My ears are burning so hard they couldn’t pick up an ounce of sound if they tried.
Surprisingly, when I glance at Zach, he winks at me. I am not a fool; I know that was possibly one of the worst line readings ever, and I think,Oh God. No way he’d settle for me if Katy was around.
It occurs to me that my best friend would kick ass at this.
In the same breath, though, I realize I am glad that Katy isn’t around kicking ass. I’m glad Zach chose me to be in his movie, winked atme.And with that, I continue my wooden line readings.
To be fair, if I am wood, Raj is metal: “Oh no. My spleen.”
I giggle quietly to myself and then a little louder when I see Zach’s shoulders shaking.
When we are done reading, I am feeling a little more confident, Kevin is hitting on me again, and the bar, overall, has been set much lower than I initially understood it to be.
Raj, however, is stuck in precisely the same place.
“So how tall are you exactly?” he asks.
“Five seven,” I say.
He sighs.
Lindsay, I realize, must have been shorter.
AFTER
January
My parents are the very last resort. If either of them finds out what I’ve been seeing, I’ll be in a psychiatric facility so fast I won’t know what hit me. I consider driving myself to the hospital, but after the night I spent there after the accident, I’ll try anything I can to avoid going back. To avoid the worried look on my mother’s face, the plastic food, the stench of disinfectant hiding the smell of worse things.
So after I leave the park, I race home and log on to my computer. I don’t know what to search for. Hallucinations? Psychosis? I go with the former, but I’m immediately knee-deep in articles about delusional disorders, and a tremor runs down my back.
I reach into my pocket for the piece of paper, the note to myself.
If I’m asking, then I can’t be.
I quickly close out of those pages and frown, struggling to think. I learned in school about a neuroscience facility close to Lyndale, and I’ve seen a few ads for it. I can’t think of the name, though, so I type “neuroscience facility Lyndale” into the search engine. Nothing.
How is that possible?
I know it exists.
After a few minutes of racking my brain, the name comes back.
Overton.
I put it into the engine, but there’s nothing.
Did you mean:Over townorOver a ton.
I’m pretty sure it’s Overton.
I pull out my phone and try again, but I get the same ridiculous results. Do I have the name wrong?
Neither my phone nor my computer is yielding anything useful. It’s not the first time I haven’t been able to find something on my computer, thanks to the insane parental controls my mom has had on there since I was in middle school and Channel Se7en ran some story on child predators and Internet safety. I’ve never figured out how to get around them.
When I crack open my bedroom door, I can hear my brother downstairs eating dinner, so I tiptoe down the hall.
I don’t just avoid Caleb’s room because we’re not particularly close; I avoid Caleb’s room because I value my life. Simply making it the approximately five feet from his door to his computer, I nearly lose my leg. There are clothes everywhere, three bowls with varying levels of moldy cereal, and books and papers covering every inch of his desk. His wall is plastered with pictures of different types of aircraft and a poster of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who successfully landed a plane in the Hudson River during an emergency.
