Page 94 of What You Wish For

“It worked for you?” Babette wanted to confirm.

“Life is stilllife. But it has definitely helped stack the deck in my favor.”

Maybe that was why Duncan’s attack on the school felt so personal.It was more than just bad for the faculty and bad for the kids—it was specifically bad for me.

My epilepsy had gone away when I was twelve. It just… resolved itself. All through middle school, the seizures were less and less frequent, and then, six months had gone by, and then a year. And the relief I’d carried—for years after the seizures stopped—was profound. It was like I’d been broken my whole life, and now was fixed.

I worked very hard at pretending the epilepsy had never even happened—and did a very thorough job of forgetting.

So when it came back—out of nowhere, in my midtwenties—I had some feelings about it. Dark feelings. Hopeless feelings. Self-hating feelings. Lots of those.

That first seizure brought the feelings all back—and maybe even bigger. Maybe worse. Almost as if ignoring it all for so long had allowed all those emotions and assumptions to fester and mutate and grow.

But I’d coped.

I’d found a way to drag myself out of a very dark place back into the light. I’d worked to fill up my world with flowers and sunshine and color. It wasn’t theoretical for me—it was very practical. If Duncan erased those things from the school, he erased them from my life.

And what if the darkness took back over?

I couldn’t let that happen.

It wasn’t just the school that was in danger. It was me.

But we weren’t going to think about that now. We were going to figure out some way to bring this guy back to life. For his sake, as well as mine—and everybody else’s.

“This is going to work,” Alice said.

“I think he needs to have some good, old-fashioned fun,” Babette said.

I frowned. “Fun?”

“You should take him dancing—what about that line-dancing bar by San Luis Pass? Or that secret disco on Post Office Street? Or even just to the Pleasure Pier. You could ride the merry-go-round, hit the bumper cars… Or—don’t overthink it—just go swimming in the ocean. Go walking down Seawall Boulevard.”

Alice was nodding. “We have to start confronting him with joy.”

“Canyou confront someone with joy?” I asked.

“You know…” Alice said, trying to rephrase. “Pelthim with joy. Attack him with it. Joy-bomb him.”

“Joy-bombhim?”

“Yes,” Alice said, likeDuh.

“And get him into therapy,” Babette added. Then she made me circle “therapy” on the list twice and put stars all around it.

She wasn’t wrong. We weren’t professionals. It seemed pretty clear that he was dealing with some hefty post-traumatic stress disorder, and none of us were really qualified to cure that. So therapy would be a cornerstone of this plan.

“Good luck with that,” Alice said, and as I pictured Duncan’s stony face, he did not strike me like a willing candidate for therapy, either.

But Babette wasn’t worried. “Trust me,” she said. “I’ve got a guy.”

It was so fun to see Babette taking on a project. The fog around her seemed to burn off at the prospect of helping someone. And of course, helping Duncan meant helping all of us. And the school, too. And potentially putting everything—well, almost everything—back the way it should be.

When the flow of ideas finally started slowing down, it hit me that I had no idea how we were going to make him do all these things

“Babette,” I said then, feeling suddenly worried. “How exactly are we going to get him to cooperate?”

“Oh, that’ll be easy,” Babette said, with a little wink.

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