Something Like Normal(23)

“Yeah, I was at the beach with, um—with Harper Gray.”

“She’s such a sweet girl,” Mom says. “I refuse to believe the rumors I heard about her at school.”

“What rumors?”

“Mean, vulgar things I don’t even want to repeat.” She folds the shirt and puts it in a drawer. “I know she runs around with Lacey Ellison and Amber Reynolds, but—well, Harper Gray is not an S-L-U-T.” She spells it, as if she’s offended just saying the word. “What kind of person would even start those kinds of rumors?”

If she only knew.

“An idiot.”

“You were at the beach all night?”

“She volunteers with a sea turtle conservation group, so we were monitoring a hatching.”

Mom blinks. I’m pretty sure my high school career was more notorious in her mind than in real life. “Really?”

“Yep.” I reach into one of the bags and pull out a white T-shirt and a pair of normal-looking cargo shorts. “Do you mind if I borrow the car again? I need to run an errand.”

Mom rummages in her purse. “Will you be home for dinner? It’ll just be you, me, and Rye.”

I give her a grin. “As long as I don’t have to cook it.”

She laughs and throws me the keys.

After grabbing a quick shower, I head across town.

I had a good time last night with Harper, but the hallucinations and flashbacks are messing with my head. The nightmares suck, too, but at least they’ve happened when I’m asleep and not a danger to anyone. So far. What if I have a hallucination when I’m driving or something? What if I hurt myself—or worse, someone else?

My cell phone rings and it’s Eddie.

“Dude, I bought an AK-47,” he says. “Me, Michalski, and Rye are going shooting tomorrow. Wanna come?”

Used to be, every few weeks we’d pile into someone’s car and head up to the gun range on Tucker’s Grade to release a little 9 mm steam, playing Dirty Harry with Glocks and shotguns and a .38 Special that belonged to Eddie’s dad. For Eddie, an AK is a big deal, but everyone in Afghanistan has one. Taliban. The Afghan National Army. Even the farmers, who were mostly Taliban anyway. The novelty wears off after you’ve been shot at by one, so I’m not all that impressed. But, what the hell. I like shooting stuff. “Yeah, I’m in.”

“Where you at?” he asks.

“On my way to a doctor’s appointment.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I lie. “Routine checkup.”

“Come over later.”

“I might,” I say as I turn into the parking lot of the veterans’ clinic. I feel bad about it, but I don’t want to hang out with Eddie tonight.

I write my name on a sign-in form at the reception desk, but when the receptionist sees that I’m a walk-in patient she shakes one long glittery purple fingernail at me. “It’s better to have an appointment.” Her accent is Jamaican, or possibly Haitian. “But have a seat”—she looks at the sign-in sheet—“Travis Stephenson, and I will call you as soon as someone is available.”

I sit in a red molded plastic chair in a waiting room filled with people who aren’t anything like me. There are a couple of regular-looking guys, but they’re probably in their thirties or forties. One of them has a prosthetic leg. Straight across the aisle is a wrinkled old veteran in a red Wind-breaker with a USS Saratoga ball cap and a metal cane. He’s thumbing through an old copy of Newsweek. His mothball breath blasts across the aisle whenever he coughs. Two seats over from me is a skinny, sketchy-looking guy maybe five years older than me who can’t hold still. His knee keeps jittering, shaking the whole row of chairs, and he’s missing a couple of teeth.

“You Army?” he asks me, but doesn’t wait for my reply. “I was Special Forces. They picked me right out of basic because I already had a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu, so I didn’t need much training.”

“Hey, good for you, bro,” I say, and pick up a back copy of a news magazine that promises an article about the war in Afghanistan, hoping he’ll get the hint that I don’t want to chat.

“Yeah,” he continues. “I led my guys on a whole bunch of covert missions in Africa, and you know when they captured Saddam Hussein? That was us.”

“Sure, dude, whatever.”

“I’d still be in, but I broke my back on a helo jump,” he says. “They weren’t sure if I’d ever walk again, but I fought it, you know? The doctors are having trouble getting my meds right, though, because I have to take, like, six pills at once for the pain to even go away.”

“Uh-huh.” I’m not calling him a liar, but nobody gets picked for Special Forces right out of basic training and he doesn’t look old enough to have done everything he claims.

I turn a page in the magazine and discover a series of photos of my own company, taken by a photographer who’d embedded with us for a few weeks. They’re from the beginning of our mission, when we were first deployed and still fairly clean. From when the other guys called Charlie and Kevlar and me FNG—fucking new guy—and Boot. It seems like it was years ago, instead of months.

There’s a picture of Kevlar and Charlie waist-deep in a poppy field. The caption only says US Marines under fire in Helmand Province and it looks like it could be a picture of any Marines, but I would recognize them anywhere. I turn to the next page and the full-page photo there is of a Marine squatting down on a dusty road, talking to a little Afghan girl who has a tear trickling down her cheek.