“What?”
I pointed at her watch. She laughed again. “No. I just like shiny things. Like a magpie.” That was Paris—always a bird. Light bones, mind flitting from place to place, acquiring things. Something tailored from wind, unanchored in the sky. She walked over to a big flat-screen TV. “Anyway, we have forty minutes. Just enough time for Project Runway before we go. I DVRed it.”
We walked to the bowling alley. The place was kind of run-down. There was an empty lot next to it, full of weeds, cordoned off by a wire fence. I guessed it had been built when Oakwood was still a tourism boomtown, before people started flying to Mexico. A long, flat edifice, warehouse-like, squat.
There was a neon sign out front, still lit, one of those ones with three images kind of overlapping so it looks animated—a guy holding up a ball, then kneeling, then releasing it. Except the third batch of tubes was busted, so the guy was just standing and then kneeling, standing and then kneeling, like he was proposing or something.
Or having a stroke.
Inside, we walked past an empty reception area. The place was closed; I mean, it was closed for bowling. Behind the desks were rows of compartments holding white-soled sneakers in different sizes. We cut right and went past the lanes; the lights above them were off, but screen savers cycled on the computers above them, showing cartoons of shocked-looking pins tumbling end over end, creating flickering shadows. It felt like an introductory scene in a horror movie.
“Spooky, isn’t it?” said Paris.
“Uh-huh.”
The balls gleamed in their racks. Green and blue and black and red, the colors pearlescent, swirling like gasoline in a puddle. They gave me a sick feeling. They reminded me of bruises. I could smell stale popcorn.
“In here,” said Paris. She opened a utilitarian fire door with a letter-sized piece of paper taped to it, saying PRIVATE MEETING IN SESSION VSG SOUTH JERSEY BRANCH.
I followed her in. There was an oldish-looking guy sitting on a cheap plastic chair with steel legs; ten or so empty chairs were arranged in a circle in front of him. The room was bare—against one wall was a table with a paper cloth over it, and a coffeepot and cups.
“I’m hoping someone’s going to bring cookies,” he said. He had gray hair, twinkling eyes. Kind of handsome, in a scruffy, old-guy kind of way. He was wearing Nike sneakers with jeans and a polo shirt. He looked like the antidoctor. He looked like, I don’t know, an advertising executive or something. Not that I know what an advertising executive looks like.
“****,” said Paris. “I baked some. I swear. Then we were watching Project Runway.”
“A valuable use of your time, no doubt,” said the old guy. But he was smiling as he said it. He turned to me. “Dr. Lewis,” he said. “But you can call me Mike. And you must be … what do you prefer? Cassandra? Cass? Cassie?”
I shrugged. “Whatever.”
The voice said,
“Manners, Cass. For ****’s sake.”
“I mean, I don’t mind,” I said. This was weird. The voice wanted me to be polite to this guy? Suddenly I felt scared. I mean, this was the thing that had made me slap myself and inject myself with epinephrine, and it wanted me to play nice with the doctor?
Anything the voice wanted had to be bad, didn’t it?
But I squashed this thought down, jumped on it, like Daffy Duck jumping on Bugs Bunny when he’s trying to get out of his hole. I didn’t want to be taking the drugs either; I didn’t want to be a zombie all my life.
“Cass?” said Paris. “Earth to Cass?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m here.”
“That you are,” said Dr. Lewis. Mike. “And it’s an important first step. So. Why don’t you take a seat and tell me about it. Paris, you mind giving us the room?”
A nervous voice inside me spoke up then, not the voice, but an instinct voice. It said, You want to be alone in here with this guy you don’t know?
Then the actual voice said,
“Shut the **** up, *****. Stop being so pathetic.” It was quiet from the risperidone, but it was still pretty forceful.
I closed my eyes as my inner voices argued. “Can she … can she stay?” I said.
Paris looked at the doctor.
“Why don’t we leave the door open?” he said. “Paris can wait in the main hall. She could even bowl a few rounds.”
“Bowl?” said Paris, like he was suggesting necrophilia or something.
He shrugged. “The balls are there. Might as well use them.”
Paris smiled. “The philosophy of every male,” she said. “Okay, fine. You need me, Cass, you call for me.”
And then she swept out the room, long legs tick-tocking. I watched her go, amazed as I always was by her, by her self-possession and her grace, despite her illness. She was like a machine in tight-fitting clothes, engineered to hold the eye, but she had charisma too, blazing out of every pore.