UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
I dismantled the pillow fort enough to make the couch sit-able again. Dad and I watched the History Channel and played chess all day, and in the evening, my mother and Charlie joined us. Charlie played behind the life-size George Washington statue in the corner, reenacting the crossing of the Delaware.
When it was just me and Dad, he’d ask about school and what I’d been doing while he’d been gone. He carefully maneuvered around the word “friends,” something I thanked him for. But I did reassure him.
“They’re my friends. I mean, really, they are. Or were . . . I hope they’re still my friends, if they know . . .”
“If they’re really your friends, they won’t care about your condition, Lexi.” Dad hugged me closer to his side. He smelled like rain. “Tell me about them.”
So I told him about the club. About the triplets. About Art and the fact that even though he could kill a small man with a poke to the chest, he still acted like a complete teddy bear. About Jetta and her French heritage. About Tucker and his conspiracies. I smiled more than I had for the past two weeks.
“Who’s the kid who brought you home?” Dad asked suddenly, throwing me off kilter. “The one you punched?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“Mom told me,” he said, smiling. “Punching? Is that how you wrangle boys these days?” He nudged me in the side. I swatted his elbow away and pulled my blanket tighter, trying to hide the blush in my cheeks. “Wrangling” boys hadn’t been on my agenda lately.
“It’s just Miles.”
“Just Miles?”
I ignored him. “He runs the club.”
“What, that’s it? Nothing else?”
“Uh, what do you want to know? He’s the valedictorian. He’s really tall.”
Dad made an approving sound at the word valedictorian.
“He knew who Acamapichtli was,” I added after a second. “Along with most of the other Aztec emperors. And the Tlatocan.”
Dad’s approving noise rose an octave.
“And I’m pretty sure he can speak German.”
Dad smiled. “That all?”
My face heated up again at the look he gave me. As if I liked Miles. As if I wanted to think about him.
Just thinking about his stupid face and his stupidly blue eyes turned me into the most confused person on the planet.
“No,” I said, burrowing into my blanket. “He can also take a hit.”
By the end of the third week, the world balanced on its axis. Dad stayed home, Mom stayed happy, and I got to go back to school on Monday. Sure, I wanted to puke from the anxiety rolling around in my stomach, but now I could get back to my (admittedly late) college search, catch up on all that schoolwork, and see my friends again.
Assuming Miles hadn’t told them everything, of course. If he had, there was a real chance they wouldn’t want to talk to me at all. But, reassuringly, I thought they had tried to contact me. The phone had been ringing more often than usual, and more than once someone knocked on the door and was turned away by my mother. I wished I had my own cell phone, but my mother probably would have taken that away from me, too.
Sunday night, as I tromped down the back hallway—I’d just finished putting up all my pictures again—to the living room, I heard my parents’ voices floating out of the kitchen. Talking about me. I pressed myself up against the wall outside the doorway.
“—that it’s not a good idea, that’s all. We can’t pretend that it isn’t as bad as it looks.”
“I don’t think we should resort to that yet. Lexi’s a responsible girl. Something must have bothered her. I don’t think she’d forget—”
My heard swelled painfully with appreciation for my dad.
“David, really,” said my mother. “You can’t know that. What if she didn’t want to take it? It was my fault for not paying enough attention, but . . . but that’s not the point. The medication isn’t the problem. This has happened before, and it might happen again, and it keeps getting worse.”
“So you want to hide her away? You really think that’s best for her? Trying to convince her to stay in some asylum?”
The word rang in the air.
“Oh, David, please.” My mother’s voice lowered to a whisper. “You know they’re not like that anymore. They’re not even called asylums. It’s a mental hospital.”
I hurried to the living room and curled up on the couch, drawing my blanket tightly around me. So much for feeling good. My mother had removed my intestines and used them to tie a noose around my neck. She just hadn’t kicked the stool out from under me yet.
She couldn’t send me to one of those places. She was my mother. She was supposed to do what was best for me, not what would get me out of her hair the fastest. How could she even think of that?
It took a while for me to notice the big blue eyes watching me from the doorway.
“C’m’ere, Charlie.” I spread my arms. Charlie hesitated, then ran across the room and climbed into my lap. I wrapped my arms and the blanket around her.
She saved me from trying to figure out how much I should tell her. “I don’t like it when your head breaks.”
I knew she was old enough and smart enough to know that my head didn’t actually break, but she’d been calling it that for so long it didn’t matter anymore. I think it made her feel better to think of it like something broken that could be fixed.
“I don’t like it, either,” I said. “You do know why it happens, right? Why my head breaks?”
Charlie removed the black castle from her mouth and nodded. “The brain chemicals make hallucinations. . . .”
“And do you know what a hallucination is?”
She nodded again. “I looked it up.”
Word of the Week, maybe? I hugged her tighter. “You know how you didn’t want me to leave for that party a while back?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And how you didn’t want me to go to the hospital three weeks ago?”
“Yeah.”
I took a breath, pulling myself together. Better to prepare her for the worst than let it blindside her. My parents would never tell her this. Not until it was too late.
Maybe, if I told her now—if I prepared myself, too—I could still avoid it.
“Well, I might have to go away again. And it won’t just be for a few hours or days or weeks.” I absentmindedly pulled a bit of her hair back and began braiding it. “Okay? I might not come back. I wanted you to know.”
“Do Mom and Dad know?” Charlie whispered.
“Yeah, they know.”
It was better if she didn’t know that it was our mother’s idea. She’d figure it out one day, but for now she could go on believing that some higher power sent me where it thought I needed to be. She could keep trusting Mom and Dad, and keep being my whining, chess-playing, crusading Charlemagne.