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“But I didn’t—”

“Oh, man,” Abby interrupts, laughing. “I remember this one time, I was traveling around following the Copenhagen Interpretation with my ex-boyfriend …”Advertisement

Thirty minutes later: “… dancing polar bears and tracers coming off my body like the freaking aurora borealis! Crazy! Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, I’ve been where you’ve been.”

No, Abby. It is now clear that you have been many, many places I have not.

“And that’s why I say, you have everything to live for, Cameron. Every reason to be happy. Why would you want to hurt that? You need to stop self-medicating and start talking about your feelings,” Abby insists. “Get them out. Express what’s inside.”

“Okay, well—”

She holds up a finger. “So that’s why I’m going to send you to my colleague, Dr. Klein. Would you like to do that, Cameron?”

“I guess—”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Cameron,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “We’re out of time for today. But I think you did very well.”

THE VISIT WITH THE PSYCHIATRIST

“Hi, Cameron. I’m Dr. Klein.”

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His office is a study in bland. Soothing vanilla-colored walls. A few ergonomically correct chairs in muted shades of brown. A wooden desk that seems to be whispering, “Don’t mind me; I’m just observing,” tucked into a corner. And a long leather couch pushed against one wall. I decide right away that I will not go on that couch.

“You can sit anywhere you like,” Dr. Klein says, settling into a big Star Fighter villain-worthy chair. I sink into one of the ergo-chairs. It’s so low my knees come up to my chest.

“You can raise that,” Dr. Klein says, seeing me. “There’s a handle on the side there.”

I struggle with the hydraulics of it, bouncing up and down like a low-rider till I finally land in the same squatty position where I started.

“Good?” Dr. Klein asks.

“Yeah. Golden.”

“So,” Dr. Klein says, giving me a smile as vanilla as the walls. “Why are you here, Cameron?”

“Aren’t you supposed to tell me?”

Dr. Klein nods. The nod says, I Know All About You, Asshole. “I know what your parents have said. I want to know why you think you’re here.”

“Chronic mast***ation.”

Dr. Klein raises an eyebrow. “If that were a character disorder, I’d be seeing the entire high school. Anything else you want to tell me?”

Turns out, there is. It feels good to talk, and once I start, I don’t stop till I’ve told Dr. Klein all about the weird flame dreams, the feather message I found, the winged Valkyrie girl with pink hair at Buddha Burger, and the feeling that my body has basically been invaded by pain aliens who stab me in intervals and make it hard for me to remember stuff.

Dr. Klein jots down notes, and then he stops writing and just sits, ramrod straight, looking small and a little scared in his big boy chair. In the end, he hands my parents a script for antipsychotic medication and schedules some serious sessions. So, now I’ve been to see a drug counselor who told me I needed to lay off the drugs and talk about my feelings, and a shrink who heard what I had to say and immediately put me on drugs.

Thank God I’ve still got some weed left.

CHAPTER TEN

Of What Happens When I Find Myself on a Dark Country Road and the Sky Rains Fire

The anticrazy meds make me really tired, but still I can’t sleep. The insomnia’s gotten worse in the past week, and I’m up every night until four or so watching late-night TV. Last night, I was so bored I actually watched a public television special about some scientists building their own big bang machine—some kind of super-duper, atom-smasher, supercollider thingy they want to use to discover strings and super-strings and parallel worlds our brains aren’t wired to see yet; worlds that could be as small as a snow globe or as big as the Milky Way. Eleven dimensions. That’s what they say there might be.

Right now, the dimension I’m in is extreme boredom. I’ve basically been under house arrest since the Chet incident. But tonight, Dad’s got a lecture at the university, Mom’s at book club, and Jenna’s spending the night with her girl posse. I feel kind of shitty—my muscles ache like I took a body slam from the entire football team—but I’m not wasting my freedom. I smoke enough to get loose and bike it over to Eubie’s.

“Hey, Cam-run!” Eubie says when I walk in the door. “Where you been?” pqdm.com