Open Mind: Chapter Nineteen

This may come as a bit of a shock, but after the aftermath of Heather Sampson’s ill-fated slumber party, I didn’t exactly get asked to many other sleepovers after that. Being at Annie’s was the first time since that night that I was allowed to spend any amount of time at the home of another person my age. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but there was a deep embarrassment and shame that I felt in being ostracized. I tried to convince myself that it didn’t matter -- that they weren’t having any fun anyways and there was no reason for me to be jealous of such a stupid, insignificant thing. But once I was there, in Annie’s living room, eating garlic knots and watching her administer pain to the dreaded K-Slayer in Shinigami Shinobi, I wondered if this was what I had been missing the whole time.

“Like I said, it’s not too difficult once you figure out her attack patterns,” Annie remarked between bites of pepperoni pizza. “The second time you fight her, after you kill her boyfriend and everything, she throws in this aerial move that can be a little tricky if you aren’t paying attention, but it’s not too bad honestly.”

“Spoilers!” I shouted. “I never got past this fight, you know!”

“Skylar, this game came out like, over five years ago. You can’t pull the spoiler card on a game that is that old.”

“Yes you can! How would you like it if I just blurted out the ending to movies and shit that you haven’t seen. Like, the Sixth Sense, at the end--”

“Bruce Willis is a ghost, yeah, I know. Everyone knows that one. I’ve never seen it, never will, but I at least know how it ends. And it’s fine.” Annie took another bite of pizza, and continued between chews, “besides, you kill a bunch of dudes in this game. Killing her boyfriend is like, not even that big of a deal in the plot.”

I folded my arms with a frustrated sigh and looked over at Annie. I pouted my lip to try and elicit some small drop of sympathy, but her well was dry. After a few more moments of protesting without any reaction from her, I untangled my arms and grabbed another slice of pizza for myself. We sat in mostly silence for a while, except for the occasional curse from Annie as she played through the game. She wordlessly offered the controller to me a few times, and each time I refused. I enjoyed watching her play the game, both the entertainment on the screen and the entertainment of watching her roller coaster of emotions as she experienced frustration and pride in each measure with each battle. Wilcox had long since fallen asleep in a seemingly failed attempt to return to the other side. He was curled up on the end of the sofa like a house cat.

“How does it feel,” Annie asked, out of nowhere, “your first day out of the Wood?”

“It’s good,” I said plainly.

“Just good?”

“I dunno, man. Really good?”

Annie scoffed. “I just remember my first day outside was kind of bittersweet, you know? I was obviously really happy to be able to sleep in my own bed, take a shower for however long I wanted, choose what I wanted to eat, watch TV on whatever channel I wanted. But I also remember feeling this pit in my stomach, thinking about the kids still stuck there.”

“Well, I have been that kid stuck there every day since I got admitted. I’m pretty sure I am the record holder at this point for consecutive days stuck at Dogwood. So I don’t feel any pity for any of those other kids.”

“So then what’s with the dark cloud you’ve got hanging over you?”

I laughed incredulously. “You just now noticed it?”

“No, this is different,” Annie paused the game and turned to face me. I could see the genuine concern on her face, and I felt a pang of guilt shoot through my chest. “I can tell that something is still bothering you, and it bothering you is bothering me. So spill it. What is it?”

I couldn’t look her in the eye. I didn’t know how she did it, but she managed to pierce straight through all of my bullshit and picked the lock to my mind like it was my gaudy pink diary from the third grade. I barely understood how I felt myself, but I knew if I didn’t at least give Annie some crumbs to work with, she would potentially ruin my night of freedom with her questioning.

“I just … I feel guilty.”

“For what?”

“I dunno … I just keep thinking of the look on my mom’s face when I told her I would be coming here on my pass instead of coming home with her. And it obviously hurt her feelings. I just keep thinking that maybe I should have gone with her, but I’m afraid I might still blow up on her and ruin everything.”

“You’re still healing, Skylar. And yeah, it might have stung in the moment, but I think your mom knows that.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever once healed in my whole life,” I said assuredly. “I don’t even know what healing would look like, what it would feel like. My life is just a never-ending cycle of getting wounded and those wounds scabbing over. And sometimes, like when my mom is really on my ass about something, I just want to drink and rip that scab off, but all that’s underneath is a nasty, pus-filled monstrosity. I thought the scab meant it was healing under there, but it wasn’t. It was just festering.”

“You still have to clean out the wound, you know,” Annie responded. Her tone was on the razor’s edge of condescension -- a note she and her aunt hit often in their comments -- but there was enough genuine concern and care in her voice to balance it out. “Any wound will get infected if you don’t treat it properly. Wash it out, put that stinging alcohol on it, all of that. If you don’t take the time to do that, it just will keep getting infected over and over.”

“I don’t feel like what I’ve been doing is cleaning out anything. I still feel like the same nasty pus sack I’ve always been.”

“First of all, gross,” Annie laughed. “Second, I don’t buy that for a single second. I can say for sure that you are not the same girl that I met that first day in the Comfort room. That girl would not have thought twice about how her mother felt, or how I felt, or how anyone felt.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, trying to mask the hurt in my voice. It was really presumptuous of her to assume something so terrible about me, and I didn’t know how to feel about it. It’s not that I didn’t care how people felt… I just didn’t make it a priority over my actions in the heat of the moment -- a small but important distinction, in my mind.

“Well, did you…?”

“I did care,” I said softly. “And I do care. I guess I just don’t know how to show it all the time, you know? I just get so upset and angry at shit that it blinds me to everything else around me, and especially the people around me.”

“Are you less angry now than you used to be?”

“Yes, but I think that’s mostly the medication.”

“And do you care about people?”

“Most people.”

“Do you… care about me?” Annie shifted closer to me. We were already sitting side by side on the floor, with our backs against the sofa for some strange reason, but I could feel the subtle shifting of her weight against me. I could feel my temperature rising, and I wanted to run and scream. My head began to turn fuzzy and my mouth operated on its own without warning.

“What kind of stupid question is that,” I blurted out. I felt her weight shift away from me. “Sorry, what I meant to say is… I mean, of course I do.” I mustered up the courage to look in her direction, even though I knew she couldn’t look in mine. “I wouldn’t be right here right now if I didn’t.”

“I just feel silly,” Annie admitted. Her fingers tugged at the bottom of her sweater nervously. “I know that you’re here because you want to get out of Dogwood… because you want to find your dad. I get that. There’s just some small, stupid part of me that hoped that you’re here because you want to be here, with me, in this moment. B…because… I-”

My mind continued to work on its own as I leaned over to Annie and pressed my lips against hers. I felt them tense up, drawing in a sharp breath, and as the shock of the moment dissolved, I felt her lips loosen again as she kissed me back. Had I known that the night would lead to a kiss with my new best friend, I might have recommended that we not get the garlic knots, but in the moment, I didn’t care. The kiss lasted for what felt like an eternity, neither of us wanting to pull away.

“Because you… what?” I whispered into her lips with a grin.

Annie pulled away from me, and then turned her head. It was not the reaction I expected, and I put my arms around her. I assured her that it was fine, that she didn’t have to say anything, but this made her burst into soft, stifled tears.

“Oh no, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that,” I stumbled over my words. My heart was racing and my stomach was in my throat. “I totally messed that up. I thought that’s what you wanted, but I just--”

“No, no… I wanted you to,” Annie said, so soft that I could barely hear her. “It’s not that.”

“Is it the garlic?” I said with a sly smile. “Because if it is, I don’t blame you. I don’t know whose idea it was to put that much--”

“It’s because I don’t know how many moments I have left, okay?” Annie blurted out those words as if they were a leech she’d ripped from her chest. She struggled to catch her breath as she sobbed, and I pulled her close to me as she cried into my shoulder.

“What do you mean?” I asked. Annie continued to cry, and after a few strained breaths, I pulled her from my shoulder and held her at arm’s length. I asked her the question again, more forcefully.

“I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Well try,” I barked.

Annie thought for a moment, wiped her nose, and sighed painfully. She reached into her messy black ponytail and pulled out the hairband that held it in place. Her straight, shoulder-length hair cascaded down her shoulders and partially obscured her face.

“I should have tried to tell you this before, but I wasn’t sure until very recently. Just know that what I am going to tell you is my best guess about all of this, okay?”

“Just tell me what’s going on, Annie.”

Annie took a deep breath. “When it comes to Open Mind, I used to think of it like a mirror. There is you, and then there is a copy of you on the other side. I thought that when you enter Open Mind, your consciousness just transfers to that mirror version of you for a bit and then comes back.”

“I never thought about it that way, but it makes sense.”

“But when I first found Wilcox, he wasn’t in that shiny spirit form you see him in now, you know. He was a flesh and blood possum, with a fresh tire mark where he’d been run over. But when I walked over to him, he lifted his head and he spoke to me.”

In that moment, I came to a startling realization. When I was young, I saw my Grandma Helen speaking to a rat. I had chalked it up to her dementia, but I started to wonder if perhaps she had some inner ability that we never knew. Something that maybe she was not even aware of.

“And that’s when I knew that it wasn’t just one way that we could cross over through Open Mind,” Annie continued, a little louder than before, as if she had noticed my mind wandering. “Spirits can cross over as well, when they have a physical husk to inhabit. And that’s when I came up with the Rubber Band Theory.”

“Rubber band… theory?”

Annie held out the band, one end in each hand. “Your spirit or consciousness or whatever is one end of this band, and your physical body is on the other. We spend most of our time on one end of the band, dragging the other end through the other side without any consideration. The other side is an empty husk, completely imperceptible to the spirits on that side. I think that, for the most part, things on the other side also happen the same way.”

Annie stretched the band slightly, increasing the distance between her two hands a bit. “When we use Open Mind, the band -- so to speak -- of our spirit stretches from our physical body here to our spiritual husk over there. And what happens when you stretch a hairband over and over?”

“It loosens?” I asked, struggling to keep up with the metaphor.

“Correct. It loosens, and the transition from one to the other -- the ability for the band to stretch -- gets easier.”

“Which is a good thing, isn’t it?”

“At first, sure,” Annie said with a sniffle. She wiped her nose again with the sleeve of her sweater. “But it presents two dangers. The first one is one that you already know. When your band is stretched, it makes you vulnerable to attacks from either side. This is what the Vulture tries to do -- it tries to cut the band to keep you from traveling back and forth.”

“So we just keep avoiding the Vulture and it’s fine.” I rubbed her shoulder reassuringly, but she pulled away from my touch. “I don’t plan on going back once I find my father anyways, and I feel like we are getting close. I heard him, Annie.”

“It’s not the Vulture that worries me the most,” she said. She pulled the band as tight as she could and released it, over and over, at least twenty times, until it snapped. She dropped the one remaining strand on the ground between us. “If we keep doing this, the band will eventually snap.”

“Some of them don’t, you know. Not all bands snap. Maybe your spirit is more like a bungee cord or something.”

Annie tried to get up and stumbled forward, nearly hitting her head on the coffee table. I tried to help her up, and she swatted me away as she always did. “The doctors don’t know what is wrong with my body… not really. Every diagnosis they’ve tried to give me never sticks. But I know now what it is. I’ve been doing this since I was old enough to spell my own name. My connection to my body and my spirit husk is weakening. I’ve lost control of when I’m in any given place. Sometimes I wake up and I’m there, and other times I am here. And I’m so scared that one day, before we’ve had a chance to really know each other -- before I’ve found what I’m looking for, my connection will snap… and I don’t know where I’ll be then.” Annie was reduced to tears again.

Wilcox, who stirred from his sleep, crawled across my lap and into Annie’s. He looked up at her and sighed appreciatively. “Well that doesn’t make you all that different from everyone else, then.”

“What’s that supposed to mean,” I interjected.

“No one knows where we end up in the end. Even I don’t know. We think we do, but none of us really does. There’s something beyond where the spirits reside -- I’ve seen spirits dissipate with my own eyes. No one knows where they go or when. That’s the one thing that connects us all -- the mystery of what’s next.”

“What’s your point?” I asked impatiently.

“You can’t live your life in fear of what comes next. You have this life here, right now. Enjoy it. Make the most of it. And when your spirit snaps, it snaps! When you die, you die! And even when my spirit moves on, it moves on. But don’t waste any of this time you’ve been given worrying about what’s after this. Just appreciate what this is.”

“I don’t want to lose this,” Annie whimpered.

“Then hold on to it tight. Hang on for dear life and wring every moment out of it till the band snaps.”

Annie pulled me in for another hug, and we held one another until I started to drift to sleep. I must have only been asleep for a minute or two before Annie gently shook me awake. I could tell by looking at her swollen eyes that she’d still been crying while I was dozing off.

“What is it?”

“You’ve got to take your medication before you can fall asleep. Go take it and I’ll make up the couch for you.”

“You don’t have to do all that. All I need is a blanket and a pillow.”

“Don’t worry about it. The sofa actually pulls out. It’s not the most comfortable thing in the world, but it’s okay.”

“Do you need help with it?”

“Nope, I’m good,” Annie replied with a forced smile. “Just go take your meds.”

“Thanks,” I said as I rose to my feet -- a bigger struggle than I’d anticipated as pins and needles shot through my legs from sitting too long. I looked around for Wilcox, but it seemed that he had finally returned to his home … wherever that was. I hobbled to the kitchen and rustled through the plastic bag that the doctor had left on the counter. The typical bottles of Lexapro, Diazepam, and melatonin were there, but there was also a fourth bottle that I didn’t recognize. I dumped a few of the pills into my open palm, but their thin, needle-like shape and bright yellow coloration caused alarm.

“Hey Annie, can you come here a sec?” I looked over to her as she struggled to pull the bed frame out from inside the sofa. I rushed over to her, but by the time I had reached the back of the couch, she’d managed to pull the entire frame across the living room.

“See? Told you I had it under control.”

“That’ll teach me to second guess you!”

“Probably not,” Annie scoffed playfully. “But you’re learning.” She tossed the pillows onto the mattress. “What did you need help with?”

“Oh, right,” I muttered. I grabbed the pill bottle from the counter and approached Annie. I dumped a couple pills out and held them in my hand to show her. “Have you ever seen these before? They usually tell me exactly what medication they are giving me when they change things up, but I have never taken these.” I walked back over to the plastic bag on the counter. “And these doses are all wrong. The nurse basically doubled all my medications, except for the melatonin.”

Annie was deep in thought for a moment, as if she were contemplating her next words carefully. She walked around the couch and towards me in order to take another look at the mysterious medication. “Oh yeah, I remember these.”

“You took them?”

“Really briefly. I don’t remember what they are called. Started with an X or something crazy like that. Pretty sure it’s just some kind of mood stabilizer.”

“They’re all mood stabilizers, Annie.”

“Smart ass,” she snorted as she bumped her hip against mine. “Did she tell you how many to take?”

“Just one.”

“Well, just make sure you leave them out on the counter. Aunt Gemma is going to check them in the morning, because that’s how she is.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” I mumbled. Far be it from me to complain about Dr. Lau’s house rules. “I’m going to brush my teeth and stuff real quick, but you don’t have to wait up on me.”

“If you say so,” Annie said. It’s the door right next to my bedroom door. Have a good night, Skylar.”

“Good night, Annie.”

Annie’s bathroom was nothing noteworthy. Regular sink, regular toilet, regular shower curtain, and regular fuzzy red bath mat. Her towels hung on the rack, neatly folded and embroidered with her aunt’s initials: G.L. There was a mirror over the sink, and I tried desperately to avoid looking into it. There were no mirrors in the residential facility -- both a danger to residents if it was shattered, but also damaging to their self-esteem at a time when they are at their lowest. I, of course, was more concerned about the dark spirits that might be lurking on the other side. Knowing what Annie said about the connection becoming unpredictable for her, I couldn’t help but wonder what my own connection was like. She’s been doing it for over a decade, but even before I started Open Mind, the veil between the two sides had slipped several times by the time I’d met her.

I thought about what Wilcox had said about not living in fear of what comes next. I wondered if I would be doomed to spend the rest of my days avoiding mirrors and dreading each night, wondering where I might wake up.

No way, bitch,” I told myself. We are NOT living our life like that.

I took a deep breath, clenched my fists, and allowed my eyes to wander upwards to the mirror. When I looked into the mirror, the sight that greeted me was far more frightening than any creature of the spooky night could be -- it was my face. My skin, which had always been a tawny smattering of freckles, was more pale than it had ever been, and my freckles had nearly disappeared. In place of my freckles were red splotches of acne -- no doubt a result of the worst soap that money could buy at the bulk discount store where the Dogwood employees surely must have shopped. I looked more like my mother than I ever had -- the puffy squirrel cheeks I’d inherited from my father had sunken in somewhat, and the angles of my jaws and cheekbones were more pronounced than ever. I hardly recognized the girl in the mirror, and I wondered if this was the person that Annie had always seen.

I left the bathroom and headed back to the couch. There was a beautiful rainbow colored afghan lovingly left for me on a pile of at least three or four different sheets. I settled under the blankets and felt instant relief. Was there a metal bar wedged between my shoulder blades? Yes, but it was luxurious compared to the plastic mat I had become accustomed to in my room in the facility.

As my thoughts started to drift away into the night, I felt the blankets shift behind me. Annie wrapped her arms around me and shifted her body as close to my back as she could manage. I could feel her breath on my neck.

“Thank you for tonight,” she whispered. “I’m glad that you are here.”

“Me too.” We said nothing for a moment, but then a thought that had been stuck in the back of my mind bubbled to the surface. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, anything.”

“Earlier, you said you were looking for something. I’ve been wondering what exactly it is that brought you into the Open Mind program in the first place. What is it that you’re looking for?”

Annie shifted uncomfortably. “Okay, maybe anything but that.”

“Seriously? You know all about me and my shit with my dad. I just want to know.”

“I don’t want you to know.”

I turned to face her. “What’s so bad about me knowing?”

“Because then you will want to help me, and I want to do it alone.”

“You don’t have to do things alone anymore. Neither of us do.”

“This is the one thing that I have to do alone.”

And with that, Annie pressed her head into my chest and silence filled the air.