I rolled my eyes. “I would so rock one of those tight black numbers with a thigh slit. Anyway, you’ll probably wind up juggling more than one date, and I refuse to be one of your balls.”
“But you’re such a cute ball.”
“I know,” I said. “Now back to my question.”
Lua turned toward me. She wiped her hand down her face, replacing her smile with her most mock-solemn expression. “You may ask your question, Oswald Pinkerton of the Cloud Lake Pinkertons.”
I almost changed my mind, because Lua clearly wasn’t in a serious mood. “What do you know about Calvin Frye?”
“Not much,” Lua said. “Smart kid, good at wrestling, had a nervous breakdown over the summer.” She shrugged. “Rumor is he’s even less likely to graduate than me if he doesn’t get his shit together. Why? Do you like him or something?”
“No!”
A grin spread across her face. “Sure.”
“It’s just . . .” It’d been a mistake to bring up Calvin, so I tried to change the subject. “Fuentes forcing us to partner up made me start thinking about college. Like whether I even want to go. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You still planning not to go to college?”
“Shit, Oz, all I want to do is make music.” She held up her fingers. “These callouses are more than layers of dead skin. They’re hours spent practicing. They’re my grades; the only ones I care about. Music is my school and my life.” Lua dropped her hand to her lap. “But I feel like I’m waiting for someone to give me permission. For them to see my callouses and hear my songs, and tell me it’s okay to chase my dreams.”
I turned down Lua’s street and parked in front of her house. The front lawn had grown wilder than Lua’s hair, and the driveway was stained with Rorschach inkblots of oil and mildew. But between Lua’s hectic schedule and Ms. Novak’s two jobs, neither made home maintenance a priority.
“Since when has the Great Lua Novak ever asked permission to do anything?”
“I’m scared, Ozzie,” she said. “If I fail, what will I have left?”
“Uh, everything?”
Lua rolled her eyes.
Tommy went through a phase in tenth grade where he read nothing but biographies about great men and women. “You know what’s funny?” he’d said to me one night we’d stayed up late talking on the phone. “People like Hillary Clinton and Medgar Evers and Josephine Baker and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It’s like God mixed in something extra when he cooked them up, and the folks around them couldn’t help but see it. Like, if people shined, some would shine brighter.”
People like Lua.
Lua shone like the sun.
“I envy you sometimes.” I said.
“Don’t patronize me, Ozzie.”
“I’m not!” I needed to leave soon to avoid being late for therapy, but I honestly didn’t care. “At least you know what you want to do with your life. You’ve always known.”
Lua frowned, her disapproval searing. “Are we throwing a pity party? Should I run inside and find some balloons?”
“Whatever. Just forget it.”
Lua and I squared off, staring each other down. I waited for her to get out of the car, but she remained fixed in her seat. “Yeah, fine, I’m a talented musician. I’m good at exactly one thing. But you, you’re good at everything.”
I rolled my eyes. “I should get to my doctor’s appointment.”
Lua got out of the car and grabbed her stuff from the back. She leaned in through the open window and said, “You worry too much, Ozzie. You’ll figure it out.”
“Thanks,” I said. And I meant it, even though I didn’t believe her. The sun would never understand. We couldn’t all shine as brightly as Lua.
7,956,000,000 LY
THE ONLY SCARY MOVIE THAT had ever truly terrified me was IT. And it wasn’t even the movie itself, it was Pennywise the Clown who’d clawed into my nightmares and liked them so much he’d decided to stay forever. If I thought about that creepy-ass clown even for a second, I couldn’t shower for hours.
Dr. Andrea Echolls reminded me of Pennywise.
It was her smile.
Or rather, that she never stopped smiling.
She’d walked into the waiting room and called my name, wearing this crazy rictus she must’ve thought put patients at ease but definitely did not. I’d hoped once I plopped down in the overstuffed microfiber chair opposite the couch she occupied that her grin would fade, but it didn’t. It hadn’t. Not as she went over my history. Not as she asked me the same basic questions my other therapists asked—How was my mood? Did I get along with my parents? Was I doing well in school?—and not even when she’d asked me why I thought I was there and I replied with my stock answer about being the next name on the list of insurance-approved therapists, which wasn’t exactly true since I’d skipped Dr. Norman Dewey.
No matter what, Dr. Echolls kept smiling.
Only weirdos are happy all the time.
“Now that we’ve gotten the boring stuff out of the way,” Dr. Echolls said. “What would you like to discuss, Ozzie?” She said my name so often, I wondered if she thought I’d forgotten it.
“Don’t you have questions for me or something?”
Dr. Echolls settled into her couch like we were a couple of old pals catching up. She didn’t even have a notepad or tablet. “I prefer letting my patients guide our discussions, Ozzie.”
“But isn’t that your job?”
“You’re a comedian, aren’t you, Ozzie?”
“No.”
“We can chat about whatever you like, Ozzie.”
“There’s this guy at school,” I said. “Calvin.”
“Okay,” Dr. Echolls said, like this was the most interesting conversation she’d had in months, which was either sad or a lie.
I tried to think of how to phrase what I wanted to say without bringing up Tommy, because I wasn’t in the mood to see that look on her face. The pitying one everyone wore when I brought him up. “He has information about something—information I need—but I’m not sure I can trust him. I might’ve been able to last year, but he’s different now.”
“Why is that?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that I’m not sure I can trust him.”
“Why?”
Another question I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know why Calvin had changed. Honestly, I hadn’t known him well enough before, and maybe he’d always been this way and no one had ever noticed. But after catching him cutting himself, I figured there was probably more to it than that.
“Orange juice,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Orange juice.”
“What about it?” Dr. Echolls said.
“You’ve eaten an orange, right?” I didn’t wait for her to answer. “But I bet there are people out there who have never tasted an actual orange.”
Dr. Echolls kept smiling. She didn’t interrupt me even though she must’ve been wondering what the hell I was talking about.
“So the thing is, all the orange juice you drink is artificially flavored. Even the stuff that says it’s not from concentrate. It’s a lie.”