Every Last Word

Once the sun went down, the temperature started dropping fast. I’m not sure how long I’ve been out here, but my chest feels numb, my eyes are puffy, my face is sore, and there’s dirt caked under my fingernails.

I pull myself up off the ground and collapse in the driver’s seat. The car door has been open for hours, the dome light on the entire time, so I give the ignition a quick turn to be sure I didn’t kill the battery. The engine starts right up. I crank the heat.

My phone is on the floor next to the console. Texts and missed-call messages fill the screen, and I scroll down, past countless pleas from my mom to call her right away. There are three missed calls from Shrink-Sue, the last one only twenty minutes ago.

I hit the call-back button and Sue picks up on the first ring. The tears start falling again when I hear her voice, and I squeak out a faint, “It’s me.”

“Where are you?” she asks, panic in her voice like I’ve never heard. I tell her about the hill and give her the cross streets, and she tells me not to move, that she’s on her way.

I hang up the phone and stare at the clock on the dashboard. It’s 7:12.

Open mic.

I’m supposed to be on my way to the city right now. I’m supposed to be watching my boyfriend play guitar on a real stage, and Caroline’s supposed to be next to me, cheering him on. Instead, I’m here in the dark, all cried out, waiting to be rescued. I hope AJ won’t tell the Poets; I’ll never be able to face them again.

I’ll never be able to face him again.

I picture the look on his face when he told me about Caroline. What a sharp contrast it was from the expression he wore just minutes earlier, as he stood there, admiring that photo of me on the diving block. The me he thought he knew, next to the real me he was forced to see for the first time. Once he saw who I really am, he couldn’t get away fast enough.

I never wanted him to find out. And now he’s gone.

Headlights shine into the back window, and minutes later, Shrink-Sue’s guiding me into her shiny black Benz and buckling the seat belt around me. “Your parents are on their way to get your car,” I hear her say.

As Sue winds her way down the hill, I stare out the window, wondering where we’re going and deciding I don’t care. I feel heat on my face. My butt is getting hot from the seat warmer. I rest my forehead against the glass, close my eyes, and don’t open them again until we’re stopped in a driveway, waiting for a garage door to open.

Sue pulls in and cuts the engine. She comes around to my side of the car and unbuckles the belt, helping me out as if I’m elderly and infirm, and leads me inside the same way.

We arrive in a kitchen, and two girls stop what they’re doing. They’re a few years younger than me and a lot smaller; like Sue, tiny in every way. Same straight hair. Same delicate features. They’ve grown up since they took those photographs that sit on Sue’s desk, but I recognize them immediately.

“Sam,” she says gently, “these are my daughters, Beth and Julia.”

Their expressions are full of concern, but I guess I shouldn’t expect anything else; I’ve been crying in the dirt for the last five hours. And they’re just staring, like they aren’t sure what to make of me, but that doesn’t surprise me either. Knowing Sue and her commitment to “professional distance,” I’m pretty sure she’s never brought a patient into her house.

“Julia, would you get us some tea, please?”

Sue leads me out of the kitchen, past the living room, and through a set of double doors. This must be Sue’s home office. It overlooks a perfectly manicured garden, set in a circle with a fountain at the center. It’s softly lit. Peaceful. I walk to the glass door. “This sure beats the view of the parking lot.”

“It’s my favorite place.” She’s standing right behind me. “I sit right there,” she says, pointing over my shoulder to an oversize metal chair with deep cushions and lots of throw pillows. “That’s where I think, or meditate, or work on patient files. Unless it’s raining, that’s where you’ll find me.”

We’re both quiet for a long time. I can hear the sound of the fountain through the glass. It’s soothing.

“Are you still cold?” she asks.

I shake my head.

“Do you want to sit outside?” she asks.

I nod.

“Good.” She steps forward and twists the lever on the French door, and it swings open. “Let’s talk out there until we can’t take it.” She grabs two blankets from a basket on the floor and wraps one around my shoulders. She tells me to sit in her favorite chair.

Julia arrives holding a cast-iron teapot and two mugs. Sue thanks her and arranges everything on the table in front of us, pouring out a mug of steaming tea and handing it to me. Sue settles into a spot on the couch, and Julia leaves, closing the double doors behind her.

“You can talk whenever you’re ready, Sam.”

I pull my knees to my chest and hold my mug in both hands, staring down into it, breathing in steam and inhaling the scents of flowers and citrus, thinking about everything that’s happened since I sat in Sue’s office two days ago. The P.M. Poet’s Corner meeting. AJ and me alone downstairs. Telling the Crazy Eights about him. Caroline saying good-bye to me in her own way.

Caroline.

I’m surprised I have any tears left, but sure enough, they start falling again. A tissue appears in front of me, as if by magic, and I dab my eyes and blow my nose.

Shrinks and their tissues.

“What do you already know?” I ask.

“That doesn’t matter. I don’t know anything unless I hear it from you.”

I understand her code. That means she’s spoken with Colleen. I think about the urgent calls and texts from my mom, and wonder if she called AJ looking for me. If she talked to him and he told her what happened today, Sue must have a pretty clear picture.

“You asked me to make one new friend,” I say, staring into my mug. “And I did. And I liked her. A lot. But as it turns out, she’s been dead for eight years, which, as you might expect, can really hinder a friendship.” I thought sarcasm would make me feel better, but it doesn’t. I start crying even harder.

Sue takes my cup out of my hands so I can pull myself together. I wipe my eyes and blow my nose while Sue tops off my mug. She trades my hot tea for a pile of snotty tissues and doesn’t seem to care.

Once I start talking, I can’t stop. I’ve sworn to keep Poet’s Corner a secret, but I can’t keep it from Sue anymore. I describe that first day I ran into Caroline in the theater, how she settled in next to me, made me laugh, told me that she wanted to show me something that would change my whole life.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” Sue says. “Start at the beginning.”

“Caroline told me to meet her on the stage, next to the piano.” I close my eyes and see the scene a bit differently, like I’m watching it from a bird’s-eye view. “I waited for her, hiding on the other side of the curtain until I heard the group pass by.”

“And then Caroline met you.”

“She told me to follow her, and I did. We went down this narrow staircase, and through the gray-painted halls. She told me where to turn, which doors to open.”

I picture the two of us rounding that final corner, just in time to see the door at the far end swinging shut.

“What is this place?” I’d asked her when we were standing in front of it. She ignored my question and pointed to the doorknob.

“I’m going to be by your side the entire time, but this is all up to you from here. You have to do all the talking.”

My eyes spring open.

It was me all along. I saw the doors in front of me closing. That’s how I knew where to go. I turned the knobs—she never did. I saw the mop heads on the wall, swaying as if they’d just been moved. I found the hidden seam, the dead bolt.

I followed them.

“Caroline didn’t bring me downstairs.” I can barely get the words out.

Caroline didn’t stand to the side and tell me to knock. I did that on my own. I heard her say it was up to me from that point on, but that wasn’t exactly true. It was always up to me.

“I saw them walk across the stage that first day.”

“See you Thursday,” someone had said.

“I came back when I knew they’d be there again. I waited behind the curtain, by the piano, and then I followed them. Oh, my God, Sue. I followed them down there.”

I tell her about the first time I visited the room in the basement. “AJ was really cold to me,” I say, picturing the way he stared me down until Caroline grabbed my arm in solidarity. Only she didn’t.

I set my mug on the table and wrap the blanket around me tighter. Sue asks me what happened next, and I tell her about the time Caroline came to my house and we hung out in my room together. She told me AJ didn’t hate me, but I’d hurt him and he didn’t know how to handle that. I suck in a breath, realizing that conversation never actually happened either. I knew what Kaitlyn and I had done. I didn’t remember it consciously, but I knew all along. I think about the poem Caroline helped me write, and how I used her words to ask him to forgive me. And he did. He let me stay. They all let me stay.

I tell Sue about every interaction I had with Caroline and the rest of the Poets, and how that room in the basement calmed my mind. There, I learned how to write and let go and speak up. I became one of them.

Now I’m crying hard again, because despite all the incredible things that have happened over the last few months, I can’t stop thinking about the one thing that’s wrong with this whole picture.

“I made up a whole fucking person, Sue!” I yell through tears. “What kind of twisted mind makes up a whole person?”

“You didn’t just make up a person, Sam. You made up a unique and wonderful person who was all the things you needed her to be. Funny and smart and kind—”

“And again, Sue. Not. Fucking. Real.”

“She was real to you.”

Was. Of all those words, that’s the one that stings the most. I miss her. Real or imaginary, I don’t want her to be gone.

“What’s happening to me?” I ask. Sue scoots to the edge of the couch and sets her tea on the table.

“This isn’t what you want to hear, Sam, but the truth is, I don’t know. It might have to do with your medications, or chemical changes taking place in your brain, or a combination of the two. It could have nothing to do with any of those things.” She’s trying to keep her voice calm and level, but I can tell she’s concerned. A lot more concerned than I want her to be. “What’s happening to you isn’t consistent with OCD. Something else is going on, and I’m not sure what it is yet, but we’re going to figure it out together, just like we always do.”

I pull the blanket over my head. I can’t look at her. I don’t want to listen to her either, but I need the information she’s sharing in a way I can’t ignore.

“Based on what you’ve told me tonight, I think Caroline becomes real to you in moments of extreme anxiety.” The sound of her voice is soothing me, and I feel a deep sense of relief when she starts talking again. “You met her on the first day of school. You were already highly anxious, but you became even more troubled about something Alexis said, and that might have sent your mind looking for…a new way to cope.”

I pull the blanket off my head so I can see Sue’s face.

“And it worked. So after that,” she continues, “Caroline came around when you needed her to. After your fights with the Eights. When you were nervous about following a group of strangers down a dark, narrow staircase. When you had to read on stage for the first time. She was there today, after you told your friends about AJ, right?”

I mentally transport myself back to those moments, and then to all the others Sue didn’t mention. Whenever I was upset about something and needed to write, Caroline would be right there, waiting at her locker. We’d joke about it, like it was a coincidence. Then we’d go to the theater together.

“Your mind found a solution—a pretty positive one, I might add—and the more it worked, the more real she became to you.” Sue reaches for her tea and takes a sip, watching me over her mug, like she’s giving me time to let it all sink in.

“Has she been showing up a little less frequently?” she asks.

Now that I think about it, she hasn’t been at her locker in the morning, not every day, like she used to be. I never see her between classes.

“Over the past few weeks, I’ve really only seen her in Poet’s Corner.”

It fits Sue’s theory. I’m always anxious about going down there during lunch. I’m afraid the Crazy Eights are going to follow me and find out about that place, and I’ll be the one who exposes the group and the room. It’ll be my fault. I’m always a wreck until that door bolts closed. Then I start to relax.

“You read about a girl named Caroline over a year ago, and you thought you forgot all about her, but she stuck around in your subconscious. You gave her characteristics you have a hard time expressing. And she became that kind, caring voice you needed to hear.”

All this information is making me feel better in the way concrete facts often do. That last bit even makes me feel a little relieved.

Still, Sue’s talking about this whole thing like it all makes perfect sense, like it’s perfectly logical, but it doesn’t and it’s not. This whole thing is completely insane.

“You can go ahead and say it, Sue. I’m crazy.”

She’s quiet for a full minute, staring into the fountain and trying, I assume, to figure out how to deliver this news.

“Crazy,” she finally says, her eyes still fixed on the water. “Do you know the dictionary’s definition of ‘crazy’?” I shake my head. “It means both ‘insane’ and ‘a bit out of the ordinary.’ That’s a pretty broad scope, don’t you think?”

I nod.

“Crazy is such a subjective word. I’d never use it to label anyone—certainly not you. Look, your brain functions differently from other brains, Sam. And because of the way your brain works, you got to know this wonderful person named Caroline. No one else had that privilege.”

“Like your patient, Anthony…The guy who could hear colors.”

“Exactly.”

But I was getting better. Feeling normal.

Two days ago, I wanted Sue to consider stepping down the meds and cutting back my therapy. Now that I’m having full conversations with imaginary people, I’m assuming the opposite is true. More meds. More therapy sessions. No more Caroline.

“We need to be sure Caroline’s gone for good, right?” I say, sad about the diagnosis, but proud to beat Sue to the shrink-think.

“Do you want her to go away?”

“No.” Caroline felt as real to me as everyone else in Poet’s Corner. She’s only been gone for a few hours, but I’ve never missed anyone more. The idea of never seeing her again makes my whole body feel hollow.

Tears start sliding down my cheeks again.

“Remember Wednesday, when you listed all the things that made AJ so incredible?” Sue hands me another tissue. She’s giving me that look, the piercing one that makes me feel like she can see right into my soul. “Do the same for Caroline—not the girl you learned about today, but the girl you’ve come to know over the last few months—your friend, Caroline.”

My mind starts racing and I feel that same sensation I do when I first step up on stage, my chest tightening, that uncomfortable tingling in my fingertips. Maybe that’s why I close my eyes.

I begin counting, starting with my thumb. “She has this energy about her—I can’t explain it—but it’s kind of contagious. She listens to my poetry, even the really stupid stuff I should never share with anyone, and she never laughs at me. And she doesn’t just listen to the words I write, she hears what I’m really trying to say and helps me figure out how to express it. She seems to know when I need her.”

I open my eyes and bite my lip because, yeah, the reason that one’s true is now pretty obvious.

Sue brushes her fingers over her own eyelids, silently telling me to close mine again.

I pick up where I left off, holding up my fifth finger. “She’s a little bit damaged, just like me. She doesn’t give a shit what people think of her. I love how she doesn’t wear makeup. I love her snarky T-shirts.” I feel a smile spread across my face. “She always makes me laugh, even when she isn’t trying to.”

The tenth one pops to mind immediately, and I start to say it like it’s no big deal, but I find myself choking on my words.

“That’s nine,” Sue says.

Caroline told me to knock on that door. She never spoke for me, but she gave me the words to say. When AJ kicked me out of Poet’s Corner, she told me to fight my way back down there again. When I was terrified to read on stage, she came up behind me, rested her hand on my shoulder, and said, “Don’t think. Just go.” And I did. She was always there. And yet, she never was.

“She made me brave,” I say.

Sue reaches over and takes my hands, gripping them hard in hers. It strikes me how dainty but strong they are.

“Good. Here’s what you do now. You take those parts of Caroline and honor the fact that they’re part of you. You start being kind to yourself, making decisions that are best for you, not best for everyone else. You look around at the people in your life, one by one, choosing to hold on to the ones who make you stronger and better, and letting go of the ones who don’t. I think that’s what Caroline wanted. She didn’t make you brave, Sam. You did that all on your own.”

We sit there for a long time. I drink more tea. I listen to the water cycle through the fountain.

“She’s not coming back, is she?” I ask.

“I don’t think you need her anymore,” Sue says gently. “If she shows up again, tell me, but don’t panic. Let her do her job. She seems pretty good at it.”

She’s not coming back.

I keep thinking about Caroline and how she left today, and that leads me to a memory of AJ and how he had to be the one to tell me that my new best friend had been dead for eight years.

I’m mortified. I didn’t want him to find out. Not now. Certainly not like this.

“I didn’t want AJ to know about me,” I say.

Sue takes a sip of her tea. “Are you sure about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Caroline could have left at any time, in a number of ways. She could have told you exactly who she was in the privacy of your room. She could have disappeared without ever saying anything at all. But the way she left, the things she said…”

“What’s your point?”

“You say you didn’t want AJ to know about you, but if you think about it, a big part of you did.”