Grayscale

Chapter Eight

        When I woke up, I was in the back of my dad's Monte Carlo. He and my mom were talking in hushed voices, and my head was killing me. I cried out in pain, and their voices ceased to exist for a moment. "Sweetheart, are you okay? We're on the way home. Dr. Jenkins wrote a prescription and released you. We were there for just over three hours. Do you remember any of it?"

        I remembered flashes of bright lights, a lot of white, black shadows closing in as nurses in green smocks did the same. Screaming. Gunshots. The stuff nightmares were made of. "A little," I said, voice hoarse from my incessant wailing. All I really knew is that they'd given me a dose of my medicine. I could feel the steady throb in my arm where the needle had penetrated my skin. My guess is that I wasn't responsive enough to take it orally. Shocker, considering how little I remembered of my short hospital stay.

        "That's okay," my dad sighed. "We weren't expecting any different."

        "You scared us," my mom whispered. I saw her reach over and grab my dad's hand, and he gave hers a firm squeeze, as if to say, "We're in this together. It's okay." I knew that even if everything else went to shit in this world, my parents would still have each other. No matter how little time they actually spent together. They kind of defined soulmate, more so even than Dane and Robin did. And it was kind of beautiful, despite how much I disliked my father and his heavy-handed mode of discipline that sent me spiraling into flashbacks.

        I wondered if I would ever have that. That reassuring hand squeeze on the drive home, the every night phone call when one of us wasn't home. Never needing to say "I love you" because you just knew - you didn't need words to express your feelings. Being able to be a rock in someone's life, the one constant that would never change.

                                                       ~~~~

        Robin called me later that night, after hearing of my hospital stay through the grapevine. Jackson had told his girlfriend, who told her best friend, who was friends with a few freshman, who told Robin's younger brother, who, naturally, didn't have any of the facts correct, and reported to Robin that I'd held a gun to my head while screaming about soldiers on the battlefield. Apparently, my dad had had to wrestle the gun away from me, and I was wailing that I needed it, that I couldn't take it anymore.

        I would never understand the way gossip contorted facts.

        "No, Robin. None of that happened. We don't even keep a gun in the house; you know that. My dad sold them all the first time they had to hospitalize me. My mom doesn't even leave the drawer where we store the kitchen knives unlocked. I don't own a pocket knife anymore. Unless I used a dull pair of scissors to slit my wrists, there was literally nothing I could've used to commit suicide. Not that it would've been my fault, even if I had reached for a pair of scissors. My dad's the fucking psycho that sent me spiraling into a flashback." I told her the story, not omitting any details, even the ones about seeing shadows at the hospital. "They put me back on my PTSD meds," I finished. "Thankfully. If it was that easy for me to just slip again, I need them. I can't do that all the time."

        There was silence on the line for a while as Robin digested everything I'd told her. "Tell me something happy," she finally said. "I've almost lost you way too many times. I don't want to talk about anything related to that anymore. It freaks me out. And I'm not saying I'm not here anytime you need to talk - I just can't do it anymore today. So . . . how are you on the boy front? Any news?"

        I laughed, and the somber mood dissipated. I'd totally forgotten that I hadn't gotten the chance to tell anyone about Reed yet. A lot had happened between then and now. It was hard to believe it had only been about six hours since we parted ways. "Actually . . . yeah. Yeah, a lot happened on the boy front. Remember how I said I went out earlier to do some sketching? Well, I went to the fountain to do that, and there was this totally adorable kid sitting in it. I sketched him, and we ended up talking. His soulmate died about a month ago. He's totally grief-stricken, but he decided she'd want him to move on and be happy, and he knows that if he hadn't taken me up, he'd be alone for a long time before he finally found someone permanent again, since the dating scene is pretty nonexistent until we're like, in our forties, and people start dying off." It was kind of morbid, when you put it that way, but still true nonetheless. "So, anyway, we talked for like three hours. He's really sweet, and he's got a great sense of humor. And I think he and Dane would get along really well. He likes cheesy eighties movies too. His favorite is Laybrinth."