The Masked Truth(67)
“Riley, don’t. You’re—”
“Count of ten, Mom. If you’re still in here, I’m screaming until someone comes and then I’m confessing. Ten … nine …”
She leaves when I get to six.
CHAPTER 23
I’m so furious I can barely form words when the nurse stops by. I manage to tell her that I want to speak to the police—now. When she returns a few minutes later to say they’re on the way, I’m already on my laptop, researching schizophrenia so they can’t bullshit me.
Max has schizophrenia.
My initial reaction had been confusion, as I struggled to remember what it was. Once I did, I thought only, That fits. Overly worried about getting his meds, avoiding violent confrontations and, of course, the part where he’d warned me he sometimes got confused, imagined things that weren’t there.
Yet after I look it up and it really hits … I’m kind of angry and a little bit hurt. No, I am angry and I am hurt, and I cannot deny it.
I sit on my bed and stare at the wall, and I want to pull up the covers and roll over and shut the world out, because after four months of sleepwalking through my life, the one guy who made me feel something—really made me feel something, brought me back to myself and made me care—he lied to me. Told me he needed meds for a heart condition. Went through hell with me and never mentioned that he was suffering from a serious—yes, a very serious—mental illness. And it wasn’t like hiding an eating disorder, where it was none of my business under the circumstances. This one mattered.
I keep thinking about what we went through. No, that’s not exactly true. I keep feeling what we went through. Reliving not the horror of that warehouse but the parts that weren’t horrible. The parts with Max, the ones where he went from being the jerk at the back of the room to the guy who’d held my hand when I thought I was dying, who’d sworn I wasn’t dying—not just gentle and empty words but words he’d meant, passionately meant, as if he could stave off my death with them. I remember the boy who kissed me, tasting of fear and panic. I remember all that, and I remember how I felt about him. How I feel about him. And now finding out this? It hurts. It hurts so much.
But this isn’t the time for recriminations. As angry as I am, I acknowledge that he did warn me, in his way, and even if his explanation had been a lie, the warnings had not. He had made sure that if anything went wrong—if he started seeing or hearing things—I wouldn’t be caught off guard. So I’ll give him that, and while it does take the edge off my anger, it doesn’t ease the hurt. The only way I’ll deal with that is to face him and get his side of the story. First, though, I need to be prepared. To fully understand his condition.
So I continue my research.
On a scale of grave mental illnesses, schizophrenia is near the top. It isn’t a temporary bout of depression. It’s serious, and it’s life-altering, and it’s permanent. While I hate to give Sloane’s snark any credence, schizophrenia really is what most people think of when they say someone’s crazy. It’s the homeless guy arguing with himself. It’s that story in the news, the one where someone was murdered horribly and all you can think is “How can someone do that?” and the answer is “Schizophrenia.” But it’s not always like that. It’s not often that, the same way the average person with PTSD isn’t likely to snap and start shooting from a balcony. The extreme cases are the scary ones, though, and those are the ones that make the news.
Schizophrenia, like many mental illnesses, isn’t easily treated. In fact, it’s one of the toughest, because not everyone suffers the same symptoms. Max clearly doesn’t have a problem with personal hygiene. Nor does he seem to have any trouble with social interaction. Most schizophrenia symptoms can be controlled with medication, which must be tailored to the individual and the symptoms. The side effects are not negligible. They can include drowsiness or restlessness, tremors, muscle spasms, blurred vision … the list goes on.
There is no question of anything—and I mean anything—we experienced in that warehouse being Max’s fault. The only event I hadn’t witnessed myself was Aaron’s death. I remember how freaked out Max was, and now I know why. He must have been questioning the sequence of events himself, because the thing about a mental illness like schizophrenia is that you don’t know when a situation isn’t what it seems. You might know it’s possible you’re imagining it, but when it’s actually happening, there must be no way to tell reality from fantasy.
Everything I read says most people with schizophrenia can’t tell the difference while they’re experiencing an episode. That’s why Max had panicked. He knew his meds had run out, and he was terrified he had somehow played a role in Aaron’s death. That’s what I remember—his terror—and that’s when I truly forgive him for not telling me the truth.
He warned me, as best he could, in case something went wrong. What he has, though, isn’t something to be taken lightly, to be shared in casual conversation. I hate to talk about my anxiety and my depression. I’ve seen how people react to it. Now—through Sloane—I’ve seen how they react to schizophrenia, and I suspect her response is actually relatively benign, if inconsiderate and infuriating. Say “schizophrenia” and people remember those horrible news stories, and having seen that terror on Max’s face, I think that’s what he recalls too. But he did nothing wrong Friday night. The evidence in Aaron’s death supports Max’s story completely. Now I just need to make sure the police know it.