Overdose

23. Yvonne Mcreary

Lilith and I had been preparing hard. I trained constantly, and had managed to convince Lilith to train too. She had been very optimistic, but I had a feeling that she was hiding how she really felt. She went from being really upset and scared about her powers to this energetic ball of positivity. Maybe it was just the fact that I never was really happy for long until my depression kicked in, but I didn't believe that she was suddenly OK with everything that had been happening.

"Alright?" Heath asked as I sat next to him. I nodded.

"Do you think you can talk to Lilith?" I knew that Heath had known Lilith longer than I had.

"I thought she was feeling better." Heath set down the escape plans and covered them with a book. He looked at me, worried. I noticed that whenever Heath got worried or mad, he would bite his lip. Not in a flirty way, more of like "Good god someone's going to die" way.

"I think she's putting on a facade. I haven't known her for long, but no one goes from being that sad to happy in only a few days."

"Maybe she's bipolar?" Heath shrugged.

I know Heath wasn't trying to sound ignorant, but his question just made me think of how people constantly connect the smallest behaviors to mental disorders. You get nervous about a test? Anxiety. You're sad because your partner broke up with you? Depression. You like to keep your room clean? OCD. If there's one thing that makes me truly angry, it's people that either don't see that mental illness is a big deal, or people who don't know anything about mental illness and say they have an illness that they don't have. But I knew Heath wasn't trying to be one of those people. So I didn't get mad.

"That's not what bipolar disorder is, but I can understand why you might think that." I brushed his comment off. "I just think that she doesn't want people to know how sad she is."

"I'll convince her to go see Nathaniel. I'll go down with her." Heath glanced at one of the guards, and then lowered his voice. "Xander doesn't like people talking about his son."

"Why not?"

"His son and him don't see eye to eye. But I'm sure you can guess that from the fact that he locked him up."

"Lilith and Nathaniel are really close." I wondered out loud. "Almost like brother and sister."

"Xander is a terrible father. Locking his own son up." Heath shook his head. "I'd rather he'd just erase Nathaniel's memory and not tell him that he's his father. But I digress."

I was going to say something but Marina sat down next to Heath. "Still talking about Nathaniel?" She asked sweetly.

"Just telling Yvonne about him. That's all."

"We don't have to talk about him anymore." I smiled at Marina. She smiled back, but it didn't exactly look like a warm smile.

"Good. So, Yvonne, how are you adjusting to your powers?" Besides her smile, she sounded pretty genuinely interested.

"Dr. Helena had me working on them at training. But she would only work on stuff for fighting. Not anything else."

"I'm not surprised." Heath sighed. "I can help you. Marina, you wanna teach her some stuff too?"

Marina nodded. That time, her smile looked genuine. I made a mental note to not mention Nathaniel around her. "This really means a lot to me." I expressed.

"We know." Heath declared. He sat up, looking proud. Marina rolled her eyes playfully.

"Now, I want you to get Lilith on board. It's important that she learns how to use her powers as well. I wish we had our friends from Containment. Their powers were so cool. Isaac would burn our homework when we got them back. And Rem, well, he did this thing where he would pretend to die. He worked with reality, and he would make it seem like his heart stopped. He loved doing that to us." Nathaniel laughed softly. "We hated when he did that."