The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B (19 page)

Chuck sighed. And Adam remembered just how much the therapist hated being called “sir.”

“Tomorrow? Can you make it for three-thirty?”

“Yeah, I can skip biology.”

“Good. I’ll write you a note if need be. And, Adam?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Breathe.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll start right now.”
Seven sets. One, three, five, seven …

The next day Adam felt better, so he felt like a punk for calling Chuck. Not better-better, but better. True, he couldn’t stop counting, and there was that annoying low-level vibration that seemed to be buried somewhere in his bone marrow. Still, it was douche bag–ish to call Chuck at home, and to get Eric Yashinsky to cover him in biology, and to lie to his mom about why he’d be late and … well, so many things. This was a mistake.

“This is a mistake,” he said to Chuck while hovering at the door. “I feel better. Sorry, this is nuts.”

“Sure, but come in anyway, Adam. Take a load off.” Chuck moved from around his desk to the plush beige armchair he sat in for sessions. Adam didn’t budge. “If you’re not having a threshold issue, come in and relax. Look, we can do this rather than next week’s one-on-one if it makes you feel any better.”

Adam sat in the big overstuffed wing chair he liked best. Chuck let his people choose from four different chairs. The wing chair had a mushy pillow that Adam always hugged into himself even though he felt like a wuss every single time he did it.

“So how did it go at the church?”

“Good.”

“The Group?”

“Good. They were good. It was good.”
What the hell was he doing? Why was he here?

“So what triggered last night, do you think? Any thoughts? Are things, the rituals, escalating?”

“Trigger? What was the
trigger
? You’re kidding, right? My life is the trigger, sir.” Adam became aware of his breathing. It was like he was breathing into a microphone. The sound filled up the room.

“Fair enough. The threshold rituals, are they escalating in response?”

“Don’t know.” He shrugged. Now he could hear his heart.
Thump, thump, thump, pa-thump, thump
. Wait, was that right? That didn’t sound right.
Thump, thump, thump, pa-thump
. He was perspiring. Was this how it was for Wolverine? He was going to have to cut the guy more slack—this sucked. But what if it
was
Wolverine who was sending the sick crap to Mom? No. That just didn’t make any sense. He wasn’t
that
crazy. He was just like him. Poor guy.
Pa-thump
.

“Adam? Is it the tapping?”

“No.” He sighed in relief because that, at least, was the truth.

“All right, then. Uh, dare I ask if you completed a List?”

The List! He did! He remembered doing it in the library last week after he’d finished his homework and trying to hide it from Eric Yashinsky, who was keeping him company.

“Yeah, I did one!” Adam fished around in his backpack. “By the way, don’t you think it’s time we stop punishing me about the Internet access? I am so over—”

“It wasn’t a punishment, Adam. But I agree the rituals don’t seem to center around the Internet compulsions, and so very soon we can—”

“Here it is!” He handed his List to Chuck.

The therapist unfolded the paper.

“Adam?” Chuck took off his aviators. “There’s nothing here.”

Adam got up and retrieved the paper.
Thump, thump, thump, pa-thump, pa-thump
. “Oh. Oh yeah. No more Ativan; I need another prescription. I forgot to tell you after Group. I lost a bunch down the school drain the other day.” He hadn’t written
anything
. He could have sworn …

“I’ll call the pharmacy as soon as you leave, and maybe we should increase the Anafranil to seventy-five milligrams—twenty-five milligrams three times per day.”

Adam was already doing that. It didn’t help. He’d crank it up some more.

“But, Adam, the List is—”

“I did, like, a million of them, I swear to God. It’s just that I rip them up after. I don’t know why, honest. I thought that was a finished one.” He had to fight the instinct to jump up and run out of the room.

Chuck leaned forward. “Try it straight. This is important. Has the counting moved exclusively into your head, no physical or visual ritual attached?”

Adam shoved the pillow into his gut. “Pretty much.”
One, three, five, seven …

Chuck nodded. “That’s significant. Even or odd numbers?”

“Both,” he admitted. “Different situations call for, uh, different scratchings.”

“Scratchings?”

“It’s like my brain gets itchy, uh, hot sometimes.” Adam barely said it out loud. Chuck had to sit at the end of his chair to catch it.

“How are things at home? Is your mother’s hoarding escalating?”

Adam shouldn’t have told about that. That was disloyal. That was wrong. It would hurt her. It would come back on him—it
was
coming back on him. Betraying her, making everything worse. He remembered the garbage bags, winced.

“She’s, like, taking out two green garbage bags a week.” And it was true. She still was. She made a big show of it every single week.

“Excellent.” Chuck nodded. “So something else with your mom. Do you want to talk about her a bit?”

“No, sir.”
You are an abortion. Die bitch die. You are ruining your son’s life
. A dread hiding a guilty truth pounded harder and harder. Jesus. Was there some disgusting part of him that agreed? Adam shook his head. Jesus,
thump, pa-thump
. Jesus. He was a monster. “No. I’m good.”

Chuck frowned. “Okay, we’ll leave that for the moment. How about at your dad’s? How is it going with your stepmother?”

“Brenda?”
Brenda? Mrs. Brenda Ross loves you more, she said
. “Brenda’s good.”
Thump, pa-thump, pa-thump, pa-thump, thump, thump
.

“Adam, I feel it’s time for us to seriously consider commencing with the exposure response and prevention therapy. Now, I can’t make you talk and I certainly can’t
make
you undertake this stage, but the interior quality of the counting has moved it into what some in the profession call pure OCD and …”
Words, words, words
.

“Yeah, sure, Doc. Absolutely. But not now. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. I think that I had a panic attack is all and I didn’t have any Ativan left, like I said. Yeah, for sure that was it! So …” He stood up. “If you’d just call the pharmacy. Thanks for helping me sort that out in my own head.”
Three, five, seven, nine, eleven …
 “Sorry for freaking you out.” He headed for the door.

“Adam, you didn’t. Adam, wait! Our time—”

What are you going to do? Stop talking and fix me! Just fix me. I need to be fixed
.

“It’s good. I’m better. Plain old panic attack, sorry. Thanks, Doc. I’m way better, seriously clear and everything.”

He was reeling when he got into the elevator. He was alone, at least in the beginning. It felt like he had walked into a vacuum tube. Adam rode the elevator up and down, as he sometimes did after a session with Chuck. The compression was soothing, as was the soft
ding
of the floor indicator. As Adam rode, he reviewed every word and gesture. Seventeen minutes later, he walked out into the cold toward the pharmacy.

He took an Ativan before he called her. He thought she’d be pleased about the whole impromptu Chuck session. She wasn’t.

“Did you tell him about the letters?”

“Not in so many words,” he admitted. He walked over to his fish tank. The boys swam over to him and then swam away in a huff when they realized he wasn’t going to feed them. All except Steven, who stayed and looked at him pityingly.

“In
any
words, Adam? I mean words that actually left your head and came out loud into the world?”

“Not so much.”

She eventually wore him down. It was a war of attrition and Robyn was better armed. In every conversation, every evening that week, she hinted not so subtly that he had to
get more support, more ammo, more help—in other words, tell Group about the letters.

“Uncle!” he groaned on Sunday night.

“Good decision,” she said sweetly. “I’ve been praying on it.”

The superheroes all checked in with their accessories that Monday. Batman wore his ring. He wore it all the time now, and Robyn brought in a new pair of long green leather gloves. She smiled encouragingly at him as soon as he sat down. Adam found that irresistible and had to concentrate on not throwing himself across the room and kissing her. Instead, he spoke up right after check-in.

“Adam, you’d like to start us off?” The therapist looked pleased.

“Yes, sir. I think. So, guys, well, you all know I have the counting and, uh, the threshold thing, right?”

Everybody but Wolverine nodded. Wolverine just looked bored—or was he checking his target heart rate? Thor offered Adam his signature death stare. At least it meant that he was paying attention.

“Yeah, so it’s expanding. Maybe.”

Snooki turned in her seat to face him.

“A lot. New ones. I don’t know why. There’s more places at school, and you know about the church. There’s the side door at my dad’s now, and the worst”—Adam’s mouth dried up—“the worst is the front door of my house.”

“Your own place, man?” Iron Man shook his head. “That is so the bitch.” You could tell by the way he said it that he’d been practicing that phrase, working it hard and waiting for the perfect moment to roll it out.

“Yeah, yeah, it is. I’m, like, scaring the neighbors.”

Adam elaborated and could quite legitimately have taken up all his time on that rather salient and considerable problem, but he noticed that Robyn had given up on being
encouraging
and had careened straight into being
anguished
.

“But that’s not the real problem.”

“No shit, Sherlock!” said Wolverine. “You’ve gone from tapping your brains out every session to not being able to get into your own house and that’s
not
the problem? What about that pretty speech you made in September? The one about getting clearer every week until you could blow this place?” He leaned forward shaking his head, radiating concern. “Man, you’re circling the drain.”

Chuck cleared his throat.

Thor glowered.

Wolverine shut up.

Adam noted all this while exhaling, slowly. He did not count or choke on Wolverine’s passive-aggressiveness. He also did not get up and fling himself at Wolverine as he moved his chair closer to Robyn’s. “Maybe I am, but no, that’s not the real problem.” He took a couple of raggedy breaths but still did not count. He’d be damned if he would count in front of that mutant. “So, and like this
so
has got to stay here …”

What was he doing?
Sweat beaded on his forehead and then on the sides of his face until all the beads found each other and decided to form clammy streams that raced down his neck.

Danger. This was a betrayal. Danger
.

He didn’t know how to begin. He should have practiced, like Iron Man. Adam fumbled around in his head
searching for a path, until he remembered how Robyn had talked about her mother.

“Okay, so …” He looked at his feet, which were on the floor. He crossed his legs the wrong way, undid them and crossed them the right way. “Uh, I think I got to lay some ground rules?” He looked to Chuck, so they all looked to Chuck. Chuck nodded and everyone returned to Adam. “Right, so like I said, except I didn’t say anything. So I’ll say it, but I don’t actually want at this point, right now, any solutions or comments, okay? It’s crazy complicated, and I can’t go to the cops or tell any authorities.
Any
. You just have to believe that. I feel like I’m taking a big risk and … like I’m going to make it worse.”

Wolverine groaned, but Thor emitted a low soft rumble. Again Wolverine shut down.

“Sorry. Okay, thing is my mom … my mother has been getting these deranged, threatening letters that call her disgusting names and keep pushing her to kill herself.” Adam noted a soft gasp, and he stumbled. He looked to Robyn. He could
feel
her across from him, pleading with him, urging, nodding, cheering for him. The girl was burning up a lot of energy.