Made You Up(18)

It wasn’t always so easy. Some things took longer to disappear than others. But this technique helped me figure out what was a hallucination and what wasn’t. I had albums full of pictures, too, but the albums were for things I knew were real, like my parents. Charlie had a whole album to herself. More than once I’d caught her in my room, looking through it.

My artifacts came from my dad. First and foremost, Dad was an archaeologist. I didn’t blame him. If I could do nothing but play in the dirt all day, I’d be an archaeologist, too. My mother used to travel with him, but then they had me and they took too long trying to decide if they wanted to take me to the digs. By that time, my mother had ended up homeschooling me and didn’t want to take me anywhere, and then Charlie was born and they didn’t have the money to take both of us. So my mother stayed home all the time and Dad was always gone.

Whenever he came home, he brought stuff: most of the things we owned, our furniture, and even some of our clothes. My mother crammed every available corner with Dad’s stuff, and the house didn’t feel so empty.

I tried not to think about the fact that shipping things like that across the ocean must cost a lot of money.

I remembered a few times, before I was diagnosed, when I’d lay in bed and my artifacts would talk to me or to one another and I would listen to them until I fell asleep.

My artifacts didn’t talk to me anymore. At least not when the medicine was working.

I turned off my light and rolled over onto my side, pulling my sheet with me. The little boy at the lobster tank was losing his definition—until I reminded myself that even if he was real, which he wasn’t, he and Miles were not necessarily the same person.

That was ten years ago. Ten years, and I hadn’t seen him since. It would take some ridiculous odds to bring us full circle like that.

I didn’t fall asleep. I couldn’t. I waited until I heard Mom walk down the hall and close her door (Charlie had shut herself in her room half an hour ago), then slipped out from under the covers, put on a jacket and an old pair of sneakers, and grabbed the aluminum baseball bat I kept under my bed. I popped the screen out of the window and set it carefully against the wall.

I didn’t often ride my bike in the dark, but I walked. Baseball bat clinking against the heels of my Converse, nighttime breeze brushing against my legs, I trekked through my backyard and into the woods of Hannibal’s Rest. The creek whispered up ahead. I took the last bend in the road and stood face-to-face with Red Witch Bridge.

I didn’t feel the need to do a perimeter check, because this was where the worlds met. Everyone thought they saw or heard strange things here, and I didn’t have to hide the fact that I really did.

I laughed when I remembered Tucker bringing up the bridge earlier. The Red Witch? The one who gutted travelers, coated herself in their blood, and screamed like a banshee? No, I wasn’t scared of her. The nighttime might have made everything upside down, inside out, scary as hell, but not to me.

The baseball bat clink-clink-clinked as I walked toward Red Witch Bridge.

I was the scariest thing out here tonight.





Chapter Nine




Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I kept taking pictures, hoping I’d look at one and know its subject was a hallucination. I did my perimeter checks, thinking I’d eventually be able to walk around paranoia-free. I spent every day hoping someone would tell me I smelled like lemons.

If I wasn’t insane by anyone else’s definition, I figured I was at least insane by Einstein’s.





Chapter Ten




The first thing I did the day after the parking-lot incident was look for Miles’s truck at school. Rusty, sky blue, 1982 GMC. Looked like he’d saved it from a scrap heap. It wasn’t there. Marvelous.

My second order of business was with his locker. I hurried into school, checked to make sure no one was around and the ceiling wasn’t wired, then delved into my bag in search of superglue. Two tubes and seventeen Popsicle sticks later, Miles’s locker was well and truly glued shut. I tossed the evidence into the nearest trash can, swapped out what books I needed from my own locker (most still severed from their covers), and left to find a uniform.

The janitors’ closet was next to my chemistry room. When I knocked, there was a crash inside. The door cracked open and a familiar bespectacled eye looked out.

“Oh, hi, Alex.” Tucker opened the door a little wider. His gaze flitted around the hallway behind me. “W-what are you doing here?”