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I shoved all of it into my pockets and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks, Mom.” I turned back toward the kitchen. “Bye, Dad!”
“Bye, Lexi,” Dad called back.
Miles stepped out the front door right before Charlie came barreling out of the kitchen, aiming for me.
She slammed into my legs. “When are you going to let me come with you?”
“Someday,” I said. “Someday I’m going to travel the world, and you can come with me, okay?”
“Okay,” she mumbled. But her eyes snapped up, and she jabbed a finger at me. “But I’m holding you to it!”
“I won’t let you down, Charlemagne.”
Chapter Thirty-one
I wondered how Miles made this trip every month without losing it. There was no music, no stereo, just an endless stretch of US-31 between Indianapolis and Goshen.
My delusion detector went off less and less while I was around Miles. Had his offer to meet his mother come any earlier this year, there wasn’t an ice cube’s chance in hell I would’ve taken him up on it. I would’ve gone nuts trying to figure out if he was lying, if it was some elaborate plan, or if he was just going to leave me in the middle of nowhere and laugh all the way home. But his presence didn’t set me on edge anymore. The opposite, actually—since Tucker and I were no longer on speaking terms, Miles was the easiest person to be around. Maybe better than Tucker, even, because Miles knew. He knew, and he didn’t care.
And he didn’t seem to mind being around me, either.
“So what’s your mom like?” I asked when we got off 465.
“I don’t know,” said Miles.
“What do you mean, ‘I don’t know’? She’s your mom.”
“I don’t know—I’ve never had to explain her to anyone before.”
“Well . . . what does she look like?”
“Like me.”
I rolled my eyes. “What’s her name?”
“Juniper,” he said. “But she prefers June.”
“I like it.”
“She was a teacher. She’s smart.”
“Smart like you?”
“No one is smart like me.”
“I’ve got a question,” I said. “If you’re such a brainiac, how come you never skipped grades?”
“Mom didn’t want me to,” he said. “She didn’t want me to go through the things she went through when she skipped grades. She was always excluded from groups, people made fun of her. . . .”
“Oh.”
“She probably won’t stop smiling the entire time we’re there. And don’t mention anything about my dad or where I live. I don’t like to worry her with stuff like that.”
I nodded, thinking about Miles slinking across his rooftop and dropping down onto the demon dog’s roof.
“That, um, that dog . . .”
“Ohio,” Miles said.
“Yeah. He’s your dad’s dog?”
“Yes. My dad got him partly to keep people from getting into our house, partly to keep me from getting out. He thinks I sneak out to meet people.”
“But you do.”
“He has no proof,” Miles said. “Anyway, Ohio’s not that smart and sleeps like a narcoleptic, so I guess he and my dad were kind of made for each other.” He stared at the highway, then said with disgust, “I hate dogs. Cats are so much better.”
I made my snort sound like a cough. We drove on in silence for another few minutes. I tried to burrow a little deeper into my coat.
“You didn’t eat much at breakfast,” I said.
“I wasn’t that hungry,” he replied.
“Liar. You were looking at that food like a kid from a third-world country.”
“Your mom’s cooking was really good.”
“I know; that’s why I eat it.” After I check it for poison, of course. “Terrible deflection, by the way. You could have said, ‘Because I felt awkward eating too much at a family gathering with people I’ve never met before,’ and been done with it.”
He coughed loudly, his fingers tapping the steering wheel.
Eventually Miles pulled off the highway and into a heavily wooded suburb. Everything was coated in blindingly white snow. He only took the backstreets, and the more houses we passed, the more I realized that this reminded me of where I lived. These could have been the same streets.
Maybe all paranoids had a sort of sixth sense for detecting places that wanted to lock them up. I knew the hospital as soon as I saw it. A squat, one-story brick building surrounded by a fence. Bare shrubs framed the front walk and snow-covered trees dotted the grounds. It was probably pretty during the rest of the year.
This whole McCoy-Scarlet-Celia thing seemed silly now. Hardly substantial enough to get me inside a mental hospital. McCoy could do what he wanted and Celia could deal with her own problems.
“Are you okay?” Miles asked, yanking my door open. I managed to unbuckle my seatbelt and slip out of the cab.
“Yep, I’m good.” I balled my hands into fists and held them tight against my sides. Next to the front walk was a sign.
WELCOME TO CRIMSON FALLS RESIDENTIAL PSYCHIATRY CENTER.
Crimson Falls? It made me think of spilling blood. And in crimson lettering, no less.
My fingers itched to take pictures, but the little voice in the back of my head told me that if I did, orderlies would jump out of the bushes, throw a pair of shackles on me, and never let me leave. I’d never graduate high school. I’d never go to college. I’d never get to do the things normal people do because normal people don’t get so melodramatic about visiting mental hospitals, you idiot!
That voice was so ambivalent sometimes.
It looked more like a hospital on the inside, where the floors were checked tile and the walls were exactly the right shade of taupe to make you want to kill yourself. A girl not much older than Miles and me sat behind the front desk.
“Oh, hi, Miles.” She handed him a clipboard. Miles put both our names on the visitors’ log. “You missed morning rec time. They’re in the cafeteria right now. You can go on in and grab some food.”
Miles handed her back the clipboard. “Thanks, Amy.”
“Say hi to your mom for me, ’kay?”
“Sure.”
I followed Miles down a hallway to the left of the reception area. We passed another set of double doors that led into a rec room being cleaned by attendants. A little farther on was a smallish cafeteria, filled with seven or eight patients.
