“Control is something we talk a lot about here at Berkshire,” Dr. Franklin adds gently, trying not to break the flow of my words.
“Yeah, well, he definitely didn’t have it before. When we were kids, he broke my arm.” I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about that moment so much. Probably because of Bo’s texts.
When we were little, we used to pretend that we were on the Titanic. It was a silly game, born of my obsession with the movie after I dug it out of Mom’s collection, but Bo never minded playing with me because he liked the inevitable fate of the ship. We used the tire swing out in the front yard. I’d climb on top of it, and Bo would push me around, pretending the swing was the ship. When I fell off, the ship “sank.” It was fun, until the time I broke my arm after landing funny. I laid there on the ground, crying and screaming for help, but Bo just stood over me with a dead look in his eyes as the tire swing rocked back and forth, empty. He didn’t show any emotion at all. It was like he wasn’t even there.
That was the first time I knew something was wrong with him.
Dr. Franklin sits up straighter, and the movement forces my gaze from the window back to him. “I wasn’t aware he hurt you,” he says.
“It was an accident. We were playing on the tire swing, and he spun me too hard, and I fell funny.”
“I don’t think Bo ever means to hurt anyone.”
I don’t answer.
Dr. Franklin notices. “Phoebe?” he says. “Do you think Bo would intentionally hurt someone?”
I don’t meet his eyes. “I don’t think so, not now.”
“But before he came to the academy?”
I twist my fingers together. “Maybe.” When Dr. Franklin doesn’t speak, I find my words filling the silence, almost unwillingly. “Like, okay, I don’t think he’d be, like, a serial killer or anything. Nothing like that. But . . . I remember when he was a freshman, and he had so much trouble fitting in. There were these jerks in school, right, because there are always jerks in school, the kind who pick on you if you’re even a tiny bit different. And Bo was more than a tiny bit different, you know?”
Dr. Franklin nods his head.
“I was just . . .” I struggle to find the right words. “I was really glad that my dad didn’t have any guns in the house, that my mom always insisted on that. But I wondered when he would go to his friend Lee’s house, and if Lee’s dad had a gun, if maybe that’s all it would take for Bo to . . . you know.”
“You think Bo might have shot someone at school?” Dr. Franklin asks, his voice lowering a notch.
“No! No,” I say, shaking my head vigorously. “That would take a lot of planning and, you know, rage, and . . . Bo isn’t really violent,” I say. “I don’t think he’d actually do something. But if the opportunity was there . . .” I swallow, hard. “I don’t know. I mean, he didn’t. I just think . . . maybe he could have. Maybe. And if he ever did, he probably wouldn’t have even meant to do it. There are just times when he’s not himself.” I take a deep breath. “How horrible am I, to think that my own brother might do something like that?”
“How horrible for you to have lived with that fear,” Dr. Franklin says.
He doesn’t understand. It’s not like that. Bo isn’t a bad person. “It’s just that he would . . . flip, so easily, between calm and angry, and there were moments when those two feelings would collide.”
“What do you mean?”
“When the calm and the rage became one thing for him,” I say. “That was when it was scary. When he was both really calm and cold but also full of rage.”
“Did you see that often?”
The doctor’s pen scratches across his notepad. I wish I hadn’t said anything. Bo’s different now; Berkshire Academy has helped him to be different. He had only been so full of anger because he saw the world in such a different way. Most people look at the world in black and white, even if they say they don’t. You like someone or you don’t; you agree with an opinion or you don’t. Bo was never like that, never. He always saw things from a different angle. Like an artist who sees the shapes and colors and shading of an object, but who doesn’t always see the object itself. That’s how Bo looked at the world. He looked at it as a chance, not a done deal. He would get angry when things couldn’t change, when people wouldn’t change, even if they could.
That’s why he butted heads with Dad so much. Dad is an immovable force. He goes in one direction, straight ahead. He can’t handle a kid who doesn’t do that, who sees so many different paths, some of them going sideways or backward. Who doesn’t accept that things are the way they are.
Bo never really liked school—at least not until Berkshire Academy—and that was usually what he and Dad fought about. Bo would stay in bed as long as possible, until Dad started waking him up by dumping ice water on him, something that always ended with shouting.