A World Without You(82)

“Your ‘diagnosis.’ You really are a narcissist, aren’t you? Can’t hide that fact, even in a world you made yourself.”

Ryan shoves my chest with his free hand, and I have to let go. He backs into his room and slams the door.

And with that sound, his false world shatters back into place. There’s a keypad by his door, bars on his window.

I take a deep, shuddering breath. “I am in control,” I tell Ryan’s closed door. As the air escapes my lips, the illusion melts away again.

I am in control.

“You are,” says a soft voice to my left, the last word lilting up as if the speaker was asking a question.

My heart thuds, hard, once, a pounding so violent that I actually clutch my chest. I whirl around on my heel.

Sofía stands in front of her bedroom door.

A grin cracks across my face like lightning. “I’m winning,” I tell her, rushing forward. “I can see through Ryan’s illusions, I know what he’s doing.”

“You can see through the illusions.” There it is again, that slightly higher note on the last word.

I reach for Sofía, but she steps back, holding her hands behind her back. Outside my reach.

She shakes her head and backs further into her bedroom. I catch just a glimpse of her pale pink rug, her neon pink comforter on her bed, the fuzzy lamp on her nightstand—and then she closes the door in my face.

“Sofía, wait—” I start, lunging for the door and throwing it open.

The room is empty. The mattress is bare; the walls and floor unadorned. I stumble, bile rising up in my throat. No. No, I had control. I was back in power. I stagger away from her room and into the hallway.

Ryan’s door is open again. He watches me with a smile as I scurry back to my room.





CHAPTER 56


Phoebe



It’s Thursday. Almost time for Bo to come home for the weekend.

But it’s like he never left. The house is quiet. Everyone walks around on eggshells.

Actually, we all walk around as if we were eggshells. We’re all afraid of breaking here.

Mom cleans more and more the closer we get to the weekend. The wood floors are like mirrors, the windows are washed, and there’s not a speck of dust to be found anywhere. That is, except for Bo’s room. Mom walks past his bedsheet-covered doorframe as if it weren’t there. And the gouge in the floor from Dad’s drill—she still hasn’t fixed that. It stands out even more now, a blemish against the rest of the perfect house, but it’s as if her eyes dance right over it.

Dad practically lives in his office. I think he might be sleeping there, even though it’s only four doors down from his and Mom’s bedroom.

Everyone is tense because this is Bo’s first weekend back since “the episode.”

I hate that. I hate labeling what happened. When Bo flipped out at school, my parents called it “the incident.” And now we have “the episode.”

It was a seizure of some kind. Call it what it is. It was a seizure that preceded delusions. I don’t know much else about it because no one will tell me. When Dad drove Bo to a clinic in the middle of the night, the doctors didn’t want to diagnose him without consulting Dr. Franklin first. And other than saying Bo needed to return to Berkshire Academy, Dr. Franklin hasn’t said much. At least not to me.

There are pieces of Bo in every diagnosis I read about online: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression. The more research I do, the stranger the diseases I find: brain lesions and mind-controlling viruses, flesh-eating amoebas and bacteria and fungi. There are no cures, only temporary treatment options. Sometimes minds are just plain broken—they see the world in a fractured way. Does it really matter what we call the problem with Bo’s brain if there’s no way to fix it?

It’s not like there is a name for the look in his eyes when he clutched at me, begging me to see the truth of a world that doesn’t exist.

I have gone over that night a thousand times. In the quiet of every night since, when my mother shuts the door to her bedroom and my father shuts the door to his office and I shut the door to my room, in those long empty spaces where no one moves but everyone’s awake, I have relived that last night with Bo over and over and over again. The crazed way he insisted that his girlfriend wasn’t dead, that I knew more than I was letting on, that he had some sort of power over all this. I can still feel the way his fingers dug into my shoulders when he clutched me, trying to shake his reality into my brain.

And I will never forget the way his eyes lost focus, the way his muscles seized. When you see seizures on television, they’re full of violent shaking, with people falling down and their bodies flopping around like a fish out of water, but that’s not what happened with Bo. Instead, he just went stiff as a board. His eyes closed, but I could see through his eyelids that they were still moving, violently shifting back and forth. His jaw went super tight, and his fingers became frozen claws. When Dad came outside, he couldn’t get Bo to walk; he had to pick him up by the shoulders and awkwardly shuffle him back inside while Mom called 911.

I kept backing away until I hit the dining room wall, and I stayed there, my back pressed against the beadboard the whole time. I watched as the EMTs arrived, as Bo came out of the seizure only to pass out. I stood there as Mom and Dad got into the car—Mom still in her pajamas and wearing a big overcoat—and followed the ambulance. I sank to the floor, my eyes still on the spot where Bo had been, and I fell asleep there, curled beside Mom’s china cabinet. When my parents came home the next morning, after checking Bo into St. Lucy’s, they didn’t even notice me. They walked right past the dining room, headed to their bed, exhausted from the night. Once I heard Mom snoring, I got up, walked up the stairs, and went to my room.