t w e n t y – t h r e e
“How do you feel?”
“Alright.”
“Any red thoughts?”
“Not for two days.”
“Pain?”
“Three – ow.”
“Sorry.”
Dr. Lemaiy removes the stethoscope from my chest. I look at it.
“Why do you have that? Shrinks don’t use stethoscopes.”
“Heartbeats can tell you a lot,” Dr. Lemaiy says, leaning back in his chair. I feel like I can’t see him; my eyes are dull and my vision is blurred around the edges. It’s the meds. It happens every time they amp up the dosage. They fuck me up but I’m saner these days. Didn’t want to pull myself out of my skin. Didn’t hurt anyone. It’s been four days since then and Mikaela’s been skirting around my edges and bringing me food I don’t want to eat. Everyone in the building heard the screaming. Everyone saw Dexter running out. Everyone saw him crash down the stairs. Everyone saw Lola pick up what was left of him downstairs. And everyone looks at me like I did it. And I did. So I don’t blame them.
I don’t know how he is. Neither does Mikaela.
Dr. Lemaiy is swiveling about in his chair, looking at me.
“You have two options now, Evianna.”
“Yes.”
“First – you transfer to a college in Parnem and go there for good. Live with your aunt and commute. Try to…try to lead a normal life. Or, you could…you could go back.”
“To the Blue Leaf?”
“Yes.”
I look at the ceiling. I think I laugh.
“You need the help.”
“Do you ever wonder if I’d be like this even without all the shit? Without all the fucking brain pills? That maybe I’m just like this?”
He looks at me, slow and steady.
“No.”
“No?”
“No. It’s not normal. You have a disease, and it’s getting worse. You only think this way because you’ve forgotten your normal self, you’ve forgotten who you were and what you were like…Evianna, this is not who you are.”
I don’t say anything. Four days have passed. My brain is foggy. I should be sick of this by now, sick of how my life is on an endless loop of entropy without end, but maybe I’m so immune to it that I don’t even register the pain of it all.
The meds make my thoughts sharp inside my skull, the edges of the words scratching at the bone. So many words. Dr. Lemaiy is watching me, but I don’t say anything, don’t let myself think anything because it hurts.
“You have time,” he says finally. “Go home. You don’t have to decide anything now.”
“I know.”
I stand up. Suddenly, he grabs my hand. He’s never done this before. I look at him.
“Evianna…Eve – you’ve made progress. You have, in the little time you’ve seen me. I don’t know who you were before it all or how you were but I’m sure you were a beautiful person, and you still are, but in a different way. And I don’t want you to think you have to stay like this forever. You don’t.”
I pull my hand out of his and I nod because I don’t know how else to respond to the fire in his eyes. He sits back again, and I feel like his grey hair is bristling. Then I walk out of the clinic.
I walk back home. I like walking, my legs ache and I sweat on my back and under my arms and I smell, but it’s good because my body validates itself with something other than the pain I inflict upon myself. It takes me twenty minutes to get home. There’s a blonde girl sitting on the steps in front of Jack’s Mausoleum, wearing a camisole and hot pants, smoking a Marlboro. When she sees me, she wrinkles her nose.
“You should invest in a bra,” I tell her.
“Too lazy.”
She stands up, hitches up the strap of her top, and looks me right in the eye against the setting sun. She waits for me to ask.
“How is he?”
My throat hurts when I ask. My throat hurts like someone forced my mouth open and shoved a tennis ball down there. I clench my fists in my pockets.
“Broken wrist,” she said. “Apart from that, he’s being a whingy idiot about you.”
“I don’t want to know about it.”
She puts her hands on her waist, sticking out her chest and looking around, still wrinkling her goddamn nose.
“I don’t know what your goddamn problem is. He’s fucking in love with you.”
“That’s not true.”
She just looks at me. I stare back at her.
“I have problems, Lola. I do. I don’t want to be bound like this. And he’s binding me even when he isn’t here, more with his absence than his presence, don’t you see? He binds me with every time I think of him and every time I want to see him. I can feel my whole life shifting around him and I don’t want that, I don’t fucking want that. That is my goddamn problem.”
Her expression doesn’t change.
“Listen, I came to convey a message. He’s having his surgery the day after tomorrow. He wants you to be there when he wakes up in the night. When he…when he can see.”
She stumbles a bit on the last bit. I don’t know what to say. I wish I could be alone right now.
“He wants you to be the first person he sees.”
I look away from her, because I can’t contain myself. I can’t.
“Lola, I’ll kill myself trying to find my freedom.”
She understands, but doesn’t attempt to tell me not to, or that I’m wrong, or that her brother is good for me. She just nods to herself, not even to me. She takes another drag from her cigarette and discards it.
“I can’t tell you anything more, Eve.”
“I know.”
“I’ll go now.”
“Alright.”
She tries to smile at me. I don’t. Then she walks away.
Five hours later, her words are floating up from where she uttered them, knocking on the window of my bedroom, knocking at the inside of my mind. He’s fucking in love with you. And they drag me down. I feel myself wanting him and I sink deeper. I feel myself belonging to someone other than myself and I know that I will be gone unless I pull myself out. I know I am not strong enough.
But I know something out there that is.
*
