“C’mon, man. What is this? Amateur hour?!”
You are momentarily quiet at this judgment. It has never occurred to you that people might have such strong feelings about nearly identical sedatives.
“Sorry, sorry,” he immediately says. “I’m a little edgy. Movingvehicles aren’t my thing. And I usually have my support animal, but he couldn’t come. Which is why I need the…”
He clicks his tongue and trails off and then seems to actually look at you for the first time.
“I’m Troy,” he says.
“Case,” you say.
He extends a sweaty palm, and you shake it before he yanks it away. He’s silent after that, and you remember that before you stopped going, your therapist was always telling you to ask questions. People like being asked questions, she said. It plays to their vanity.
“So what is it?” you say.
“What is what?”
“Your support animal.”
“Ah,” he says. “Right. You mean Turbo. He’s a wiener dog. Thus, the shirt, I guess…”
He points to a white ringer T-shirt with bright blue ribbing around the neck and sleeves. You have to squint to make out the faded letters stretched over his skinny chest, which read:THE GRASS IS GREENER UNDER MY WIENER.
“Oh,” you say.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’ll snag one, by the way.”
“One…”
“Xanax. Sorry. Sometimes I forget the whole context thing. But I’ll take it, you know… if the offer’s still on the table.”
You dig into your pocket, where you feel the familiar ovoid contours of the pill. Sometimes all you need to do is just dip your fingers into your pocket and touch the edge and you start to feel alittle better. Still, it doesn’t feel good to fish this little talisman out of your pocket now to give it away.
“Thanks, man,” Troy says when you hand it to him.
Then, instead of swallowing it, he quickly chews it into a paste, a trick that only the professionally anxious know makes it kick in faster (at the expense of the worst aftertaste imaginable). After that, he salutes you for some reason and disappears behind the wall of his seat again.
Outside, the sun turns the air a chalky white and it begins to rouse a few more of your compatriots. You hear a yawn or two. The telltale candy-rattle of a pill container. And that cartoon-bubble-popping sound a phone makes when a message goes in or out. Once you reach your destination, deep in the Boundary Waters, your phones will no longer work, so it makes sense that people would be using them while they still can.
You don’t want to use yours, though.
Not because you have no one to text—you still have a few loyal school friends, even after your months of isolation—but because you know if you get your phone out now, you’ll just look at pictures of your brother, Sean. And, if you do that, the suffocating guilt will almost certainly return and you might even start crying. Right now, you have a chance, however short-lived, to be the guy who doesn’t cry first on the therapy trip.
So you keep your phone in your pocket. But because just thinking about all this is making you feel bad anyway, you decide to get up and walk slowly to the bathroom at the back of the bus, where you close the old accordion door and look in the mirror.
“Wherever you go,” your therapist once said, “there you are.”
It was the name of a book or something. You never read it,but the phrase stuck with you. And here you are in this bathroom: same floppy haircut you’ve had since freshman year, and the same lost expression on your face. You take a breath and try, just for a moment, not to think of your brother, who, ironically enough, actually liked the outdoors. Hiking. Fat-tire biking. Cliff-diving. He was always trying to get you out of the house, and he would have been beside himself with excitement at the thought of a wilderness mystery trip.
If he were here right now, he would surely be punching you in the arm and telling you, with his face too close to yours:
“C’mon, Space Case. Get out of your head!”
You draw one long breath—in through the nose, out through the mouth—and flush the toilet in case anyone outside somehow wants to prove you didn’t really go to the bathroom (yes, this is actually the kind of thing you worry about). And then, while you’re splashing water on your face and trying to shake the feeling that coming on this trip was probably a terrible mistake, you suddenly hear a voice from somewhere else on the bus.
It’s too distant to make out any words, but you stop anyway, water dripping from your forehead into the tiny basin below. Even though it’s far away, and even though there’s a door separating you from the sound, you know immediately whose voice it is. It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s one you know very well. A voice you used to hear almost every day before things went terribly wrong.
A voice you were sure you would never hear again.
