I rolled my eyes. “I’m not taking your college fund, but if it’ll make you happy, I already accepted my spot at UC Boulder. I’ll figure something out. Just don’t tell Mom and Dad.” I wasn’t lying to Renny, but even if my parents changed their minds, I still wasn’t sure I’d go. And it wasn’t just because Tommy might return or Lua might not go on tour. Renny needed me. I had a hundred reasons to stay in Cloud Lake, but I didn’t want to argue with my brother while he was in so much pain.
“Good,” Renny said. “Go to school, Ozzie. Study something ridiculous. Join a frat and bang a ton of dumb hot guys. Become one of those conceited college kids nobody likes, who bores everyone by spouting pedantic nonsense. Go to grad school because your degree is worthless in the real world. Fuck the real world. The real world took my legs and my dick, Ozzie. The real world took my future. Don’t let it take yours.”
Warren rendered me speechless. For someone who hated me, he sure seemed to love me. I wanted to tell him he could have all the things he wanted me to have—that I’d take out soul-crushing loans for my own education so he could have any future he wanted—but I didn’t. Because, in a way, he was right. I knew his life wasn’t over because he couldn’t walk, it just wouldn’t be the life he wanted.
“I promise, Renny.”
“Good.” He sighed and his eyelids fluttered. “Look, I’m getting tired, kid.”
“Okay,” I said, not wanting to let him go. “When you get home, we’ll have wheelchair races on the roads in front of Dad’s new place.”
“Sounds good.” Renny’s voice drifted farther away.
“And don’t expect me to feel sorry for you either,” I told him. “I’m not ceding my chance to call you ‘numb nuts’ to spare your feelings.”
“Shit, Oz, if ‘numb nuts’ is the best you can come up with, you’re not as smart as I thought.”
“I love you, Renny.”
There it was. A smile. Fragile and newborn, but still a smile. “Ugh, you’re such a wuss.”
“Wuss? Really? Is that all you got?”
“Don’t make me roll over there and kick your ass,” he said, which seemed like the funniest thing in the world. He started laughing, and I laughed because it was good to see Renny smiling again. But laughing must’ve hurt because he winced and held his sides.
“Ow,” he said, but he kept grinning.
“Walk it off, Renny.”
“You’re an asshole, Ozzie. And I love you, too.”
211,581 KM
DR. MAKALI SAYEGH HAD BEEN STARING at me for the longest five minutes of my life. We’d exchanged pleasantries after she’d called me into her office, and then she just sat there, staring and smiling. She didn’t ask why I thought I was there. She didn’t ask how I was feeling. She hadn’t asked me anything other than whether I’d like a glass of water.
I didn’t know what her game was, but I didn’t like it.
Dr. Sayegh was a tiny woman—barely five feet tall—with gleaming white teeth, an overabundance of laugh lines, and wavy black hair shot through with gray. I admired her for aging gracefully rather than attempting to dodge time with harsh dyes or skin creams made from leftover baby foreskin. Besides, Sayegh didn’t act old. She seemed like the kind of woman who’d celebrate her fiftieth birthday by climbing to the peak of Mount Everest just to prove she could.
I examined the walls to kill time, waiting for her to start the interrogation. A picture of the doctor grinning from inside a yellow raft, an oar in one hand, white water raging all around her, hung on one wall. An abstract painting that drew me into its chaotic world of red splatters and neat yellow boxes, probably painted by a man who’d cut off some extruding body part and mailed it to an unrequited love, hung on another.
“My brother’s paralyzed,” I said when I couldn’t bear the silence anymore.
Sayegh covered her mouth with her hand and her eyes widened. “Oh, Oswald. I’m so sorry.”
“Fell off this tower thing in basic training.” Even though I knew Renny would live, I’d been moving through life like everything around me was distant noise. I spent my days sleepwalking through school and my nights sitting with Lua and Ms. Novak, watching bad reality TV. I hadn’t seen much of Calvin outside of physics, and he hadn’t made an effort to talk to me, either. “Cracked his skull and severed his spine.”
“At least he’s alive,” Dr. Sayegh said. She didn’t have a tablet or a notepad to write on.
“I wish Renny agreed.”
“How are you coping with all of this?”
I snorted. “Me? I can still walk. Who cares how I feel?”
“I do,” Sayegh said. “Your parents do.”
“Right.” I folded my hands together. “My parents are staying with Warren until the army doctors transfer him back home to start physical therapy.”
“And what about you? Where are you staying?”
“With my friend Lua. Which is fine. It’s not like I have a home anymore anyway.”
“Why is that?”
The downside to seeing a new therapist every week was constantly having to explain the same things over and over. It would’ve been easier if they’d shared notes. “My parents are divorcing, so they sold the house.” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter, though. That house stopped being a home a long time ago, I think.”
Dr. Sayegh shifted in her burgundy leather wingback chair and crossed her left leg over her right. “I spoke briefly with your mother before your appointment,” she said. “She mentioned I’m the ninth doctor you’ve seen in the last six months.”
“Eleventh, actually.”
“Why is that?”
“Why are you number eleven?”
I started to answer with my usual spiel about her being the next name on the list, but she cut me off. “Why do you keep changing therapists? I understand needing to find one you’re comfortable with, but eleven is uncommon.”
None of the others had asked me that, and I didn’t know how to answer. But I was great at avoiding answers, so I said, “The moon’s gone, you know?”
“What is a moon?”
“Exactly. Don’t you think it’s strange that our entire universe ends right outside our planet?”
“Not particularly. Do you?”
“Obviously.” My attempt to ruffle Dr. Sayegh had failed.
“We were talking about why you can’t seem to stick with a therapist longer than one session.”
“Were we?”
“Yes.”
“Fine,” I said. “You want the truth?”
“That would be nice.”
“I don’t trust you.” I leaned back in the peach love seat and spread out, taking up as much space as I could. “Not you specifically; therapists in general.”
“You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist,” Sayegh said. “Indira Gandhi, the first female Prime Minister of India, said that.”
I rolled my eyes. “You should frame that and hang it on your wall.”
Dr. Sayegh chuckled. “You enter each new therapist’s office determined not to trust them, so of course you never will. But if you want help, you’ve got to try.”
She acted like it was just that easy. But the truth was that I did want to talk. I wasn’t Giles Corey. The weight on my chest was killing me, and I couldn’t bear it alone anymore.
“You want me to trust you?” I said. “Tell me something personal. Something no one else knows.”
Dr. Sayegh cocked her head to the side. “I bite my toenails. It’s a disgusting habit I never outgrew.”