OCDaniel (18 page)

“How did—” I started.

I didn't finish. A shape suddenly appeared behind Sara, tall and slender and as black as night.

My fingers were flying over the keyboard when my cell phone rang. I almost fell off my chair in surprise. It was after midnight. I looked at the phone and frowned. Sara.

“Hello?” I said uncertainly.

“Are you sleeping?”

“No.”

“Good. I'm outside.”

I looked at my window. “What? Where?”

“Disney World,” she said sarcastically. “Where do you think? I couldn't wait until tomorrow. I listened to it. You need to hear this. Can I come in?”

I paused. My mom would not be happy.

“On my way.”

I eased the door open and let her in, and then we both crept down to the basement. She jumped onto the couch and laid the phone out in front of her, nodding at me to sit. I sat next to the phone, staring at it apprehensively.

“What is it?”

“Listen.”

She hit play, and we sat there in silence. Then I heard shuffling and movement and a TV playing in the background. It sounded like a football game. And then a phone rang. There was a groan and heavy steps.

“Hello,” a gruff voice said. John. “Fine. What's up?”

I looked at Sara, still feeling weird about invading his privacy like this. She kept her eyes on the phone.

“That's fine,” John continued. “I'll be here all day Saturday. Except for dinner. I'm over at Michelle's. . . . Yeah, that's still going. . . . I know. There was a lot of complications. The girl is still weird.”

I glanced at Sara, but she still showed no reaction.

“I don't know. Michelle told me . . . the girl's got ten different disorders. Doesn't speak. Walks around like a ghost. . . . Yeah, well, got it from her dad, I guess. . . . I know. It's been almost a year.”

Sara leaned in intently, gesturing for me to do the same. John's voice was quieter.

“Yeah. Messy one, that. Wish I hadn't had to get involved, but Michelle said it was necessary. She asked me to do it. I told her to leave it alone, but she knew the girl would have questions. Close to her dad, I guess. So I did it, and it seemed like it was fine. Lately I don't know. She's acting weird again.”

Sara's hands were shaking again. I stared at the phone in amazement. It was all true. John had killed him, and he didn't even seem to mind. It was like he was talking about cutting the grass or something.

“Michelle's worth it,” John said. “She's a good one. Just a shame about everything else. But yeah, we can chat more Saturday. Two? . . . Sounds good. Take it easy.”

The phone call ended, and Sara turned off the recording.

“It was all I got,” she said quietly. “And all I needed.”

“It's not proof,” I murmured. “But I believe you now. So, what do we do?”

Sara met my eyes. “We figure out a way to take him down.” She stood up and started for the stairs. “I should get home.”

I noticed for the first time that she was wearing a backpack. I followed her upstairs and out onto the front porch. It was bitingly cold, and I shivered in my sweater and sleep pants. She turned to me.

“Two nights ago I came to talk to you late,” she said.

I frowned. “You did?”

She nodded. “I couldn't sleep and I wanted to go over some clues with you.”

“So why didn't you?”

Sara paused, glancing up at my bedroom. “How long does it take you to go to sleep?”

A different kind of chill suddenly ran down my back. “Why?”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I shouldn't have stayed. The curtains were mostly drawn. But not all the way. I waited for an hour and watched.”

I didn't say anything. Shame and humiliation and even anger swept through me. She reached out for my hand, but I pulled it away. She continued.

“The lights flicked. Sometimes nonstop, and then they would pause, and then go again. It was still going when I finally went home. How long does it take you to go to bed?”

My eyes were unexpectedly welling with tears. I looked away. “A while.”

“What does it feel like?” she whispered.

I didn't reply for a moment. “Like I'm dying every night. Like I go mad.”

“And you don't know why?”

I shook my head, and the tears started to drop. I felt my face burning with embarrassment. My knees suddenly felt weak, and I wanted to just drop. I was always hiding, and someone had still seen me.

“I don't know what's wrong with me,” I managed, my voice cracking. “Maybe I'm being punished for not being a good kid all the time or something. Maybe I am not a good person or—”

She found my hand, and this time I let her. “I told you,” she said. “You are extraordinary. No one said that it would be easy.”

I felt my face scrunch up like a dishcloth, closing in above my nose. Tears flowed.

“You never looked it up online, did you?” she asked.

“What would I look up?”

“And you've never told a soul?”

I shook my head. “I don't want them to know.”

“Of course,” she said. She let go of my hand and slipped off her backpack. As I watched, she withdrew a book, seemed to think about something, and then handed it to me. “Read this,” she said. “I got it from my doctor's office. If you want . . . call me tomorrow.”

She hurried away, and I turned over the book, reading through blurry eyes.

OCD: How Compulsions Can Take over Our Lives.

I spent most of the night reading. It was lucky the next day was a Sunday, because I didn't get to sleep until the sun came up. I read and reread and counted and cried silently from confusion and relief and doubt and so many emotions that by the time I slept, I felt like an empty well.

It was all there. From the beginning I knew.

OCD stands for obsessive compulsive disorder and is an anxiety disorder. Some believe it is a brain disorder, caused by the malfunction of a component of the brain called the amygdala. The disorder has two parts: obsessions and compulsions. These obsessions and compulsions take up considerable time and cause tremendous suffering for the individual. The sufferer believes that their obsessions and compulsions are central to their well-being, and sufferers can sometimes create intricate explanations to justify the continuance of their rituals. The fears could be:

• Sanitation (fear of germs, disease)

• Scrupulosity (fear of offending a higher power or acting contrary to your morals)

• Personal Health Fears (fears of dying, choking, going insane)

• Responsibility Fears (fears of harm coming to others)

These fears cause the sufferer to create rituals to relieve the uncomfortable and highly distressing anxiety that follows. When the person conducts a ritual, the anxiety lessens, and the person feels better. But as soon the anxiety returns, the sufferer must complete the ritual again or face even greater torment.

When I finished reading, I lay there and thought about it. I had OCD. It made sense. It was a disorder.

The Zaps were caused by anxiety. The things I did—the counting and the rituals—were just ways that I tried to control the anxiety. The obsessions made me want to do things, and it was called a compulsion when I actually did it. I didn't get hit with Zaps as much when I was talking to people or actually playing football, because I was too busy to notice the anxiety. At nighttime I noticed it the most, and that was when I really fell apart. The Routine was just a long ritual. Even the other parts had names. The Collapse was called a panic attack. The Great Space was called derealization. It was all there.

My mind was reeling. I wasn't alone. There were other people with this sickness.

And then I got up and started the Routine. It took me three hours.

When I woke up, I saw the book lying beside me and I swept it under the bed before anyone else saw it. I didn't know what to think. There was a small relief to know there were other people who had OCD, but now I was officially a crazy person. I was just like Sara after all. We weren't extraordinary.

We were mad.

All I ever thought about was being normal. I dreamed about it and pretended I was and that the Zaps weren't really happening. But now it was confirmed. I wasn't normal. I never had been.

I called her. I sat perched on the corner of my bed, arm wrapped around my knees. She picked up quickly, like she was waiting for the call.

“How long did you know?” I asked.

“I suspected two years ago,” she said. “I saw you in class once with your textbook. Flipping a page and rereading the sentences. I looked it up later that day.”

I dug my fingernails into my cheek, not thinking. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“We didn't talk then. And you read so much . . . I figured you knew.”

“I didn't think . . . I didn't know it was a disorder. I thought I was the only one.”

“We always do,” she said. “You should be happy.”

“Happy? I thought I was special. I'm just crazy.”

Her voice lowered. “You have OCD, Daniel. But you're still extraordinary.”

It was silent for a moment.

“Can we go for a walk today?” she asked.

“Okay.”

“Meet me at your corner at one. Bye, Daniel.”

She hung up, and I stayed there for a while longer, wondering if she was right.

  •  •  •  

I did a bit of writing before I went. It was the only thing I could do that made any sense. I got to control everything. It was my world and my story, and I could delete a sentence if I wanted to, and it would be gone. Maybe there was more to it too. The Daniel in my book was normal. He was saving the world. He was the Daniel I wanted to be.

Sara slammed her foot down on the gas pedal, and the car shot past the creature, barely missing its outstretched hands. She whipped the car into a turn around the fallen tree and sped back onto the highway, and Daniel turned to see the creature leap over the tree after them.

He could see it better now. It was at least seven feet tall and as thin as he was; its arms were long enough to reach its knees and ended at slender fingers, at least a foot long. Its face was long and slender as well, with big black eyes, slits for nostrils, and a small flat mouth. It was darker than anything he had ever seen, like walking oil that swallowed up the daylight.

It was also terribly fast. Even as Sara sped down the road, it lashed out, just missing the bumper. Daniel turned to Sara, wide-eyed. “That was too close.”

She nodded. “Apparently they are hunting us now.”

“How much further?”

She checked the clock. “Seven hours.” She glanced at him. “And we're going to need gas.”

I wrote two more chapters and then realized it was one o'clock. It was time to be crazy Daniel again.

  •  •  •  

We walked to the huge open field to the north of town, which ran off along into farms that stretched as far as you could see. It was flat enough that the world disappeared somewhere between the sky and the wheat fields, and it was hard to tell which was which. The vanishing point.

It's a word they use for art a lot—the place where you don't need to paint anymore because everything becomes one. We walked toward it, but of course we would never reach it. You can never vanish, but everyone else can.

We didn't say too much. We just walked in a strangely comfortable silence, small beneath the open sky. A memory came back to me of the last time I'd been in this field.

It was at school last year. My seventh-grade teacher was Mrs. Saunders, who was quite different from Mr. Keats. She liked students more than the newspaper.

I think she liked me. She told me I was equal parts smart and unusual. I know the second part sounds mean, but she meant it in a positive way. I understood what she was saying. She would assign us to write about our weekends, and one time I ended up discussing Middle Eastern politics and how colonialism was still relevant in modern-day politics. And she wrote:

You are a curious boy sometimes. But this is brilliant. I didn't even know about the secular lines derived by backward-thinking European colonists that failed to respect the nuances of indigenous culture. Your writing is meticulous and absorbing, as always.

P.S. Did you read something about this on the weekend? Not sure I see the relation. But brilliant.

Anyway, I was secretly pleased, and my cheeks were burning when she gave it back to me, and she smiled and said “good job” really loudly.

I was in the hallway putting my books away when Bryan came by. He played football too, but he wasn't good friends with Max and therefore was more likely to be mean. He slapped my textbooks out of my hand and stared at me with eyes the size of raisins. He had stubble on his chin, which was impressive.

“Teacher's pet,” he sneered.

I started to pick up my books. “I'm not sure I understand that saying,” I murmured. “If you're implying that she likes me, then I hope you're right.”

He kicked my books across the hall.

“You think you're so smart, don't you?” he asked.

People were watching now. One of them was Raya. I was already infatuated with her then, so it made my cheeks burn when I saw her. A few kids were laughing.

Including Taj, who was watching from down the hall.

“Not really,” I said, bending down to try to get my books.

He put his right shoe on my shoulder and pushed me to the ground. I smacked my thigh on the hard ceramic tiles. Then he looked down at me, and for a second I thought he might hit me. “You're a loser,” he spat. “You're a suck-up and a nobody. Enjoy your words and your As, because that's all you got.”

I heard people laughing again. I shouldn't have been offended. Words and As aren't the worst things in the world, but I wanted more than that. And when you spend your days fighting Zaps and the Great Space and your nights are Routines that take three hours and leave you crying and alone, words can hurt. There was a lot of hate in his eyes that I didn't understand. Later I found out that Bryan's mom was gone and his dad drank a lot and his brother was in jail, so who can blame him for having hate in his eyes? But that day they were directed at me, and I started to well up, and I knew I was in trouble. Thankfully, Max showed up right then and pushed Bryan away and threatened to fight him, so that was that.