Chapter Twenty-Three

Dr. Crimm and Shima stayed outside and talked for an hour while the rest of us got ready for bed. Aideen and I took the back bedroom for the girls without any fight from the boys. It was cramped inside the motor home once the couches were unfolded into beds and the loft above the driver's seat had been dropped down to reveal another place to sleep.

All the windows were left open and that might have been the only thing saving me from panicking in the compact space, where it felt as if we were all on top of each other. In the morning, we'd be heading back to R2L for another round of the medication and virtual reality therapy.

The door to the back bedroom was open and I could hear Marco, Ken, and Damien whispering as they lay in their beds. I wouldn't be able to get any rest without the door being locked, but chances were I wouldn't be able to fall asleep even then, so I didn't have any intention of making a big deal about it being open as we waited for Shima to come to bed.

"I want to try it," Ken's deep voice whispered. Today had been a powerful day for him out there with the horse. He had done something he didn't think he could do and that had healed a part of him that doctors were inadequate to treat. He'd needed to fix it himself. He'd needed to prove he was still capable. But maybe most importantly, he'd needed a very capable stranger to see in him what he'd somehow lost sight of himself.

"I don't know, man, that was brutal," Damien answered back in his familiar cautious tone. "You saw how tormented those girls were. We couldn't do shit about it."

Aideen sat up beside me in the bed. She only hesitated a minute before standing up and making her way into the front area. "It was worth it."

I moved, too, not wanting to be alone in the dark or left out of the conversation. Maybe I shouldn't have felt that dependent on this group of kids already, but I was. We were there for a reason and I couldn't imagine going through anything this intense ever again with anyone else. I moved to stand next to her near the tiny kitchen sink.

"I think you should all do it," Aideen suggested. "What's there to lose? If I could do it again so Ken could go, I would."

I looked to Marco, who was stretched out on his back on the bed with his hands tucked beneath his head. He'd already told me he planned on going. He could easily volunteer to go with Ken. His eyes met mine and he held my gaze. He'd told me he would go with me. If he spoke up now and went with Ken, Damien would determine my fate. He could decide he didn't want to try it at all and then I wouldn't have a partner. Maybe I wouldn't want to go when the time came, but knowing that I might not get the chance made my stomach knot.

I waited for Marco to say something, but he remained quiet, his eyes fixed on me. Damien shifted in his bed. He rolled onto his side so he could face Ken and Aideen. "I've spent my whole life being humiliated. The question isn't just, 'What's there to lose?' It's whether or not I want to gain yet another humiliating experience. The data already proves I'm not cool, I'm not likable, I'm not typical, and I'm not wanted."

Ken sat up a little higher in his bed. His expression was incredulous. "First of all, I'm offended," he said. "You don't know anything about me and how I feel about you. And secondly, why would you give a shit what any of us think, anyway? We aren't your family. We're just five fucked-up kids—no offense—" Ken looked around quickly. "—who clearly don't feel like we're sailing through life, either."

"No," Damien said, his voice sad and non-argumentative. "You aren't my family. You don't have to pretend to like me. So when you include me or smile or actually listen to something I have to say, it means something. There have been many times in my life where I've made the wrong move socially and people who I've thought were friends have cut me off. Maybe that's something that would be easy for you. Maybe you can just pull up another kid that's been sitting on the bench waiting for a chance to be called into the big game and be the quarterback in your social circle, but that's not my life.

"I didn't have a single friend my mom didn't make for me until I was in sixth grade. Not one. And the ones that she would make for me would get tired of me, or they would outgrow me somehow. I struggle in big groups: I don't always get the jokes and sometimes I take things people say the wrong way. I definitely say things wrong. I'm not an easy friend, one you can slide up to and they'll fill the spaces you find empty with casual conversation and the perfect amount of eye contact. I'm the guy that either stays too long or walks away before the conversation is over because I misread the social cues.

"People laugh and make jokes about how I'm always awkward and I'll shrug my shoulders because I've learned that makes things better for everyone—when I play along and let myself be the butt of the joke. What I really want is to say 'Fuck you!' Did you know that not everyone says goodbye at the end of a conversation? Do you know that mentioning class is going to start might be misconstrued as a cue to leave, and maybe I wouldn't be so hypervigilant and on edge about that if my peers didn't laugh at every little social hiccup I have when it comes to being around people?"

Damien's words made my heart ache for the hurt and loneliness in them. Each question was laced with sadness and anger, as if he was still trying to work out how other's actions made him feel. I wanted to reach out to him but my own issues held the space between us like a thick, cumbersome shield.

"I'm enjoying just being a part of this group," he said, slightly defeated. "I'm enjoying not having my history spread out across the table in front of everyone and I hope that maybe for just a little longer you guys won't look at me like I'm the special kid. I'll just be one of you. If I had to choose a way to experience the last few days of my life, I'd say that would be a pretty great way for whatever higher power there is to make it up to me for the last seventeen years of bullshit he's been shoveling onto me from his castle in the clouds." Damien's words fell heavily and for a moment we said nothing.

Finally, Ken turned to him, his body propped up on his elbow. "If you don't take the pill out of fear that we might see you differently, then you've already let the ugly win. And maybe in the end that's what we're all going to do anyway. Maybe we are all going to choose to let the roar of the masses overpower us, but I think we should give our lives one last long look. It can't all be for nothing. If I'm going to end my life, then I want to know what it looks like with all the information that helped push me off the bridge." Ken lay back down, his focus moving up to the dark ceiling. "I owe that to myself."

Damien waited a minute, watching Ken as he shifted into a more comfortable position. Then with a heavy sigh he rested back against his own pillow. Aideen and I headed back into our room, the light of the full moon outside the only thing illuminating the motor home enough to see where we were going. The boxy vehicle rocked as Dr. Crimm and Shima climbed the steps and swung the tall door open. Quietly they made their way inside.

I couldn't help but think about Ken's plans and his reason for wanting to take the pill. For him it could offer closure. He might finally be able to understand why he was treated a certain way or how someone felt about him. It was a truth that would otherwise be buried inside someone else that he might never have access to. But my truth? My truth was a swarm of angry bees. If I went poking around near their hive, I might get some answers, but the pain they could inflict would undoubtedly be unbearable.

Shima came into our tiny room, her face cast in darkness but the puffiness too hard to miss. I grieved with her. Months of feeling numb was giving way to sharp and insistent emotions that plagued my body, churning my stomach and stabbing at my heart. She was so broken, but how could I hold her together when I was in just as many pieces?

Just before Shima slid the partition closed, I heard Damien tell Ken, "I'll do it."

Aideen turned to look at me, to see if I had heard. I nodded.

Ken answered, "Thank you. I know you might not believe this right now, but there's nothing locked inside your head that's going to make me not want to be your friend."

Damien didn't hesitate to respond. "You can't possibly know that."

"You are doing something for me that scares the shit out of you and possibly could ruin the time you have left before you get your hands on Repose7. That's all the information I need." Ken's answer was perfect. I admired Damien's selflessness, too. His position against the medication had been adamant up until the moment Ken asked for help. It hadn't taken much to convince Damien to sacrifice his comfort to help someone else in pain. If I had been braver or more confident in my own skin that night, I would have told Damien he'd never have to question my friendship, either.

I tried to fall asleep. The campsite was quieter than R2L, even more so than my own house, but my mind was not. I hadn't found a way to turn the volume down. I felt safer with just the small group. I still got up and checked the lock on the door twice, but I told myself I could fall asleep and be safe for a short while. It didn't help.

I'm not sure what time it was when I noticed a light outside the window of the bedroom. The night was pitch-black otherwise, so it caught my attention and I peered out the window to see where it was coming from. Outside, Dr. Crimm sat in a folding chair, a paper notebook on her lap. The light was hung from a latch somewhere on the motor home.

"You can come out if you'd like," she said quietly. I nearly jumped. I hadn't realized she'd noticed me and my heart raced beneath my palm as I tried to calm it. Thankfully, I hadn't screamed.

"Okay." I carefully unlatched the lock and made my way past the sleeping boys and down the steps to the door. It was already open, the thin screen door the only thing separating us from the outside. I did my best not to wake anyone as I let myself out and went to where Dr. Crimm was setting up another chair.

"Can't sleep?" she asked.

I sat down in the chair she'd opened for me. "No." I looked out at the rows of motor homes and tents lined up along the camp roads. Above us the night sky was filled with stars that I hadn't even realized I missed seeing until then. In the city the light pollution was so bad it was impossible to see any of them twinkling above us the way I could see them then. They were beautiful in a simple and yet brilliant way.

"Have you tried writing down your thoughts?" Dr. Crimm asked. She tapped her pen lightly against the notebook on her lap. I hardly ever used real paper anymore. We type at school and send messages through our screens, so seeing the blue lines on the white background of the page made my lips curl upward and my mind light up with curiosity.

"I don't like the thoughts inside my head. If I write them down they would be somewhere forever." I pulled my feet up and sat with my legs crossed.

"Keeping them inside your head doesn't make them any less real. It doesn't make what happened go away or what you're afraid of disappear." Dr. Crimm shifted in her chair and pulled her legs up like mine. The rings on her fingers glinted under the dangling light above us. "Secrets can't be confined. You lock them behind doors and they'll slip underneath like an envelope over the threshold. You sink them in the ocean and they'll float to the shore like a message in a bottle. You burn them with fire and they'll rise to the sky like smoke signals." She shook her head, but a small, kind smile lifted her cheeks. "I can't control what happened to me, but I can choose the words I use to tell the story and I can arrange the sentences on the paper. I can tuck them away or read them aloud. I can tell no one or a room full of people. I can tell a stranger, or I can say it right to the face of the one who hurt me."

My palms sweated. The thought of writing anything down made me feel dizzy and nauseous. My brain felt like it was tripping over her words, specifically 'room full of people' and 'the one who hurt me.' Had she really done that? Had she had the courage to speak out about it? Had it made it better? My eyes looked quickly to her wrists and the thin scars that ran along them. I wondered if the words that told the story of those lines were on a paper somewhere. I wondered if she would let me read them, but I didn't have the courage to ask.

"You mean journaling?" I asked instead.

"Sure. Journaling, word association, letter writing, narrative therapy, or poetry." She shrugged. "It doesn't matter how you do it, just that you get it all out. My therapist asked me to journal after my attack. I would stare at my tablet for hours. I couldn't connect. Then one day a friend of mine asked me to go with her to a poetry slam and I felt like it opened me up somehow."

"What's a poetry slam?"

"Slam poetry is performance poetry. Poets read their work to an audience. It doesn't have to rhyme, but it usually flows to a rhythm. There's prose and metaphor, similes and alliteration. It's a beautiful way to say something that isn't always pretty, if that makes sense." Dr. Crimm smiled again and leaned back so she could look up at the night sky. "My personal life and my professional life have had some really dark moments. There were times when I found myself wondering if I'd ever get to see the beauty again through all the noise." She pointed up to the stars with the tip of her pen, "In those moments the only thing I had control over was the words I put on the paper. And somehow I made it through."

She let her eyes fall back to the old notebook on her lap. She held her thumb against the edge and caused the pages to flip past quickly, page after page of written text. Her notebook was filled with ink. Some poems were short and others filled entire pages. I listened to the crinkle of the paper as each captured moment settled on top of another and rested perfectly. The poems at the bottom were buried far beneath those on top and I loved the way she could look at her work and see the progress she'd made, moving away from each dark moment she'd conquered in a poem.

"That sounds cool. English used to be my favorite subject. I enjoyed writing." How long had it been since I'd thought of that? My life as a great student seemed so long ago. I hadn't cared about that part of me in months. Now little snippets of information flashed through my mind. I thought of The Bell Jar and the semester when my favorite English teacher read aloud some entries from Sylvia Plath's journal.

"When we get back to R2L I'll find you a notebook. What you write in there will be your business. I won't ask you about it, but if you want to share it with me, I'd love to read it or hear about it." She stood up and I followed. We folded up our chairs and tucked them into a compartment beneath the RV. She locked it and grabbed the light, then turned to me again. "I don't have all the answers yet either, but I have faith that they're out there. If writing doesn't work for you, then we'll just have to find what does."

Dr. Crimm was so different than the other adults who'd been trying to fix me. She was human, just like the six of us kids. She struggled like we did and for some reason knowing that she still had dark times and wasn't ashamed of that made me think maybe it was normal. It didn't feel like she was on the boat throwing a lifeline while I was drowning in the sea, it felt like she was in the water beside me, guiding me. We were in this together. It occurred to me that if I chose to leave R2L at the end of treatment and take Repose7, I'd be another dark moment in her professional life—maybe even her personal life now.

A question had been nagging at the back of my mind and I couldn't help but let it spring free while I had a moment with her alone. "Do you think Braden Ertz killed his girlfriend?"

She shifted her weight and sighed, looking up at the night sky for a long pause. "I don't know, but I think something terrible happened in the moments before he was discovered. Giving him the key to that box without the same options I give all my clients, would never sit right with me. When my work stops being about helping teens heal and starts being about uncovering evidence or easing the collective conscience of a jury, then I won't want to be in this business anymore."

"What if he's innocent?" I asked.

"Then it will always be emerging experimental science against tried-and-true methods of convicting a murderer. He'll still doubt himself, as will most of society. It's an off-label use of the medication and we haven't even received approval for the mass market." Dr. Crimm motioned toward the RV. "I'll fight it as long as I can."

As I crept past Marco, Ken, and Damien, disheveled on their beds, I smiled as I pictured them being the unorganized stars finally visible in the sky above me. They had been there all along, but the noise was gone and now I could see them clearly. They were my friends. Maybe the extreme nature of our reason for being together lead to fast friendships, but it didn't change the fact that they were real relationships. We needed each other.

I slid the door shut and flipped the lock. Aideen and Shima were already asleep when I slipped into the bed beside them. I heard rustling as Dr. Crimm situated herself out in the other room with the boys and then the clank of the drape as she slid it shut, closing off her bed from their view. My eyes suddenly felt very heavy. I let them close and focused on the little dots of light on the insides of my eyelids. Like stars. And as I finally drifted off to sleep I replaced the scary thoughts in my head with thoughts of stars swimming in rushing water, skipping stones and laughing as they danced across the surface.

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