Eight

Screenwriters should stop going to the same school, or at least stop writing the same stories. The movie Junior picked—High School Musical—got louder as the students broke out into a simultaneous dance and song after tearing up their midterm exams or something. Nobody dances like that in school. Nobody dances like that anywhere, really. I understood why Junior hated this film. I almost threw up, but controlled my gag reflex and looked at my feet until feeling came back to my stomach. Just kidding, it wasn’t that bad, but it did seem like a very tired narrative.

Another student on screen began preaching about the finer points of life, and why the other students had missed out on those good things for so long. They all agreed to fight the powers that be, one dance at a time, smiling their way to a restructuring of enforcement. How vogue. At least the lead actor was kind of attractive, so I daydreamed about being in that school and meeting him. Then I saw Fitz and realized I already had that. I know, I know, way too mushy. I agree.

Fitz was wearing his Namaste in Tonight shirt—seriously, we had maybe four different shirts and a couple pairs of pants, nothing spectacular—and I commented on the irony of his clothing choice considering tonight was the night we were escaping.

On screen, one of the students swiped something from the teacher’s desk, only for the teacher to immediately notice it was missing. It was a playful gesture, but it made me nervous.

“Isn’t Martha going to notice that we never returned from our different errands or whatever?”

“I’m not worried about Martha,” he said.

“Why not?”

Fitz started laughing. “Willy, that’s a good one. I think you should tell Toby. I’m kind of busy. Sorry, Addie,” he said.

“No worries. Can you tell me?”

“I could tell you, but then I’d feel bad. It’s kind of lousy.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Maybe later, Willy,” he said, motioning for Willy to take a hike. “Sorry. But getting back to what you were asking: Martha will have to work on an incident report with Potts because of Leah’s running. It won’t be anything serious, but you know they have to report all of that. Martha is forgetful. And even if she does notice, we’ll be long gone.”

“Speaking of long gone,” I said. “Where do you plan on staying tonight when we get out? We have to think of these things, or we’ll really be up a creek.”

“We’ll take a bus to a motel near where the ferries launch to the island. We’ll be fine,” he said, slouching in his chair. “Won’t we, guys?” He leaned to his left and nodded his head and kept saying things like, “Yep, sounds good,” and “Wouldn’t have it any other way” until I hit him in the arm. “You’ve got to understand that we won’t be alone,” he said, smiling at me.

I was glad Fitz was able to make light of his situation. I think I’d be terrified knowing I would never be alone, that those voices would always be there. I guess we all have an interior monologue, but for it to be so insistent and loud and populated would be impossible to ignore. Maybe his life was a series of interruptions, and he lived in the space between. He lived in the spurts and spats between the longer moments of conversing with the imaginary group that followed him everywhere.

Maybe Doc was confident he could rid Fitz entirely of those intrusions, but I doubted it. If this was the best Fitz had ever been, I figured he would never really get past those other voices in the background. It made me sad. I rested my hand on his briefly.

“My heart is like a freaking hummingbird,” I said.

“Then I’ll go first,” he said.

Fitz asked Jenkins if he could walk him to his room—I didn’t hear the excuse he gave, but I started thinking of how I was going to have to trick Martha. I didn’t know what to do. Why hadn’t we planned better what we were going to do? At least we’d thought of breaking our pills in half the day before. That would buy us at least one day on the outside before the tremors hit.

Fitz returned ten minutes later, just as the students on the screen were breaking into song in the gym after passing the basketball around. They all looked so happy; it was actually quite wonderful. But it was so easy to see through those masks. Everyone wears a mask, but actors get to change theirs constantly. I kind of envied the way they played different parts and got to live different lives. They could empathize with so many types of people, of personhood. If actors were the opposite of people, what did that make me? A series of masks, maybe.

“I’m so nervous,” I said, alternating my blinks at a rapid rate.

“I didn’t do anything but go to the bathroom,” he said.

“What?”

“It was a dumb idea to try the change-of-clothes thing,” he said. “It’s too obvious. Why didn’t we think of that? Of course they’ll notice we walked into our room with nothing and came out with a bundle under our shirt or something. So stupid. But I did grab our pills. I can pocket those.”

“Good. The pills are the most important thing. It’s not like we need the extra clothes, right? I mean, we’ll need to stop someplace for shoes either way.”

Fitz smiled and flashed that handsome gap.

“Luckily you won’t get too many looks in Seattle for walking around barefoot. But I agree, we should get something for our feet.”

I wanted to keep talking to Fitz, but I was too nervous. I tapped my hand on each leg seventeen times and then repeated the process. I asked Martha if I could use the restroom so I could wash my hands, and she obliged. When I got back, the movie was reaching the closing scene where the students were dancing on some massive stage in a giant auditorium or something. It looked ridiculous.

“Sure is true to life, isn’t it?” said Fitz, loud enough that Junior could hear.

“Just like my childhood,” I said, just as loud. “I always danced in class when I wanted to really feel alive.”

As the credits rolled, I realized I hadn’t spent enough time emotionally preparing myself for the chain of events that was about to be set in motion with Junior’s outburst.

I wished we had spent another few weeks planning everything or had gone over the details more, but Fitz was adamant about the timeline for some reason, and he still wouldn’t tell me why. Maybe I was wrong to trust him, but at the time I only knew he was desperate and I wanted to help. I wanted to find out my own answers, too, for Dr. Morris and for myself. Maybe I was more selfish than I let on. Whatever.

Junior stood up just then and heaved a chair into the wall—harder than usual. He broke through the drywall. He knocked over another chair just as the orderlies stood and walked his way.

“Where’s a knife?” he yelled, lifting another chair over his head. “I’m gonna rip their cute little faces out of that screen! Nobody is that happy!”

The orderlies backed away, and Junior threw a second chair into the wall. Jenkins grabbed Junior, and I could tell that Junior was strong enough to break free but chose not to. He fought it off for a while to really sell it, though.

He looked at us and winked as the orderlies dragged him to the door. He kept shouting about a knife to make sure he’d go on suicide watch. I could tell he was not legitimately mad, and that the knife comment was just for show.

Junior was still shouting as Martha turned off the TV and motioned for us to line up at the door. Didi couldn’t stand still, and I saw him raise his eyebrows as Martha came closer. He started flapping the ears on his hat and singing some opera song I’d never heard. But knowing Didi, he’d probably claim he wrote the opera himself years ago and that it won a bunch of awards. Like, all the awards.

Martha told Didi to calm down, so he took his hat off and started swinging it around. He leaned back, yelping and shouting, “Gotta get me that eight seconds for a score!” and acting like he was holding onto a rope like a true bull rider. Didi then dropped his hat and looked at Martha and started running around the room, flapping his arms and yelling, “Fly like butter, sting like a flea!”

Martha looked super annoyed and waited for him to stop. But he didn’t.

His whole act was way over the top, but Martha wasn’t going to question Didi because then she’d have to log his outburst in the shift notes that night. She bent over to pick up his hat, and it was time for me to get her keycard.

Leah was supposed to help, but she stayed in her seat and looked nervous. I didn’t want Martha to hear or feel the keycard being clipped, so I stood there unsure of what to do.

That’s when something happened that I am still not quite sure how to explain because it went against everything I knew about the guy: Wolf looked at me, then at Leah, then took off in a sprint in Junior’s direction yelling, “Hi-Ho, Silver!” as he jumped onto Junior’s back. He started yelling, “Hyah! Hyah! Go, boy! Hyah!” as he kicked his feet into Junior’s ribcage like he was spurring a horse.

I almost didn’t get the keycard because I was so shocked, but as Martha turned to help with Junior, I grabbed the card. I know she didn’t feel it because she was so surprised by Wolf’s outburst, as we all were, I’m sure.

It looked like Junior was laughing but still trying to maintain his serious and angry demeanor.

That’s when Leah stood up, perhaps encouraged by Wolf, and screamed at the top of her lungs. I quickly covered my ears like the rest of the group. Well, except for Wolf. He was still shouting, “Hyah!”

The scream brought Martha running back our way. She looked at Leah, who was standing next to me, with a shocked expression.

“I just was curious how loud I could scream,” said Leah, her face turning pink.

“My goodness, child,” said Martha. “You were all acting fine during the movie. And it wasn’t even a good one. Now you’re on one—all of you. I wish you had smiles like those kids on the screen. And quit all that yelling and flapping,” she said to Didi.

“The Magic Schoolbus!” said Didi.

I don’t think Didi meant to say it, but it seemed to fit the moment just fine.

Martha just shook her head and gave Didi back his hat. She opened the door, holding her hand out to lead us into the hallway.

Jenkins had Wolf under control, and Junior was on his way to the suicide watch room.

Everything was working out just fine—and that made me nervous. No plans ever work out that smoothly.

Who would have guessed Wolf would come through for us? Wow. Maybe Wolf was a lot more coherent than any of us thought. He never let on that he was listening to what we had talked about in the chapel. In fact, he always looked so uninterested that we all thought he just walked around with us and nothing more. Turns out we were wrong, and it was nice to be wrong about Wolf.

I was sure the other slip-resistant bootie was about to drop. Like, Martha would notice her keycard missing, or Wolf would suddenly start saying something other than asking for his horse and totally give us all up.

But that didn’t happen. We walked to our individual rooms and sat in silence for over an hour. I stared at my watch and was careful to move every few minutes so I didn’t fall asleep. The pills I was on made me quite sleepy and hungry. I flipped through The Real Inspector Hound and made sure I’d found every bill hidden in the pages, and pocketed the cash.

I’d probably put on a few more pounds over the last week, but I was careful not to speculate or feel my stomach or anything. Wasn’t worth my time. I’d already spent hours talking with Ramirez about the weight gain, and he kept telling me different ways to handle those intrusive thoughts. I’m not saying it all worked, but I was getting better at keeping my hands by my side and leaving my stomach alone.

I decided to read because I had to keep my mind from wandering back to my anxious thoughts of the escape. It was difficult because I had the keycard in the pocket of my sweats, and I kept turning it, my palms hot. I wanted to wash my hands after holding the keycard, but I waited because the plan required that I wait.

To keep from obsessing, I opened up Waiting for Godot and read more about Vladimir and Estragon, and I was just getting to the scene where they started swapping hats in this really fast-moving part when I looked at my watch and realized it was almost time.

It was tricky reading by moonlight, but when I’d tried turning on my light, Martha shouted, “Lights out!” But that was good news: Martha was out there reading, which meant that Potts and Jenkins were in their places too, most likely.

I considered writing Martha a note, just to let her know that we would be okay and that we were sorry about putting her through all of this. But I didn’t. I regretted it later, but at the time I was too nervous, too worried she might find the note before we got far enough away from the hospital.

Five minutes later, I knocked on my door.

“Bathroom,” I said.

I could hear Martha’s heavy sigh on the other side of the door, and I listened as she struggled to get up from her chair. It sounded like quite the ordeal, shifting papers and gasps and grunts.

As I walked to the bathroom, I heard Fitz knock on his door, and Martha told me to hurry. She turned away, and I realized I wouldn’t have to tell her I was seeing Jenkins about my pill or anything. I walked past both the pharmacy and Potts, who looked like he was reading something on the computer.

Fitz was in the process of making up some story about needing to see Jenkins about his pill when I heard another knock: Leah. I was amazed everything was moving so precisely. When in need of precision, courage, and proper execution, just look to the adolescent psych ward. That was probably a pretty popular phrase, right? I bet it’s on some poster in the offices of all the most powerful CEOs out there, or used as a movie tagline. Or it should be.

Fitz turned the corner and walked my way just as Martha was nearing Leah’s door, or so I hoped. I mean, I couldn’t see Martha at that point. We stood behind a fake ficus tree near Potts’s station by the front door and hunched into the shadows. Thankfully the hospital was all about conserving energy, so only half the lights were on at night, making it easier to hide.

I felt Fitz’s body heat and smelled his scent—all guys have a scent. I’m sure all girls do, too, but it’s impossible to know how you smell, right? Anyway, we both watched as Leah came booking around the corner at a full sprint. She was a fast little girl. Her feet padded against the tiles as she zipped by the front desk and down the hall. It was nice to see her leg it like that.

Potts almost fell off his chair when he heard Martha scream Leah’s name. He opened his door and took off after Leah, who was laughing, and I almost laughed out loud with her.

Martha came huffing around the corner and looked annoyed and tired and maybe like she thought it was a little funny that she was chasing a girl at midnight down a hall in a psych ward. Martha shouted Leah’s name again, and it’s the last thing we heard.

Fitz and I were out the door.

I had the keycard in my hand. “What are we supposed to do with this?” I whispered to Fitz. “She’ll notice, and we’ll be caught before we get anywhere.”

I’d spent an entire week after our Sunday talk coming up with plans for numerous scenarios that were not probable but simple and maybe even likely. But, of course, I hadn’t planned for this specific moment. And, of course, we’d missed a few things. Isn’t that always the case?

“Slide it back under the door,” Fitz whispered.

“What? Why?”

“If you slide it far enough, maybe she’ll think it fell off while she was running after Leah. Hurry!”

Fitz grabbed the card and slid it as far as he could. Moments later, we heard Martha’s voice from down the hall. We took off in a sprint, only slowing down when we reached the elevator bank.

“We just walk out the door?” I said.

“To the ER. Then out the door,” he said. “Nobody looks twice at people leaving the ER in a sad sartorial state,” Fitz said as we rode the elevator down to the main level. “Pretty good word, huh? Sartorial. Picked it up from Ninja Assassin Protocol 4.”

I was blinking so rapidly that I only caught glimpses of Fitz. The elevator doors opened, and Fitz walked me to the ER. He could tell I wasn’t doing so hot. I took deeper breaths and gathered my emotions before we stepped into the lit hallway of the ER. I knew there would be a lot of people, and I couldn’t show any signs of abnormal behavior.

Fitz held my hand and walked with purpose. “If you’re confident,” he said under his breath, “nobody will think twice about what you’re doing or why.”

And it was true.

We walked right out the door, slip-resistant booties and all.

We walked into a breezy, starlit night and didn’t look back.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. We looked back when we were a block away. The night was a bit colder than I’d expected it to be, but the temperatures in Seattle could be just as mercurial as Fitz, changing by the minute. I told him we should hurry to a bus before word got out that we’d escaped. I wanted to be indoors somewhere before planning our next move.

“Look at all those stars,” he said, still holding my hand.

“We’re free of the hospital, you know,” I said, looking down at our hands.

“And?”

He smiled, and I felt all my insides come untethered. My heart picked up its thrumming pace.

“Let’s get to a motel. I have enough for maybe two nights, as long as we’re not too spendy on our shoes. I’d like to get a better sweater, too. I bet it will be colder tomorrow.” I had on my usual gray sweater, but it was pretty threadbare.

Fitz hugged me to him, and I felt myself relax in his embrace. “I’ll keep you warm,” he said.

I didn’t look up, but I could feel his heart beating against mine. I wanted to stay there forever, but we had to keep moving.

He seemed to know where he was going, so I followed Fitz and smiled at the way he walked so confidently with my hand in his. We were able to find a bus, but the driver only knew of one motel near the ferry. It made our choice pretty easy.

It was a longer ride than I’d expected, with a lot of stops thrown in, but I’d always enjoyed watching people get on and off the bus. It was this odd form of people-watching where I could give them narratives and imagine what their lives were like when they stepped past the sighing doors and back onto the pavement of reality. It was kind of inspiring, in a weird way.

“You guys warm?” said Fitz, looking at the empty seats in front of us.

“Are they acting cold?”

“Just Lyle. He’s a snowflake,” he said, then wrinkled his brow. “Maybe that’s the wrong term. He’s a delicate flower.”

“At least they made it out of the hospital,” I said. “I was worried that Willy would get his long braids stuck in a door or something.”

Fitz just smiled and rested his hand on my lap.

I mean, like I said, I was never really one to break the rules. I was always home on time. I always slept in my own bed or on the couch by our family dog, Duck. So being on a bus with a boy in a city I’d only traveled through during the day with Mom was like being in the Twilight Zone. I didn’t know how to get a read on the emotions, the colors, the scents, the lighting, or the other people we saw who were just going about their daily routines.

When we arrived at the motel, we stepped off into a much colder wind. The blinking neon sign a hundred yards away had only half of the letters working —TEL. The bus drifted back into the nighttime sounds of the city. I smelled cheap, fast food and the salty ocean breeze.

“Let’s hurry,” he said.

“Wait,” I said, grabbing his arm. “If the orderlies find out we’re gone, they’re going to look to any form of transportation we could have taken. If they find that driver, he’ll point out exactly where he dropped us. It won’t take them long to take two and two and two and stack it all up to six.”

“You love your numbers,” he said.

“I’m serious.”

“I know,” said Fitz. “And you’re right. Man, I’m so cold!”

I thought of running into the motel and asking about other accommodations in the area, but then realized that wouldn’t work either. If the person working at the desk remembered telling two young people where to stay, then the trail would still be fresh for the police or whoever would come after us. At that moment, I imagined the police handing hound dogs some of our clothes to get our scent. Stupid, I know, but whatever.

“Usually motels are in groups. Let’s just keep walking,” I said.

The wind cut right through me. I had on sweats, but neither of us had any shoes on. Hopefully the people at the front desk wouldn’t look too closely or care too much. Hopefully Fitz was right about people in Seattle not worrying about that kind of thing.

Fitz’s hair was all over the place, and I realized that his bandana looked even stranger outside of the hospital. Everything did, except maybe his shirt. Funny how that worked out. He used his body to try to shield me from the breeze, but eventually we just walked side by side at a fast clip for about four blocks before we saw a faded sign for an inn another half a block away.

I jumped a little, excited by the idea of any respite from the wind off the churning water.

We hurried to the front desk of the inn and found that the rate for one night wasn’t that much more expensive than the motel. It probably meant the room wasn’t all that nice, but all I wanted was a warm bed and a warm shower.

There was no clerk at the desk when we arrived. I rang the small bell, and we waited. It was one of those obnoxious tabletop bells that seem more like you’re insulting someone rather than just attempting to get somebody’s attention.

A short man walked in, looking sleepy. His tie was loose and askew, and two buttons on his shirt had popped off. We stood close to the desk so he wouldn’t be able to tell that we didn’t have any shoes or luggage. Maps of the islands were spread out beneath a thin glass plate on the countertop, finger-smudges all over the little dots of green and large swaths of blue beneath. I traced the lines of the ferries from port to port until the clerk finished logging onto the computer.

“One room,” Fitz said.

I blushed and looked away. The clerk looked at me and then at Fitz and told us the price. He was maybe a year or two out of high school, and even that was a stretch. He didn’t seem to care about our ostensible rendezvous.

When I handed over the cash, he gave us another odd look, but passed us the key and told us where the elevators were and when breakfast would be served, then he headed back to the dark office where he would most likely go right back to sleep.

The room was garish and dirty. Loud and shiny decorations attempted to mask the awful smell of mushrooms and the beer stains on the walls and the floor. There was a nautical theme to the room, fitting seeing as we were near Fidalgo Island, with windows looking out onto the streets that led to the water.

“We got lucky,” I said.

“Very lucky,” said Fitz.

“What were you going to do if I hadn’t gotten the money?”

“Probably find some homeless shelter or sleep in one of those ATM portals that close off. I don’t know. It wasn’t the first thing on my list,” he said.

I plopped down on the bed. I was so tired that it didn’t fully register that there was only one bed until Fitz sighed and dropped next to me, his body like a massive boulder hitting a rickety cot. His weight tugged at me, pulling me closer into the large indent our bodies made in the cheap mattress.

“We got lucky,” I repeated. “Doesn’t mean you’ll get lucky.”

“So presumptuous.”

“Well,” I said, waiting for his response.

“It’s the universe,” said Fitz. “Knows it owes me one.”

“So arrogant. Classic tragic character flaw,” I said, smiling.

We both stared at the ceiling for a while in silence. I could hear his breathing and his heartbeat, and I started counting the number of beats, the blinking on and off with each alternating aortic push.

“We could watch a movie. Oh, and I’ll sleep on the couch. I’m a gentleman, after all,” he said, smiling. “Lyle, I’m not in the mood. Yes, I think you did a fine job earlier today. Thanks for taking a minute to talk to me. Go write some lyrics or something.” Fitz waved to his right, as if motioning someone away.

“It’s the middle of the night,” I said.

“Addie Foster. You’re supposed to be the comic character. You should say something funny instead of denying a movie. Shut up, Toby!” He laughed and rolled on his side and rested his chin against his hand. “Country singers. They ruin every possible romantic moment, don’t they?”

“We’re a mess,” I said.

The awkwardness of being alone with Fitz outside of the hospital was gone, and I felt comfortable just lying next to him, tapping my hand on the bed and blinking in my usual pattern. I waited a few minutes before talking, hoping he’d say something first.

I wanted to ask him more about San Juan Island. Like, maybe since we were finally out, escaped, free, we could discuss why the island was so important to him, and why he had to go there before the middle of November. But I was too nervous, and I felt gross being in that germ-riddled room.

I rolled off the bed and went to shower. When I came back, Fitz was on the couch, totally out, snoring like an old car engine starting up on a winter morning. I climbed into bed and tried not to think of all the people who had slept in that bed before me.

The sheets smelled like musty books in dusty boxes in the attic at home. I was wary of how often the sheets were washed, or what might be crawling around inside the mattress, but I tried to shrug off those thoughts and sleep. It didn’t work.

It didn’t help that I kept thinking of how dangerous it was to let Fitz into my life. I considered waking him up to tell him that he shouldn’t get attached to me, that we wouldn’t end up together because we had too many issues to deal with outside of just normal living, normal loving. But I let him sleep.

At some point in the night, I realized that I had free access to a sink and soap and no Martha to stop me. That was dangerous. I kept thinking of all the messy bodies that had made their way to those sheets—sweaty bodies, bodies with dead skin flaking off everywhere, bodies with other bodies. Fluids. Ugh. Gross.

I took another, longer, shower and ended up laying down on top of the sheet. I know it really didn’t make a difference, but it was the only way I could justify being anywhere near that bed. And that’s when I heard it. It was a sound that I’d grown to love as a child, and one that always made me feel nostalgic, made me think of home: a foghorn sounded, sending its yearning call into the foggy night.