Chapter One
Do you know what you never hear of in kids’ books? The wicked stepfather. The wicked stepmother gets the bad rap, but my stepmom is hilarious, loving, supportive, and makes the best lasagna in the country. I will fight you on this.
Wicked stepfather? Exhibit A: Arnie Patterson, spin doctor and quack doctor extraordinaire. Some people shouldn't be allowed to practice medicine. People like him.
Oh, well. It shouldn’t matter. I’m twenty-five. I should have been out of the house a long, long time ago, right?
“Agatha, you don't have to do this! Aggie! Baby, get back in the house, please!”
“Mom, you chose him over me. I absolutelydoneed to do this. My anxiety isn’t getting better living here.”
“You ended up inthat placelast time!” Mom hisses and chases me to my battered little Chevy with the mismatched panels.
That place. She can’t even say the name of the residential mental health facility I was in for six weeks during my senior year of college. Pre-law with a business minor. Walked in on my then-boyfriend with his roommate in a decidedly un-platonic sleepover. My meds were already feeling “weak,” and finals were putting pressure on me.
I snapped. I felt trapped, like there was only one way out—but I didn’t take it. I got help. I got better.
And now... I’m getting worse again. I’ve tried everything to make real progress, but whenever I do, Arnie finds a discreet way to torpedo me—and Mom won’t believe that.
The only thing to do is leave while I’m still sick. “All better” isn’t coming. “Strong enough to make my own choices” will have to do.
“Your father has the best medicine money can buy, Aggie! Something new. He’s sure it’ll help this time!” Mom follows me, frantic voice grating on my raw nerves.
Just like they “helped” the last time?No, sometimes when I’ve been doing great, I notice the change happens like walking off a cliff, a sudden steep drop-off, like my meds do nothing. Arnie swoops in and presses me to try something new—and the ugly spiral starts again.
“I’m not taking any more experimental drugs just because Arnie recommends them.” Another suitcase in. A cardboard box full of things that won’t fit in a suitcase next.
For a girl who lived the last four years of her life in the dorms and her childhood home, you’d think I would have a lot more stuff.
“Your father loves you! I don't know why you can't accept that. He's trying to help you. That place—”
“Auburn Acres saved my life,Mother.” I bite the word off and throw in the final box. “And I know my father loves me. If he and June were in the country, I would be moving in with them, no doubt. They even offered to come home early, but I’m not going to do that to them. There are people worse off than me.”
I tell myself this a thousand times a day, holding my phone, begging myself not to crack and call my dad and stepmom. They’re on a one-year medical missions trip to Central America. Whenever I’m about to give and beg them to come home to Texas so I can leave New York and hide in the safety of their warm, earth-toned ranch house, I look at pictures of the villagesthey’re rebuilding, of the school where June is teaching girls to read, sew, and do first aid.
They’ll be back in January. Six months away. I can do this.
“Arnie has been in your life for ten years, Agatha Ann Habersett.”
“I know.” I bite my tongue and swallow my words. What I want to tell her is something I’ve told her a million times before—something she always waves off as being part of my “issues.”
Arnie works as a medical consultant for a pharmaceutical company. I know that lots of things can go wrong when you're inventing a new medicine, but it strikes me as very strange that every time Arnie personally gets involved in a case, it's one where he has to travel to examine a young woman. He always decides he needs to stay involved in her case, monitoring her by staying in the area for weeks—even months—always on the insurer's dime.
I find it even more strange that some of these drugs get pulled off the market with only a few years in action. They take millions to make! Why isn’t he fired for approving drugs that end up putting people in comas or collapsing their lungs? I don’t know why the company hasn’t been shut down. Probably because desperate people want any straw they can clutch at. I'm living proof. I'm desperate and clutching at straws, taking a job in a tiny town I’ve never heard of in a mountain chain I never even knew existed.
Maybe Arnie does something to the data, so they never connect the pieces. Maybe he has something on the researchers or the office bigwigs that keep them quiet.
He looks like such an ordinary guy—and I think that’s what makes him so scary to me.
I’m terrified to go—traveling two hours away and starting a whole new life—but I’m slightly more terrified to stay here.
Don’t think about that. Can’t think about that. Focus on getting out.
My anxieties are having anxieties as I pat my pockets for the tenth time this hour.
Keys.
Inhaler.
