I felt like my brain was frozen, glitched as it tried to process everything.
“You should’ve seen it,” Fitz laughed. “The one time I tried to give him gloves. A nice Yves Saint Laurent pair, very sleek and stylish. Black leather, with clips. I thought it would help with the whole skin-to-skin thing. But he just threw them in the fireplace. Said it was pointless to try to hide behind a piece of clothing. Didn’t even give them a chance.”
Fitz put his head in his hand, scowling at the graffiti etched into the table.
“Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t want to get better.”
Those words freaked me out – it sounded exactly like the things I used to think, back when Dad was first diagnosed. In the darkest parts of me, when I’m down and out, I still think like that. Reading the psych textbooks helped me, so much so that I knew I’d be lost in despair if I didn’t read them.
“Fitz,” I put my hand over his. “Listen – I’m the one trying to go to NYU for psychology, right?”
He snorted. “Yeah.”
“You know how many of those textbooks I check out a week.”
“A hundred million.”
I chuckled. “Yeah. A hundred million. So when I tell you it’s not a matter of Wolf wanting to get better, you understand me, right?”
Fitz shrugged. “Not really.”
“Nobody wakes up one day and says ‘I want to get better’,” I shook my head. “Well, sometimes they do. But that’s a very rare occasion. And getting better isn’t as easy as going to see a shrink three times a week. It doesn’t work like that. If one part of your body is hurt, you don’t just put a band-aid on the spot and call it a day. You wash the wound, you put antibiotic ointment in there, and you wrap it up. You change the bandage, you put more ointment on. Over and over, until it’s healed. Sometimes it gets infected, and you have to go get that taken care of, with pills and stuff. And then sometimes, no matter how hard you try to keep it clean and dry, it gets re-infected. And then, maybe after it’s all healed, the scar’s skin is too tight, or you lose all feeling in that area, or maybe it aches so bad you can’t get out of bed some days.”
I took a breath.
“That’s what it’s like. It’s not easy, okay? And it’s even harder to know where to start. All you can do is offer a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on. Sometimes it’s not even that dramatic; sometimes all you can do is sit down and watch TV with them. Sometimes all you can do is throw a microwave dinner in and bring it to them with a glass of juice. Sometimes, you can’t do anything at all.”
Fitz was quiet. I fell silent, suddenly feeling awkward about how much I’d talked. I’d sounded preachy. I knew there was nothing worse than someone trying to tell you about how hard it was for someone else, when they were the ones suffering, too.
“So you’re saying…there’s nothing I can do for him?”
“Just be there,” I said. “That’s all.”
Fitz studied his empty milk carton. I noticed the faint eyebags around Fitz’s green gaze. It struck me, then, that the Blackthorn brothers were going through a lot more shit than people knew. I was so convinced their lives were perfect and easy, and yet sitting in front of me was clear evidence that they weren’t. For all their money and connections and popularity, they were still just boys, recovering from the loss of their mother, confused and as lost as any of us.
“Do you wanna,” Fitz ran a hand through his hair. “Do you wanna come and smoke with me? To get my mind off all this shit? I’d rather not be alone.”
“You can’t hide in drugs forever, Fitz,” I said. He smiled, though something about it was a little broken, cracked on the edges.
“I know. I know that better than anyone. Just let me have this now, okay?”
I nodded, but refused to come with him. He finally gave up when he spotted Keri – trotting over to her and forcing his smile to be cheery. Had he always done that? Or was I just noticing it now?
****
When people are sad, they deal with it in a lot of different ways. For Fitz, it was drugs. For Dad, it was closing the doors on the world. For Mom, it was staying out more.
For me it was, and always would be, hiding in the library.
The smell of books was the smell of my childhood, of old imaginary friends and new, hidden between the pages. Libraries meant quiet - gentle and soothing quiet - like the quiet of a low tide. Everything was orderly, too – the Dewey decimally sorted books, the A to Z labelling, the fiction and nonfiction and vampire romance sections. Everything had its place. When life got too confusing, I came to the library, because nothing about the library was confusing. The librarians would help you, no matter what you were looking for, they always had at least one answer, or a semblance of an answer. And sometimes, that was a lot more than the world outside could give me.
Unfortunately, Fitz knew about this. He knew my hideout was the library. Doubly unfortunately, he’d told Burn.
“Bee,” Burn’s low voice made me put my book down, and once again I was struck by just how damn big Burn was. He was tall enough to reach the topmost shelf, easily.
“Oh, uh, hey,” I closed my textbook. “What’s up? Are you alright –” I stopped myself. He hated that phrase. “I mean, uh, how’d you find me? Wait, let me guess – Fitz.”
“Fitz,” Burn agreed with a nod. “Come with me.”
“If you want me to run my ass off again after this morning, in which you worked me like a racing horse, I’m gonna have to decline.”
“It’s a surprise,” Is all he said. His face was placid, calm as always. His eyes were sleepy, giving nothing away about what he was feeling or thinking.
“Is it a good surprise?” I asked.
“I think you’ll like it.”
“Simple and mysterious at the same time,” I sighed and stood up, packing my books in my bag. “I don’t know how you do it, Burn.”