The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B (6 page)

Sweetie nodded enthusiastically now.

“Even better, let’s load it up and go for broke. Let’s
do
one hundred and eleven
! That’s a one and a one and a one.”

“Wow, yeah! That’s an eleven with a friend. Yeah! One, one, one, it’s very pretty. I love one hundred eleven a lot! I can see all those ones.”

Adam felt Sweetie relax into him, felt his heart slow. It was different with him. Sweetie just liked to pick a number and think about it, but it had to be “pretty.” Adam had tried to teach Dad and Brenda about the numbers. But they couldn’t do it—didn’t get it or maybe didn’t believe.

But Adam did.

His brother got lost in all those ones for a while.

“Better, Sweetie?”

His brother sighed and melted into him. “I’m all better now. You fixed it.”

At least he could do this. At least there was this.

“I’m glad, Sweetie,” Adam whispered, and he hugged the little body even tighter. “I’m glad.”

Adam and the climbers sat panting in their chairs for a full five minutes before the rest of Group got there and a full minute and a half before Chuck arrived.

“Hey, my stair-climbing superheroes, how’s it going?” he asked as he shuffled through the door. “Are there more of you this week?”

It was true. Green Lantern and Iron Man had joined Wonder Woman, Robyn, Wolverine and Batman in their accidental fitness quest. Snooki had threatened to as well, but couldn’t that day because she was squeezing in an extra tanning appointment before the meeting.

Chuck took off his faded corduroy jacket and carefully draped it across the back of his chair. He laid down his repurposed file folders just so on the empty chair beside him and painstakingly sorted through them looking for
last week’s notes. Chuck did this with a nuclear absorption while the rest of Group dribbled in.

Adam, meanwhile, tried to settle into inconspicuous gazing at the ravishing Robyn. She had on a new school jacket. It fit better. Still the same skirt, though, and still heart-thumpingly too short. He was numb with emotion.

“You okay, Dark Knight?” Chuck took off his aviators and squinted at Adam.

Robyn glanced at Chuck and then resumed examining the floor.

“Me? Yeah, sure. I mean, still out of shape, but I’m good. Well, you know, for being whack and all.”

“Cool.” Chuck shook his head. “You guys are something else.”

Chuck was cool. Adam promised himself that he would talk about Robyn at their next one-on-one.
Robyn
. She still hadn’t looked up. He was getting
uncomfortable
again. Just looking at her across the semicircle made him hotter than a match. He counted the ceiling tiles, thought about Sister Mary-Margaret and then returned to the task at hand.

Chuck’s continuing preoccupation with his notes gave Adam just enough time to sort out his thoughts and start figuring out what to say during Group. He needed some kind of edge. Maybe it
was
time to talk about the letters. His mom had received yet another one yesterday afternoon. How many was that? They were starting to infiltrate the house somehow. Adam knew it was bad even as she turned her back to him and ripped it up. She couldn’t hide the color draining from her hands while she shoved the pieces deep into the garbage pail.

Sick stuff was attached to those paper shreds, and it got sicker each time his mom brushed him off. Whatever was in those letters was scaring the crap out of her and had set off the tripwire to his not-so-free-floating anxiety. Adam had spent all of last night rearranging his Warhammer figures. There was, of course, an exacting ritual to the rearranging. Each Orc had to be in the correct formation on his shelves, and he also had to replace them all in a particular way, circling down from above, counter-clockwise, thirteen times. If he did it wrong, he would have to start again. It was virtually impossible to do right.

Adam owned almost three hundred miniatures.

It took hours.

Adam hadn’t had to “arrange” for months. He was angry with himself, with the situation … with his mom, but he knew he couldn’t talk about the letters here. The letters were like the inside of the house. Secret. There would be consequences. His mom had laid it out hard a couple of years ago. Talking about the house would be a betrayal. If he betrayed her, they would take her away. Period.

Yes, the compulsions
were
escalating. But just a bit, nothing to worry about, not yet. And yes, it was annoying that the threshold to the large biology lab had amped up from a negligible clearing to a semi-full ritual. But that was sort of nothing. In fact, maybe he could talk about that. Maybe it would help to get support from his support group, because that’s why one went to a support group, right? Except he would sound way more nuts than he wanted to sound. No one else had a threshold thing as far as he could tell. Everyone in Group seemed shocked by the new
uncovering of someone else’s way-weird ritual, each one of which was entirely different from their own way-weird rituals. Thresholds? Too weird. What would Robyn think?

Adam tapped his right foot on the front leg of his chair for three sets of thirty-seven. He tapped invisibly while everyone settled in and started up. Wolverine whispered something to Robyn. It made her smile, sort of. This called for seven sets up to eleven.
One, three, five, seven, nine, eleven
. He didn’t have a chance. Even though he’d swear that Peter Kolchak was crazier on his best day than Adam was on his worst, Wolverine had that thing that some guys had, the thing that makes you move as if you’re used to being liked. The way he’d just leaned into Robyn assuming she’d
like
what he whispered to her.

What would that be like? How do you get that? And yet …

The smile that she had just offered Adam was bigger than the one she’d offered Wolverine a second ago. Adam knew this because he’d counted it out in taps. Wolverine had got two taps, no teeth showing, while her smile for Adam had clocked in at over three beats with a flash of white.

Captain America came in and punched Adam’s arm. “Batman, my man! How’s it hanging? How’s it hanging?”

What did that even mean? Jacob was seriously in over his head with his Captain America persona. The guy was normally a nervous, tidy fellow with energetic checking and repeat issues, not an arm-punching, how’s-it-hanging type.

“Cool, Captain America. You?”

Jacob puffed up, delighted that someone had finally remembered
to call him by his superhero name. “Cool, man. Cool.”

Adam watched Robyn as Robyn sort of watched everyone. Something was up.

Snooki came in looking like a shiny nutmeg and Thor stormed in five minutes late, managing to make them all feel guilty for being on time. The Viking settled into his accustomed seat behind rather than beside Chuck, and glowered his customary glower—or was it dialed down a bit?

As the session got under way, Thor’s eyes remained relatively calm even as Wonder Woman went on at mind-numbing length about her food or lack thereof. Food discussions seemed to set Thor’s teeth on edge and Adam was right with him on that one.

“I know I should lay off the laxatives—that way lies madness, et cetera, et cetera—but since I bought the bottle, I felt I had to empty it. Every damn ritual comes with its own instruction manual, right?”

Snooki put a comforting hand on Wonder Woman’s arm. Snooki was a “patter”—every group had one. That’s what Robyn said. Robyn had been to a lot of groups.

“But I won’t do it again,” Wonder Woman promised.

To who, exactly?

“I mean it. I learned my lesson, guys. I don’t need a full-fledged eating disorder layered on top of the claustrophobia and, and other stuff. So I’m back to chewing a hundred times for each bite. Dinner takes almost two hours, but see, that works because …”

Forget it. Thor and Adam folded their arms across their chests. Try as he might, Adam couldn’t come up with
anything remotely sympathetic to say. Skinny girls worrying about getting skinnier totally perplexed him. He
hated
being perplexed, especially in Group. There was enough perplexing
outside
Group.

Green Lantern, thank God, had a superior story about having to keep driving back to a school crosswalk several times a day, all week, because he was convinced that he had run over someone last Tuesday. Classic—now this was something Adam could get into. Green Lantern listened to newscasts on the radio and TV, read all the local papers and scoured the Internet, searching for a report of an accident on the corner of Chestnut and Walmer. Nothing. Far from calming him, the lack of reportage just made him escalate. Adam had never had this particular experience—he couldn’t drive, after all—but he could completely understand the supremely logical compulsion to return to the scene of the imaginary accident over and over again. He so
got
that one. Adam suggested that, for starters, Green Lantern might want to journal every revisit or
thought
about revisit and assign it a number value, just like it said in the manual (well, on the back cover of the manual anyway). And that act alone might help a bit. Just because Adam didn’t do any of the assignments didn’t mean they shouldn’t be done. Green Lantern looked genuinely relieved.

Robyn didn’t. Something was up for sure. She was avoiding eye contact and her vibe was off. She didn’t even look like herself, although Adam didn’t understand how exactly. He wasn’t good with girls’ faces. If he ruled the world, girls would say every single thing that was on their minds. He sucked at guessing, and that whole reading-between-the-lines
thing was so beyond him, he couldn’t get there with a map.

Thirty-seven minutes in and, aside from that lone smile, Robyn had not looked at him once. What was the matter? Something was. He was screwed. She
hated
him. Completely understandable, of course, but why?

Wolverine took the floor and began laboriously listing the reasons why he thought he had congestive heart failure. “I have undefined fatigue, you know?” The guy should have sounded like the douche bag he was, but somehow he didn’t. It was unbearable.

Adam crossed his legs, caught himself and readjusted immediately. That was no way to
man up
. He was crossing his legs the way girls do. He examined Thor, who was glowering at Wolverine, or maybe that was just Thor’s “listening” face.

“It’s chronic, of course, and eventually fatal.” Wolverine shuddered.

If only,
thought Adam.

“I’ll have to get a ream of tests: extensive blood work, nuclear medicine, examine my creatine levels. Then there’s stress tests and …”

Thor sat like a man, and at nineteen arguably he was one. First of all he really
occupied
the chair. Adam tried for a bit of heavy-duty chair occupying. He raised his right leg and oh-so-casually placed his right ankle over his left knee, finishing off with left hand grasping right ankle loosely. There. Just like Thor. Okay, not comfortable, but
way
more manly. Adam also tried nodding sympathetically at Wolverine, but his heart just wasn’t in it. More importantly,
Wolverine sounded like he was winding down and it didn’t look like anyone else was going to come in.

There was going to be a
lurch
. And he didn’t have anything prepared. But mere seconds into said lurch, Robyn shut it down.

“My mother killed herself five years ago today. Exactly. Today.” She inhaled just as all the air left the room. She didn’t look at anyone, but everyone looked at her. Everyone except Adam. Adam flashed straight back to the black granite headstone.

Today.

Robyn was staring at his shoes—well,
shoe
, given that only his left foot was on the floor. Adam uncrossed his legs. Sitting like a man was going to take some practice.

“So I don’t want to talk about it or anything,” she said, gaze still fixed firmly on his feet. “Really, I don’t. Not today, anyway. I just felt that I should …” Tears threatened to erupt but were sucked back. “I don’t know, like, I felt I should note it, somehow. My father doesn’t … uh, he wouldn’t approve.”

Adam exhaled when she exhaled. He
needed
to protect her, and the need was so big and pounding that he thought
he
would break.

So he stared at her shoes in solidarity. He did
not
count the lines on the planked floor.

Admittedly not a big gesture, but maybe she would recognize it.

She wore scuffed Doc Martens. All the girls in his school wore them too, but not quite as scuffed. She was a scuffed goddess.

“We will of course respect your wishes, Robyn,” Chuck finally broke in. “And we’ll look forward to hearing about your mother when you’re ready to share. But right now, how about we close our eyes in a minute of contemplation and celebration of Robyn’s mother? If that’s comfortable for you.”

The air in the room returned as Robyn nodded.

Everyone, including Thor, bowed their heads and shut their eyes. Adam knew this because he tracked the semicircle through his eyelashes. Adam hadn’t been able to keep his eyes closed in public since he was seven. So he always kept watch and guarded, keeping everybody safe.

That was his job.

“Okay, people—same time, same place next week.” Chuck clasped his hands. “Good work today!”