He sniffed a laugh.
“No, I can hurt them where it counts,” I said. “If I tell the press about my Alaskan field trip—or worse, if I spill it on Twitter—my parents’ empire of money could come crashing down in shame and infamy. That scares the crap out of them.”
“So you’ll get out and become a famous writer someday, while I’m stuck here forever,” Milo said, sounding petulant again.
“Not forever. And you’re going to be okay. Take it from your Uncle Cassie.”
“You’re so weird.”
But I heard the smile in his voice. His back pushed against my chest in a big sigh, and I felt him settle deeper in the bed, closer to sleep.
“Holden?”
“That’s me.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“Constantly.”
“I mean, aren’t you scared of getting out of here? When you’re not better yet?”
I thought long and hard about how to answer, sorting through the voices in my head clamoring and shouting, banging their cymbals like toy monkeys. I wasn’t better. I was never going to be better. No matter what the counselors and doctors and pills and therapy tried to do, the cold would always find me. Alaska had broken something inside me forever.
“Are you kidding?” I said, making my voice light. “I’m going to live in sunny California. I’ll live in a new town where I don’t know anyone and be the new kid in school and…yeah, no. Now that I’m hearing it out loud, it sounds terrible.”
Milo laughed and the good feeling came back a little. Truthfully, I didn’t give two shits about being the new kid at a school. The universe had bequeathed unto me a tortured mind, but that mind also happened to be firing on all cylinders. An IQ of 153 meant a year of high school was more of an attempt at normalcy, not something I actually needed.
“I’m going to miss you, Holden,” Milo said, his voice heavy with sleep.
“Nah. You’ll forget me by dawn.”
He hugged my arm tighter. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Talk like you don’t matter. You do matter. To me.”
I clenched my teeth. Milo’s care and concern were perplexing and made my heart feel strange. Tears even tried to spring to my eyes, for crying out loud.
“It’s late,” I said thickly. “Get some sleep.”
“Okay. Goodnight, Holden. See you tomorrow.”
I didn’t trust my voice, so I held very still as the dimness in the room softened and grew darker. Milo’s breathing became even and regular. Carefully, I slipped out of his bed and back into mine. For an hour, I watched the shadows creep across the ceiling like long black fingers.
When dawn’s first light started to color the sky, I quietly dressed and packed up the rest of my belongings in matching Louis Vuitton luggage. My journals, mostly. The sanitarium didn’t allow us to keep much of our own clothes; my wardrobe for the past year was criminally full of crew neck shirts and poly-blends.
At seven a.m., a key turned in the lock of our door. I was already there. I shushed the orderly with a nod at Milo. He nodded and wordlessly took my luggage for me. I glanced back at my roommate.
He wasn’t going to be sad I was gone. Or if he was, it’d last for a few minutes and he’d get over it.
I went out and shut the door behind me. It locked itself with an automatic click.
The family lawyer my parents had sent to facilitate my exit from Sanitarium du lac Léman looked adequately slimy and expensive. Monsieur Albert Bernard sat beside me in the Director’s Office, resplendent in an Armani suit. I felt pitiful in jeans and—God help me—a short-sleeved button down with little yellow pineapples all over it.
Dr. Lange, the sanitarium director, looked uncharacteristically unsettled. He nodded at me. “Good morning, Mr. Parish.”
Now that I cradled the sanitarium’s balls in my hand—to crush or massage them depending on how smooth my escape was this morning—I was Mr. Parish.