Without hesitation, Jinx sheathed her sword. Sword and armor disappeared again with the same sparkly effect that reminded Fran of a Star Trek teleporter (original series). The fox exited through the open window in a single graceful bound, her huge white-tipped brush whipping from side to side behind her.
Fran rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. She sat up, still fuzzed with sleep and with the nightmare-hangover. God, why now? Why did it have to be now? With pre-SATs looming behind a ton of homework and the Indian summer all hot and sticky and Tricia Lopez freezing her all the way down to zero about Scott Tam who she didn’t even like.
Her laptop had moved. It wasn’t in the mess on the floor anymore: it was over on her Ikea desk, propped open with her Attack on Titan screensaver playing. Not a good start. Fran stiffened and braced herself for worse.
Lady J climbed back in through the window.
It was a police car, Jinx said. It went up Penn Avenue.
Fran had known that already, of course. She could tell a police car from an ambulance siren, and either of them from a fire truck. You didn’t grow up in Larimer without getting extensive lessons in siren taxonomy. But it was nice to pretend that Jinx could see things she couldn’t, and go places all on her own. That she was real, in other words. If Jinx was real, then it didn’t matter so much if Bruno Picota was real too. Oathkeeper’s touch was like a burning brand to evil (or something). Jinx could take him.
Even though she was alone in the room, Fran rolled her eyes at her own embarrassing lameness. She had turned sixteen exactly one month earlier and she hadn’t watched Knights of the Woodland Table in almost a decade. She knew it was crazy—the kind of crazy that was not okay—to be clinging to this kiddie stuff in the way she did. But then the nightmares weren’t okay either. Especially if they were going to start coming out again when she was awake. She shot a sideways glance at the desk. The laptop was being all nonchalant and pretending it had never moved at all, but there was no point in pretending.
Very reluctantly, Fran reached up onto the shelf behind the bed and got down her journal. She eyed its anonymous navy-blue cover with disfavor. You again, she thought.
I can take care of that for you, Jinx offered, once more dropping a paw to Oathkeeper’s jeweled grip.
Fran smiled in spite of herself. It was an appealing thought. “I wish, Lady J,” she said. “But I need it in one piece.”
She opened the notebook and grabbed a pen. Had another nightmare, she wrote. About him. He was sort of a spider thing this time, with lots of arms. It was in the evening. I dozed off when I was doing my homework. First time that’s happened in ages. Also, maybe I had a bit of a hallucination right after. Nothing too wild, just I thought my laptop was in one place and then it was somewhere else, but I’m supposed to write everything down so there you go. I was definitely freaking out for a while after I woke up.
Dr. Southern insisted on the journal. He said the meds were all very well in their way, and certainly you couldn’t argue with them if all you were looking for was a symptom-suppressant. But he also said you didn’t get well by suppressing symptoms. You got well by understanding what made you sick in the first place. Hence the journal, which was where Fran was meant to write down all the things that came into her head with a view to panning them with Dr. Southern the next time they met up.
“Panning?” she’d repeated when he used the word the first time. “Like what movie critics do?”
“No, like what gold miners do—or used to do, back in the day. They had a pan with a sort of wire mesh in the bottom, like a sieve. They got handfuls of wet mud from river beds, put it in the pan and shook it out again through the mesh, hoping to find little nuggets of gold in there.”
When Fran pointed out that they weren’t looking for gold, Dr. Southern said they were. He said their gold was the truth. Then he apologized for how corny that was and Fran said yeah, he’d better be sorry.
She closed the journal and put it back on the shelf. She stayed where she was on the bed for a long time, picking at balls of fluff on the crocheted coverlet. Jinx stood guard, respecting her silence and trying not to break it.
The coverlet had nine big squares in nine different colors. It had taken Fran’s mom two years to make it, and she hadn’t quite finished it before she got too sick to sit up. After she died, Fran’s dad, Gil, tied off the loose threads as best he could, but the unfinished corner looked like someone had taken a bite out of it. Fran always put that corner at top left so she would be facing it as she fell asleep. Somehow it made her feel a little bit closer to her mom, as though she might come back some day, pick up her crochet hook and her balls of wool and just take up again where she left off.
Fran’s mom hadn’t had much time for Dr. Southern. “You take what you can get, I suppose,” had been Elsa Watts’ sour verdict on that subject. Meaning that the psychiatric care Fran was receiving came from the legal liability part of Bruno Picota’s medical insurance—a cheap-ass provision written into the small print of a cheap-ass policy. It was part of the settlement after Picota was found guilty of kidnapping and attempted homicide, but it came with strings attached. If Fran wanted to keep getting treated, she had to go to Carroll Way, which was a big walk-in clinic ten blocks south. Dr. Southern came in there twice a week and handled every psychiatric referral they got. There was an actual therapy unit at West Penn Hospital, but the Watts family couldn’t get a piece of that action unless they paid for it themselves. That had been impossible even when Fran’s mom was still alive. It was doubly impossible now that it was only Gil who was earning.
Fran could just cut loose, of course, and wing it with no chemical safety net at all. But her hallucinations came back hard and strong if she went off her meds, and in any case it was a requirement of her staying within the state school system that her condition should be “actively managed”—a typical piece of mental health doubletalk that Gil had duly translated for her.
“Means they’ve got to look as though they’re doing something whether there’s something to do or not.”
“Like they even know what my condition is!” Fran had grumbled. That had been four years ago, when she transferred from Worth Harbor Elementary to Julian C. Barry, and the monthly pilgrimage out to the clinic had started to feel like a heavy injustice.
“It will get better,” her dad had promised her, and it had. She wasn’t on Ritalin anymore and her risperidone prescription was down to a maintenance dose—only half what it had been back in what Dr. Southern called her acute phase. “And given how big you’re growing, that means it’s really about a quarter dose,” Gil had pointed out. “Half the dose spread over twice the body mass. Or maybe three times the body mass, what would you say?” Which of course meant the discussion ended in a pillow fight because every time her dad hinted that she was fat it was Fran’s part to pretend to be furious. In fact, she was skinny and getting skinnier, as though her fervid brain was a wick burning up her body’s fat, but there wasn’t much you could do with that that was funny.
Her dad had been right about things being better. And in a lot of ways, she knew, she was really lucky. She got all her care for free as part of the settlement, and all her meds likewise. That counted for a lot, since Gil’s income was just enough to push him over the Medicaid threshold and his workplace policy didn’t cover mental health. But she had been right too, when she said that Dr. Southern, along with all the other smiley white-coated men she’d had to talk to over the years, hadn’t known what was wrong with her to start with and still didn’t know now. For ten years, the diagnoses had wobbled all over the place. Dr. Southern had read them aloud to her once and more or less admitted that his predecessors had been throwing darts at a medical textbook and writing down every word they hit. Juvenile incipient schizophrenia. Schizoaffective disorder. Early onset paraphrenia. His own approach was to deal with each crisis as it came and hope they were just aftershocks from the big earthquake that had happened all those years before.