Hey, Kyle, it’s Day Eight. Still here, the loony bin.
Remember Saturday nights? I bet you don’t miss seeing A Separate Peace or Psycho for the millionth time. What’s it like where you are?
Did you ever sneak out of the dorm at night? Piece of cake. After the dorm parents shut down, like 1 a.m., we put masking tape over the latch of the outside door. I’m sure you did, too.
One time last year Donny swiped two six-packs from home the weekend before, and he, Rambo, and I met at our spot in the woods past the cornfields. We ran for it. When we got there, Rambo set a big flashlight upright so the beam of light went straight up, made the trees naked. It was cold, maybe February, and our breath sometimes floated through the light beam.
After a couple of beers, we started to warm up, and Donny made us do Beerhunter.
“Scared?” he said.
Rambo grabbed one of the Coors and shook it. Then she started moving the beers around like they were peas under cups, and I couldn’t tell where the shaken one went.
“Okay, Macho Man,” Rambo said, “You start.”
All three of us sitting on logs around a flashlight pointed straight up, we could have been Boy Scouts camping. Our foreheads were light, but our eyes and mouths were shadows. Donny held the Coors to his temple.
“WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote,” he said. He hated Chaucer. His eyes closed, he popped open the tab. The click and fizz were quick. Donny’s eyes opened. He survived.
In this nut house, you see a different shrink every few days. The girl-shrink says that what I’m doing with my life is playing roulette. Whatever.
I told her about Jack and Alta. Not everything, but some.
I told her that you were the only person to get me, more than anybody, even Doug.
And I told her everything I touch dies.
What a loser.
She told me I had choices.
Does a stonefly choose to molt twenty-five times as a nymph? In three years, which is the same amount of time most kids are in boarding school, the nymphs stay submerged in water. That’s what it feels like, boarding school. A kid is down there in the muck where shit happens and looks up at something he thinks is sky, a place he can breathe although he doesn’t know what breathing is. And every time he tries to get up there, his skin falls off. Twenty-five fucking times. That’s boarding school.
If I could choose, I’d be the female stonefly dancing on the river top. I’d flutter and splash to get my eggs out, and that would attract one single steelhead. That would be Alta.
If I could choose, I’d be her food.
So I choose not to tell Ms. Shrink about this thought, and she tells me how Ms. Alta had no choice but to inform the authorities about my suicidal tendencies. Harm to self or others is the line I crossed, and law bound her to report me. Fucking-A.
Ms. Shrinko is wrong. Alta feels it, too. It scares her shitless.
That’s why she turned me in. Right?
You can tell me.