Derek chomped on a cheese fry, its thick end dark with barbecue sauce. Though sixteen, same as Chelsea, he still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of closing his mouth when he chewed. Strands of what looked like bleeding potato were visible between his teeth. It made Chelsea think about what she might look like in the mouth of a lizard.
As he ate, he talked. “What do you think Restrooms will say?”
“Restrooms” was Derek’s clever nickname for her shrink. Three years of Italian class, starting in middle school, had left Derek with one word, gabinetto, which meant “washroom” or “bathroom.” Derek found toilet humor hysterical. For a while, poor Dr. Gambinetti was “Restrooms” Gambinetti, Mafia hit man. Time and boredom (Derek and Chelsea had been seeing each other six months) shortened it to “Restrooms.”
“Dr. Gambinetti will say it’s a great opportunity,” she said listlessly. “A perfect chance for me to challenge myself.”
It was after her shift at Rhett’s, before her weekly therapy appointment. The two of them sat in a coffee shop, surrounded by Bilsford University students with their heads buried in laptops or books.
Derek nodded vigorously, remembering to be supportive. “It is! Definitely. It’s like kismet. I don’t understand why you’d even think of saying no.”
“Hello?” Chelsea waved her hand in front of his face. “Big, old house. Big, old lizard? Can it get creepier?”
“Sure,” he said, munching more fries. “It could be two lizards.”
Chelsea closed her eyes. Of the 30,368 residents of Bilsford, 19,878 were students enrolled in the University. That left 10,490.
Derek read her face. “Are you doing it right now? Counting?”
“No,” she lied, but she couldn’t look at him. She poked her Caesar salad and fought an urge to count the croutons. “I just don’t want to be there alone with something that might eat me.”
Derek brightened and managed to look cute, despite the dollop of sauce on his lip. “That’s the beauty part, L. C. Big, old, empty house. Who says you’d have to be alone? You could be with me!” He took a quick slurp of his soda. “It’d be like having our own place for two weeks!”
She raised an eyebrow at her boyfriend. Derek was sloppy but sweet, and into digital photography. He was cute and very understanding about the OCD, but he could also, on occasion, like many boys, approach her with all the subtlety of a mastiff in heat.
He leaned forward across his orange plastic tray. “You’d be crazy to pass that up.”
“First of all, I am crazy. Second of all, we wouldn’t be alone. There’d be Koko. A monitor lizard. Same family as Komodo dragons. Ever hear of them? They can grow more than ten feet long and attack and eat horses.”
“Come on, L. C. Restrooms says you have to fight harder!”
“I am fighting!” she said, eyes flaring.
“Oh yeah? How many fries have I eaten?”
“With or without the barbecue sauce?”
“I always use sauce.”
She shook her head. “You scarfed three down before you could peel the lid off the packet. Since then it’s been thirty-two. I can’t…I can’t help it.”
His tone softened. “I know, I know. Fine. Forget about Hobson Night. Forget I ever asked to come over. Forget about us. This is important for you. It’s what you want to do, right? You love animals. And a monitor lizard? What could be cooler, L. C.? This lizard, it’s part of the cycle of life.”
He called her L. C. for short. It had something to do with El Cid, a hero of some sort. Ages ago, when he first came up with the nickname, it’d seemed adorable, like Restrooms Gambinetti. “It’s like me eating the fries that fall back from the rest of the herd.” He scooped up a handful. “I do not eat out of anger or malice, but only because I must feed.”
He stuffed them all in his mouth at once. Little bubbles of white burst from the golden brown. She couldn’t help but laugh.
He swallowed, then tried to look serious. “You can’t let the OCD stop you from realizing your dream, can you?”
Chelsea sighed.
“What’s wrong?”
“That’s exactly what Dr. Gambinetti is going to say.”
“Score one for Restrooms,” Derek said, popping his fifty-sixth fry into his mouth. “You can’t go around the rest of your life being afraid of everything.”
But Derek was wrong about that. She could, she really could.
At age eight, Chelsea washed her hands thirty times in a row then stood on her bed in stark terror, eyes wide, and refused to move for two hours, because everything, everywhere, except for the one little spot on the old green blanket where she stood, was contaminated and would kill her. A few days later, she was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder.
Three months earlier, she’d visited her grandmother on her deathbed, seen her cancer-withered face, witnessed her shallow, troubled breathing. Her mother, Susan Kaüer, was convinced that this foolish decision to let Chelsea say good-bye to her nanna was what caused the disease. The visit had overwhelmed poor Chelsea, broken her.
But doctor after doctor said it could have been anything, real or imagined. Some OCD sufferers reported that their symptoms began the first time they saw the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. It could have been a dead animal in the street, a scary face on Halloween. A nightmare. The reptile brain saw it all as real.
Her mother never believed that, just as she never believed Chelsea was one of the lucky ones. But she was. She never missed school and did well in most classes. It didn’t stop her from making friends or having a part-time job. It just kept her almost constantly frightened.
Some sufferers, on the other hand, couldn’t leave their homes. For others, the OCD was an early sign of Tourette’s syndrome. The first time she heard that, Chelsea felt her head twisting, wanting to twitch. That was part of the OCD too. Suggestibility. It could latch onto any thought and run with it until it was something horrid. But Chelsea was never even medicated, though Dr. Gambinetti held it out as a possibility if she didn’t manage to overcome the compulsions on her own.
And today she didn’t seem able to overcome anything. Once she left Derek, the OCD roared for the entire bike ride to the square, old brick house in the center of town that held his office.
What if that gas pump leaked and someone tossed a cigarette down and all the cars and the people burst into flames?
She counted the parking meters in front of the building.
What if you scratch yourself on a rusty needle and get one of those infections that are resistant to antibiotics?
She counted the steps up to the white door and walked inside. The building was old, creaky, typical New England, but everything was painted white and there were lots of windows in the waiting room, so it was too bright and sunny to think of it as anything but cheerful. Though the OCD tried.
What if Dr. Gambinetti was killed by his last patient, a serial rapist who’s waiting for you inside the office?
The magazines on the table. 8, 9, 10.
Finally, Dr. G. opened the door and, barely looking at her, motioned her in. The fuzzy teddy bear of a man hummed as he swiped his rumpled tweed jacket back, adjusted his Snoopy tie and sat in his old swivel desk chair. As usual, he flipped through the massive piles of papers on his desk, humming cheerfully as he looked for her file.
As she walked in and sat on the old green couch, she realized she’d never seen him find that file. It was like a little performance for her sake, a distraction, just like the toys scattered about for his younger patients; the interesting wooden dollhouses, the muscular monster dolls. She’d been a child when she started seeing him, and back then she’d always liked his office and all the toys. The cacophony of objects, rather than being irritating, seemed to form a safe buffer against the rest of the world.
But she wasn’t a child any longer. She worried for a moment she’d outgrown his ability to help her, but as he continued to hum, she noticed something new above his desk. A little strip of leather was tied to holes in either corner of a flat stone, the strip held in the wall by a red thumbtack. On the stone, he’d painted, in homey, so-so calligraphy.
WHAT MIGHT BE ALWAYS OWES
ITS DEEPEST DEBT TO WHAT IS.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
He turned from his papers then followed her eyes back to the plaque. “Oh that. That. Something I read somewhere, or maybe I made it up. What do you think it means?”
“I haven’t got a clue.”
“Not at all?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. So. We think OCD may be physiological, based in the basil ganglia of the brain, but it’s also a disease of the imagination, right? It uses your imagination to conjure horrible images and bizarre solutions. We don’t want to defeat your imagination, it’s a wonderful thing. But we want the OCD to let go of it. So, what’s stronger than an imagined fear? Reality. So, focus on what’s real, not what you feel might be real. Reality would exist without our imagination, but imagination would not exist without reality. So…get it?”
He pointed at the stone and then turned back to her, apparently giving up on pretending to find his notes.
“Sort of.”
“Well, maybe it’s not a very good quote. But how was the week? Where’s the OCD at, right now, on a scale of one to ten?” His chair squeaked under his weight as he leaned forward in it.
“Twelve.”
His eyes widened. “Really? That’s high. What’s going on?”
She shrugged. “Midterm week is coming up and I’m doing a double shift at the store. Derek asked me to go to Hobson Night.”
He nodded. “Of course, of course. Pressure gives the OCD an in, but remember it can’t do anything except scare you. What was that project we had from last week? A book you started but couldn’t finish, because if you did you’d die from some infection?”
The Missing, by Sarah Langan. She was sorry she’d ever heard of the damn thing. “I finished it. I couldn’t put it down. It’s about a virus.”
“And?”
“I couldn’t sleep for two days.”
“But what happened? Did some virus come out of the book and infect you?”
She shook her head. “No. It was fiction.”
“So who’s in charge, Chelsea? You or the OCD?”
She shrugged. “Me?”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“Me.”
“So. Thoughts can’t hurt you and you’re in charge. Now, I can’t advise you to go to Hobson Night. But if I could advise you to go…”
“I know. I just…I just don’t want to.”
He made a face as if he didn’t believe her and then looked at her, a little puzzled.
“So, what are you not telling me?”
It was a common-enough question, but this time it happened to hit the nail on the head. In a few short, clipped sentences, she repeated the offer from Ms. Mandisa. As she spoke, his smile spread into a grin. “Wonderful. But you’re afraid of the lizard?”
When he said the word, she thought she felt something twitch in her skull, like a flashing tail. Reptile brain. Lizard in my brain. Chelsea nodded.
“I can understand that. They can bite. They can scratch.”
“It’s more than that. Monitors can get really big. And they’re aggressive.”
“Is this a big lizard?”
She furrowed her brow. “I don’t know.”
“Okay. Is it in a cage or is it wandering around the house?”
“A cage. Ms. Mandisa said it was totally safe. She used to study them. She was a herpetologist.”
“And we trust Ms. Mandisa?”
“Pretty much.”
“So there’s a good opportunity here for you, but you’re worried there’d still might be some danger. What’s the OCD telling you to do?”
“Don’t do it. No matter what. Don’t do it.”
“And what should you do?”
“Go and see if it really is dangerous before I decide.”
The doctor nodded. “Yes. Exactly.”
He pointed at the little quote above his desk, and for a second, Chelsea felt as though she understood it.