The Kids Aren't Alright

Chapter 75: Finn

The rest of the night passes by in a blur. After hours of dealing with the breakneck speed of people and questions and oh, God, the emotions— everything fades into a nonsensical, distorted fog. My head feels like it's full of the grey mist that always hovers over the lake, and my thoughts turn into radio static. My memories become blurry clips of a television show I watched once many years ago.

I wish I could sleep.

If only I felt tired.

The chaos continues all night long. Of course, the most insane part was my phone call with my mother.

It was weird, hearing my mom speak. I've begun to consider Lightlake as part of a separate universe from everything else, so when I heard my mom's voice, traveling through the phone lines all the way from Indiana, in the Med Cabin with the red emergency phone pressed up against my ear, I felt like I was breaking the law again. Communication between two parallel universes isn't allowed. Our phone call should have shattered the space-time continuum into a billion chunks of cosmic soup.

But her voice was there, and I was listening to it. The call wasn't unpleasant. She didn't cry or scream or curse, which was a relief, considering that hey, it's my mom, the very same woman who once called the dad of a kid on my soccer team a "pathetic eyesore of human being" after the dad informed our coach that said son was better equipped to play goalie than I was. This was in third grade. And, since I had a tendency to catch the ball with my face instead of my hands, the dad was probably right.

It almost would have made the phone call easier if she had freaked out. I could've just shouted back about how it wasn't my fault my counselor tried to kill me, slammed the phone back into the receiver, and been done with the whole ordeal. Instead I had to listen to mom's controlled voice, her eerily calm, almost robotic words, and pretend that I didn't sense how she wasn't okay at all— that she was panicked to the point where the only way she could retain her sanity was by putting on a false mask of confidence.

Obviously, I couldn't tell her about my close encounter with a mythical creature of the depths, so I had to lie through my teeth about everything that had happened at the lake, which made me feel disgustingly guilty inside, and left me wondering what kind of son I really was. Keeping the kraken a secret wasn't even a choice for me. The Director swore us all to secrecy. I don't know what I would've told my mom if the Director gave me the option to tell the truth— to be honest, I probably would've lied anyway. My mom would lose her shit if I told her about the kraken. She'd commit me to an institute like Emory. Still, knowing this doesn't keep the guilt from itching at me like a bad rash. In fact, I feel even worse knowing that I would have kept it all a secret either way.

Mom asked me if I'd gotten hurt and how I was feeling, and her eerily calm tone was so upsetting that I just smiled into the phone and told her that everything was swell. Then she asked if dad had called yet, so I lied again and told her yes. For some reason, I didn't feel bad about this bit of dishonesty.

Before she said goodbye, she offered to meet me at the airport in Alaska and fly home with me. I almost accepted.

But then I insisted that I was fine, and I had to say goodbye to my friends, and I was looking forward to traveling alone anyways, and mom eventually gave up trying to convince me that it was the safer option and we said our farewells and I promised to call her as soon as I got to the airport. Then she hung up, and she was gone. And our universes split apart all over again, this time even more violently than before.

"Everything alright?" Ronan asks me after the phone call is over. It's proven fact that phone calls from Lightlake never work out well, so he's rightfully concerned. "Did she freak?"