His dad comes and tries to sit next to him but more like leans against the octogenarian woman’s chair, and he kneels and cradles Aaron’s head in his chest and Aaron slowly relaxes into his father’s care, all the while breathing, slow, slow, as his dad offers the saddest, kindest litany he’s ever heard.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
After the funeral, Britt hides in her room, playing Candy Crush.
She thinks, Tillie didn’t even say goodbye, and she slashes a row of grape candy, and she imagines it’s Tillie’s face.
It’s stupid when people don’t say goodbye. And if Tillie was sad, she should have said so. Britt could have made her feel better. With a hug.
Explode three rows of lemon drops. Make them go bye. She won’t cry. Not like Mom.
Dad didn’t cry like a baby at the funeral, and she won’t, either. Dad just stood there, and then after that he packed up and went on his business trip. Kissed Britt on the top of the head and went off with his suitcase because that’s his job as a dad. Which is normal. Act normal, like Dad. Don’t get all sad like Mom.
She smiles. That’s her job. So while she crushes the stupid candy, she pastes a smile on her face.
Aaron lies in bed, alone, staring at the ceiling, on his first post-medicine Friday night. He feels like he has entered a club of one: the End of the World Club.
He thinks about the girl who would have understood, could have joined him in the club. Tillie Stanley. He’s curious about her in a way, but also he’s afraid of knowing more. Of finding out that she was an amazing, shiny person, so much more necessary to the world than he is. That he should have died and she should have lived. He’ll never unsee that moment, and the less he knows about her awesomeness, in some ways, the better.
He’s always wanted things to be different but this isn’t the way he was hoping. Suddenly he has a medication making its way slowly, painfully slowly, into his bloodstream, and who knows what it will do to him, or if he’ll even recognize himself in a few days, or a week, or up to three weeks, as Dr. Laudner said.
What kind of masochist creates a medication to help people who are in emotional crises, and makes it so that it’s only effective after three weeks? Is this a normal phase others have gone through? Just waiting around, hoping to wake up and not want to die?
He picks up his phone. Lots of text messages. From Sarah. From Marissa Jones. One from Ebony.
Aaron types:
There’s no response right away, so Aaron puts the phone down and then picks it up again to turn it off.
“How you doing?” His dad sticks his head into the room. He’s been coming and going with some regularity, bringing cups of tea and chicken soup as if Aaron has the flu and not a broken brain.
Aaron doesn’t sit up. “I just won the Critics’ Choice Award for Greatest Person.”
His dad kisses the top of his head and scruffs his hair. After his dad leaves, Aaron sighs and reaches for the notebook his dad gave him after they got back from therapy and the restaurant meltdown.
“It may be good for you to just write,” his dad said. “This time, when you’re going through so much, it might be nice to have a place to put thoughts and ideas.”
He nodded, but really he thought, My time to write is over. No one cares.
But now he stares at the space for a title, and an idea comes to him: Aaron Boroff: Songs from Up Top, Never to Fall.
He rereads it and laughs. It reminds him of when his dad says, “Fake it till you make it.” Usually in regard to feeling awkward as fuck socially before going to some party. It’s decent advice that sometimes goes terribly wrong, like at Chloe Vick’s ’70s party, where he thought it would be hilarious to show up as a septuagenarian rather than a person of the 1970s, and his dad talked him into just owning it, going in confident. It did not go well. There’s nothing worse than going to a party in old people’s clothes, walking up to someone like Kiersten Haas, all smiles and fake confidence, and have them look at your outfit and go, “Okay …” and then walk away. It had been somehow worse than had he just been real and stood there in his ridiculous outfit alone by the bathroom door feeling authentically awkward.
He opens to the first blank page and decides to write a song.
He rolls his eyes. Not exactly the stuff of Spotify viral charts.
He could be the next Ed Sheeran if he could just write the right song. It’s so frustrating. And worse, it’s so alone.
He tries again.
He looks at what he’s written and thinks: Yeah. Not my best. Not exactly what everyone wants to hear. I could call the album Kill Me, Please. It’s like his brain is jelly and thoughts are not connecting and not in a boy, what an amazing tortured artist sort of way. More like a Debbie Downer sort of way. Nothing grabs him.
It’s the first night of his post-medication life. He now has one Petralor pill in him. Petralor. It sounds like the name of a heroine in a postapocalyptic novel, some girl whose family has died, who has to forage through this city for dead vermin to eat.
A lot of his life is lived in his head, he realizes, which makes it all the more ironic that he is, as of today, diseased in the head.
Jesus. If he can’t trust his brain, what can he trust?
CHAPTER 4A: APRIL 21
On Sunday morning, Aaron’s dad bursts into Aaron’s room without knocking.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
Aaron has been in bed for the better part of thirty-six hours, and when he sits up, his head spins.
“Ready for what, exactly?”
His arms and legs feel super restless, like he wants to do something—anything—that would get him out of his head. The other parts of him, though, are pretty okay with continuing to avoid the real world indefinitely. Yesterday, Aaron told his dad he was ready to venture out and they made a plan to see a movie, but in the shower the negative thoughts attacked, and he started thinking about his music career in the past tense, and realized that probably everyone was humoring him, and they all knew he was terrible, and the joke was totally on him, and by the time he got out of the shower, it was all he could do to get back into bed. His dad, it seemed, wasn’t particularly surprised when he came in all dressed for a movie. He simply sat on the bed and silently rubbed Aaron’s temples until Aaron fell asleep again.
But today, apparently, is a new day.
“Time to reprise Aaron Day,” his dad says, and Aaron rolls his eyes. Aaron Day was something he and his dad did right after his mom left. Aaron got to choose what they did, and his dad had no veto power. Aaron knew this was one of those things parents do to make up for divorcing, but he loved it nonetheless and still has memories of the candy binge they did, hitting eight different candy stores and loading up on all Aaron’s favorites. But now he’s seventeen and depressed, and he’s not sure he has it in him to make one choice, let alone six, or ten.
“Is it, though?”
His dad does that thing he does when he’s trying to be Cool Dad. It’s a bit like pantomiming, and Aaron has no idea why his dad thinks this is a good look. He pretends to grab for a gun holstered to his left side, and then does the same on the right side, and he pretends to shoot in Aaron’s direction as if life were a Western movie. “C’mon, partner. Think of all the fun we can have with you at the helm. We can drive to Pennsylvania and find a shooting range. We can … do a pottery class. A foreign film binge at Lincoln Center.”