Page 100 of Goodbye Days

They turn over every inch of my room. They lift each book and leaf through. Look under my mattress. Rummage through all my drawers. Go through my clothes hamper with rubber gloves on. Pull each picture and poster off the wall and look behind it. They unscrew the light fixture and peer inside. They open my vents and grope around in the ducts. I guess in case I wrote I killed my three best friends on purpose on a piece of paper and shoved it in there. They ask me if I keep a journal. I don’t, but I only stare at them anyway, confident it’s what Mr. Krantz would want me to do. They find a thumb drive and my iPod and put them in bags. They take some of the notebooks I write story ideas in.

Watching them, I feel like they’re picking through my innards, tugging meat from bone. Vultures on a carcass. Their hunger: to ruin my life even more than it’s already ruined.

I’m a coiled spring sitting across from Dr. Mendez. I’ve been dreading this visit because I know the first thing he’s going to say.

“Tell me a story,” he says.

“No.”

His expression doesn’t change. He’d be a hell of a poker player. He cocks his head and lets the silence breathe, waiting for me to explain. But I don’t.

“Why not?” he asks finally.

“People tell stories to create one where none existed. There is already a story here. We know what happened.”

“Do we?” Dr. Mendez is so still. Not just a passive lack of motion. Deeper than that. Actively still.

I can’t sit anymore. I get up and pace. “Yes. I texted Mars and I knew he would answer and he tried to do exactly what I knew he would do and my friends died because of it.”

“What about Billy? Hiro?”

My voice is rising. It’s satisfying, feeding anger to his quietude, setting this calm pasture ablaze. “They don’t exist. They’re figments of my imagination. They’re a lie I’m telling both of us. I know it, and so do the police. They have my phone and laptop right now, by the way, so I hope you didn’t try to call me. They searched my room. I’m going to jail.”

“Did they tell you that?”

“I mean, pretty much.”

“I’m sorry this is happening.”

“Me too.”

“If I could wave a wand and make it all go away for you, I would.”

“See about getting one of those wands maybe.”

Dr. Mendez gazes evenly at me through his rectangular, transparent-frame glasses. “You mentioned you were going to do a goodbye day for Eli.”

I stand in front of my chair and flounce down, causing it to skid backward a few inches. “Yeah.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah.”

“How did it go?”

“Oh. Fantastic.” I punctuate “fantastic” with two acerbic thumbs-ups.

Dr. Mendez’s placid smile makes me instantly regret my sarcasm and anger. “I’m sorry,” I murmur.

“Don’t be.”

“It was a disaster.”

Pause. Waiting.

So I continue. “Eli’s parents…have issues. They haven’t gotten along for a while. Now they’re getting a divorce. They said it wasn’t because of this, but it is. And it was super awkward being with them. Plus Eli’s dad basically told me he holds me responsible. Oh, but he doesn’t want me to go to prison and he doesn’t hate me as much as Eli’s sister, who definitely wants to see me skip prison entirely and go straight to the electric chair. And of course Eli’s sister didn’t go on the goodbye day but she really wanted her parents to go for some reason. It was a really weird situation.”

“Drastically different, I gather, from the experience with Blake’s grandmother.”