Made You Up(62)

“Ohio,” Miles said.

“Yeah. He’s your dad’s dog?”

“Yes. My dad got him partly to keep people from getting into our house, partly to keep me from getting out. He thinks I sneak out to meet people.”

“But you do.”

“He has no proof,” Miles said. “Anyway, Ohio’s not that smart and sleeps like a narcoleptic, so I guess he and my dad were kind of made for each other.” He stared at the highway, then said with disgust, “I hate dogs. Cats are so much better.”

I made my snort sound like a cough. We drove on in silence for another few minutes. I tried to burrow a little deeper into my coat.

“You didn’t eat much at breakfast,” I said.

“I wasn’t that hungry,” he replied.

“Liar. You were looking at that food like a kid from a third-world country.”

“Your mom’s cooking was really good.”

“I know; that’s why I eat it.” After I check it for poison, of course. “Terrible deflection, by the way. You could have said, ‘Because I felt awkward eating too much at a family gathering with people I’ve never met before,’ and been done with it.”

He coughed loudly, his fingers tapping the steering wheel.

Eventually Miles pulled off the highway and into a heavily wooded suburb. Everything was coated in blindingly white snow. He only took the backstreets, and the more houses we passed, the more I realized that this reminded me of where I lived. These could have been the same streets.

Maybe all paranoids had a sort of sixth sense for detecting places that wanted to lock them up. I knew the hospital as soon as I saw it. A squat, one-story brick building surrounded by a fence. Bare shrubs framed the front walk and snow-covered trees dotted the grounds. It was probably pretty during the rest of the year.

This whole McCoy-Scarlet-Celia thing seemed silly now. Hardly substantial enough to get me inside a mental hospital. McCoy could do what he wanted and Celia could deal with her own problems.

“Are you okay?” Miles asked, yanking my door open. I managed to unbuckle my seatbelt and slip out of the cab.

“Yep, I’m good.” I balled my hands into fists and held them tight against my sides. Next to the front walk was a sign.

WELCOME TO CRIMSON FALLS RESIDENTIAL PSYCHIATRY CENTER.

Crimson Falls? It made me think of spilling blood. And in crimson lettering, no less.

My fingers itched to take pictures, but the little voice in the back of my head told me that if I did, orderlies would jump out of the bushes, throw a pair of shackles on me, and never let me leave. I’d never graduate high school. I’d never go to college. I’d never get to do the things normal people do because normal people don’t get so melodramatic about visiting mental hospitals, you idiot!

That voice was so ambivalent sometimes.

It looked more like a hospital on the inside, where the floors were checked tile and the walls were exactly the right shade of taupe to make you want to kill yourself. A girl not much older than Miles and me sat behind the front desk.

“Oh, hi, Miles.” She handed him a clipboard. Miles put both our names on the visitors’ log. “You missed morning rec time. They’re in the cafeteria right now. You can go on in and grab some food.”

Miles handed her back the clipboard. “Thanks, Amy.”

“Say hi to your mom for me, ’kay?”

“Sure.”

I followed Miles down a hallway to the left of the reception area. We passed another set of double doors that led into a rec room being cleaned by attendants. A little farther on was a smallish cafeteria, filled with seven or eight patients.

Miles went in first. I followed in his shadow, tugging on my hair and trying to shake the feeling that men in white coats were going to jump out and grab me.

There was only one food line in the cafeteria, and about ten square tables in the middle of the room. Large windows let in the sun. Miles navigated through the tables without so much as a glance at the patients, intent on only one of them, on the far side of the room.

He was right—she looked like him. Or, rather, he looked like her. She sat at a table near the windows, rolling around a few green beans on her plate and flipping through the pages of a book. She looked up and smiled a radiant smile—it was almost tooth-for-tooth the same as his, only easier, more used—and it was not the smile of a crazy person. Not the smile of someone who injured herself because of swinging moods. It was just the smile of someone who was very, very happy to see her son.