“Not going on the highway?”
“No. We’ll drive around the neighborhood until I’m confident you know what you’re doing. If you don’t scare me, next time we can go on University Road and do a circuit around campus. If I decide at any point that you need to stop and let me take over, you will. Agreed?”
“Sure. Can we have music?”
“No. No distractions. You need laser focus. Read the road, Harry. Be mindful of idiots who drive while texting or using their iPods. Once, I saw someone driving and brushing his teeth. Watch everything and everyone around you. Anticipate hazards.”
Anticipate hazards. Harry rubbed his nose. His insides were wibbly-wobbly, like a thousand fleas were jabbing him with teeny-tiny spears. Jab, jab; jab, jab. And a thought stuck on repeat: You drive, you die; you drive, you die. A thousand things could go wrong. Drivers ed the first time had taught him that—when he’d pulled onto the Durham Freeway and nearly hit a school bus. The instructor had sworn; the kids in the back had sniggered. One of them had whispered, “Retard.” What if he ran over someone’s dog? What if he totaled the car? What if he hurt Dad? Sammie wouldn’t care if he didn’t drive, if he never learned to drive. Sammie wouldn’t care, but he would. He wiggled in his seat, imagined crushing those fleas one by one.
Laser focus, laser focus.
Harry glanced over his shoulder and pulled out onto the road. “Let’s do this thing, Dad.”
Harry parked. Perfectly. “Who da man!” He punched the air, and Dad exhaled loudly.
“That was good, Harry.”
For real? Dad had used good and Harry in the same sentence without irony?
“You didn’t tic at all while you were driving.”
“Can we do this again tomorrow, Dad?”
“If you take your medication.”
The pressure started building. A tic that wouldn’t be contained. No, not now. Let Dad say good and Harry one more time. Please.
He should have known. Compress all that energy, pack it together as if it were a bound and tied Slinky, and sooner or later it would spring free. Tics 101. Harry started jiggling from side to side. His foot stomped on the brake, stomped on the brake. Repeated.
Dad opened the passenger door and let out a sigh. It was a small one, but it was a sigh. And that wow! moment vanished. Replaced by the feeling you got when you were in the back of a car and it hit a speed bump too fast, and your stomach went bleh and you prayed you didn’t hurl. Worst feeling in the world, topped only by the realization that if he wanted to win Dad’s approval, all he had to do was not tic—not release any nervous habits—for the rest of his life.
TWENTY
Nudging the door open with his foot, Felix stood on the threshold of Hades. The doorknob would, of course, be sticky. Stickiness oozed from his son’s pores.
Piles of books or papers didn’t bother him, but the mayhem of Harry’s room had no rhythm. Even the posters weren’t hung straight. Coheed and Cambria definitely tilted toward the left, and the Tar Heels basketball team was decidedly wonky. It was clutter run amok; it was bedlam. And it stank of unwashed socks and leftovers.
The trail of disaster snaked from the unmade bed to the desk to the floor. An open family-size bag of salt and vinegar chips gaped next to Harry’s laptop, and not one but two plates of toast crumbs sat on the floor. A third plate was upside down, as if kicked over in a mad dash to exit the room. An action that made perfect sense to Felix.
His son was living in a hell of his own creation.
Reaching around the doorjamb, Felix grappled for the light switches. He had returned from the hospital to discover the house in darkness except for the light blazing under Harry’s door. Which meant the lights had been on since the boys had left for their Sunday matinee.