Turtles All the Way Down(31)

—

Driving to Daisy’s apartment complex, I kept forgetting why I was stopped at a stoplight, and then I’d let off Harold’s brake only to look up and notice, oh, right. The light is red.

You hear a lot about the benefits of insanity or whatever—like, Dr. Karen Singh had once told me this Edgar Allan Poe quote: “The question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.” I guess she was trying to make me feel better, but I find mental disorders to be vastly overrated. Madness, in my admittedly limited experience, is accompanied by no superpowers; being mentally unwell doesn’t make you loftily intelligent any more than having the flu does. So I know I should’ve been a brilliant detective or whatever, but in actuality I was one of the least observant people I’d ever met. I was aware of absolutely nothing outside myself on the drive to Daisy’s apartment building and then to my house.

I went to the bathroom when I got home and examined the cut. The swelling seemed down. Maybe. Maybe the light in the bathroom just wasn’t strong enough for me to see clearly. I cleaned it with soap and water, patted it dry, applied hand sanitizer, and then rebandaged my finger. I also took my regular medication, and then a few minutes later an oblong white pill I’d been told to use when panicky.

I let the pill melt on my tongue into a vague sweetness and waited for it to kick in. I felt certain something was going to kill me, and of course I was right: Something is going to kill you, someday, and you can’t know if this is the day.

After a while, my head got heavy, and I sat down on the couch in front of the TV. I didn’t really have the energy to turn it on, so I just stared at the blank screen.

The oblong pill made me feel exceptionally groggy, but only from the bridge of my nose up. My body felt like its standard self, broken and insufficient in the usual ways, but my brain felt sloppy and exhausted, like the noodle legs of a runner post-marathon. Mom came home and plopped down next to me. “Long day,” she said. “I don’t mind students, Aza. It’s the parents that make my job hard.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“How was your day?”

“Okay,” I said. “I don’t have a fever, do I?”

She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead. “I don’t think so. Do you feel sick?”

“Just tired, I think.” Mom turned on the TV, and I told her I was going to lie down and do some homework.

—

I read my history textbook for a while, but my consciousness felt like a camera with a dirty lens, so I decided to text Davis.


Me: Hi.

Him: Hi.

Me: How are you?

Him: Pretty good, you?

Me: Pretty good.

Him: Let’s continue this awkward silence in person.

Me: When?

Him: There is a meteor shower Thursday night. Should be a good one if it’s not cloudy.

Me: Sounds great. See you then. I have to go my mom is here.

She had, in fact, peeked her head in through the door. “What’s up?” I asked.

“Want to make dinner together?”

“I need to read.”

She came in, sat down on the edge of my bed, and said, “You feeling scared?”

“Kinda.”

“Of what?”

“It’s not like that. The sentence doesn’t have, like, an object. I’m just scared.”

“I don’t know what to say, Aza. I see the pain on your face and I want to take it from you.”

I hated hurting her. I hated making her feel helpless. I hated it. She was running her fingers through my hair. “You’re all right,” she said. “You’re all right. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” I felt myself stiffen a little as she kept playing with my hair. “Maybe you just need a good night’s sleep,” she said at last—the same lie I’d fed to Noah.





TWELVE



THE MORNING OF THE METEOR SHOWER, I arrived at school with Harold and discovered a bright orange Volkswagen Beetle parked in my usual spot. As I pulled in next to the car, I saw that Daisy was in the driver’s seat. I rolled down my window and said, “Didn’t Josephine the banker tell us not to make any purchases for six months?”

“I know, I know,” she said. “But I talked the car sales dude down to eighty-four hundred dollars from ten thousand, so in a way I actually saved money. You know what the color’s called?” She snapped. “Snap orange! Because it’s snappy.”

“Don’t waste the money, okay?”

“Don’t worry, Holmesy. This car is only going to appreciate in value. Liam is a future collector’s item. I’ve named him Liam, by the way.” I smiled—it was an inside joke that literally no one else would get.

As we walked across the parking lot, Daisy handed me a thick book, Fiske Guide to Colleges. “I also picked this up, but it turns out I don’t need it because I’m definitely going to IU. I always knew that college was expensive, but some of these places cost almost a hundred grand per year. What do they do there? Are the classes on yachts? Do you get to live in a castle and get served by house-elves? Even Rich Me can’t afford fancy college.”

Certainly not if you’re buying cars, I wanted to say, but instead I asked her about the Pickett disappearance. “You ever figure out what ‘the jogger’s mouth’ was?”