Chapter 25: Twenty Three - Proof

Proof

October:

I definitely didn’t want to be the one who broke the silence; partly because I wanted to give Parish time to digest everything that had just happened – but mostly because I was feeling too awkward to say anything.

What could I have possibly have said that wouldn’t have made things more uncomfortable? “Sorry your mom left, but yet on the progress in your relationship with your father”?

Somehow, I didn’t think that would fly too well, so I kept my mouth shut.

I’d honestly tried my level best not to listen, especially when Darren mentioned Parish wanting to take pills to help him fall asleep. That kind of stuff was extremely personal – definitely not something you would want an almost-stranger to overhear.

But when he came to the part about finding his Dad in the kitchen, I couldn’t help it. Something about the way his voice shook, the way it abruptly cracked in some places, made me want to listen. It drew me in. The vulnerability in his voice was undeniable – it felt like I was listening to a completely different boy than the one I thought I knew. Not the cocky, sarcastic Parish that I’d grown used to over the past few days. Not the closet nice-guy that showed up once in a while – but a broken boy.

Parish Feltman, It appeared, wasn’t as strong and confident as I’d first believed him to be. I could tell by the slight tremor in his voice as he told his tale that he was just like me; just like the rest of us – Troubled, bruised and unsure.

I sat there, leaning against the bed in silence, waiting for him to speak first. A good five minutes passed and I began to wonder if he was doing the same thing – waiting for me to initiate the conversation.

I was just about to clear my throat when his voice reached my ears through the vent. “I’m guessing you heard all that?” He asked, a slight hint of sadness coloring his tone.

“Yeah, I did.” I confirmed. “I’m sorry Parish. I tried not to listen.”

“I don’t doubt that.” He replied. At first I thought he was being sarcastic; mocking me. But there was something about the way he said it that made me realize that he was being sincere; that he believed that I tried not to listen.

“Do you...” I twiddled with the edge of my sheet nervously, not having any idea what to do or say next. “Do you want to talk about it?”

His response came instantly. “No.”

“Okay.” A small part of me was slightly offended by his response, but forced myself to remember that he had every right to refuse. We didn’t know each other that well and the topic obviously caused him a lot of pain. Why would he want to talk about it with me?

A minute passed before he spoke up again. “So, how much are you pitying me right now?” he asked quietly.

“Pitying you?” I repeated. Pitying Parish hadn’t even crossed my mind. Should I have pitied him? Yes, what he’d been through was awful; there was no denying that, but hadn’t we all gone through traumatizing things? My thoughts flew to Sid, who’d been regularly abused by his neighbor, and Kara, whose cousin had tried to kill himself while she was in the next room. Everything we’d been though made us all perfect Pity Party candidates; but what good would pity do? We didn’t need pity. It couldn’t help us. What we needed was something more. Understanding, compassion, people who wouldn’t abandon us – That’s what we needed. Parish didn’t deserve pity, he deserved empathy. “No.” I finished. “I wasn’t pitying you.”

The relief-laced gratitude in his voice was practically tangible. “That makes you the first person who hasn’t.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that.

Before I could even think of something to say, he said, “I still have the note.”

At first, I was confused, but then it hit me. He was talking about the note his mother left for his father. He was talking about his trauma. With me.

“The one your mom left your dad?”

“Yup. It’s in my keepsake box.” He revealed.

I was shocked. Abercoster’s had a strict rule against bringing things from home that could invoke psychological distress. Before any patients are boarded, Patty and her team go through all their personal belongings and send back anything that could cause mental trauma. Each patient is only allowed a maximum of five keepsakes to bring into the institute with them, besides clothes. What I didn’t understand was how Parish had managed to keep his mother’s note.  The nurses were extremely careful when it came to the keepsake boxes; they’d even sent a picture of my uncle and aunt back home with my parents.

“How’d you manage to sneak it in?” I asked, genuinely curious.

The tone of his voice when he replied suggested that he was grinning. “I tucked it behind a photograph of me and my aunt. They didn’t think to check the frame.”

I couldn’t stop the smile that crept onto my face. It wasn’t because I thought his methods of sneaking the note into the institute were particularly ingenious – the nurses actually did check the picture frames. He’d just gotten lucky -  but because I thought it was really sweet that he’d brought a picture of him and his aunt. I didn’t take him for that kind of guy.

But then again, I also hadn’t taken him for the kind of guy who’d been abandoned by his mother and started self-harming because of it. So what the hell did I know?

“It can’t be easy.” I said. “Holding on to that.”

“It’s not.” He admitted. “But it’s the only thing of hers that I have left. My father and I… we threw out everything else in a fit of rage when we realized that she really wasn’t coming back.”

“Everything?”

“Besides the note, all I have is a picture of her when she was a teenager. It was from when she and my dad first met, and he didn’t have the heart to throw it out.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. I understood the need to have something to remember people by. After the fire, I’d lost everything of my uncle and aunt’s. And because they wanted to protect me from any more pain, my parents made sure that they hid away any photographs of them from me. The only physical reminders I had of them were the photographs I’d managed to steal from my parents.

I let a few moments of thoughtful silence pass before I spoke up. “Parish?”

“Hmm?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

I ran my hands through my hair nervously. “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“How do you—” I’d been about to ask Parish how he manages to look so strong and sure of himself when he’d gone through so much; but something stopped me. There was a sudden drop in the room temperature, as if someone had cranked up the air-conditioning or thrown me into a freezer. I didn’t need the tell-tale chill that crept up my spine to realize what was happening. The voices were coming.

“Who’s your new friend, October?”

My blood ran cold, freezing inside my veins.

No, no, no, no. I thought. Not her. Please not her.

“Introduce us.” Mind-numbing terror took over my body as the girl’s sickly-sweet, yet undeniably menacing words met my ears. In my mind, I prayed for the girl to go away; for me to wake up from this horrible nightmare and for her to be gone. It was pathetic, really, me being that terrified of the voice of a little girl. But I knew better than to mistake her youth for innocence. The last time I’d done that had been the last time I’d encountered her in a while.

The night she’d killed my uncle and his wife.

“Do what, October?” I could sense the irritation in Parish’s tone, but didn’t dare answer. Maybe if I kept silent, the girl would go away.

“Will you freaking answer me?” He continued, sounding closer to the vent.

“How did you know I’ve been looking for a new toy to play with?” The girl cooed over Parish. “He’ll do nicely.”

Something about the way she’d said it made me suddenly remember Cori, my old hamster, and I lost my control. “Go. Away.” I hissed through gritted teeth. Somewhere in the back of the mind I noted that my hands had somehow found their way to the sides of my head, where they were pressed tightly against my temple.

“What?” This time the anger in his voice was clear.

“Oh, I’m so happy now.” The girl continued to taunt me. Her childish high-pitched voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard to me. “A new toy. I wonder what his head would look like in my collection. Your uncle and aunt got very boring very fast.”

“Go away.”

“Do you want to see how much fun we had?” the girl asked. Before I could tell her to go away again, the images of my uncle and aunt pleading for mercy flashed in my mind’s eye. They were trapped in a ring of fire, desperately trying to get free. “I have some special plans for your other friends, too.”

I felt my nails digging into my scalp. “Get out. Get out. Get out.” I chanted softly, rocking back on forth as I tried to ignore the mortifying images that popped into my head consecutively.

My uncle writhing in pain as his skin caught fire. My aunt screaming for me to help her, as her seared flesh fell of the bone. The house exploding. Sid and Kara lying in pools of red. My parents in their beds, faceless. Darren lying face-down on his desk, a knife in back. Parish’s disembodied head sitting on a small, pink bed that could only belong to a little girl.

The sharp stab of pain on my shoulders was the only thing that stopped me from screaming. Blinking through the tears that the girl’s images had brought, I stared at my shoulders. I’d unconsciously unwound my hands from my hair and shoved them through the collar of my sweater, where they’d left multiple lacerations in my skin.

The images didn’t stop. After she showed me the image of Parish’s bloody head, the girl looped back to the first one of my uncle, and the cycle repeated. I was faintly aware of the fact that Parish was trying to communicate with me and tried to hear what he had to say.

“Are you having one of your freaking episodes again?” He spat, almost snarling.

“October’s got a new friend. He’s got a temper. We’ll break it out of him; bone by bone.” She sang happily. I was disgusted when I realized that it was in the same tune as Ring Around the Rosies.

“Stop!” I screamed, smashing my hands against my head. “Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.”

She kept singing.

October’s got a new friend.

“October, shut up!” Parish screamed back through the vent.

“She’s here.” I whispered, sounding almost deranged. “she’s here and she won’t leave.”

He’s got a temper.

“There’s no one there you freak.” He yelled back. “It’s all in your head.”

“Help me.”

We’ll break it out of him.

“You’re insane!” He screamed tensely, as if he was trying to shut me out. “Shut up and leave me alone!”

Bone by bone.

That’s when I lost it.

“What the hell is your problem Parish?” October’s got a new friend. “I’m not the freak here, it’s you!” He’s got a temper. “Why can’t you help me when I need it?” We’ll break it out of him. “Why must you be such a tool when I’m having an episode?”

Three things happened simultaneously; Parish kicked the vent by way of reply, the girl stopped singing, and a light went on in my head.

I recalled the first time I’d had an episode when Parish was around. It had been his first night at the institute and I’d locked myself in the bathroom after a nightmare. He’d been nice to me right until the voices started asking me about him, and then his DID had kicked in and he’d gone all Hulk on me.

The next time I’d had an episode around him, I’d been having a fight with Kara. He’d walked right up to the both of us and screamed his head off, telling us to shut up. And the last time it happened, I’d gotten so bad that I’d started screaming my lungs out and he’d punched a nurse. And we’d gotten ourselves landed in solitary.

The wheels in my head where spinning furiously, trying to connect the dots, when something extraordinarily frightening happened – the voices starts screaming in my head, all at once. They’d never done that before. They always, always took turns. They’d never ganged up on me before; not ever.

My first instinct was to scream; to wrap my hands around my head and cry until the painful pounding in my head ceased. But I ignored it. There had to be a reason why the voices didn’t want me to think; didn’t want me to connect the dots. There was something that I hadn’t been seeing for a while; something that was painfully obvious to anyone who’d been paying close attention.

“Parish?” I called out, gritting my teeth as the screaming picked up. “Parish, it’s not a coincidence.”

“What?” He snapped. “What the hell are you talking about now?”

“Shut up and listen to me okay?” I hissed back, wincing when the little girl started shrieking. Her shrill screams rattled the insides of my skull; set my brain on fire. “I think there’s a connection between our episodes.”

Talking was painful – forming words required thinking, and with the way the voices were collectively scrabbling my brains, thinking took some effort.

“You’re insane.” Parish replied, his voice filled with disgust.

“Think about it.” I tried to keep my voice as steady as possible. “Think about every time I’ve had an episode when you were nearby.”

“What about them?”

“Haven’t you had an episode at the exact same times?”

He paused and I was left to appreciate the sounds of the voices wailing uncontrollably in my head. The racket they were causing made me certain of one thing: they didn’t want me to tell him.

When he replied a few seconds later, I had to strain to hear him. “Yes…”

“Okay, this is going to sound crazy but what if—ah!” I pressed my palm to my ear as something slammed against the inside of my skull. I can hear the woman screeching nonsensically in my ears. “what if,” I push through the unbearable pain, “the voices are real? What if you can sense them too and that’s what causes your DID to kick in?”

“That’s…” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying desperately not to focus on the wails and screams in my head. “that’s not possible.”

“What if it is?” I argued.

“There’s no way…” I felt a wave of relief wash over me when I heard the subtle change in his tone. He was coming around. “It’s crazy, but it makes—What the—”

Parish let out a cry of pain the exact same time the voices stopped screaming in my head. There was a loud whooshing sound in my ears as some unseen force slammed my head backwards so that it hit the hard metal frame of the bed. The loud clang that echoed in my room was followed by another cry of pain from Parish through the vent.

“Parish?” I called out, holding the spot where my head had hit the bed gingerly. “Parish, are you okay?”

When he replied, his voice was shaking with fear and disbelief. “I think…” Another wince. “I think you were right about the connection.”

I felt my heart sink to the pit of my stomach at the visible terror in his voice. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

The next words out of his mouth caused my world to titter precariously around me. “I’m bleeding.” He whispered hoarsely. “They’ve cut me all over.”