All the Bright Places(65)

But he keeps right on like he doesn’t hear me. “As a matter of fact, we should do this with Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio.”

“Why aren’t you on your way to class?” I’m wearing one of his flowers in my hair.

“I got expelled. Just come out here.”

“Expelled?”

“Let’s go. I’m wasting gas and daylight.”

“It’s four hours to Evansville, Finch. By the time we get there, it’ll be dark.”

“Not if we leave now. Come on, come on, get on out here. We can sleep there.” He is talking too fast, as if everything depends on us looking at nest houses. When I ask him what happened, he just says he’ll tell me later, but he needs to go now, as soon as possible.

“It’s a Tuesday in winter. We’re not sleeping in a nest house. We can go Saturday. If you wait for me after school, we can go somewhere a little closer than the Indiana-Kentucky border.”

“You know what? Why don’t we just forget it? Why don’t I go by myself? I think I’d rather go alone anyway.” Through the phone, his voice sounds hollow, and then he hangs up on me.

I’m still staring at the phone when Ryan walks past with Suze Haines, hand in hand. “Everything okay?” he says.

“Everything’s fine,” I answer, wondering what on earth just happened.





FINCH


Days 66 and 67


The Nest Houses aren’t there. It’s dark by the time I stop in downtown New Harmony, with its brightly painted buildings, and ask everyone I can find about where the houses have gone. Most people haven’t heard of them, but one old man tells me, “Sorry you came all this way. I’m afraid they been ate up by weather and the elements.”

Just like all of us. The Nest Houses have reached their life expectancy. I think of the mud nest we made for the cardinal, all those years ago, and wonder if it’s still there. I imagine his little bones in his little grave, and it is the saddest thought in the world.


At home, everyone is asleep. I go upstairs, and for a long time I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, and I actually disappear before my eyes.

I am disappearing. Maybe I’m already gone.

Instead of feeling panicked, I am fascinated, as if I’m a monkey in a lab. What makes the monkey turn invisible? And if you can’t see him, can you still touch him if you wave your hand around in the place where he used to be? I lay my hand on my chest, over my heart, and I can feel the flesh and bone and the hard, erratic beating of the organ that is keeping me alive.

I walk into my closet and shut the door. Inside, I try not to take up too much space or make any noise, because if I do, I may wake up the darkness, and I want the darkness to sleep. I’m careful when I breathe so as not to breathe too loudly. If I breathe too loudly, there’s no telling what the darkness will do to me or to Violet or to anyone I love.


The next morning I check messages on our home voicemail, the landline my mom and sisters and I share. There is one from Embryo for my mother, left yesterday afternoon. “Mrs. Finch, this is Robert Embry from Bartlett High. As you know, I’ve been counseling your son. I need to talk to you about Theodore. I’m afraid it’s extremely important. Please call me back.” He leaves the number.

I play the message two more times and then delete it.

Instead of going to school, I go back upstairs and into my closet, because if I leave, I will die. And then I remember that I’ve been expelled, so it’s not as if I can go to school anyway.

The best thing about the closet: no wide-open space. I sit very quietly and very still and am careful how I breathe.

A string of thoughts runs through my head like a song I can’t get rid of, over and over in the same order: I am broken. I am a fraud. I am impossible to love. It’s only a matter of time until Violet figures it out. You warned her. What does she want from you? You told her how it was.

Bipolar disorder, my mind says, labeling itself. Bipolar, bipolar, bipolar.

And then it starts all over again: I am broken. I am a fraud. I am impossible to love.…


I am quiet at dinner, but after Tell me what you learned today, Decca, Tell me what you learned today, Theodore, my mother and Decca are quiet too. No one notices that I am busy thinking. We eat in silence, and afterward, I find the sleeping pills in my mom’s medicine cabinet. I take the whole bottle back to my room and drop half the contents down my throat and then, in the bathroom, bend over the sink, washing them down. Let’s see what Cesare Pavese felt. Let’s see if there’s any valiant acclamation to this. I stretch out on the floor of my closet, the bottle in my hand. I try to imagine my body shutting down, little by little, going totally numb. I almost feel the heaviness coming over me, even though I know it’s too fast.

I can barely lift my head, and my feet seem miles away. Stay here, the pills say. Don’t move. Let us do our work.

It’s this haze of blackness that settles over me, like a fog, only darker. My body is pressed down by the black and the fog, into the floor. There’s no acclamation here. This is what it feels like to be asleep.

I force myself up and drag myself into the bathroom, where I stick my finger down my throat and throw up. Nothing much comes out, even though I just ate. I try again and again, and then I pull on my sneakers and run. My limbs are heavy, and I am running through quicksand, but I am breathing and determined.