the overriding prerogative of the health care system is to protect the public and the patient. Which they do well. Just sometimes … the cost is … a certain quality of life.
ME:	(thinking of my constant need to sleep, my loss of appetite, my inability to read) Uh-huh.
DR. LEWIS:	So, tell her, and stick to whatever she tells you when it comes to drugs. She knows her business. If we make some real progress, you can discuss it with her again. Oh, I’ll also need to speak to your parents. Get their permission for you to come. It’s boring, I know. Sorry.
ME:	(inside: ****.) Um … It’s just my dad. My mom is … That is … It’s just me and him. And you can’t talk to him.
DR. LEWIS:	I can’t?
ME:	I don’t … I don’t really want him to know if I … if I come. Here.
DR. LEWIS:	I’m afraid it’s not an opt-in, opt-out kind of situation. If we’re talking, he needs to know about it. (shrugs apologetically) It’s the law.
ME:	(shaking my head) No. He’d … he’d freak out. He’d be angry.
DR. LEWIS:	Your father gets angry often?
ME:	Yeah.
DR. LEWIS:	Any particular reason?
ME:	He was a SEAL. In Afghanistan. He got hurt. And … And he hates me. I mean (**** Cassie why did you say that?) he doesn’t hate me. But he’s always ****ed with me. I have to be super careful, or he kind of explodes. Even little things set him off. If I told him about this …
DR. LEWIS:	He seeing anyone about that—his anger I mean?
ME:	No. He used to have some kind of therapist, in the Navy, but he didn’t like it.
DR. LEWIS:	Let me get this straight. It sounds like you’re telling me that your father has untreated post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in the Navy, that he has a temper that is triggered by even small things, and that if he knew you were pursuing this treatment, he may harm you or jeopardize your recovery. Is that a correct summation?
ME:	I don’t know about harm. He wouldn’t … hasn’t … hurt me. But yeah. Apart from that.
DR. LEWIS:	Apart from that, you’d agree with my statement? This is important.
ME:	Yes.
DR. LEWIS:	In that case my view is that it is in your best interests that he should not know.
ME:	Mine too.
DR. LEWIS:	Okay then.
ME:	Okay? Seriously?
DR. LEWIS:	(nods)
ME:	You called it a treatment though. I thought it wasn’t a treatment.
DR. LEWIS:	(smiling) You’re right. I can see that these are going to be interesting sessions.
ME:	I—

But then a guy comes in the door, trailing Paris behind him. He’s skinny, nervous looking. Maybe thirty. He’s wearing Dockers and Timberland boots, a denim shirt. My first thought is, construction. I am wrong about this. I am wrong about so many things.

“Hey,” says the guy.

“Sorry, Doc,” says Paris. “It’s five after.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“Well. Time flies. Cass, this is Dwight. He comes every week.”

Dwight nods at me. “Nice to meet you, Cass,” he says. He still has a little acne on his cheeks. I’m thinking now more like twenty-two.

“Uh, you too.”

“I think,” says Dr. Lewis, “that the group may be a little much for your first day, Cassie. Come back next week?”

“I … Yeah, I think so.”

He smiles. “Good. Welcome to the group.”

Dwight winks at me. “It’s like a family, but better.”

“Nothing that’s like a family is good,” says Paris.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

Dr. Lewis turns to Paris. “Are you joining us?”

Paris shakes her head. “I’ll walk Cassandra home. Like a gentleman.”

“Of course. Well, we’re always here. Should you need us.”

“Thanks, Doc,” says Paris. “But I think I have it under control.”

“Excellent. You’re knocking them dead at Rutgers, I hear. Professor Jenkins told me they’re thinking of recommending you for a grad program at Harvard.”

Paris shrugs.

“Well, go with my blessing. And bring that girl back next week. You’re going to do amazing things, Paris French.”

MOST WRONG STATEMENT EVER.

 

I gave Paris a little curtsy when we got out the door.

“Thanks for escorting me home,” I said. “Thanks for being my gentleman.”

She bowed, twirling her hand. “You’re welcome.”

“But seriously,” I said, “you don’t have to. I mean, I’m grateful. I am. But you don’t have to walk me home. You probably have better stuff to do.”

Paris frowned. “There’s a serial killer on the loose,” she said. “You think I’m letting you walk home alone in the dark?”

Oh yeah. That.

“Anyway,” she added. “I have nothing better to do.”

 

It was when we were nearly back to my house that it finally clicked. We were passing a slushie machine outside a corner store, blue and red ice churning, glowing in the half dark of sunset. Already you could hear the shushing of the ocean, as if it were trying to quiet our voices. I think it was her saying that thing about families that made it fall into place.

“Your trauma,” I said. “What was it?”

She looked at me.

“He said it comes from trauma. Usually.”

The slushie machine turned and turned. I thought how weird it was that people were happy to drink it. After it had been in there for who knew how long, just spinning over and over, the color bright like a chemical solution, radioactive.

“Nosy all of a sudden, aren’t you?” said Paris eventually.

“Sorry. It doesn’t matter.”

I started walking again.

“Someone … did stuff to me. When I was a kid.”

“Someone?”

She paused. “My dad.”

I stopped. There were wide cracks in the sidewalk; grass was growing through. Above us, tattered clouds were lit bloodred as the sun set somewhere over the great landmass of America.

“It stopped when I was twelve. When I finally spoke to my mother about it, she left. Not immediately. But she packed her bags the next day. Said I was a liar and a whore and she couldn’t stay in the same house as me. Moved to an apartment in the West Village.”

I turned around, very slowly. Like there was a baby deer behind me, and I might startle it off into the dusk.

“Jesus, Paris,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

She shrugged. “I still speak to my mom sometimes. On Skype actually. Sometimes I worry that I might get mixed up and, like, send her one of my cam videos instead. ‘Hey, Mom, like my ass in these panties?’ ”

Paris winked. I half laughed, shocked.

“Sorry,” said Paris. “Humor is my defense mechanism. Apparently. Anyway … if I try to mention it now, when I’m speaking to my mom, she just goes blank. A laptop going into sleep mode, you know? That on its own is enough to drive a person crazy.”

“She never … confronted your dad?”

She laughed. “No. As far as she’s concerned it never happened and he never happened.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah. It’s ****ed up.”

“And your dad?”

“He and I are not on speaking terms,” said Paris. “That’s why I want to stop taking his checks as soon as I can. I mean, he’s paying my tuition and allowing me to learn, and I don’t have to see him. That’s almost acceptable. But not really.”

“Hence …”

“Hence, yes, the side work.”

I took a step forward, and she flinched when I put my arms around her; her body was thin and hard against me, barely any flesh there to clothe her, to protect her. Then a kind of shiver went through her and she hugged me tight, before letting go.

“I will never speak about this again,” she said. “Just so you know.”

“That’s cool,” I said. An impulse overtook me. “Who cares about your sob stories anyway?”

She stared at me for a second. Then she burst out laughing. “I knew you were friend material,” she said.

I put my hand in the air, solemnly. “I swear never to speak to Paris again about her childhood.”

“Or my dad.”

“Agreed.”

I thought. “Paris. I’m scared.”

“Of what?” she asked. Her face was serious again now.

“Me.”

“Oh, baby,” she said. “Yeah. That’s normal.” She took my hand and began walking briskly. “I’m not even going to ask about your trauma because I doubt you know yet. But the Doc will help you, I do know that. And I’ll be there to support you. I’ll be looking out for you. Always.”

NO.

THAT WAS THE MOST WRONG STATEMENT EVER.

 

Paris left me on the sidewalk outside the house. I stood there for the longest time, looking at it. I’d never noticed its squat malignance before; the way the windows seemed like eyes glaring at me. The lights were out, so I figured Dad was still at the restaurant.

After a while, I sat down on the sidewalk. It was still warm from the sun of the day, though it was dark now and the crickets were chirping. There was a moon, and in the eastern sky I could see a gleam from where it was reflecting on the ocean.

I heard a car and turned, and there was your F-150, pulling up by the curb. You killed the engine and got out.

“Going inside?” you said.

“No,” I said. You were wearing a short-sleeved shirt; I noticed that your arms had got more muscular already. Lifting those bags of plush. There was a scent of flowers on the air.

“Argument with your dad?”

I shook my head. “Just don’t want to.”

You came and stood next to me. “Houses look kind of malignant when they’re unlit, at night, don’t they?”

I turned to you, surprised. “Yes,” I said. “I was just thinking that.”

Silence.

Or rather: crickets far-off engines music people shouting.

But silence between me and you. Comfortable silence.

“So what’s your plan?” you said. “You just going to sit out on the sidewalk all night?”

I shrugged. “You have a better plan?”

You looked up at the moon. “Yes,” you said.

 

You were driving.

You crossed the last intersection, and then we were a block from the ocean, the houses falling away, replaced by dirty dunes. At the end of the block, there was a turn that you could take, but if you did you’d have to turn around again pretty quickly—it became the boardwalk.

But at the corner, where the road curved, there was a track between the dunes, and it led onto the beach.

You drove toward it, not showing any signs of steering. A sign said NO VEHICULAR ACCESS TO THE BEACH OFFENDERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

I said: “Are you going to—”

And …

It appeared so. You drove right off the road, onto the track, and we bumped over tufts of grass for a few dozen yards, and then we were on the beach. You stopped. We were on the far south side—to our right, an expanse of sand and dunes, followed by houses on stilts, small from here, looking like shacks but I knew they were worth like a million dollars each. To our left, the wide strip of sand that runs the length of the town, the lights of the city and boardwalk fringing it, bright and garish against the gunmetal shine of the moonlit ocean. The piers two dark stripes connecting city and ocean, bristling with the odd shapes of fairground rides.

And that flat, smooth beach … empty, apart from a couple of groups huddled around coolers, not wanting to say good-bye to the day.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” you said.

“You get used to it,” I said.

Why did everything that came out of my mouth have to come out rude? I didn’t mean it. That’s what I’m telling you now.

“Is this allowed?” I asked. “The truck?”

“For me, yes. Because of the deliveries.”

I nodded. “Cool.”

“You want to drive?” you said.

“Drive … this?”

“This truck, yes. Do you want to drive it?”

I stared at you. “My dad doesn’t like me to drive.”

“But you have your license, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why not? This beach is three hundred yards wide, easy. And there’s no one around. Almost no one. What are you going to do, crash into a pier? They’re pretty big. I find it easy to avoid them.”

Smart-ass, I wanted to say. But I wasn’t in that kind of place. I wasn’t ready to be joking around with you. I just sighed. “Okay.”

“Hey, don’t be so enthusiastic,” you said.

“Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be … Look, just switch with me.”

You got out and we switched places. The engine was still running—all I had to do was slide the lever from P to D and we were rolling, over that hard-packed sand, and a gull that had been picking at some leftover food went clattering into the sky, screeching at us, Cass, Cass, Cass, what are you doing driving this boy you hardly know on the beach, Cass, Cass, Cass.

But the voice—my voice—was gone.

I was with you, and the voice was gone, so right then I wanted to stay in that truck forever, to never have to go home.

I pressed the accelerator. The truck lurched forward, and soon we were, well, it’s something people always say but it really was like we were flying over the beach, not like driving on a road at all, the sand so smooth below the wheels, and I turned in a long arc to avoid the first gaggle of people and then we were cruising again, between the city and the ocean, the wheel seeming to connect me right to the ground-up sea creatures beneath, to the rock under them.

I don’t know if I have described the beach and the town properly, but I mean the beach runs the whole length of the town. It’s hard to think of a comparison for how big it is, how wide, how long. We’re not talking in football fields, as a unit of measurement, we’re talking in airport runways, and even then we’re talking about many of them, lain end to end.

What I mean is: I wanted this to last forever, and it was like it did last forever. I rolled down my window and you rolled down yours, and the cool night air came whipping in, bringing with it fine sea spray, and I rested my left elbow on the door frame and put my hand out the window and curved it, concave, let it ride on the wind, undulating, like a bird, feeling the resistance of the air, sculpting it, and it was like one small part of me was free and flying away.

And the moon was shining, and the ocean was bright, and we could hear the music from the stalls on the boardwalk, and far-off laughter, and yada yada yada.

You were there too, I know, I know.

Anyway I drove up and down the beach, I don’t know, three times, and then I realized my dad was going to be home soon probably and I said I had better get back.

I slowed, passing a lifeguard stand. There were two silhouettes sitting in it, close together, merging almost.

“Kids go up there to make out,” you said. “Watching the water.”

“I know,” I said.

Then I wished I hadn’t. I felt myself blushing. I coughed. I saw your hand tense on the coat-hanger holder thing (to use the technical term). “You should take over,” I said.

I stopped the truck, and we switched back. I don’t really understand how, but some kind of frostiness had settled into the space inside the truck; I was almost expecting to see steam from our breath. Maybe it was just the downer that always comes when something magical ends; maybe I was reading too much into it, I don’t know. But I don’t want you to think that I wasn’t … feeling stuff, I guess.

“Thanks,” I said, inadequately.

You nodded. You drove back toward the road.

Silence.

Not so comfortable now.

WHAT I MEANT: thank you so much, that was a beautiful experience I loved the wind and the feel of the beach thrumming, resonating through the whole body of the truck and through my skin, and my hand buoyed up by the air, and the lights of the city and the glimmering of the ocean, like dancing jewels all around us, like stars surrounding the black space of the beach, galaxies, towers of interstellar dust.

But all of that is a lot to say if you’ve been in the hospital, and then put on drugs, and then you’ve been talking to girls who tell you their fathers molested them and you’re supposed to process all of that.

You drove the truck carefully over the small mounds leading to the path onto the road again. “What kind of music do you like?” you said, a little nervously.

“I don’t like music,” I said.

****, I thought.

You flinched a little. “Right.”

WHAT I MEANT: I don’t “like” music. I need music. I use music, to keep the voice quiet, at least for a moment. The same way I’m using you, right now, sitting in your truck. But it came out all wrong. It always does with me.

Silence for a block. The pickup halted at a stop sign, the last stop sign before the house.

“I swim,” you said suddenly. “Swam. In high school. But I’m on a swim scholarship to college too. You swim?”

Someone help me someone make the earth rise up and swallow me. “I did,” I said. It was all I could say, it was like there was a rock on my tongue, like I had forgotten how to speak to someone.

“O … kay … then,” you said, drawing it out, like, why is this girl so weird, and honestly I was impressed you had even tried again given my TOTAL LACK OF CONVERSATIONAL SKILLS OR EVEN BASIC TOOL KIT OF SPOKEN POLITENESS.

So again, for your benefit now:

WHAT I MEANT: I used to swim, with my dad, who after all is a Navy SEAL, so actually swimming has always been a major part of my life, or always was up to a certain point anyway, and that’s so cool that we have something that we share, because, yes, being in the ocean, held up by it, my strong arms knifing through it, I love that.

You pulled up to the house. The windows were still dark. “There you go,” you said. “I mean, me too, of course.” Because, as you said, OF COURSE you had to live in the apartment above our garage, just in case the whole thing wasn’t awkward enough.

I got out without saying anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say, even though I knew, of course I knew, that it was rude. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in that situation.

Behind me I heard the engine cut out. Heard the truck door slam, and then your steps on the stairs up to the apartment.

I kept walking and didn’t turn.

Well, I’m telling you stuff now.

Maybe too much stuff.

Only time will tell.

 

Even writing this is making me cringe.

You must have thought I was such a weirdo.

 

Okay, I’m not going to finish this in time if I don’t start summarizing.

I went to the group the next week, and the week after that. I barely saw you; you were always working. Probably you didn’t have any interest in seeing me anyway. You were probably hurt by how I totally failed to talk to you in any meaningful way. At group, I listened to people talking about their voices. There was a woman named Marie, who heard a devil and an angel, or that was what she called them. The devil told her to hurt herself, like my voice, called her names. The angel would help her, though—tell her where she had left her keys, stuff like that.

There was a guy called Rasheed who had what he called the Red Voice and the White Voice. The Red Voice sounded terrifying. Way more extreme than mine. Rasheed said the Red Voice was the voice of a guy who had tortured him in Syria. He lifted his shirt once and—

It was bad.

Dwight turned out to be a cop. His voice was his father’s, he thought. It would punish him. Shout at him. In real life, his father had beaten him “like a dog” since he was a toddler. When he was three, his dad threw him down the stairs and he broke fourteen bones. His dad said it was an accident, and the paramedics believed him.

Dwight told a psychiatrist about this when he was a teenager, and the psychiatrist told him he had invented the memories. Dwight gripped the sides of his chair, hard, when he told us that.

But.

But the Doc was helping all these people. They’d all gotten to the point where they rarely heard their voices anymore, where they had it under control. The only bummer for me was that he said it took months or years, in most cases, to get to that point.

What I’m going to do is, I’m going to give you what the Doc told me, over the next weeks, as if it was all one thing, okay? Just to save time.

This was what the Doc taught, or recommended is maybe a better word. I mean, he kept stressing how these weren’t “rules”; they were just “guidelines,” and it was about finding what worked for each individual and yadda yadda yadda. Anyway these were basically the steps. The group’s philosophy, their approach to hearing voices:

1.    SAFETY. Ensure that your psychiatrist and the people close to you know what you’re doing. Continue to follow your doctor’s instructions in addition to pursuing the following precepts. Notice that I had already failed at this.

2.    ACCEPTANCE. Acknowledge your voice as real, both a real part of yourself and a manifestation of your feelings about yourself.

3.    DIALOGUE AND CONCILIATION. Welcome the voice, instead of ignoring it or telling it to shut up. Encourage more positive interaction and negotiation.

4.    SCHEDULE. Allot a regular time at which the voice can speak to you. Refuse to engage if the voice tries to speak at any other time.

5.    FREEDOM. Challenge the power of the voice and establish dominance over it.

Looks simple like that, doesn’t it?

Of course, an easier philosophy, an easier alternative plan, would have been:

1.    Spend all my time with you.

Since you always silenced the voice, always muted it, just by being around. But that would not have been realistic then. And is most likely not realistic now.

 

1.    SAFETY. Ensure that your psychiatrist and the people close to you know what you’re doing.

I did not do this.

There is no simpler way of putting it.

I don’t even know why, really. I think it was the drugs. It’s like … You know when you’re walking in a swimming pool? And in some sense it’s analogous to walking on normal ground, the same motions are involved, the same mechanics, but you’re slower; the resistance is higher.

With the drugs I was on, it was the same. It was as if all the air in the world had been substituted with water, making every movement harder. I hated the drugs, and I didn’t want to take them. And I knew that Dr. Rezwari would tell me to take them, so I just … didn’t say anything to her.

I started stacking the unopened blister packs in my nightstand, piles of them. When I saw the doctor, I told her how much better I was feeling, how I never heard the voice anymore.

Which was a lie.

When the drugs went, the voice came back. It wasn’t there all the time, but enough, and louder now—telling me to run up and down the stairs, to keep my head down when passing anyone in the street, to clean my teeth fifteen times before bed, to slap myself, all kinds of things. But the voice was better than the walking in water.

Meanwhile, Dad started coming home early from the restaurant.

“You could come over to Donato’s, you know,” he said. “It’s still nut free.” Dad had eliminated nuts from the restaurant after my anaphylaxis at school. They weren’t allowed in the kitchen—the staff wasn’t even allowed to bring snacks with nuts in them to work.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Figures,” said Dad.

Instead, he would come back at seven o’clock and we’d eat together. Dad was a pretty good cook. I don’t think he was really interested in it, but he was a smart guy, and he’d spent the last decade running a restaurant. He’d make penne amatriciana, gnocchi con panna e prosciutto, veal marinara, prawns with garlic.

“****************. ******** stupid ******** ***** of a *****.”

That was Dad, working in the kitchen. He made good food, but he was always cutting himself and burning himself. His hands were covered in Band-Aids and scars, like he lived with a tiger cub.

After dinner, we would sit and talk. Dad didn’t know how to talk about feelings, that kind of thing. So he would tell the funny stuff that had happened at the restaurant. The lady who kept asking for more garlic bread, which is free, and they realized she was putting it in her purse, stashing it, to take home. The guy who didn’t realize the chili oil had chili in it, and covered his pizza with it.

“Your father is very boring, isn’t he?” said the voice. “I see where you get it from.”

“Shut up,” I said, under my breath.

“Honey?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

Dad nodded, nervously. “You know I’m here if you want to, ah, talk.”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

But of course he wasn’t; he just wanted to be.

There’s a gulf between those two things.

Then there was you. I barely saw you at all, except from a distance. We did cross each other once in the yard. You were getting even more muscles. Plush toys don’t sound heavy, but I guess when they’re in big bags and you’re throwing them up, I don’t know, ten feet onto a pier, they’re heavy enough.

Anyway, you were in your short-sleeved work shirt with the logo on it and I could see the new angles in your arms. You were tan, your skin full of sunshine, walking to your truck. In one hand was a book, I couldn’t see what it was, and the bend in your elbow and the outline of your bicep were the most incidental details on one sunny day in New Jersey, couldn’t matter to anyone ever, but also seemed to me like the fulcrum on which all existence was balanced.

“Hey,” you said.

“Hey.”

SHAKESPEARE WOULD HAVE BEEN PROUD.

“How are the stuffed toys?” I asked.

“Plentiful,” you said, shrugging. We walked together to the truck; I was heading to the library, I imagine.

“Well,” I said.

“Well,” you said. “Hey, listen, I dreamed about you the other night. The weirdest thing.”

I thought: He’s dreaming about me?

I was staring at you blankly, and you looked uncomfortable. “Yeah,” you said. “I was in the yard here, and you were at your window, watching me. Or … waiting for me, I guess. Like, beckoning me. But there was no door into the house; it was all bricked up. So I knew I had to climb up to the window. Except there were no handholds, nothing. And then my mom showed up with a ladder, which is weird because my mom hasn’t been around for … Well. Anyway. I put the ladder up against the wall and started climbing and … that was it. I woke up.”

Just like when we were driving on the beach, I literally couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I was thinking, I’m in his dreams? What does that mean? And I was so much in my head and not in the actual yard with you that the moment stretched and stretched, like taffy.

AWKWARD.

“Well I guess I’ll …” Your voice trailed off as you turned and walked to the truck. I half followed you, half walked with you. I needed to get to the street anyhow.

“Beckoning?” I said eventually.

You flushed. “Uh … yeah.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that word out loud before,” I said.

You said nothing.

DOUBLE AWKWARD.

What I meant, of course, given the pretty obvious hint you had just dropped was: What happened to your mom? Oh God, I’m so sorry. I lost mine too. I’m so, so sorry.

I didn’t mean to come across like such an *******.

We were standing by the pickup now, not precisely standing together and not precisely separate either; the sun was bright in my eyes. I was conscious of your chest under your shirt. You rocked on your heels. Your eyes caught the sun and flashed. “I should—” you started.

“How did you get that job anyway?” I blurted out.

“Excuse me?”

“The plush. How come you’re not gutting shrimp?” I knew that my dad had not been kidding about that.

You raised your hands in a beats me gesture and leaned against the pickup. “Guy named Bill does the orientation,” you said. “He took us down under the shrimp restaurant, in among the pillars of the pier. He explained the job—said it was ten hours a day, in a kitchen topping out at eighty degrees, literally just pulling **** out of prawns all day long. Maybe a short break to fry them, then back to it. He said we were going to be sweating, that we’d lose twenty pounds easy over the summer.”

“Sounds great.”

“Yeah. Then he said: put your hands up if you don’t think that sounds like fun. If you’d rather do something else.”

“And you did?”

“I did. After a moment anyway. The others, I think they figured it was a trick question, like they’d get fired. I thought that was a possibility too, but I came here to work the boardwalk, not broil in a kitchen. I thought, What do I have to lose? So I put my hand up and Bill said—he’s a really big guy, Bill, a bull of a guy, but kind—anyway, Bill said, ‘Can you drive a car? Have you got your license?’ ” You indicated the pickup. “And I said yes, and here I am.”

“Delivering stuffed toys.”

“Beats unstuffing prawns.”

“True.”

Another pause.

“You should come see the warehouse sometime,” you said. “It’s crazy. Plush animals stacked to the ceiling.”

“Hmm,” I said, in that polite way people do when they know it’s not a real offer. I was trying to work out if you were flirting with me. I didn’t have a lot of experience with boys. Still don’t. Maybe you were wondering the same thing; I have no idea.

But you were not to be deterred. “No, really,” you said. “I’ll drive you one day. When I’m off. Monday?”

“Um. Okay.”

You smiled and beamed out some of the sunshine that had gotten trapped in your skin. “You look good,” you said. Then you blushed, your cheeks going red. I thought that was awesome. I don’t think I had ever seen anyone blush before. “I mean … you look better.” You closed your eyes and sighed. “God, that’s worse.”

“It’s okay.”

“What I mean is, you looked kind of sick before. Now you look better.” You clapped a hand to your head. “Ugh. Now it’s like I’m prying. I mean, I don’t know what the deal was with you and it doesn’t matter. I’m going, before I screw anything else up.”

You unlocked the pickup and started to open the door.

“Thanks,” I said. “Really.”

You stopped, and smiled. “You’re welcome.”

“What’s the book?”

“Metamorphoses,” you said. “Ovid.” You held it up—an old Penguin classic.

“Ah. ‘My mind is moved to sing of forms changed into new bodies. ’ ”

You nodded. “I was … this is going to sound so lame.”

“Try me.”

“I was getting kind of into the metaphysical poets, you know? Donne, Marvell. Then Jane at the library said I should read Ovid, that it was sort of the source of so much stuff. The metaphysicals, Shakespeare.”

“T.S. Eliot.”

“Yes! Totally.”

Your smile lifted the dimples to your cheeks, but I frowned. It was your mentioning Jane, and the memory of how she had sold me out, ratted on me to my dad, and started all the trouble. “You know Jane?” I asked.

“Oh yeah. I go to the library all the time. Get books to read on my breaks at the plush warehouse. I kind of make a throne of stuffed toys and sit in there with a book. And Jane—she’s amazing, isn’t she? So smart.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And beautiful. She’s one of those girls, she doesn’t know how beautiful she is. I always thought that was crap. The beautiful girls I’ve met, they always know it. But then I came here.”

I felt some structure move inside my stomach, like there was a part of my anatomy mounted on a gimbal I hadn’t even known about, able to revolve. Of course you would be attracted to Jane. Why wouldn’t you? She was super intelligent and interesting, and hot, with her dyed hair and her tattoos and her ironic T-shirts.

I half expected that the voice would say something then. Something about me being nothing, me being beneath his attention, pathetic, a ****** disgrace, all the things the voice so often said. But it said nothing.

And then I remembered: the voice didn’t speak when you were there. It seemed like it was really true.

“Hmm,” I said, which along with “what?” was becoming something of a catchphrase for me.

You could see I was upset, I think. I don’t know what it was—just the mere idea of Jane, who had betrayed me, or the fact that you called her beautiful. You lifted the book again. The awkwardness surfaced between us, smooth gray back of a whale breaching the water. “Anyway … back to Pygmalion,” you said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“See you around,” you said.

“Uh-huh.”

Then you got into your pickup and drove away.

I am only telling you this, from my side, because I get it now.

I do.

Jane didn’t betray me. She helped me.

And you weren’t talking about Jane, were you? I have always been good at reading, but I have never been good at reading between the lines. When you said that thing, about her being one of those girls who doesn’t know how beautiful they are. You were talking about me, weren’t you? I think, maybe, you were. And I was thinking how you were crushing on Jane, and meanwhile you were probably thinking I’m really obviously flirting with Cass and she’s just constantly knocking me back.

Sorry.

I wish I’d been more perspicacious.

I wish I could reach into time, to its secret levers and wheels, and turn it back to that afternoon, so that I would get it, what you were saying, and not hurt you. Because it must have hurt you, when I seemed so standoffish at the end, didn’t it?

Of course, I hurt you much worse than that, later.

DR. LEWIS:	Cookie?
ME:	No, thanks. (I show him my EpiPens.)
DR. LEWIS:	Ah.
ME:	The voice is still hurting me. Telling me to hurt myself, I mean.
DR. LEWIS:	And you? Are you hurting it?
ME:	Huh?
DR. LEWIS:	Try to remember for me what happened when the voice came to you for the first time. It said you were disgusting, right?
ME:	Yes.
DR. LEWIS:	And you. What did you say in return?
ME:	I said … I think I said, “Shut up.”
THE VOICE:	You did. You ****. You ******** did.
DR. LEWIS:	The voice is speaking now?
ME:	Yeah. How did you know?
DR. LEWIS:	You get a look in your eyes. What did it say?
ME:	She.
DR. LEWIS:	She. Yes. What did she say?
ME:	She agreed with me.
DR. LEWIS:	Interesting. One of the theories we work with is that the hearers of voices are damaged, yes, but they also damage their voices. Because they are scared, because they are freaked out. They set the tone early on, by reacting aggressively.
ME:	But the voice started—
DR. LEWIS:	It’s not a schoolyard. I am not establishing blame. I’m merely saying that you may need to recalibrate the tenor of your relationship with the voice.
ME:	Meaning?
DR. LEWIS:	Meaning be nicer to it.
ME:	Hmm.
DR. LEWIS:	Tell me about your mother.
ME:	(blinking) What?
DR. LEWIS:	She died, yes? Three years ago.
ME:	(silence)
DR. LEWIS:	That must have been hard for you.
ME:	(quietly) What do you think?
DR. LEWIS:	How did it happen?
ME:	She … There was a robbery at our pizza restaurant. She was killed.
DR. LEWIS:	I’m sorry.
ME:	(silence)
DR. LEWIS:	I don’t mean to pry. I am interested in the idea that this event may have been the trigger. For your voice.
ME:	It was years ago.
DR. LEWIS:	This is often the case.
ME:	(silence)
DR. LEWIS:	Were you there?
ME:	Excuse me?
DR. LEWIS:	When your mother was killed. Were you present?
ME:	(silence)
ME:	(silence)
ME:	(silence)
ME:	Yes.
DR. LEWIS:	I see. That must have been very upsetting.
ME:	(silence)
DR. LEWIS:	(looking at watch) Okay. Well, we’ll leave it there for the moment. The others are due.

 

2.    ACCEPTANCE. Acknowledge your voice as real, both a real part of yourself and a manifestation of your feelings about yourself.

This was not easy, but I tried, and it did make a kind of sense to me.

For example: when I got back to my room after talking to you about Ovid, about Jane. The voice said,

“He doesn’t see you. Just as you deserve.”

“Who?”

The voice laughed. “Like you don’t know. You are invisible to him. You are worthless. He sees only Jane.”

I cried then. I wish I could say I was strong and always stood up to the voice, but I didn’t.

“He invited me to go see the plush warehouse,” I said.

“He is being polite,” said the voice. “You are a piece of nothing shaped like a person. You are Echo, after she dies, speaking only the words of Narcissus back to him. You may as well be dead.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Please. Don’t say that.”

“I will say what I please.”

“I can make you go away, you know,” I said.

“Oh yes? How?”

I flicked on the radio, turned the dial to find static. But I wasn’t fast enough. I caught a snippet of conversation—the Houdini Killer appears to have struck yet again, with local prostitute Shayna Jennings reported missing two nights ago, only a week after—

I kept turning the dial, let the words sink into:

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

But I couldn’t keep it up forever. Eventually I had to turn it off, and the voice was waiting. The voice was always waiting.

“See what you did?”

“What?”

“You let another girl die. You failed. You were supposed to be finding him, right? The Houdini Killer? But what have you done? You’ve done NOTHING.”

“What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to—”

“You’re supposed to TRY.”

“I …” I shook my head. I felt like I really was going crazy. “Why me? Who do I have to—”

“BECAUSE YOU’RE LETTING THEM DIE. BECAUSE OTHERWISE HE GETS AWAY WITH IT. Don’t you see? Just like the guy who killed your—”

“SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.”

Silence.

Then, a voice like a gust of cold arctic air, frost hanging in it, crystals, capable of getting into the lungs, into the ears and freezing you from the inside out.

“Wash your face,” it said. “Ten times. Maybe if you deal with those zits he will be more interested. Maybe it will make you less disgusting.”

Yeah.

At times like those, I thought maybe Dr. Lewis was right. I mean, I looked in the mirror, in my bathroom—the en suite that Dad had made for me when we moved in—and I saw two pimples, one on my cheek and one on my chin.

And I felt disgusted by myself when I saw them.

So even though there was a part of me that still thought the voice might be supernatural, might be some kind of ghost or something, I could see the logic of the Doc’s position.

I.e.: everything the voice was saying was really what I was saying. My own hatred of myself, my own desire to punish myself, to make myself pay—

And then my thoughts would stop, would come to a brick wall that didn’t let them go any further, a barricade in my memories. I know what it is, now, that barricade.

But I didn’t then. I genuinely didn’t.

Anyway, yes, I could see that maybe the voice was me. I mean, I could understand it intellectually, as an abstract concept.

It was the concrete aspect I had difficulty with.

That is: the voice was not my voice. It was someone else’s voice, a woman’s, and I heard it through my ears. You have no idea what that feels like, when you hear a real voice that seems to be from outside you, and it hates you too.

At least, I hope you don’t.

“Wash your face again.”

“You said ten times.”

“Again.”

I looked at myself in the mirror. The dark circles were gone from beneath my eyes, but the pimples were like the size of the moon, blotting out my whole face, they were so enormous.

Disgusting, I thought.

But Dr. Lewis had made me believe I could control this thing, at least. Even if it was hard. So at the same time I was thinking about the next precept, the one about dialogue and conciliation. “If I do, can I read a bit of a book?”

“What book?”

“I don’t know. The one Jane gave me.”

“That *****? You want to read her book?”

“It’s not hers. It’s the library’s. It’s by Haruki Murakami. He’s Japanese.”

“The ***** called your dad, and he took you to the hospital, and that’s where they killed me again with those pills. I already died once and you did NOTHING to stop it. Then she killed me again.”

I closed my eyes. “Please,” I said.

ALL TOGETHER NOW:

“No,” said the voice.

 

3.    DIALOGUE AND CONCILIATION. Welcome the voice, instead of ignoring it or telling it to shut up. Encourage more positive interaction and negotiation.

 

I’ve touched on this already. And the weird thing is, it did kind of work. Not right away, but it did.

So:

I was sitting on my bed, the room full of red morning light. The room was spotless. Here’s something freaky: I really liked that. I mean, it was the voice that had me always cleaning up after myself, but I had come to realize I enjoyed the feeling of space and order.

This, essentially, is what the Doc meant about the voice being part of me.

Anyway. I was sitting there feeling half-awake. This must have been a week and a half after I started seeing the Doc? Maybe. I was in my SEAL TEAM 5 EATS SHARKS FOR BREAKFAST T-shirt of Dad’s that I always slept in.

From downstairs, the smell of bacon came creeping up, I visualized it like tendrils of vapor, reaching out for me, luring me. Dad, cooking for me. It was how he showed his love. He’d also been very noticeably keeping his temper under control, never lashing out like he used to, never hitting things. That must have taken a lot of effort because Dad was an angry person.

Mom’s … Mom’s death made him that way.

The voice said,

“No bacon for you if you don’t clean your ******* room.”

“It’s clean!”

“Clean it again. And then clean your bathroom.”

I took a deep breath and thought about the steps. “Hello,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t greet you properly. How are you?”

Silence.

“Are you okay? I didn’t hear you last night, and I worried about you.”

Silence.

“It’s good to hear you again anyway.”

Silence. But a pregnant one. I could sense the voice there, invisibly breathing.

“Clean,” it said finally.

“With pleasure,” I said.

Then I thought: negotiation.

“If I clean extra well, can I read some of my book?”

“What book?”

“The novel.”

“The one the ***** gave you.”

I held my tongue. “She is a *****, we have established that. But if I clean, can I read a chapter?”

Silence.

“Can I?”

“No.”

“It’s just a book.”

“Yeah, and that boy in the apartment just broke your heart when he turned his sights on that ****** ***** ******.”

“He didn’t break my heart. Please. I’m not some princess in a story. I’m not, like, in love with him or anything. I barely know him.” Though even then, another voice in my head, not the voice but a little, quiet fantasizing voice, said, He dreamed about you.

“Yes. You are. I saw you looking at his arms. It’s pathetic.”

I tried to keep calm. “I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about the book. You want me to clean the bathroom. Fine. But then I want a chapter of my book.”

“No.”

“Please.”

And then …

And then I WOULD LIKE YOU TO TAKE A MOMENT TO APPRECIATE THE MAGNITUDE OF THIS:

“Okay,” said the voice. “But not a chapter. Ten pages.”

“Fine,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

THE VOICE: silence.

 

Unimportant lowercase spoiler:

Dad’s bacon was awesome. So were his pancakes. His bacon and pancakes are always awesome. This is, to be honest, a good reason on its own to forgive me, and to forgive him.

You do not want to miss out on his breakfasts.

 

4.    SCHEDULE. Allot a regular time at which the voice can speak to you. Refuse to engage if the voice tries to speak at any other time.

 

I was surprised by how well this one worked.

This is what I did:

Every time the voice came to me, I followed a script in my head, like a telesales operative.

Here’s an example from the shore:

EXT. DAY. A SOUTH NEW JERSEY BEACH. THE SUN IS HIGH IN THE SKY. THERE IS THE BARNACLED AND SEAWEED-FESTOONED PILLAR OF A PIER TO THE LEFT OF OUR HEROINE, WHO IS STRIPPING OFF HER T-SHIRT AND JEANS TO REVEAL A SWIMSUIT. IT IS THE FIRST TIME SHE HAS BEEN DOWN TO THE BEACH SINCE SHE FOUND A HUMAN FOOT THERE. IT IS ANOTHER WARM DAY, THOUGH THERE ARE CLOUDS GATHERING IN THE SKY, AND LATER IT WILL RAIN. THE SEAGULLS ARE CALLING, CALLING, CALLING THE GIRL’S NAME.

TAUNTING HER.

SHE IS IGNORING THEM. WHAT SHE FINDS HARDER TO IGNORE IS THE VOICE. THE VOICE BELONGS TO A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN WITH AN INDETERMINATE NEW JERSEY ACCENT.

A DOG RACES PAST, CHASING A FRISBEE; A SMALL YAPPY DOG, IT THROWS ITSELF INTO THE AIR, SPARKLING WATER FALLING FROM IT, AND TIME SEEMS TO STAND STILL, THE DOG HANGING AT THE TOP OF ITS LEAP, JAWS CLOSING ON THE FRISBEE.

THE VOICE:	You even think about swimming in that ocean and I’ll—
ME:	Oh, hi! How are you?
THE VOICE:	(silence)
ME:	I was wondering where you were. It’s nice to hear from you.
THE VOICE:	Swimming is enjoyment. You are not allowed to enjoy yourself.
ME:	I’m sorry you feel that way.
THE VOICE:	(silence)
ME:	(checking the G-Shock Dad gave me for my sixteenth) It’s two o’clock. I would prefer you to speak to me only after six p.m.
THE VOICE:	You dare to—
ME:	After six p.m., please.
THE VOICE:	Put your clothes back on. Go home. People can see your body. Your ******* fat body.
ME:	Okay. Okay, boss.
	I pull on my Levis and T-shirt. Then I turn away from the ocean, which keeps whispering to me when my back is turned, the surf hissing onto the sand, a Greek chorus behind the calling of the gulls.
THE VOICE:	Good. Now you’re not making anyone sick with your flab.
ME:	Thank you. But please, don’t speak to me again till six p.m.
THE VOICE:	(silence)

I never meant to swim, of course. It was a tactic. Not something the Doc taught me either.

But hey: if your father runs a restaurant, one thing you learn is how to negotiate.

So:

Same script, on repeat. My lines, every time the voice said anything to me:

Oh, hi!

Every time:

I would prefer you to speak to me only after six p.m.

And it must have worked, because a few days after that, Dad came home for dinner and it was only then I realized I hadn’t heard the voice all day. In fact, I had read like ten chapters of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and I hadn’t even thought about it.

“Hey, honey,” said Dad. “Why are you smiling?”

“No reason,” I said.

“Well, it’s good to see.” He held up a bag. “I’m making meatballs. And …” He hesitated. Then he held up another bag, this one clear and blue. “And … I got a movie. I mean, if you want. It’s no big deal. The girl at the store said you would like it. I mean, she thought you might—”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, maybe.”

Dad blinked at me for a second. Almost every night he was suggesting TV or a movie or going out somewhere, and every night I said no. “Oh. Oh, that’s great, honey.” He turned around and headed to the kitchen, and a very small part of me noticed him wiping his eye with his sleeve like he had shed a tear, and all the rest of me refused to notice this at all because it would mean consciously realizing how much he loved me, and that was something so painful it might create a supernova right here on a New Jersey street, suck the whole solar system into it, turn it to atoms.

Even now, my fingers are white as I type.

But where was I?

Oh yes, the DVDs.

See, before the voice, box sets used to be a big part of our lives, mine and Dad’s. We didn’t talk about much, me and my dad, but we did talk about Tony Soprano and Walter White.

After the voice: there was basically nothing. I mean, Dad was into collecting millipedes. I liked books. There was really nothing we shared. We lived in different parts of the house.

But that night, we shared the meatballs that Dad made—they were awesome; please bear this in mind along with the bacon and the pancakes—and then some nut-free chocolate ice cream. Dad told me stories about work, and I told him how I had started a book that day, and he wiped his eye again so I shut up.

But then he told a joke, a lame joke about one of his regulars and I …

I …

I smirked.

Everything about that night is bright lacquered in my memory; I could almost reach out and touch it all. It was a crappy old plastic-covered table in a small kitchen in New Jersey with green cabinets from, like, the seventies, but I felt like I was in a palace. The halogen strip light in the ceiling was bathing us. I felt like the whole world was full of light.

I reached out for more ice cream.

“Seriously?” said the voice. “With your ass?”

I lowered the spoon very slowly. I checked my G-Shock. 8:10 p.m.

“I’ve missed you,” I said. I chose my words very carefully, knowing they would go for the voice and Dad both.

Dad smiled. “I’ve missed you too, Cassington.” That was an old nickname he hardly ever used anymore.

THE VOICE: silence.

“I’ve been looking forward to speaking to you all day,” I said.

Dad got all embarrassed then and gruff and alpha male. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, me too.”

THE VOICE: “No more ice cream. You barely fit into your jeans. You could be pretty, if you looked after yourself better. If you weren’t so—”

“Thank you,” I said.

THE VOICE: silence.

DAD: silence.

I started clearing away the dinner stuff. “Can we watch a movie tonight?” I asked.

Dad looked puzzled. “I told you I got one, Cass. So, yeah.”

But of course I wasn’t asking him. I kept listening as I washed the dishes. We didn’t have a dishwasher. Mom used to say, we do have a dishwasher, and it’s me. But it wasn’t her anymore. It was me.

THE VOICE: silence.

“Can we have popcorn too?” I asked.

“Sure, honey.”

THE VOICE: “No popcorn. Just the movie. And don’t enjoy it too much. I’ll be watching.”

“I’m okay actually, thanks, Dad. Just realized I’m too full.”

“Sure.”

We went into the living room. Dad slotted the DVD into the player. The girl in the store was right; it was pretty good. I curled up on the sofa and Dad put his arm out and I leaned against him.

It was nice.

Then, like an hour into it, something happened in the movie that made me laugh.

“Bite your tongue,” said the voice.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Dad peered at me. “You don’t have to apologize for laughing, Cass.”

“Bite it,” said the voice.

And I did it; I mean, I was negotiating, I was scheduling and being polite and all that stuff, but the voice still scared me. And it had let me have this time with Dad.

I bit my tongue.

“Harder.”

I tasted salt blood, rushing into my mouth.

“Enough,” said the voice.

“Can we watch the rest?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Dad. “It’s like ten. It’s not late.”

“No,” said the voice.

I sighed. “I’m super tired actually, Dad. Tomorrow night?”

“Sure,” said Dad.

“Maybe,” said the voice.

Hell, that was a victory in my book. We got up and turned out the lights and powered down the TV. Dad went into the bug room, and I followed him in. He lifted the first lid and started taking little pots of food from a drawer beneath the wooden workbench. Artificial light glowed all around us; blue UV.

“Here,” he said, when he saw that I was there too. He handed me a stick insect.

I held up my hand and looked at the thing. It was trembling, I swear, its long body very stiff. I wanted to stroke it and tell it I wasn’t going to hurt it, but it was an insect; what would the point have been? I turned my hand to get a better look at it.

The stick insect fell—tumbled to the ground.

Dad whirled. “For ****’s sake, Cass!” he shouted. He bent down and picked up the stick insect carefully. He examined it and then reached out with his other hand and gripped my arm, tight enough to hurt.

“How can you be so ******* clumsy?” he said. “How come everything you touch turns to—”

He stopped himself, like he’d been taken over by some possessing spirit and had just gotten control of his mouth again. That was what Dad’s tempers were always like—like he was under the influence of something that needed to be exorcised.

He stared at me.

He saw the tears running down my cheeks.

“Oh Jesus, Cass, oh, I didn’t mean …”

I twisted out of his grip and ran for the stairs.

“Cass, I wasn’t talking about—”

“Wow,” said the voice as my foot hit the first step. “Your dad really hates you, huh?”

 

So.

A half victory, I guess.

 

5.    FREEDOM. Challenge the power of the voice and establish dominance over it.

This did not work very well.

Actually, you were there for part of this one.

Paris called; she wanted to hang out. We’d spoken on the phone a few times but hadn’t seen much of each other since she took me to meet Dr. Lewis. Dad was going to be home soon so I told her I couldn’t go to her condo, but she could come over to the house.

When she turned up, I was waiting on the porch. Paris was wearing torn fishnet tights with a fifties flowered summer dress. She looked crazy and beautiful. As she walked across the yard, you were just parking your pickup—she turned and looked at you as you went to the apartment stairs.

“Who’s the hot guy?” she asked, when she joined me on the porch.

I glanced at the apartment. “Him?” I had not thought of you as someone who would be conventionally thought of as hot. I also, at this point, was maybe not quite aware of my own interest in you. Although maybe that’s a lie; maybe I was. Because I remember thinking something very strange when Paris asked about you.

I mean, hearing a voice is extreme. But often, even when we’re supposedly sane, our own thoughts can be foreign to us.

The alien, strange thought that went through my mind at that moment, and I wish I could say it was the voice but it wasn’t, was:

He’s mine, bitch. Like … like we were she-lions or something. Weird how quickly we revert to being animals.

But I waved a hand in what I hoped was a casual manner as we went up the stairs to my room. “He’s one of the summer workers,” I said. “From the piers. Dad rents the apartment over the garage.”

“Sweet,” said Paris. “So you get to check out Mr. Guns there whenever you like.”

I shrugged, trying to appear more relaxed than I really was. “They’re usually working.”

“There’s more than one of them?”

“Two.”

She licked her lips. “Hmm. And is the other one hot too?”

“I guess.”

“Then I shall be a frequent visitor to this abode, methinks.”

“******,” said the voice. “Filthy ******.”

I flushed. “After six p.m.,” I said.

“I can come after six p.m.?” said Paris.

I’d been talking to the voice. “Oh. Uh, yeah. Any day.”

“Cool.”

I sat down on the bed.

Paris was a bit freaked out by my room, I think. She gazed around at the shelves and the walls.

“It’s very … clean,” she said finally.

“Yeah. The voice makes me do that.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tell the voice my condo could use a good housekeeper.”

“Very funny.”

She picked up a shell from the chest of drawers; it was one that I’d found with Mom, on one of our walks on the beach. “How’s it going with the Doc?”

“Good, I think.”

“You’re reconciling with the voice? Making schedules, all that ****?”

“Yep.”

“And what about the source? Any progress there?” she asked.

“The source?”

“Yeah. The … What did you call it when you asked me? The trauma?”

I knew what she was doing. She was reminding me that she’d told, hinting at reciprocity. Basically saying that I should tell her, in turn.

“No, nothing,” I lied. “There’s nothing.”

“Hmm,” said Paris.

We hung out for a while—I played her some music; we ate some nut-free brownies that Dad had made. “Wow,” said Paris. “These are amazing. Your dad’s single, right?”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“Joking, Cass, joking.”

I showed her Dad’s bug room, and her eyes went wide as she looked at all the brightly colored millipedes and stick insects and beetles. “They’re gross, but they’re kind of beautiful at the same time,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“A bit like you,” she said.

I punched her arm.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s have another brownie.”

Later she looked at her watch. “Your dad gets back at seven, right?”

“Usually.”

“Okay, I’d better split.” She walked to the door, and I opened it for her.

“See you,” I said.

She smiled. “Not if I see you first.”

“What does that mean?”

A frown. “Actually,” she said, “I don’t really know. I just say stuff sometimes.” A pause. “Speaking of. I didn’t see any photos of your mom in the house. What happened to her, Cass?”

(Why does everything you touch have to turn to—)

That wasn’t the voice, just to be clear; that was Dad’s voice, in my head.

“Nothing,” I said.

Paris looked at me. “Nothing happened to her.”

“No,” I said.

She raised her hands. “Okay. Okay. Leaving it.” She turned and started across the yard. “Oh, Cass!” she exclaimed. “You lucky girl.”

“Huh?”

“Bare abs. Just lying around.”

I followed her out. She strode to the street, still giggling. Asleep on the lawn, next to a couple of open cans of Bud, was Shane. He had taken his top off—I guess because it was hot and he wanted to sunbathe a little. Then he’d obviously fallen asleep. He was wearing loose red lifeguard shorts. I could see the ridges of his stomach muscles.

Paris was gone; there was just me standing there, and Shane lying on the ground like a Greek statue lain out in the grass.

“Look away,” said the voice.

But I kept looking. I was fascinated—I’d seen boys’ bodies on the beach, but never one this close. I mean, apart from my dad, and he didn’t count. I couldn’t turn away from that hard chest, the V that ran down from his—

“You’re enjoying this,” said the voice. “Stop it, or I will punish you.”

“After six p.m.,” I said automatically. “No talking before six p.m.”

“Look away, now. Or you will pay.”

I didn’t look away. I know I should have. Aside from anything else, it felt like a betrayal, of you. That sounds stupid. I mean all we had done was drive on the beach and talk a couple of times. But that’s how it felt. Sometimes the things we feel are not rational.

Often, in fact.

Then Shane stirred. He kind of snuffled and said a name—Linda—I still don’t know why—and rolled to the side a little. I thought, Oh no, he’s going to wake up and see me looking. I couldn’t move; I was stuck there like a woman turned to stone.

But then something worse happened.

As Shane turned, his hand went down and … well … scratched his crotch. Not in any sexual way, just a guy, asleep, shifting stuff around or whatever. And because he was wearing those baggy lifeguard shorts I saw his … junk.

I literally could not look away. I wasn’t titillated or anything, I was horrified.

Oh my God, I thought. I felt sick.

I guess I should have found it funny. But I didn’t find it funny at all. I just felt nauseous and appalled, and one thought went through my mind, the one that didn’t help at all with challenging the voice’s power:

The voice did this. It told me to look away or it would punish me, and then when I didn’t look away it made me see … this.

Finally I managed to make my legs work, and I turned and went back into the house. I knew the Doc would say that the voice had nothing to do with it, that it was just coincidence, but I didn’t really believe it. I was remembering how it had made me stab my finger on the compasses at school.

I was still afraid.

 

But I’m not afraid anymore, I’m not afraid of anything. Not of the voice, not of my dad, nothing.

Come to the pier on Friday, and I’ll show you.

 

Things were so much better with the voice, but it still had power. It was still the one in control.

I was leaving the house to go hang with Paris at her condo. I went to grab my keys from the monkey butler. He was a wooden monkey in a red jacket with a fez, balancing a platter that would hold my keys, Dad’s, his car keys too. I don’t know why we had a monkey. Mom and Dad got him from an antique store in Cape May when I was little, or something.

Anyway, I reached out for the keys and the voice said:

“No.”

“Hi!” I said. “How are you?”

“Leave the keys.”

“I’d really prefer if you only spoke to me aft—”

“It’s six fifteen p.m.,” said the voice.

I looked at my watch. Oh.

“Leave the keys,” the voice repeated.

“It’s a latch bolt,” I said. “It automatically locks when the door closes. I won’t be able to get back in.”

“That’s the point, yes,” said the voice.

“But why?” Something about the voice made me sound like a whining teenager. I hated that.

“You only brushed your teeth once this morning. And you didn’t wash your face. What is it, do you want to be revolting?”

“No.”

“Good. Maybe being locked out will make you think about these things.”

I withdrew my hand, leaving the keys where they were. I would have to hope Dad was home not too late, though he’d said he wouldn’t be back for dinner—that was why I was going to Paris’s place to begin with. He’d be pissed with me for staying out at night—not that I had a formal curfew, but he didn’t like me being out in the dark with the killer around—but what could I do?

I opened the door.

“Wait,” said the voice. “Put on a jacket. You look like ****.”

I went to the closet.

“No! Not that one! What are you, color blind?”

“Better?” I asked.

“Satisfactory,” said the voice.

As I passed the monkey, I pushed my luck—I reached out my hand, thinking the voice might not be paying attention.

“You want to bleed tonight?” asked the voice.

I went out without my keys.

When I got to Paris’s apartment building, I pressed the bell and heard the buzz that said the door was unlocked. I went in and rode up in the elevator to the second floor. As I neared her door, a guy in a dark suit came out—he was in his forties maybe? I glanced at his hand—there was a gold wedding ring on his ring finger.

He lowered his eyes as he passed me and hurried into the elevator. He had a belly that was stretching his white shirt, although the rest of him was skinny.

Paris was holding the door open and she looked—and if you’d told me I’d ever see this I wouldn’t have believed you—she looked embarrassed. Or more than that, ashamed.

I didn’t say anything—what could I say? I just smiled at her and she smiled back, and we went inside.

“Let’s go to the piers,” said Paris.

“What?”

“Let’s do it. Ride the Ferris wheel.”

“You’re kidding?”

“No. Why?”

“I’m town. People from the town don’t go to the piers.”

“Oh please,” said Paris. “Like you didn’t go when you were a kid.”

“That was different. I was a kid.”

She shook her head sadly. She had eyeliner ticking up from the corner of each eye, bright blue; it made her look like a cat. Pin-striped pants, high heels, a shirt. Big bangles on her wrists, in all colors. She grabbed a half-full bottle of Smirnoff from the counter. “Anyway, I’m not town,” she said. “I’m from New York. I’m a tourist basically. A student tourist. I’m everything you town people hate. So we’re going,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Story of my life.

 

I’ve just noticed that I called the bottle of vodka “half full.” Whereas I told you that my dad is a glass-half-empty kind of guy.

That must make me an optimist.

Well, I guess I wouldn’t be writing this otherwise.

 

Paris, of course, was right; we had fun.

The sun was setting over the town as we got to the end of the street by her building. We climbed up the steps onto the boardwalk, joining it just between the SLOT MACHINE ARCADIA, which is decorated with spray-painted murals of satyrs and nymphs frolicking in a dell by a stream, and VINNIE’S TATTOO STUDIO.

“You want?” said Paris, holding out the bottle of vodka.

I shook my head.

“Killjoy,” said Paris.

“My allergy,” I said.

“There are no peanuts in vodka, Cass.”

“No.”

“So have some.”

“I can’t.”

She stopped, took another swig, and looked at the bottle, then at me. “You did before we went to the group.”

“Yeah, because I was nervous. But it was only that one time. I don’t drink.”

Paris puzzled was a beautiful thing to see. It was not something that happened a lot. Her eyebrows stayed knitted. “Why not?” she asked.

“It’s if I do eat peanuts. Or something with peanuts in it. Alcohol makes an anaphylaxis much worse.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Seventeen to twenty-seven. That’s the danger zone. When most allergic people die. Because they drink and get sloppy, and then they get a reaction and their bodies are already weak from the booze.”

“Huh. Who’d have thought it.” She took a swig of vodka and threw the bottle, still nearly half full, into a trash can—laid it up like a basketball player, hand curled over, the bottle flying in a perfect parabola before landing with a chink. Then we crossed the wide wooden walkway, skirting kids carrying cotton candy, and laughing groups of teenagers. Balloons in a hundred colors rose from the wrists of toddlers, like sky-jellyfish.

Then we were across the boardwalk, and in the amusement park.

We went to a booth and bought evening tickets—they gave us blue wristbands with the moon printed on them. Already the sun was low in the sky over the town, painting the rooftops orange. We were just paying the teller—a young girl working for the summer, I guessed—when a guy at the back of the booth came over and looked at me through the glass.

“Cassandra?” he said.

I nodded.

He came out a door in the side of the booth. Russian Pete, I think he was called? Short, always wore a bow tie, had eyes that puffed out, fishlike. He did a kind of measuring motion with his hands. “Jeez, you got big.” He called over his shoulder. “Hey, Finn.”

There was a guy in a dolphin suit just behind the booth—the Piers mascot. He ambled over and stood in front of Russian Pete. Then he took off his head. “’S’up, Pete?”

“See that?” said Pete. “That’s Mike’s girl.”

“Cassandra?”

“Yep.”

The mascot named Finn took another couple of steps forward. He leaned down. It was weird being leaned down to by a guy in a dolphin costume. His hair was all mussed from the big foam head, and there was sweat on his forehead. I recognized him—he had been a regular at the restaurant. Finny McCool, the guys called him. I had no idea why.

“You got big,” he said slowly. He had a big, round face. Finny was kind of a simple guy.

“She sure did, didn’t she?” Pete turned to me. “His name’s Finn, and he wears the dolphin costume. Finn. Kills me every time.”

“Huh?” said Finn.

“Never mind,” said Pete. “Go thrill the kids with your impression of a sea mammal.”

“Huh?”

“Go be a dolphin.”

“Oh. Okay.” He turned around, putting his head back on. I could see the sweat beading at his neck. I felt sorry for him. Even though it was evening it must have been seventy degrees, easy, and that dolphin costume had to be seriously hot. Dad always said it was the worst job on the pier.

Paris was watching all this like she’d been dropped into another reality. “How’ve you been?” said Pete to me. “I haven’t seen you since … ah …” He swallowed. I saw the panic enter his eyes, saw him add it up. “Since …”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Pete, sadly. I always liked Pete. He told stupid jokes and he did lame tricks, but he was sweet, you know? Then he brightened. “You paid!” he said. “Only out-of-towners pay.”

I shrugged.

Pete sighed. “Let’s see what we can do about that.” He reached behind my ear, and I thought he was going to pull out the twenty bucks we had paid, but he didn’t. He frowned. “Hmm. Not there. Check your pocket.”

I reached into my jeans. There was a shape in there like a cigar—two ten-dollar bills rolled up. “Hey,” I said, genuinely impressed. “Your tricks got better.”

“You’re older now,” said Pete. “Got to up my game.”

“Seriously, though, we can pay,” I said.

Pete looked at us both. “You girls like popcorn, right? Dippin’ Dots?”

“Yeah,” said Paris, smiling.

“See,” said Pete to me. “Your girl is with me on this. Take the twenty, use it on the concessions. The rides are free. I absolutely insist. If you say no you will be insulting not only me but also the entire Piers staff, present, past, and future.”

“Okay,” I said, putting my hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Thanks, Pete.”

“You’re welcome.”

Then he raised a hand, like, hang on. He went into the little booth and came back out with two lanyards with VIP cards on them. “Wear these,” he said. “Skip the lines—the guys will let you on the rides first.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Go.”

“Thank you, Pete,” said Paris.

“Thank you,” said Pete. “It’s good to see our girl with a friend.”

Jesus, Pete, I thought. Way to make me sound like a loser.

But Paris smiled. “She’s special, this one,” she said.

“She sure is,” said Pete. He waved us toward the park. “Go, have fun.”

And we did.

We went to the Accelerator first. It’s the oldest and biggest wooden roller coaster in the United States. Did you know that? It doesn’t loop the loop or go upside down or any of that stuff. But it’s still a rush. You get on it and the chain pulls your car up

up

up

up

into the twilit sky. You see the ocean, all the way to the horizon, stretching out, shining in the red light of dusk. The city on the other side, a million points of light. You hear laughter and shouting, carrying over the clear evening air. Then there’s a moment where you’re teetering, in equilibrium, and then you tip, and you rush down … so fast that it feels like you’re merging with the wind.

And then whoosh, up again, and down, and up, and all the time screaming.

“That was wild,” said Paris, after.

“Yeah. It’s good for an old ride.”

“No, I mean that guy. Pete? Giving us these.” She held up her VIP pass on the gold lanyard.

“Cool, isn’t it?” We had breezed past the line for the Accelerator, as people looked at us enviously. It felt like being famous. The park was pretty full—some parents and kids, the older ones, because it was already dark. Young guys in baseball caps; girls in short skirts and short shorts. A bunch of bros from a frat somewhere, leaning on one another and whooping. There was a smell of popcorn and beer and sweat, all mingled together, and beneath it, an under note from a perfume bottle, the ever-present scent of the sea.

“I wish I had it,” said Paris.

“Wish you had what?”

Paris swept a hand over the park. “It’s like … a whole family. As well as your dad.”

I thought about that. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Seriously? That Pete guy? And Finn? Those guys love you; you can see it.”

“Hmm.”

“And what was that woman’s name? The one who let us on the Accelerator?”

“Sweet Sarah?”

“You’re kidding me? That’s her name?”

“Yeah.”

“She hugged you. She was smiling like she just won the lottery, just because you turned up at the ride.”

I shrugged. “They’re just people who know my dad. Who eat at the restaurant.”

“The restaurant?”

Oh.

“Yeah … ,” I said. “My dad has an Italian place. On the boardwalk—up by Pier Two.”

“Donato’s?”

“You know it?”

“Oh, come on. It’s like the best pizza in the state. Your dad owns it?”

“Donato was my grandfather.”

“Holy ****,” said Paris. “You’re, like, New Jersey mob. I mean, you’re like a Soprano.”

“It’s just a restaurant. It’s not a gang.”

“Yeah, right. I figure there are fridges in back full of coke and heroin in big white bricks. Does your dad keep a gun under the counter? I bet he keeps a gun under the counter.”

“No,” I said, my voice flat; hard. I must have flinched, bodily.

“Whatever, moody,” said Paris. “So your dad isn’t some kind of mob boss. But, still, must have been cool growing up with your own pizza restaurant.”

I shrugged. I wanted this conversation to be over. “It was okay.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“It was fine,” I said, frustrated and not totally sure why I was so frustrated. “I used to hang out there after school. Do my assignments at one of the small tables, you know? All the waiters knew me of course, and they’d help me out sometimes. Frank was good at math. I had my own pizza on the menu—it was, like, a ham and mushroom with artichoke and egg.” As I spoke, I realized how much I missed the place, how much a small part of me missed it anyway. “It was … it was an extension of home, I guess. I’d walk in there and I was like a mascot. It was great.”

Paris looked at me. “I think that’s the longest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“Hmm.”

“That’s more like you, yep.” Then she touched her stomach. “I’m hungry. Let’s go get pizza at your dad’s place.”

“No,” I said, too quickly.

“Why not?”

“I … It was great when I was a kid. Now it’s not.”

“Ri-i-i-ght,” said Paris, in that there’s a story here and I want to know what it is but I’m not going to pry for now tone.

“It’s my family restaurant, you know?” I said, trying to cover myself. “Boring.”

“Okay. I get that. Well, I see a hot dog stand. You can eat those, right? I mean, with your peanut thing?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Processed meat. Kind of an issue.”

“Just the bun, then.”

“Have to be careful with bread too.”

“You’re that allergic?”

“I’m oh, she’s not breathing allergic. I’m the funeral is on Saturday, no flowers allergic.” I held up my ugly purse with the insulating sides.

“Fries then?”

“The oil is often unrefined peanut oil.”

“Jesus. The world is full of peril for you, huh?”

She didn’t know how right she was.