“What if she tries to make me hurt myself again?” I asked, all concerned. “Or what if she makes me hurt someone else? I might start pirouetting all over the lounge uncontrollably, and I don’t know what would happen if I did that. It could be a Sugar Plum massacre.”
“Are you finished?” Cat Poop asked.
“That depends,” I told him, talking like my normal self again. “Are you ready to let me go home now?”
“You’re here for the full forty-five days,” said Cat Poop. “You can waste every single one of them if you want to, but you’re going to spend them here.”
That made me angry. “I thought you said I was wasting your time,” I snapped.
“You are,” he said. “You’re also wasting yours, as well as that of someone else who would really like to be helped, who can’t be here because you are. I want you to think about that. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He looked down, and I knew that was my signal to leave. So I did. And I was happy to get out of there. I couldn’t believe he was lecturing me about wasting time when he’s the one keeping me in this place. All he has to do is say I’m normal and I’ll be out of here. If a real whack-job wants my place so badly, I’m perfectly happy to give it up. I’m tired of people thinking they’re doing me favors.
Day 07
This morning I went into the lounge and found Sadie writing a letter. When I asked who she was writing to, she said her best friend. “Don’t you have a best friend?” she asked me. “You know, someone you tell everything to?”
“Not really,” I told her. “I’m not big into friends.”
Sadie looked at me funny, then noticed the clock. “I’ve got to go see Katzrupus,” she said, folding up her letter. “See you later?”
“Sure,” I told her. “I’m just going to do some homework. Apparently being imprisoned in the cuckoo house doesn’t get you out of learning about the reproductive cycle of the frog.”
That was another lie. Not the part about homework, the part about not having a best friend. I do, actually. Her name is Allie. I just didn’t feel like talking about her with Sadie.
That’s right, her. Allie is a girl. I know it’s kind of weird for a guy to have a girl best friend, but I do.
The first time I saw Allie was when Mrs. Pennyfall, the principal’s secretary, walked her into our seventh grade social studies class. Allie stared around the room like she wished she could set it on fire. The only free desk was next to mine, so she had to take it. That whole class, she sat there with her head down, drawing on the cover of her notebook. I kept trying to see what she was drawing, but I didn’t want her to think I was staring at her.
Eventually she moved the notebook over a little and I saw what she was doing. The entire cover was covered in perfect little bats. They looked like they were swarming out of the center of the notebook, spiraling around in a big cloud. I couldn’t stop looking at them, and Allie noticed. She covered the notebook with her social studies textbook.
After class, I followed her into the hall and told her how cool I thought the bats were. She looked at me and said, “I really don’t need any friends, okay? I have enough problems.”
“Whatever,” I told her. “But you do need someone to show you around. Otherwise you might make the mistake of talking to the wrong people, and then your entire social life will be a disaster.”
She looked at me for a moment and then laughed. That’s how it started. We had lunch together, and the next day she sat by me in social studies again. I found out she liked some of the things I like—sci-fi movies and roller coasters and some other stuff—and I invited her over to watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is the greatest movie ever made, and way better than Star Wars, no matter what the geeks say. She said okay, and after that we were best friends.
Allie’s story is that her mom and dad split up, and her mom moved her to our town because she said it was as far away from Allie’s dad as she could get without making it too hard for Allie to see him if she wanted to. Only Allie didn’t want to see him, because she was really angry at him for cheating on her mother. That’s why they divorced. Allie’s mom found out her husband was sleeping with her best friend, which didn’t go over very well with her.
Anyway, Allie only sees her dad when she has to, like every other year at Thanksgiving and sometimes in the summer when he decides to pretend they have a relationship and he makes her go on vacation with him and his new wife, who Allie totally hates because she’s always trying to get Allie to like her. Her name is Kati—with no e—and she says things like, “Think of me as your big sister,” which Allie says makes her want to puke.
Like I said, some people think it’s weird that my best friend is a girl. Sometimes I think it’s weird, too. Mostly people assume that we’re boyfriend and girlfriend, which I guess we could be. But that just seems too teen-movie, if you know what I mean. A boy and girl are best friends, neither of them dates anyone else, and then one night they look at each other and—bang—they realize they’ve been in love with each other the whole time. Everyone’s happy and they go to the big dance together.
Allie and I did go to a dance together once—the spring social in eighth grade—just so we could see what was so thrilling to everyone else. Our mothers made a big deal about it, making us dress up and taking our pictures and all that crap. My mother still has one of the pictures framed and hanging on the wall in our living room. Every time Allie comes over she looks at it and says, “My hair looks like it exploded. Can’t you take that down?” But I think secretly she really likes that it’s there.
The best thing about Allie is that I can talk to her about pretty much anything. I wish I could talk to her about how I’m feeling right now, about how I hate being in this place with these other people and their weird problems. I know she’d get a laugh out of it all.
I guess I could write it all in a letter, like Sadie, but it’s not really the same. I’ll wait to tell her everything in person.
I was still thinking about Allie when Sadie came back. I was surprised that a whole hour had gone by already.
“How’d it go?” I asked her.
She said, “You know we’re not supposed to talk about our sessions with anyone. Seriously, it might set me back. Do you want to be responsible for that?”
“I’ll risk it,” I told her.
She slapped my arm. “Thanks for taking my mental health so seriously,” she said. “Actually, we talked about my dad.”
“What about him?”
Sadie sighed. “Oh, you know, about how I don’t think he really loves me and how maybe I was trying to get his attention.”
“Were you?”
Sadie looked at her nails, which were chewed down to almost nothing. “Seeing as how he was halfway around the world at the time giving a lecture on medieval architecture, I think I might have planned it a little better if I was,” she said. “Once he found out I wasn’t dead he waited another week to come home because there was a castle in Spain he wanted to see first.”
I wasn’t sure I believed her. I mean, a dad who lectures on medieval architecture? That sounds like something I’d make up. But I don’t know if Sadie is a liar or not. It’s hard to tell with crazy people.
“Do you really think he doesn’t love you?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “How do you really know if anyone loves you?”
When I didn’t answer, she looked at me. “Really, how do you know?”
I thought about it for a minute. “I guess you just assume they do until they tell you they don’t,” I said.