The Rest of Us Just Live Here (21 page)

“You realize I’m now going to obsess about having a tumour.”

“I’m sorry. Ill-chosen words. But if you’re going to obsess about something, obsess about your obsession being a treatable disorder. Obsess about it not being a failure of something you’ve done or something you didn’t do or some intrinsic value as a person that you fail to have. Medication will address the anxiety, not get rid of it, but reduce it to a manageable level, maybe even the same level as other people so that – and here’s the key thing – we can talk about it. Make it something you can live with. You still have work to do, but the medication lets you stay alive long enough to
do
that work.”

“…”

“Michael?”

“…”

“Isn’t it possible to think of this as a success?”

“I never wanted to go back on it.”

“You told me, just now, just
today
, that you’d rather be dead than have to go through this much longer. I take that seriously. I don’t think your suffering is fake. I don’t think these feelings about wanting it to end are fake. I don’t think your self-hatred is fake. So why do
you
think it’s fake?”

“I don’t.”

“Don’t you? Doesn’t a part of you think you’re making a big deal out of not very much? That if you were somehow not so weak, you could be happy and free just like everyone else?”

“…Kind of.”

“You came to me because you wanted my help, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then here’s my help. One, your anxiety is a genuine and very painful problem, not one you’re making up. Two, you’re not morally responsible for causing it. It’s nothing you did or failed to do that makes it happen. Three, medication will help treat it, so that four, you and I can talk about ways to help make life bearable, even liveable.”

“Will I have to be on it forever?”

“Not if you don’t want to. The decisions are entirely yours.”

“…I hate myself, Dr Luther.”

“But not so much that you didn’t come asking for help.”

“You look amazing,” I tell Henna at her door on the night of the prom.

“Thanks,” she says, shyly. “I kind of
know
I look amazing. How weird is that?”

Her dress is, I guess, custard and burgundy, but that really doesn’t begin to describe it. Most prom dresses I’ve seen are either puffy to the point of cloudiness or cut so short and sheer you keep wondering if the girl is cold.

But Henna.

There are no gimmicks with her dress, but then there never are with her. She isn’t trying to be ridiculously fashionable but she’s not ridiculously
old
-fashioned either. She looks like a grown-up, that’s what it is. A really beautiful, beautiful, serious and beautiful grown-up. Even the cast on her arm looks like she got it from lifting a car off a refugee child.

“You look … amazing,” I say again. “I mean it.”

“You’re not so bad yourself.”

I’m just in a tux.

But, okay, maybe I do look good in a tux.

“Very handsome,” her father says, coming up behind Henna with her mother.

“Hello, Mike,” her mother says. She holds up her phone. “Picture?”

“Yeah,” I say, and Henna slides up next to me while her mom snaps us. We look for all the world like we’re going to the prom as dates. Which is what her mom and dad think. They also think she’s staying over with just Mel out at the cabin as a kind of we’ve-almost-graduated treat. They have to know Henna’s not that boring, don’t they? They must know that the rest of us are going out there, too, and maybe just this once they’re overlooking it? Or maybe in Finland this is perfectly normal, even for the devout.

“Have a good time,” her mom says, kissing her on the cheek. Her dad does the same. They’ve always been this formal, like royalty. Solemn in a way that makes everyone else feel slightly ridiculous. They stand together, his arm around her shoulders, watching Henna take me by the elbow and walk down to the waiting limousine.

“Oh, my God,” Henna says, seeing it.

“I know.”

The limousine turned out to not quite be what we ordered. Those were “all out”, it seems, to other prom nights, maybe even at our own school. So despite a regular black limo being available when we made the booking and paid the non-refundable deposit, that’s not what showed up at my house to pick up me and Mel. I texted the others to warn them, but that still doesn’t prepare you for seeing it in person.

It’s a Hummer limousine. A
yellow
Hummer limousine.

“It’s horrible,” Henna says admiringly. “So horrible it’s kind of wonderful.”

“I told you.”

Mel leans out its open door. “At the very least,” she says, “you feel safe in it.”

And we do. This is probably how tanks feel. We pick up Jared next (Mr Shurin, horrified: “How much gas mileage does this thing get?”) then, because everyone else wants it, Nathan. (“You can’t smoke in here,” I say before he even sits down.)

Call Me Steve declined a limo pick-up (“Already feel weird going to a prom seven years after I graduated,” he told Mel. “And so you should,” Mel told him back, “but you’re coming anyway.”) He’s at the school, waiting for us, opening the door so Mel can get out first. He pins on her corsage – as the only couple officially on a date tonight, he’s the only one who thought of buying one – and says, “This vehicle is a crime.”

“Against nature?” Mel asks.

“Against judgement,” he says. “Against taste. Against good sense. Against the planet…”

They walk off towards our high school gym arm in arm, still smiling, still talking about the wonderfully horrible Hummer limo that’s already gathering a small crowd of other arriving couples.

Jared, huge in a tuxedo slightly too small, says, “Don’t we all look amazing?”

“Yes,” Henna says. “Yes, we do.”

The theme of our prom is “Forever Young”.

I know.

We can’t afford to have it in a hotel in the big city, which is what most schools do, so we’re stuck with it at our own gym. Usually you have a formal dinner beforehand with your dates, but as Grillers is the nicest restaurant in our little town, we decided to just skip that. Mr Shurin says he’s stocked up a bunch of food at the lake, so as long as that hasn’t been eaten by otters or marmots or bears, we’ll be fine.

“Dance,” Henna commands, taking me by the elbow again.

“Me first?” I say, following her out to the dance floor. It’s a slow dance, so I put my hands on her hips and she rests the non-cast hand on my shoulder.

“I’ll dance with Nathan,” she says. “I’ll dance with whoever I like.”

“But what about the desire in your stomach? That you can’t help whenever you see him?”

“If you’d have ever shut up about him, maybe you and I would have got together by now.”

“In the spirit of exploration?”

She leans in, puts her head on my chest. I feel her sigh. “I wonder if realizing you’re not sure about stuff is what makes you a grown-up?”

“Lots of adults seem
really
sure about things.”

“Maybe they’re not grown-up either.”

“Tell that to my mother.”

“Tell that to
mine
.”

We dance. It’s nice.

“Just think,” Jared says, handing me a cup of punch. Yep, punch. In a cup. “This could be our last party without alcohol ever.”

“We’re not twenty-one for three more years,” I say. I look around to Henna, now fast-dancing with Nathan in a group with Mel and Call Me Steve. “And none of us are exactly big drinkers.”

“More a metaphor for making our own choices,” Jared says. “And why
don’t
any of us drink?” Then he glances at me, thinking of my father and the rehab story. “Oh. Sorry.”

I shrug and drink my punch.

“How’s the medication going?” he asks me, lowering his voice.

I shrug again. “Takes a while to work. And there’s a lot of talking to Dr Luther that goes along with it. Feeling okay, though.”

“That’s good,” he says.

“Do you like yourself, Jared?”

He looks at me, surprised. I know he guesses exactly why I’m asking. “Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes not.”

“Sometimes not,” I repeat. “Those things going on. Those things you can’t talk about.”

Jared turns to me. “We haven’t danced enough.”

“…Together?”

“
All
of us together.” He cocks his head to our friends, dancing in the crowd, smiling, working up a sweat, laughing, dancing like fools. The hall is packed now, probably for the same reason as the restaurant: people know something’s going on and just want to be together.

I have a flash of terror that this would be a great opportunity to blow a whole lot of people up again. If there are any
gas mains
running below the school, that is–

“What is it?” Jared asks.

“What if we’re in danger here?” I say, feeling my chest contract, feeling suddenly desperate, like I need to find a loop, quickly, one that will save us all from being blown up.

“Do you see any indie kids?” Jared asks. I look around. He’s right. There’s not one.

Which makes me sort of sad, really.

“We’ll be fine,” he says, dragging me out onto the dance floor.

“Maybe we should check outside,” I say, but my words are lost in the volume of the music and the crush of people suddenly around us. We join Henna, Mel, Steve and Nathan. And we dance.

It’s nice, too.

“We’re going to take off,” Mel says, about an hour later. We’re all standing in the rest area, where the school have put out a bunch of couches just slightly too brightly lit to encourage heavy kissing. “We’ll meet you at the cabin.”

“Now you’re
sure
we’re not going to be ritualistically murdered?” Call Me Steve says, actually looking a bit nervous. “Prom night. Group of diverse teens. Remote cabin…”

Mel blinks. “Are you being
serious
?”

“I’m a doctor. We see stuff. There’ve been strange things going down.”

We all just stare at him.

“What?”

“That’s not the story that’s happening,” Mel says to him. “We’re not the kind of people that story happens to.”

“What? I don’t…”

She kisses him. “I love that you’re worried,” she says, “but you’re worried about the wrong things.”

“I…” is all he says because she’s already dragging him away. She waves goodbye. Call Me Steve is driving her to our place. They’re going to change, then she’ll get the clothes we all packed and bring his car and hers out to the cabin, so we’ve got an extra there after the Hummer drops the rest of us off. Jared and his dad left Jared’s car out there today, too. It’s a whole plan.

“You guys ready to go?” I ask Henna and Jared.

“I think I’m done,” Henna says. “My arm is starting to hurt from all my phenomenal choreography.” She looks to the dance floor. “Nathan’s still out there, though.”

And he is, just kind of dancing on his own with a cup of punch. (Seriously, a cup of punch; it’s embarrassing.) I guess he’s making one of those memories to take with him.

“Okay,” Jared says, “one more dance for me and then we’ll go. I’ll find you guys.”

He presses back out onto the dance floor. Henna and I find a couch. We’re surrounded by people taking pictures of each other with their phones and then sending those pictures to a person ten feet away and then everyone commenting on them. This makes perfect sense to me.

“You having a good time?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she smiles. “I really am. Who knew it’d be this much fun?”

“I’m starving, though.”

“Oh, God, me, too. I hope Mr Shurin brought out some steaks–”