A World Without You (25 page)

“It really is you, isn't it?” I stand up slowly, pushing back the chair and moving against the wall, positioning the desk between Ryan and myself. I hadn't wanted to believe it, even when all the evidence pointed to him.

“The hell is wrong with you?” Ryan says, turning back toward me.

“It's you.”

“What are you on about?”

“It's been you the whole time. It's not the Doctor or the officials. It's
you
.”

“What the fu—?”

I snatch my own folder. “You guessed I'd figure it out.
‘It is recommended that Bo be relocated.'
You're trying to get rid of me. You're doing all of this.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Ryan says, his voice dangerously close to shouting.

“You.
You.
You can control minds. You're controlling all of us. You've made it look like we're all crazy, that the Berk isn't for people with powers. You even have the Doctor scammed . . .”

“You are
nuts
,” Ryan says, turning back to the door. “I mean, there's crazy, and there's you. This is insane. Look around you. Where do you think you are?”

I do look around. I see the Doctor's license in psychiatry, and then I blink and see his doctorate in history. I see the diagnosis folders. And then they melt into dossiers detailing our individual powers.

It's all fake.

It's all an illusion. A brilliant, terrifying illusion.

“Look, dude, face facts,” Ryan snarls. “Your little girlfriend died. Dead. Totally dead. If you would rather go to la-la land than admit that, fine. But me? I'm looking out for number one.” I stare hard as Ryan heads for the door. He turns to face me, but whatever he was going to say evaporates on his lips.

He looks terrified. Of me. And the truth I now know.

His fear makes my blood surge with power.
Now that I see him for what he is, he can't control me. I sweep the remaining folders back into Dr. Franklin's desk drawer and get up, chasing Ryan into the hallway. All around me, the walls ripple as Ryan struggles to hold on to the world he has created. I see flashes of other people, other times—breaks in the timestream. An old man with fluffy white hair—Berkshire Academy's first director, I recognize him from the portrait downstairs—walks by us, muttering to himself before disappearing.

Small children wearing bright yellow camp T-shirts run by. The very last kid looks back at me and waves, and I recognize Carlos Estrada, his T-shirt darkening with water.

Ryan sneers at me. “What are you looking at?”

The other kids disappear. It's just Ryan and me in the hall.

I know what this all is now. My powers have been suppressed by Ryan, dampened by his mind control. But like a
balloon that pops when it's full of air, my powers have been bursting out around me. It wasn't the timestream that was breaking; it was me.

“Stop!” I shout as Ryan opens his door.

The world blinks from reality to reality so fast that my head spins. Light streams out of Ryan's window as if it's still daytime, then turns into darkest night with the speed of a strobe.

I grab Ryan's wrist, holding on even as he tries to shake me off.

“Let go, freak,” Ryan growls.

“I know what you're doing,” I say in a low voice.

The world stills. The sun outside doesn't move. The walls are steady. The ghosts of the past are gone. I am in control.

“You can only shift what's real,” I say. “You can't create a whole new world, but you can shift it a little. So what does that say about you?”

“What do you mean?” He tries to wrench himself free again, but I tighten my grip.

“Your ‘diagnosis.' You really are a narcissist, aren't you? Can't hide that fact, even in a world you made yourself.”

Ryan shoves my chest with his free hand, and I have to let go. He backs into his room and slams the door.

And with that sound, his false world shatters back into place. There's a keypad by his door, bars on his window.

I take a deep, shuddering breath. “I am in control,” I tell Ryan's closed door. As the air escapes my lips, the illusion melts away again.

I am in control.

“You are,” says a soft voice to my left, the last word lilting up as if the speaker was asking a question.

My heart thuds, hard, once, a pounding so violent that I actually clutch my chest. I whirl around on my heel.

Sofía stands in front of her bedroom door.

A grin cracks across my face like lightning. “I'm winning,” I tell her, rushing forward. “I can see through Ryan's illusions, I know what he's doing.”

“You can see through the illusions.” There it is again, that slightly higher note on the last word.

I reach for Sofía, but she steps back, holding her hands behind her back. Outside my reach.

She shakes her head and backs further into her bedroom. I catch just a glimpse of her pale pink rug, her neon pink comforter on her bed, the fuzzy lamp on her nightstand—and then she closes the door in my face.

“Sofía, wait—” I start, lunging for the door and throwing it open.

The room is empty. The mattress is bare; the walls and floor unadorned. I stumble, bile rising up in my throat. No. No, I had control. I was back in power. I stagger away from her room and into the hallway.

Ryan's door is open again. He watches me with a smile as I scurry back to my room.

Phoebe

It's Thursday.
Almost time for Bo to come home for the weekend.

But it's like he never left. The house is quiet. Everyone walks around on eggshells.

Actually, we all walk around as if
we
were eggshells. We're all afraid of breaking here.

Mom cleans more and more the closer we get to the weekend. The wood floors are like mirrors, the windows are washed, and there's not a speck of dust to be found anywhere. That is, except for Bo's room. Mom walks past his bedsheet-covered doorframe as if it weren't there. And the gouge in the floor from Dad's drill—she still hasn't fixed that. It stands out even more now, a blemish against the rest of the perfect house, but it's as if her eyes dance right over it.

Dad practically lives in his office. I think he might be sleeping there, even though it's only four doors down from his and Mom's bedroom.

Everyone is tense because this is Bo's first weekend back since “the episode.”

I hate that. I hate labeling what happened. When Bo flipped out at school, my parents called it “the incident.” And now we have “the episode.”

It was a seizure of some kind. Call it what it is. It was a seizure that preceded delusions. I don't know much else about it because no one will tell me. When Dad drove Bo to a clinic in the middle of the night, the doctors didn't want to diagnose him without consulting Dr. Franklin first. And other than saying Bo needed to return to Berkshire Academy, Dr. Franklin hasn't said much. At least not to me.

There are pieces of Bo in every diagnosis I read about online: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression. The more research I do, the stranger the diseases I find: brain lesions and mind-controlling viruses, flesh-eating amoebas and bacteria and fungi. There are no cures, only temporary treatment options. Sometimes minds are just plain broken—they see the world in a fractured way. Does it really matter what we call the problem with Bo's brain if there's no way to fix it?

It's not like there is a name for the look in his eyes when he clutched at me, begging me to see the truth of a world that doesn't exist.

I have gone over that night a thousand times. In the quiet of every night since, when my mother shuts the door to her bedroom and my father shuts the door to his office and I shut the door to my room, in those long empty spaces where no one moves but everyone's awake, I have relived that last night with Bo over and over and over again. The crazed way he insisted that his girlfriend wasn't dead, that I knew more than I was
letting on, that he had some sort of power over all this. I can still feel the way his fingers dug into my shoulders when he clutched me, trying to shake his reality into my brain.

And I will never forget the way his eyes lost focus, the way his muscles seized. When you see seizures on television, they're full of violent shaking, with people falling down and their bodies flopping around like a fish out of water, but that's not what happened with Bo. Instead, he just went stiff as a board. His eyes closed, but I could see through his eyelids that they were still moving, violently shifting back and forth. His jaw went super tight, and his fingers became frozen claws. When Dad came outside, he couldn't get Bo to walk; he had to pick him up by the shoulders and awkwardly shuffle him back inside while Mom called 911.

I kept backing away until I hit the dining room wall, and I stayed there, my back pressed against the beadboard the whole time. I watched as the EMTs arrived, as Bo came out of the seizure only to pass out. I stood there as Mom and Dad got into the car—Mom still in her pajamas and wearing a big overcoat—and followed the ambulance. I sank to the floor, my eyes still on the spot where Bo had been, and I fell asleep there, curled beside Mom's china cabinet. When my parents came home the next morning, after checking Bo into St. Lucy's, they didn't even notice me. They walked right past the dining room, headed to their bed, exhausted from the night. Once I heard Mom snoring, I got up, walked up the stairs, and went to my room.

Bo was at St. Lucy's for almost a week so that they could keep an eye on him and do an MRI and some other scans. Mom was there every day, but Dad stayed in his office, working. When
the hospital was ready to release Bo, they sent him straight back to Berkshire Academy. Dad didn't even have to drive up; the hospital sent Bo in an ambulance.

It's been two weeks now, and he'll be home in two days, and I don't know how all of this is going to play out.

Mom cleans. Dad works. And I . . .

I just sit here.

• • •

At seven, there's a knock on my door.

“Yeah?” I call.

The door budges a crack, then Mom pushes it open. She's meek about it. “Dinner's almost ready,” she says. She could have yelled for me from the base of the stairs like a normal mother, but she didn't.

In the distance, a faint beeping rises up from the kitchen. “Oh!” Mom says. “The tenderloin! Go get your father and come on down, okay?” She dashes down the hall—passing the office where Dad is—and runs down the stairs toward the kitchen.

I push up from my bed, tossing aside the book I'd been reading.

The floorboards creak under my feet, and when I reach Dad's office, I knock on the wooden door three times with the back of my knuckles. “Dad,” I say loudly from the hall. “Dinner.”

He grunts in response.

I start down the stairs, but something holds me back. I turn around and head back to Dad's office, the door cracked open from when I knocked.

He's standing by the window, but the curtains are closed. In his hands is a child-sized football, the kind Bo used to play with
when he was in elementary school. Bo wanted to quit football in middle school, but Dad kept him in. But when Bo made the team at James Jefferson as a freshman reserve, he dropped out during the summer practice before school had even started. He made sure that Dad couldn't reenroll him either, by flipping out on the coach and nearly getting himself suspended. I guess he actually got kicked off the team. But he did it on purpose.

Dad tosses the ball up, spinning it in the air before catching it again. The motion is repetitive and hypnotic. Maybe Dad didn't really hear me when I told him about dinner. I raise my hand to knock on the door again—

And then a sliver of light from between the curtains passes over Dad's face, illuminating the tear tracks on his cheeks.

I lower my hand, pressing my face against the small opening in the door to get a better look at Dad. I've never seen him cry before, and now he's just standing there with big fat tears rolling down his face. His fingers fumble, and the ball drops to the floor, toppling end over end under his desk. Dad kneels down to pick it up, and I hear a sob escape him. I can't see him anymore, not really, just his hands and feet and the tops of his legs as he crouches under the desk to pick up the ball, but that shaking sob guts me.

It's the sound of defeat. No. That's not right. Defeat implies that there was a fight, that you stood a chance of winning but just happened to fail. No. That sound was more hopeless than that. It's the sound a man makes when he realizes that there's no way to win because there's no way to fight. Things just
are
, and nothing can change them.

I want to throw open this door and run to him, wrap my
arms around him. I don't want to tell him it'll be okay, because neither one of us would believe it, but I just . . . I want to tell him I understand.

But I don't move.

I need school as my place to pretend that everything's okay. Maybe Dad needs his office. He's just trying to survive this too.

From under the desk, I can see Dad's grip on the little football tighten. I wonder what he's thinking about. This whole situation—Bo being the way he is—it's hard on Dad. Maybe harder on him than on Mom and me. Everything's one way or the other with him: black or white, this or that, here or there.

But Bo? Bo is elsewhere.

Dad's phone rings. He lets the football go, and it rolls silently across the expensive rug in his office toward me. Dad moves to get up from under the desk, and I jerk away from the crack in the door, my back pressed against the wall. A moment later, Dad answers the phone.

His voice is clear and rich, no hint of tears or sorrow as he answers. “Hey, Tim,” he says cheerfully. “How 'bout them Patriots?”