Oh! I stare down at my phone. “Garlic.”
“Okay. Same deal as the onion. Top and tail and remove the skin, but this time instead of chopping, you crush it.”
He works a knife into a white bulb, and a couple of pieces come away as he pries it open.
I hitch myself off the stool and pad through to his bedroom to look for the book he mentioned. Sure enough, a book with a cool 1970s cover with black type against a white background is sitting on his nightstand. As I turn it over in my hands, a piece of paper flutters to the floor, and I bend down and pick it up. It’s a list in James’s neat handwriting. It says:
Pills
Cutting wrists
Drowning (cold water? Research this.)
Jumping
Car crash (not foolproof)
Stabbing (self-inflicted? Ouch.)
Contract killer (lunatic idea)
I blink down at the square lettering and curly details on hisys.Holy shit.This is …
The girl’s code restartsher heart.
… This isawful.
My eyes drift toward the doorway and back out into the hallway where I can hear James chopping away in the kitchen. Why would he write a list like this? He has everything going for him.
But … somewhere inside me, some old despair claws its way up. Before I found out I was dyslexic, I was angry. I got my diagnosis in my final year at school, but by then it was too late. I left with no qualifications. My life was one long round of problems: Jake drank a lot, my mom was ill, and I worked whatever minimum-wage job I could find to bring in money so we could survive. I hated everything, including myself. One day, when I was looking to escape the cold and my mom’s apartment, I dove into the library and discovered a Brandon Sanderson book in a returns tray. I struggled through the first few pages, letters jumping on the page and tangling in my head. But then … the words stop being words. They became rooms, forests,people. When I disappeared into his world, my life vanished for a while. So I devoured fantasy book after fantasy book. Eventually, I drummed up the courage to dig out the leaflets my teacher at school had given me and found some online computing courses. But forgiving myself for not being Katniss Everdeen is still a work in progress. I still read slowly, and the characters still light me up inside.
