It’s hard not to feel a little smug about that.
DOSAGE: 4 mg. Same dosage.
APRIL 10, 2013
The weird thing about yesterday is that I don’t remember getting out of bed. I remember standing in my bedroom for a while, watching Rebecca sleep, and then walking out into the hall to stretch my legs. I was feeling twitchy.
The other weird thing is that I didn’t take my phone. I realized this even before I saw the mob boss in my family room lounging on my couch with a cannoli and a cappuccino. He didn’t have the same manic look on his face that he did when he opened fire at school. He actually looked pretty calm, just watching while the two boulder-sized men behind him browsed our bookshelves.
“It’s late. You should be sleeping,” he said.
“I also shouldn’t be seeing you.” I was in no mood to be lectured.
“Cannoli?” he asked, raising it to my face. It smelled delicious. That’s how crazy I still am. I could smell the cappuccino and the cannoli as if I’d just bought them at a bakery or, you know, made them myself. The powdered sugar disappeared into a puff of dusty air when he took a bite, little bits falling on the rug.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Your loss, kid.” He stuffed the rest of it into his mouth and wiped the sugar on my great-grandmother’s crocheted blanket. That irritated me for a second, and it must have shown on my face because his mouth split into a wide grin.
“You really want to yell at me for that, don’t you?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You don’t have to. I’ve never met anyone so tightly wound. How did you get that stick up your ass, kid?” When I didn’t answer, he took a fistful of cookies and crushed them into tiny crumbs, dropping them deliberately onto the ground in front of him. This is the part where you would interrupt me and say, But, Adam, at this point, didn’t you know he was a hallucination? Why, yes, Professor, I did. The same way I know that there are no monsters under my bed. But that doesn’t mean I let my feet dangle over the edge, either. It’s difficult to know anything with absolute certainty, especially with a very real hallucination staring back at me.
“How long do you think you’ll be able to keep this up? Do you think your little Flip girlfriend is still gonna wanna touch your junk when she finds out you’re a schizo?” I couldn’t remember if “Flip” was a slur or not, but I winced.
“It didn’t bother your mom,” I said.
The men behind him flexed their muscles warningly, but the boss actually laughed.
“That’s more like it!” he roared, wiping sugar from his lips. “We’re a part of you, paisano. Every single one of us is a piece of you, and you hide us like we’re trash.”
“You’re not real.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “To them maybe not. But we’ve always been real to you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“And what about her?” He tilted his head toward my bedroom, where Rebecca was sleeping. “Are you casting her out, too?”
“She doesn’t make me crazy,” I said.
“None of us made you crazy.” He laughed.
“If I can’t see you, I can move on with my life.”
“So if you can’t see us, we don’t exist? I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“I’m going to bed.”
“You do that, kid. Just remember what I said. You can’t keep this up forever. The drugs can only do so much.”
I walked back to my room and climbed into bed. Rebecca was still sleeping. Her hand found mine, and I squeezed. She squeezed back.
DOSAGE: 3.5 mg. Decreased dosage.
APRIL 17, 2013
I feel fine. For most of this week, it was just Rebecca and the choir. The rest of them haven’t been seen for days.
How’s my mom’s pregnancy going? I’m a terrible son. I know I’m supposed to say that Mom is glowing. That she’s never looked more beautiful. But the fact is that I saw her eat an entire Costco bag of Doritos by herself and then burst into tears, which without any context is pretty terrifying. She’s also left the remote in the fridge twice in the past week. Paul says it’s called “pregnancy brain,” but he never says that above a whisper. Also I’m pretty sure she used to have ankles. Now her leg just shoots directly into her foot. I mentioned this to Paul, who gave me a warning look but didn’t disagree.
Maya says that her mom didn’t have any of those mood swings. Or cravings. She basically just looked bloated until she was ready to give birth. This confirms my belief that Maya’s robotic behavior comes exclusively from her mother. Maybe she’s a clone.
My mom wants me in the room when the time comes, but Paul has already said he’s willing to make my excuses. Thank God for Paul. The man has grown on me. I’m not sure I could handle the emotional turmoil of the birth while still pretending everything is magical. Without throwing up. As it is, it’s going to be difficult not to be repulsed by the baby when they hand it to me for the first time.
Newborns are not cute. They’re hideous, squishy pink larvae that don’t look like either parent regardless of what anyone says. Compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, human babies are fugly. I feel like I would be more emotionally attached to a baby platypus than a human.
Maya agrees with me. She says that there’s a picture of her holding her two brothers after they were born and she’s not smiling.
“I was afraid of them.”
“Afraid of babies?” I asked.
“You just wait,” she said knowledgeably. “They’re fragile and horrifying. Like tiny monsters that suck the life out of you. Every noise they make means something, and they always need something. Food, diapers, sleep.” She grimaced.
“So you don’t want kids someday?”
“Probably not,” she said. I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t, so I asked her why. “Because no matter what you do, they can still get messed up anyway. There’s no guarantee that they won’t do drugs or get sick or end up hating my guts just for trying to be a good mom.”
“You worry about that kind of stuff?” I was amazed. It was also kind of refreshing to hear, in a “shit happens” kind of way.
“If I don’t have kids, I don’t have to. How’s your head?”
“Fine,” I lied.
She’s right, though, of course. Maya may not be the warm-and-fuzzy type. She might not even like kids. But she always notices the little things and responds accordingly like a friendly robot. She can read my moods, and she always knows when she can get away with asking a steady flow of questions and when it would be best to wait for me to tell her something on my own. She may not be nice, but she’s really good.
And I’m not just saying that because I’m sleeping with her.
It’s been about three weeks since our first time, and every time since then has been different. The first time, neither of us knew what we were doing. Obviously.
I don’t think either of us was nervous; if Maya was, then I’d missed it completely. The second time, Maya climbed through my bedroom window again, and instead of teasing me for hours, she got into bed with me, pulled down my pajama pants, and put the condom on me herself because I was already hard. I’m not sure how a person can be so regimented in one aspect of their life and then so completely free in another. It makes no sense that Maya would color-code her notebooks and analyze my headaches and then completely lose herself in sex without worrying about our parents finding out. But in this case, I don’t want her to make sense. I want her to be Maya, and I want to have sex with her.