“No, I want to keep dancing.”
“You have a headache. We should sit for a minute.”
“I’m fine.”
I let her drag me to a table at the back of the auditorium as a roar that sounded like crashing waves at the beach filled my ears and knocked the wind out of me. I fell into the closest chair.
“We’re leaving. Something is wrong. You’re sweating.”
“I’m fine. Nothing is wrong.” But even as I said this, I knew she would never believe me. It’s one thing for her to not know exactly what was wrong with me and another thing entirely for her to be oblivious to a problem. And my hands were already shaking when I noticed Ian standing at the other end of the dance floor, staring at us.
Just then, the monitors that lined the dance floor stopped flashing, and an entirely different visual began playing on all ten screens as the music stopped playing. It was a video of me.
I was illuminated on the screens, vomiting onto a urinal, slamming my hands against the sink, screaming “GET OUT” at the third grader, my eyes unfocused and my hands shaking. Someone had recorded the whole thing.
And suddenly I couldn’t breathe.
“Adam?” Maya whispered, trying to put her hand on my back. “What’s going on?”
Then the voices started.
What is he waiting for? He has to run. Everyone knows now. He’s got to get out.
Ian had done this. He’d always hinted that he knew my secret, but now he had evidence. And the rest of the school could see it, too. There I was. A freak on display for everyone to see. For Maya to see.
I saw Ian run toward us, and my body began to vibrate. I just knew I had to move, but before I could do anything, he turned into something else, something dark and unnatural that slithered across the floor and launched itself into my chest.
It’s hard for me to give details about what happened next, so I’ll tell you what my mom told me. Apparently, she’d heard it from Sister Catherine, who came to pray over me when I first got here. I was out of it, so I don’t really remember.
Hearing it from my mom was worse than remembering it myself. I had to keep asking for details until she told me the whole story.
“You screamed for a long time before you would let anyone get near you,” she said.
I don’t have any memory of this, so it’s weird that I can still burn with shame, isn’t it? “Who was I screaming at?”
“I don’t know.” But I could tell by the way she’d said it that she meant she knew I was screaming at nothing.
“Did I hurt anyone?”
“No,” she whispered, touching my face.
“Liar,” I said. She’d made her trademark lemon face.
“You pushed her down, sweetheart. But she’s fine.”
I remembered sticking out my arm to stop something from running into me. I shoved it away from me and ran in the opposite direction as fast as I could. I’d had no idea it was Maya.
I lost control and pushed Maya to the ground. And while I was busy losing my mind, there was no one to tell her what was going on. No one to explain.
“Does she know?” I asked. My mom nodded, wiping tears off my cheek. She held my hand for a long time.
“I told her, honey.”
I cried for a long time, but I didn’t get mad about it. I didn’t tell my mom it wasn’t her place to tell Maya anything. She’d given me plenty of opportunities to tell her myself, and I couldn’t do it, so in the end, my mom did my dirty work. All I’d wanted was for her to keep telling me that Maya was okay and that I didn’t hurt her. It seemed like every time she said it, it wasn’t real and I needed to hear it again. She didn’t say anything else about the prom. About taking the drugs when I wasn’t supposed to. About lying to her and Paul and putting myself in danger. I told you that my mom is the kind of person who makes you feel important. And she is. But she’s also the kind of person who makes you want to feel powerless because it’s nice to be taken care of.
After a while she told me that the baby was kicking and asked me if I wanted to talk to her belly. I just shook my head and asked her where Paul was. He was waiting in the hall. Giving us some privacy.
It must be hard to hold someone’s hand while they’re in restraints. And on the list of shitty things you have to do as a parent, telling your kid what happened when he lost his mind is pretty high up there.
My mom said that Maya had tried to visit when I was in the ICU, but it was against hospital rules. Family only. When they transferred me here, I still didn’t want to see her. Actually, I just didn’t want her to see me.
But I did see her mom.
Remember I told you she’s a nurse? She came in to check my IVs but didn’t say a word while she worked. I didn’t want to say anything to her, but I couldn’t stop myself. She had Maya’s eyes.
“Can you tell her I’m sorry?” I whispered to her.
“You can tell her yourself.”
“I can’t see her again. Not like this.”
She looked at me.
“Nothing you have is impeding your speech. You can tell her yourself.”
“Look,” I said. “Now you know what I have. You understand better than she does. You know there is no cure. I’m going to be messed up for the rest of my life. Am I really the kind of boyfriend you want for her?”
She considered me for a moment and then turned to leave with her tray of instruments.
“That,” she said, “is not up to me.”
Then she closed the door behind her, leaving me alone to fully appreciate how warm and fuzzy Maya was compared to her mom.
—
Later, I could remember fragments of what had happened. Even in my delirious, drug-soaked mind, I remember the look on Maya’s face when I pushed her. Funny how you can remember something small like that. The way her face sort of dropped when she fell. Her eyes were wide, and her hands were stretched out at either side of her body as she looked up at me from the ground. I must have looked like a monster. That was when I ran.
I didn’t get far, obviously. I’m surprised I even made it up to the bathroom between the church and the hall to throw up. The words were still scrawled on the bathroom wall in there, and it made me wonder if they couldn’t get them cleaned off or if the nuns left them there as a reminder:
JESUS LOVES YOU.
Don’t be a homo.
That fit somehow. Together, it sounds like a conditional phrase. Separately, it sounds like one guy being nice and another guy being an asshole. But the most surprising thing about it was the way it could be twisted with one extra word. JESUS LOVES YOU BUT DON’T BE A HOMO. It was all in how you read it.
“Jesus loves you” basically says “Come as you are.” “Don’t be a homo” passes judgment. They contradict each other, like everything else in life, I guess. You’ll hear one thing that gives you hope and another thing that takes it away.
Be who you are.
But not that. Anything but that.
That was what I was thinking when I threw up again. But after that, I was definitely gone.
There were footsteps. I remember that Rebecca held my hand in the ambulance, and I thought it was odd that I couldn’t hear my mom. I heard Paul instead. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew he was crying.