He finds himself avoiding the eyes of everyone in the dizzy-making, skewed hallway, sure word has gotten out that he wrote something hurtful and that everyone is talking about it. If he’d jumped yesterday, people would be saying nice things about him, but instead he’s still alive and everyone hates hates hates him and what in the world are they saying in the hallways at Spence about Tillie, and it’s probably mostly nice, and could he get that without the dying part, could he just get everyone to be nice even when he’s bad, even when he’s wrong.
Tillie, is it better where you are? Are you finally at peace? Was it worth it? Did it work?
In physics class, he struggles to pay attention, and the difference between centripetal and centrifugal goes right through him and he feels it not landing, and he realizes he doesn’t actually care anymore. It just goes through him. And when the bell rings, the funniest thing ever happens.
He doesn’t move.
Aaron is staring at the whiteboard. A crack in the upper-left quadrant that is almost a diagonal line, almost leading toward the top-left corner, but not quite. It’s imperfect and random.
“Aaron?” Dr. Sengupta says from the front of the classroom. It may be empty, it may be emptying. Aaron doesn’t know. He cannot move his head.
Hmm, he thinks. This is new. This is interesting. Aaron likes new and interesting, but not this new and interesting in particular. It’s petrifying because he literally cannot move and if he had feelings left he would feel deeply scared. But feelings are gone.
“Aaron?” Dr. Sengupta repeats, and it’s as if Aaron is watching a movie but not seeing it. He knows there’s a classroom, and he’s in it, but he can’t quite see the scene, and his mind tells him, It might be good for you to stand now and walk out of the classroom, because there will be repercussions—but that’s not a choice he has. He can’t. Move.
The next fifteen minutes are notable in that he is aware that a class is not starting, despite the bell. Something, someone, must be keeping the kids out of the classroom. Sengupta and the Nameless They were talking to him and then not talking to him, trying to roust him and then accepting the unmovable object that is Aaron Boroff, who is so, so weird, and this will not help his reputation but also, again, he doesn’t care anymore. He can’t.
The stretcher feels new. A new form of transport from the physics room. And as he’s carried out as a sort of problematic Egyptian king, the thought he has is that he’d better not come to right now, because probably nothing would be more alarming to him than what is happening right at the moment, except it’s not quite happening to him, is it? It’s the idea of an event, happening to someone else. His brain is cushioned by white cloud. His eyes are very much open but unseeing. His ears are swathed with a puff of toilet tissue from the inside, clogging up the canal.
The ambulance is.
The hospital hallway, too. Is.
Is. Is. Is. Time undulates, goes copper. Then silver-white.
The questions the doctor asks are not for him and it seems from the tone of what he can hear that this is understood, much like an agreement in math, when it’s understood that X is a positive integer, perhaps. Solve for Y. He is Y. Someone is there with him, and the presence of this person is a color, off blue, like a grayish version that dulls at the corners and will never take anyone to prom. No one likes this blue or invites it to hang out in front of the Museum of Natural History on Friday nights.
Is Topher? Is Sengupta? Is the assistant principal? Who has a name, too? They?
Dad?
CHAPTER 3A: APRIL 19
“So I heard you had quite a day yesterday,” Dr. Laudner says.
Aaron nods, but he’s elsewhere. Not elsewhere like yesterday, when he really wasn’t present. More like contemplative, tired. He’s sitting in a small, faded, gray-walled office that is packed with ferns, as if this dude should have gone into horticulture and started a greenhouse rather than becoming a shrink. The doctor, a tall, lanky middle-aged guy with a well-trimmed blond beard, sits across the room in a high-backed beige leather chair, taking Aaron in with a look that is not unkind.
For Aaron, it feels like he’s taken a vacation from his life. Like by not going to school on a Friday, and having his dad take the day off, too, it’s as if it’s summer break without the heat. He’s stepped outside the bounds of what is usual and it feels a bit like the end of the world. And he’s not sure it will ever feel any better, ever again.
“Aaron?” Dr. Laudner says.
“Sorry.”
“So the last couple days. Tell me about them.”
Aaron goes through the experience as best he can, and it’s all so exhausting to relive. He leaves out the part about Tillie; that’s not something he’s up for sharing. He finds that when he gets to the part where he’s carried out of the classroom on a stretcher, he has to pause. Not because he’s going to cry; he’s far too numb for that. It’s more that he’s so, so tired. Of talking. Of everything.
Thankfully, Dr. Laudner doesn’t push. They just sit there in silence for a bit, and then the doctor grabs a clipboard from his desk and hands it to Aaron.
“How about if we just have you fill this out,” he says, and at that moment Aaron decides he likes Dr. Laudner.
The doctor hands him a questionnaire. There are eighteen questions, and each has six multiple choice responses: Not at All, Just a Little, Somewhat, Moderately, Quite a Lot, or Very Much. If he weren’t nearly comatose, he knows he’d probably find the British-sounding responses charming. Instead, he just stares for a bit and then gets to work.
It’s not hard to answer the first. He realizes he’s been staring at the statement I do things slowly for a long time, so that one gets an easy Very Much.
Does his future seem hopeless? What future? Check. Very Much.
Has the pleasure and joy gone out of his life? Check. If there ever was any, it’s now totally gone. Very Much.
He stares at the column of Very Much, and suddenly the word Much looks like it’s misspelled, or not a word, or it’s lost its meaning.
The eighth question is the first one that doesn’t get a Very Much. I am agitated and keep moving around. Um, no. Not at All.
But the rest are all Very Much, and when he gets to fifteen, which asks if he spends a lot of time thinking about how he might kill himself, his hand starts shaking and he overfills the circle. Very Much.
In the end, he has fifteen Very Much, one Quite a Lot, one Moderately, and one Not at All. He motions the clipboard at Dr. Laudner, who jumps up and collects it. He then sits down and scores it with a blue pen.
When he’s done, he looks up at Aaron. “So you scored an eighty-two,” he says.
Aaron asks, “Is that good?”
“Zero to nine is not depressed. Anything over fifty-four is severely depressed.”
“Just like me to pick the worst time to get a B-minus.”
This makes Dr. Laudner laugh, Quite a Lot, and Aaron, despite himself, perks up Just a Little.
“So let’s talk,” the doctor says, and Aaron tells a little bit. How he felt going up to the bridge and deciding not to jump. And about his dad sobbing in the hospital, when he heard, and how that made Aaron feel like the worst person in the world. Super Guilty. And all the background of his life. Just the facts, ma’am. His dad and his mom. The divorce when he was eight, which multiplied his holiday presents by two, basically. Living with Dad ten months a year, visits to Mom during the summer and over Christmas, which makes sense since she’s Christian and Dad is Jewish. The doctor nods at all the right places, and Aaron finds that he’s pretty comfortable, actually. For a guy who went, like, full-on catatonic a day earlier, for a guy who just aced the severely depressed test, just talking feels okay, like a warm sweater and a log on the fireplace at his mom’s place in Sandwich, writing a song or maybe a funny short story. Hygge. Which is a word his dad taught him.