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“Sydney, dear, what’s wrong? You’re grinding your teeth and you look like a rabbit in a trap.” Adam crouches down from where he was standing and speaking to his client, placing his hands on his knees. Sydney breathes in a bit to respond, but his jaw stays tense.
“It’s just – you keep telling me that I’m right. You’re just telling me that everything I’m feeling is normal, that it’s okay, but I don’t want to be okay. I want to know what to do when I’m not. I’m here for help.” He doesn’t look up, either, instead his eyes are transfixed on the clock across from him, wondering if they’ll make a shred of progress before he has to go back across the lake and just sit in that sick feeling of just being right and knowing it won’t change anything.
“But you don’t want to be wrong, yes?” Sydney shakes his head – being wrong is worse, and look at the time, they’re still getting absolutely nowhere. “Look, Adam, it’s fine. It’s just not what I think therapy should be.” What does Sydney know about therapy? It’s no more than he knows about eating things that aren’t butter, bread, or medicine, or Jedidiah’s project, or why he can’t get better on his own. He swallows another response as Adam stands with his hands behind his back and an owlish smile.
“Well, we can discuss what you think about therapy, but I am the therapist, am I not?” Adam smiles like he’s so clever. He’s never torn the grass out of the ground and sat in the rain and barely felt real.
“Yes, you are, Adam. But you’re also quite literally my personal demon.” He meets the paisley-suit wearing man’s eyes, sharp in his response. He doesn’t know how else to ask for help but to cut others on his jagged edges, so he lets himself have his response as a retort.
“Touche, Sydney. Now what can I do better?” The way he asks it makes the acid go into Sydney’s throat, it’s so…he’s supposed to know what he wants, isn’t he? It’s like when Jedidiah asks “How can I help?” If Sydney knew what’d help him, he doesn’t think he’d need somebody else. But it’s a well-meaning question, of course it is, everyone always means the best for him and nobody knows what that fucking means. They want him safe but they don’t want him isolated, they want to help but they don’t know how and goddamnit, the session’s supposed to end in three minutes.
“You’re the exp–I don’t know. I don’t know, and I know that I should figure it out, okay?”
“Figure it out, then,” Adam says, smiling innocently and approvingly, and Sydney hears the words the demonic fellow doesn’t say. You’re on your own. He picks up his shoulder bag and takes his kayak out back to Camp Here and There – he hopes Jedidiah didn’t make any kids cry this time – he gets distracted, pours too much rubbing alcohol and adds injury to what’s supposed to be injury relief, plus he doesn’t let any of the campers pick from the candy drawer. He feels like he should’ve stayed at camp today – his departure wasn’t worth it – Sydney isn’t worth it.
The red hull blinks into red blood in his exhausted blurry eyes. Jedidiah doesn’t even ask how therapy was – probably decided it felt too cruel to prod at after meeting Adam himself. Sydney doesn’t know if that’s right of him – he doesn’t know what he needs, but he asks for so much. Maybe he shouldn’t. He doesn’t know why he finally takes out that stupid, shiny knife and opens up his skin – maybe the answer will be beneath. Maybe he’ll finally know what changed inside him that makes him so impossible.
He doesn’t stop there, for a moment he knows what he wants and what he wants is proof in pain that he can’t just stop there, more than just the feeling that his heart beats too loud and his form is too stiff and he can’t tell if he’ll never rot or if he already has. He wants to be something, and something hurts, he went home and figured that out. He crosses over the lines on his thighs, digging into scars that have been there since he was a teenager and loosening tense skin and letting blood come up in beads. It’s no worse than what Adam wants to do – he says that the exchange of blood makes one closer to another, and doesn’t he want to be able to say he’s able to know himself?
He did, once, he knew everything and why, but Jeddie has to know his inner workings with the same amount of incomplete knowledge than he does. Once both of Sydney’s thighs are torn up and he presses damp toilet paper to them like he’s a clueless kid again just wanting for somebody to notice. The dull sting accompanies him when Jeddie doesn’t – he’s already asleep, didn’t even wait for Sydney to come to bed.
It’s hotter than Sydney can afford in terms of hiding last night’s impulse ruining a short life’s worth of progress that he can’t claim any more – plus the cut pain combined with a flare-up in his lower back means he just wants to stay in bed. He knows he’s not worth it, though, everybody says he is and nobody actually believes it. He resolves to still switch from sweatpants to long skirt, even if it means he has to be on his feet before Jeddie’s even awake. He’s still not sure what he needs – could be attention, he needs to have something to prove that trying to figure it out will be a disaster. Still, he’s trying to hide it, isn’t he? Putting in an effort to make sure nobody knows it might be getting worse, because god knows he’s not worth the attention.
Halfway through the day, right after the only lunchtime announcement to ever be uneventful (Matthew made ‘ye olde’ turkey legs, and for vegans, pickle on a stick. Everyone’s in camp. Everyone’s fine.) Jedidiah comes in to check in.
“Sydney, dear, what’s wrong?” He asks, and Sydney can feel his heartbeat tick like all those clocks. “You sound tired, and you were walking more carefully when we went out to water the garden, after breakfast. Is it a bad pain day, or something else?”
“I’m fine, Jedidiah,” Sydney says, a bit too defensive, and shit, this is no better than therapy. “Back hurts.” He takes a small breath, clenching his jaw again, building the tension below his ear though hoping he won’t let it out the same way he did last night. “...legs hurt.”
“I’m worried, Sydney. I can tell something happened in therapy – you looked pissed, and I could tell you didn’t want to talk to me,” he doesn’t argue, doesn’t say that Jeddie didn’t check in the first place. He’s not worth the fight – it’s not what he needs anyway. For the little he knows himself now, he knows that arguing with Jeddie makes both of them feel worse.
Sydney hears his teeth press into his lower jaw – he might have to wear that shiny stupid plastic mouth guard again. “I don’t know, Jeddie, when I point something out to Adam he expects me to figure it all out, like he can’t be right if I don’t know what the alternative would be.”
“I’m – I’m sorry, Sydney. I can try to talk his ear off about it next couples’ session, but you know how he is. Is there anything I can do?”
“I don’t know.” Sydney can’t tell Jeddie about his uncerimonious blood ritual. First off, Jeddie hated when Sydney was like this as a teenager, all exposed nerve endings and worrying him ‘til he threw up. Second, if it’s because of Adam, Sydney won’t even get to try to pull the help out of Adam’s words and they’ll be back to square one. It’s like Jeddie knows all of Sydney’s old patterns though, because he does. And the way he’s grinding his jaw and thinking but not knowing, goddamnit it’s familiar.
“Can I…see your legs? I promise I – I won’t be mad, Sydney, I just know how you acted, and it might be coming back.” He thought his thoughts were silent, thought it’d never gotten this bad before, thought he was better than retracing his steps like this, but he guesses that got disproven when he even gave Adam’s offer a second of consideration.
“No,” Sydney says, because he knows it’ll confirm it just as well. “I’ll get the antibiotics,” Jeddie says. He needs to run or he’ll collect Sydney’s blood in his hands and cry over it. Sydney knows this, and he’s not worth any of it.