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And what are the possibilities? Either she’s the reincarnation of a medieval peasant, or she’s a time traveler, or she’s a person caught up in a persistent, vivid, and overwhelming hallucination who nevertheless has periods so lucid that Jordan can talk to her like he would anyone in his dorm.
She’s like a case study in a psych book, where the symptoms are wildly complex and the diagnosis can’t be determined. Hannah has secrets—he knows that. Everyone does. But hers are deeper and darker than most. She’s starting to trust him, though, and maybe this means he’ll be able to help her bring them to light.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” he says firmly. “That’s not it at all. I just didn’t know … I didn’t know about Mary. I’m so sorry.”
Hannah looks up at him, startled. “Thank you,” she says. “That actually means something to me.”
CHAPTER 30
Suddenly I didn’t want to talk only about terrible things—I wanted to remember the good years I’d had. So I told Jordan about the communal fields we planted twice a year, and the forest where we played and hunted for mushrooms and berries, and the songs we used to sing while we worked. I told him the names of all the villagers, and the way the river looked in the spring rush, and how we’d once found a litter of snow-white kittens mewling in the straw of our chicken coop.
I must’ve rambled on for half an hour before I had to lean over and snap my fingers in front of Jordan’s face. “Hello?” I said. “Earth to intern, hello?”
His cheeks turned a bright, embarrassed pink. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I—I was trying to picture it and spaced out for a minute.”
“You had the thousand-yard stare I usually associate with a high dose of tranquilizers,” I said. “Anyway, it’s okay. Listening to me talk about my other life is probably as boring as listening to people talk about their dreams.”
Jordan flashed a quick grin. “‘I dreamed I was in my house, but it didn’tlooklike my house ….’”
“Exactly. ‘When I got to school, I realized I wasn’t wearing any pants!’”
“Classic dreams, but they don’t sound like they’re ‘simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes,’ do they?” Jordan asked.
“Nope. Nor the ‘royal road to the unconscious.’”
Jordan looked surprised. “You’ve readThe Interpretation of Dreams? By Sigmund Freud?”
“No,” I said. “Just the one by Dr. Seuss.” When his expression changed from surprise to confusion, I couldn’t help grinning. “I’m kidding,” I said. “I’ve read Freud. I’ve read a shitload of books.”
“That’s pretty impressive.”
Was it, though? Since no one else seemed to care about educating me, I’d basically had to do it myself. It helped pass the time. “Sure,” I said. “I guess.”
“I know Freud was doing groundbreaking work and stuff, but I feel like he got a few things wrong,” Jordan mused.
“He got alotwrong,” I said heatedly. “Dreams don’t have anything to do with wish fulfillment. They’re more like—well, like your mind takes a giant dump every night, and the result is a bunch of weird, nonsensical stories that happen to you while you’re sleeping.”
Jordan laughed, and then I suddenly started laughing, too. How wild was this? I was having a normal conversation with a cute, normal guy, and I’d managed to say something funny. I couldn’t remember the last time something like that happened. Maybe … never? Yeah, never sounded about right.
“Freud probably shouldn’t have done so much cocaine,” Jordan said, tossing the clementine back and forth between his palms.
“It was over-the-counter medicine back then,” I reminded him. “And if you want to talk about drugs, I’ve done gobs of them.” Without thinking, I began to tick off names on my fingers. “Let’s see, Thorazine, Stelazine, Moban, Haldol, Seroquel, Zyprexa—”
“Amy says you sometimes won’t take them, though.”
And just like that, the conversation wasn’t normal anymore. We were back in the present reality that I was so sick of—the one where 99 percent of the world’s population was sane, and I was in the 1 percent that was truly nuts, which was why I had to be in a locked ward of a famous, highly regarded psychiatric hospital that kept taking me in like some kind of charity case.
Some kids get scholarships to college; others get scholarships to mental wards. Who said life was fair?
“Yeah, well,” I said, “a lot of the drugs make me feel flat and dull and exhausted. I gain weight, I’ve gotten facial tics, and sometimes my brain feels like it’s turning into some giant wet dishrag. I’m notmeanymore. I’m a different person.”
That this other Hannah was the one that everyone wanted me to be—quiet, obedient, leaving my loves in the past and living only one, dull life—didn’t make her more appealing to me.
Jordan looked like he was going to say something, but then he stopped and held out that stupid clementine again. “Are you sure you don’t want this?”
“I’m only starving in the Middle Ages,” I said dryly. “Here, I can wait until lunch.”
“Okay,” he said. He stood up and walked over to the door. “Well, do you want to go to your new room?”
