Rock N Soul (17 page)

“No you didn’t,” Chad said. “The meds make you sleepy and unfocused and that’s why I walk and talk like I do. But did it help?”

“The meds,” I repeated. “Chad, did you put something in my food?”

He had the decency to appear ashamed of himself. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “I saw you talking and you looked like I used to look before I learned to stop talking and I thought it would help. Did it help? It doesn’t help me. But did it help you?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, starting to get a little freaked out.

“
I
know what he means,” Chris growled. “And I’m going to strangle him.”

“Shut up,” Chad said, pointing straight at Chris. “You’re not real and you’re just confusing him, so shut up before he gets like me.”

My mouth dropped open, and it took me a few seconds to remember how to close it again.

Chris looked just as surprised as I felt. He crossed his arms. “You can see me?”

“Yes,” Chad mumbled. “Not that it matters since you’re not real.”

I snapped my eyes back and forth between them. “This is . . .” There didn’t really seem to be an appropriate ending to that sentence.

Chris came up with one, though. “Bullshit. This is bullshit.”

“Um . . .” I let a nervous laugh bubble up. “I was going to say something more like ‘weird’ or ‘unusual,’ but okay.”

“No, it’s bullshit,” Chris insisted. “If he can see me and he can hear me, then he
knows
you’re not crazy, but he still spiked your green beans with antipsychotic medications that are prescription strength for a
reason
.”

Chad shrugged. “I was trying to help.”

“Well, stop trying,” Chris shouted. “You could have killed him!”

“Whoa, whoa, let’s take a step back, guys,” I said. “No sense yelling and getting flustered and making me pull out the salt gun.”

“That wouldn’t work anyway,” Chad said. “Tried it. I’ve tried everything. I even ordered some special powdered jungle root and tried rubbing it on the soles of my feet during a quarter crescent moon. Nothing works.”

I frowned. “Not even the clozapine?”

He crossed his arms over his stomach as if to hold his insides in. “Especially not the clozapine. But Mom keeps giving it to me and like I said earlier, if I stop taking it, then they’ll throw me in a psych ward. So I pretend to take it and then I pretend that it’s helping. And I just . . . try not to talk to anyone unless I’m sure they’re actually there.”

“That stuff is serious, though, man,” I said to him. “I mean, I only had one dose and it knocked me out faster than a heavyweight boxer.”

“I know.” He sighed. “Believe me, I know.”

Chris pointed at him. “Look, I’m not sympathizing with you after you tried to kill my ride.”

“I didn’t try to kill him,” Chad said. “Just to make him stop seeing you.”

Chris glared. “Fine. But still. You stay the hell away from Tyler.”

Chad ignored him and instead focused on me. “You think you can see him, I guess,” he said, the tiniest sigh escaping his lips after the words. “But . . . can you see others?”

“Other than Chris?” I shook my head. “No, just him. Are there others?”

“Oh yes,” Chad said. “Hundreds. Thousands. I mean . . .” He shifted. “They’re not
that
common, really. They’re not just
everywhere
. But they’re common enough that I’m not surprised when I see one.” He shrugged, averting his eyes. “I didn’t really expect to see one at Christmas dinner, though.”

“Well, let me introduce you,” I said, then half turned toward Chris before Chad yelled, “No!”

I turned back to him with my eyebrows raised. “No?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head emphatically. “If you talk to them, then they become more real in your head and then it gets harder to convince yourself that they’re not there.”

I peered at Chris. “. . . but he
is
here.”

“He’s not,” Chad insisted. “He’s just a product of your mind, okay? He’s not real. He’s not there. You’re imagining him.”

I glanced at Chad, then looked back at Chris, then at Chad again. “. . . but he’s here.”

“No!” Chad said, raising his voice again.

“Shhh, dude.” I lifted a finger to my lips. “Do you want Uncle Tim to come running up here to check on us?”

Chad crossed his arms. “I’m just trying to keep you from becoming like me, okay?”

“I get that, Chad, I really do,” I said. “And I appreciate the thought, but . . . if Chris wasn’t actually here, then how would we both be seeing him? The same guy? And hearing him say the same things.”

Chad slid his arms down to wrap around his own stomach again. “I don’t know what that means. But I know he’s not real.”

I thought about Chad for a moment, trapped in a world where everyone said he was crazy. That could have been me, if Chris had happened earlier. When I was still learning reality from imagination as a kid. It made me have a little more sympathy for the guy. “Can I ask you a few questions, Chad?”

Chad didn’t look particularly happy about it, but he nodded.

“Do you have someone like Chris?” I asked. “Someone attached to you?”

Chad’s eyes darted around the room, and for a moment I wasn’t sure he was going to answer.

“I did,” he said after a long time. “She’s gone now. And then there was another one but he’s gone too.”

“Who were they?” I asked.

“Nana. Dad’s mom. She was with me for a long time and then she wasn’t. When she left I started to see more of them. Then I found Lucas and he stayed with me for a while, but I never stopped seeing the rest of them. And then Lucas left. And now I’m alone. But it’s easier this way because I just pretend like I don’t see the others and they leave me alone and I can almost act normal sometimes.”

Chris and I exchanged a glance, then Chris cleared his throat. “You said they left. How did they leave? Where did they go?”

“I don’t know where they went,” Chad said, staring down at the floor and catching his bottom lip in his teeth before continuing. “They just disappeared. Maybe my meds kicked in or something. Who knows.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, let’s pretend for a second that they were real. Where do you think they went?”

He shifted on his feet. “Heaven, I guess. I don’t know. Lucas didn’t think he was going to heaven since he was a suicide. But I don’t know what happened after they left, only that they were gone.” He met my eyes for a second and then looked away again. “Not that I’m saying that they’re real. But if they were.”

I nodded. “Okay. Fair enough. But how did they leave?”

He shrugged. “I guess they just didn’t want to be here anymore. They finished what they wanted to do and then they left.”

“So . . .” I waved my hand at Chris. “Unfinished business, then?”

“I guess,” Chad said. “I have to go. I’m sorry. I need to go lie down.”

I wanted to make him stay, to keep asking him questions, but he suddenly looked so bone-tired that I couldn’t bring myself to stop him. “Okay, buddy. You go nap and we’ll talk more later.”

Chad nodded and stumbled out of the room, tripping over his own feet and moving like he was already at least sixty percent asleep.

Chris watched him leave, then faced me. “That shit’s messed up.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, yawning. “But that makes a lot of sense, I guess. Poor guy.”

“Poor guy?” Chris said, scoffing. “He drugged you.”

I glared at him. “You have no sympathy for your fellow man.”

“I have sympathy for people who don’t drug other people,” he grumbled.

“You know, for a guy who did so many drugs he died from it, you’re awfully judgmental about this whole drugging thing.”

He tensed up and glared daggers at me. “That is
totally
different.”

And it was, of course. I knew it was. So I relented. “Yeah. I know. I’m sorry.”

“Will I ever be more than just a walking syringe to you?” he asked, anger tinting his voice. “I mean, really? Will you ever let go of that?”

“Why didn’t
you
let go of it?” I shot back. “All the people you loved told you that you should stop before you hurt yourself. They begged you to do it. And you didn’t stop because
why
?”

He worked his jaw a little. “Because it’s my life and they don’t control me.”

“Well, I guess you showed them,” I said bitterly.

“It wasn’t like that.”

I shrugged. “Whatever. You just tell yourself that none of it was about you being a selfish prick.”

“
Everything
was about me being a selfish prick.” He turned away from me and started pacing, his hand tugging at his hair while he walked. “And by the way, my sister and Eric told me that all the time. If you think you’re being original, you’re not. And I did it because I could, okay? Because it was something I could do. Something I could choose for myself that didn’t depend on anybody else giving me permission. Something that my sister could hate me for that made sense because
I
hated myself for it. And it was a way to show Eric he didn’t control me.”

I watched him for a few seconds. “It was still selfish.”

“I know,” he ground out. “That was the point.”

Silence fell, and it wasn’t the companionable silence we’d started enjoying recently. It stretched on for so long that I physically
had
to move, so I crossed and then uncrossed my arms.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last. It wasn’t enough, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

After another long pause, Chris shrugged and looked away. “I just want to stop talking about it. I want to be myself again and since I don’t
need
the heroin as a ghost, I can be. But I need you to stop harping on my drug use. I need to be more than just a junkie to you.”

“Why to me?”

“Who else is there?” he said back. “I mean, no offense, but you’re literally all I have in the world. It’s in my best interest to be friends with you.”

There was yet another moment of even more awkward silence. “It’s just hard to get past it.”

“Well, it’s not like I’m
proud
of it,” he grumbled.

I let out a long breath through my nose. “You sound proud. Talking about how it gave you control and talking about how you used it as a big fuck-you to Eric and to your family.”

“I’m
not
proud of it,” he said. “I was selfish and I was vindictive and I was just a giant douche to everyone who knew me, and I hated myself for how I was acting. I’m not making excuses or expecting you to understand it or to agree with my reasons. I’m just telling you . . . why.”

“. . . Okay.”

He sighed. “And besides, this is why I need to go talk to Eric and to Allison before I can move on. I need to tell them why. To let them know why I did it and how bad I feel about it.”

“What about your mom?” I asked. “Are you going to apologize to her, too?”

He shook his head. “She doesn’t know.”

“Really? Everybody knew. It was common knowledge.”

“Yeah, well, not to my mom.” He kicked at a nonexistent rock on the floor and watched his own foot move. “She has early-onset Alzheimer’s. She—” He broke off, then continued a few seconds later. “She thinks I’m twelve. She thinks Dad is still alive. She doesn’t know and even if I told her, even if I came totally clean about everything, she’d forget it the next day.”

“Oh.” I wrinkled my nose and squinted up at him. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” he said, quickly. “She’d be so hurt if she knew. So it’s better that she doesn’t.”

I nodded while I processed that. Dead father, amnesiac mother, sister who hates him. Maybe my messed-up family with the absent mother and the psychotic cousin was actually better in comparison. “I get that. But . . . you should still see her. Tell her good-bye.”

“She won’t remember it,” he said again. “I thought about going to see her, but it won’t matter. She won’t remember.”

“But you will,” I pointed out. “And really, maybe moving on is about
you
saying good-bye rather than the living people saying it. We could go stand over your grave and get our closure, but this is your only chance.”

“I guess that makes sense,” he said, but he didn’t continue the conversation and I didn’t particularly want to keep talking about it myself, so I let it go.

“Okay, enough fighting,” I said. “Let’s just get through the rest of Christmas and then go home. I’ll see if Richard will let me put in some extra shifts and maybe I’ll be able to get a cheap red-eye flight or something before too long.”

He offered me a small smile. “Thanks for doing all this for me.”

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t deserve it.” But I smiled back, and he seemed comfortable with that.

The rest of Christmas passed uneventfully. My mother didn’t show up, and Grandma gave me a new coat and an envelope that she made me promise not to open until I got home. Chris stayed grumpier than usual and kept Chad well in his sights at all times, but in general it was a nice holiday. Grandma begged me to stay over, so I did, and it was only slightly awkward to go to sleep knowing that a rock star was going to spend all night sifting through the weird shit that Teenage Tyler had been into back in high school.