Page 135 of What You Wish For

I needed to get him out of there.

“You think I can’t handle it?” he asked.

Well, yeah. Kinda. “You shouldn’t have to.”

“What if I want to?”

“Nobody wants to.”

“I would have told you nobody could see my scars without fleeing the country, but here you are.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Why not?”

I tried to think. “You got shot by someone else. It wasn’t your fault. But my seizures—they’reme. I’m not doing them on purpose, but Iamdoing them. My own malfunctioning neurology. I’m the problem. That’s different. Plus, they’re never over. They don’t fade away.”

“What do you think that means?”

What did itmean? It meant that I couldn’t promise him that it wouldn’t get worse—or start happening all the time. It meant my life wasn’t in my control. It meant that we didn’t have a future together. It meant that if he ever saw me like that, he’d be disgusted.

And maybe that was the first time I’d put that into words.

He was waiting for an answer. So I sat up and edged to the side of the bed. The I turned to him and said, “You know all those after-school specials where kids mistakenly think their parents split up because of them—but then they learn the healing lesson that it had nothing to do with them after all?”

“Okay,” Duncan said, not sure where I was heading.

“I was the reason my parents broke up when I was eight. My dad left because of me. I overheard him actually saying it that night. Then, when I was ten, my mom died. And he wouldn’t take me. I went to live with my aunt instead. When I graduated high school, she gave me a trunk of my mom’s old things, including some diaries, and they confirmed everything I already knew—in intricate detail. He hated my seizures. He was humiliated by them. I drove him away. I was the reason my mom’s life fell apart. Why she had to work two jobs. Why she died alone. And that’s not a false conclusion. That’s the straight truth.”

Duncan nodded, but just barely. Then he said, “You think your dad left because you were too much. But what if your dad wastoo little?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… a better man would never have left you. A better man would have stayed.”

I tilted my head. “Maybe you’ve just never seen one of my seizures.”

Duncan sighed.

Sitting up had helped a little. I felt slightly better. Encouraging. “And it wasn’t just him, by the way,” I added then. “I wasn’t just teased at school, I was apariah. I was the butt of every single joke. Utterly cast out of grammar-school society.”

Duncan shook his head.

I went on. “Do we need to talk about the time I woke up to find the kids throwing the spilled peas from my lunch tray at me? Do we have to talk about the bag of spare clothes the school nurse kept in the supply closet for the inevitable moments when I would need to change my pants? Do we have to cover all the years when I ate lunch by myself, sitting across from Richard Leffitz as he ate his own boogers?”

“Fair enough,” Duncan said. “But those were kids. And—all due respect—kids are assholes.”

“Spoken like a guy on the verge of summer break,” I said.

But it was true: after elementary school, I’d blamed it all on the epilepsy and never looked back. Which was fine. Until the epilepsy returned. And then it turned out I had a whole truckload of unquestioned assumptions about my worth as a human being.

Assumptions that, perhaps, I had not examined too hard.

And would not be examining tonight.

Being around Duncan… there was no question it was glorious, and powerful, and hypnotic. The kissing-in-the-waves portion of the evening left me in no doubt of that. There was no doubt that he was a good thing. Too good.

Because:what if?

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