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When Josh is 11, his teacher assigns the class to take an outline of a person and draw something inside that represents them in some way. Chris draws a computer and pizza dripping cheese. Jeanie Simmonds draws a basketball, roller skates, and a red heart with a bunch of blocky, smiling people inside. Josh draws a lanky, pale figure with blackhole eyes and no lips breaking out of the printed black lines representing his body.
His concerned teacher phones the Washingtons, and his parents set up an appointment with a psychiatrist. Bob thinks Melinda is being dramatic about the whole thing, and argues that Josh watches too many of his horror films, but with the history of mental illness that runs in her family, she insists.
His mother tells the psychiatrist that he's irritable a lot for no reason, he has trouble sleeping at night, he worries about bad things happening to the family often. And when the psychiatrist asks about the drawing he made at school, in spite of the disapproval between his father's furrowed brow, he says, “We had to draw something that shows who we are, so I did. I guess it's sort of like part of me is telling me all these bad things are gonna happen, and I can't stop listening.”
He’s diagnosed with a major depressive disorder, prescribed Fluoxetine, and somehow he only feels worse for it when his father takes the news with a dark look and says, "Don’t tell your sisters."
Whenever Josh comes home after “drama club” looking worn-out and frowning, Hannah grabs his hand and pulls him up to her room. Beth draws stick figure pictures of him holding a movie camera and shooting his first film, and Hannah practices monologues in front of him, so she can join drama club next year too.
Almost a year later, a student reports a fight breaking out in the boy’s bathroom. It takes the basketball coach and Chris to pull Josh off of a bigger boy, and even then Josh kicks and screams until his throat is raw. Over and over, voice unbroken and high, “I’m not a fucking psycho!”
Dr. Harris doesn’t think he can be of much further help, and puts in a referral to another psychiatrist, but Josh’s prescription stays the same. Bob shakes his head in disappointment and Melinda tuts over it but tells him not to worry.
If he had trouble sleeping before, it's nothing compared to now. Laying in bed for hours, waiting and waiting and unable to do a thing but close his eyes and watch the colors in the darkness. Beth wakes up just about every night at the same time to go to the bathroom, and when she realizes he can't sleep, starts to check in on him. She’ll go get Hannah and they’ll crawl into bed with him on those sleepless nights and sing “Frere Jacques” to him until they inevitably fall asleep. Only then does he curl up between them and find peace for a few hours.
His family goes up to the Blackwood lodge that summer, when he's 12, but when Josh suggests a traditional game of baseball, Bob makes excuses about work and spends most of the vacation on the phone with film executives. Melinda shrugs helplessly, but Beth offers to play if he'll help braid her hair later. He throws the bat and gloves in the corner and braids her hair anyways while Hannah waits impatiently for her turn.
When he’s 14, he starts throwing up each morning. The nausea fades as the day passes, but by fourth period he has to tap his pencil to hide the tremble in his hands and bounce his leg to disguise his shaking. He loses twenty pounds in three months, in spite of Chris trying to shove half of any food he gets in Josh’s direction. He skips classes just because he's too tired to get up some mornings, and Emily, an honors student who shares most of his classes, reluctantly fills him in and shares her notes.
He starts inviting her to hang out, and she brings her best friend Jess. Josh convinces Chris to invite Ashley, his study partner, in the hopes that he'll finally ask her out. Chris doesn't, but they all watch movies at Josh's house with Hannah, Beth, and their friend Sam, or hang out at the mall together, or go to Hannah’s tennis matches, and Josh forgets for a few hours that his hands aren't steady enough to hold a camera.
In October, a teacher catches Josh behind the school slicing the pads of his fingers open with scissors. She calls his parents and his mom comes to get him, but he barely responds to her panicked questioning, staring at his mutilated fingers silently. She schedules an emergency appointment with Dr. Surkiss, who makes a referral.
When he gets home, he tells his sisters he had an accident in shop class. Hannah jokingly insists on kissing the tip of each finger before Beth wraps each one in a Hello Kitty bandaid. Bob looks at his fingers once, before telling him to quit fooling around and acting like a psycho.
Hannah's friend Sam sees his bandaids when she comes over, but all she does is compliment him on his choice in cartoon characters. He paws at the air and tilts his head, meowing, and she laughs before going upstairs to Hannah and Beth’s room. He wonders if they tell Sam about him, whether she asks about his hands.
Josh tries to tell his new psychiatrist that the Fluoxetine isn’t helping anymore, but she recommends upping the dosage since he may have built up a resistance.
After that, he buys a bag of rubber bands and breaks one just about every day snapping them against his wrists. He read once that it's supposed to help keep him grounded and out of his head, but the pain is more of a relief than a distraction. He gets headaches a lot, too. By November, half of hanging out with Chris is them laying beside each other on Josh’s bed in the dark, the only light coming from Chris’ Nintendo DS while Josh covers his eyes with a damp cloth. Emily and Jess text him a lot, but he can't even look at his phone, so he makes Chris text them that he's just busy helping his dad.
In December, he snaps at Hannah and Beth when he doesn’t mean to, and that’s the last straw. He demands to be taken off the Fluoxetine or to get a referral, so Dr. Williams grants his wish and wipes her hands of him.
He picks up his final prescription of Fluoxetine and hides the sealed bottle in his sock drawer.
Christmas passes, and for the first time in months Josh wakes up without feeling like he's on a rocking boat. Hannah and Beth pool their allowance and buy him his first camera, and he has to grit back against the sharp sting in his throat before he can say anything. Bob can't be there, what with his new project, but Melinda gives Josh a set of camera lenses from the both of them.
New Year's arrives, Josh inviting everyone over to shoot fireworks and party. Emily brings a guy she obviously has a crush on, Mike. Ashley invites a guy she tutors in English, Matt, who's on the football team. Chris watches the two all night, fiddling with his phone pathetically, before Josh sneaks a bottle of alcohol from Bob's liquor cabinet. Then they drink in the pool and swim in their clothes, getting steadily more goofy and giggly as they watch the rest light fireworks. Sam shoots him disapproving looks and he sticks his tongue out at her, but ends up "accidentally" spilling the rest of the bottle in the pool anyways.
They dance, eat an obscene amount of pizza, and do stupid things with fireworks. On a dare, Josh jumps into the deep end of the pool with a lit bottle rocket in his hand to whoops and laughter. At the bottom, the only light is the flare of the rocket, and he is suspended, breath forgotten, in silence.
The rocket shoots out of his hand and explodes in a brief cloud of bubbles and muted rolling thunder. He opens his mouth and water surges in, but he doesn't want to surface yet. It's dark, calm, and empty. He doesn't remember closing his eyes, but when he opens them again he's gasping for air, eight terrified faces crowding around him as he rolls and throws up water.
Mike, the guy Emily brought, is laying next to him, coughing wetly into the concrete, fist still twisted in Josh's shirt. Beth shoves everyone back before checking Josh over, while Hannah leans down by Mike, doing the same. Chris is suddenly next to him, helping him up, and Sam drapes a towel over him, scrubbing it against his arms. He realizes he's shaking.
They're asking questions, what happened, are you okay, should we call someone, before Josh breaks out in a smile, says, "Water you looking so apoolled for?"
They stand there for a moment, silent, before Emily screams in disgust, actually looking appalled, and shoves him. Everyone shouts, reaching for him at once, while he flails and latches onto the first thing he touches. In the end, he drags half of them into the pool with him.
He laughs about it later when they're all toweling off and Sam asks again if he's okay, but when he closes his eyes that night he sees the dying rocket flare in his mind's eye, and the cool darkness.
Josh's first appointment with his new psychiatrist is three days later, and he lies about taking his meds. By the next appointment, she figures out he's lying and knows his referral was due to disagreement over treatment. She prescribes Duloxetine, and makes him promise to tell her if he suffers any side-effects.
Beth shows him an advertisement for an amateur short film contest, and by February, Josh has a script written, and conscripts all of their friends into helping him out. They go up to Blackwood lodge, and it takes three days to film a story about a ghost trying to solve her own murder.
Sam is the star, much to her amusement, but she's a decent actor. Hannah plays the killer, a role Josh knows she's always wanted. Mike and Matt help with scenery and props, Emily and Jess are on wardrobe, Chris is tech support, and Ashley proofs the script and suggests changes. Beth makes sure they stay on schedule, and Josh makes sure everyone gets a role or cameo on camera.
Everything should run smoothly—Hannah's been in front of an audience and on camera most of her life, yet somehow she stumbles over her lines and calls for frequent breaks. It's not until Sam suggests that he send Mike out of the room that it clicks.
He looks at Sam, eyes wide, but she just smirks back at him. He smiles back slowly, and they both look at Hannah, who is so obviously watching Mike lift a prop back in place to re-shoot the scene.
"She's got her work cut out for her," he mutters, noticing that Hannah isn't the only one eyeing Mike appreciatively.
"She knows," Sam says, laughing. "I don't think she cares, though."
"Just as long as she's careful." He turns back to the script in his hands, not reading, just looking at the words. "He's cool, but I've seen how many ladies he's gone through just since we've known each other."
"Hey, she'll be fine as long as she's got her big bro looking after her, right?" Sam punches him lightly on the shoulder. "And she's got me, too. I'll tell him off if he breaks her heart, and you feed her ice cream and cheer her up."
"Yes, ma'am," he says, elbowing her in the side. She shoves him back, then leaps aside as he tries to return the gesture. He throws up his hands in defeat, but when she steps close again, he grabs her sides and tickles her. When all she does is raise an unimpressed brow, he tries to jump away, but she's already got her hands on him, fingers dancing up his sides.
He slumps to the ground, a laughing mess as she mercilessly tickles his ribs. Another pair of hands pries off one shoe and then another pair takes the other, and through the tears streaming down his face he can see Beth and Chris running traitorous fingers across his socked feet.
"Didn't know you were so ticklish, bro," Chris laughs. Josh flips on his back and tries to kick him in the face, but Chris' fingers do something that has him jerking his leg further away instead.
Sam's hair brushes his cheek, and he laughs up into her grinning face.
On the last night of their stay, when he thinks everyone is asleep, he sits on a couch on the main floor and edits the movie in the dark. He's got a bottle of cheap vodka but he barely touches it, caught up in the motions of cutting and deciding which take is the best and adjusting the colors.
He's so lost in it, that he doesn't notice Hannah until she slumps next to him on the couch. He jumps, nearly throwing his laptop on the floor, but her quick reflexes save it. When they settle down, she doesn't say anything--just leans into him and sighs deeply. He continues working, and finds himself humming “Frere Jacques” under his breath.
They return home and Josh spends the next few weeks editing and cutting. He submits it hours before the deadline, not totally content but out of time.
Beth and Hannah present a letter to him in May, on his fifteenth birthday. He smiles easily as he takes it in front of everyone, but his hands are shaking slightly. They all crowd him, shushing each other, until he finally tears it open, accidentally ripping the letter a little. When he finishes reading, he thrusts it to Chris, hiding his trembling mouth behind a fist.
The rest look from Chris to Josh's blank expression worriedly, until Chris suddenly whoops and throws his arms around Josh, screaming, "We won, we won!" Sam jumps on him next, and then everyone else, hugging and screaming excitedly.
They party like fucking pornstars, and when Josh presents the letter to his parents that night, Melinda hugs him and Bob cracks a proud smile.
Josh grins into his mother's shoulder, until his dad says, "About time you finally got your head on straight, son."
The win should be enough to eclipse the disappointment buried in his father's tone—as if he should have gotten over this depression nonsense the moment the first pill hit his tongue. But the words echo in Josh's head for days. He closes the blinds and stares at the gray walls of his room, wondering what's the point of putting up a front of normalcy if someone can come along and tear it down in ten words.
That summer, he insists on having writing sessions with Chris and Ashley so he can work on his next script idea, and then takes every opportunity to go get something he's forgotten in another room. Hannah and Sam see him loitering around the living room one day, coming back from tennis practice, and give him knowing smiles when he thumbs upstairs towards his room and makes obscene gestures. Sam slaps his hands while Hannah giggles, and he shrugs.
"Hey, we're probably gonna be seniors before either of them actually make a move," he says.
"Not sure if you mean seniors in high school or senior citizens, but either way.” Sam shakes her head in mock disappointment.
Hannah snorts. "Like you have any room to speak."
Sam turns abruptly, glaring at Hannah, and Josh's heart drops into his stomach, but his lips smile on reflex.
"Oh, does our Sam have her eye on an eligible bachelor?" Josh pulls on her ponytail lightly, and she jumps away like she's been slapped.
He pulls away just as quickly at the hurt on her face, but can't stop the words spilling out of his mouth. "Sorry, I uh, sorry, just joshin'." His smile is crooked as he turns around and heads back upstairs without another word.
Sam puts her elbows in his sides and he sits next to her when they watch movies because it's always the last open spot, but there's a few inches of space after that. Sometimes he lays in bed and looks at the thin scars on his fingertips, remembers the flaring bottle rocket in the darkness, and tries not to wonder if he's too messed up for her.
Chris and Ashley don’t get together, Josh writes script after script over the summer, and the Washingtons go to Blackwood for a weekend where Josh finally puts the baseball equipment in the basement. He attends his classes with Emily when school starts back, and shoots short movies after school for his YouTube channel.
Christmas morning, he watches Hannah and Beth’s faces as they open their presents from him. Beth lights up at the custom watch, her initials engraved on the back of it. When she sets the alarm on it and lets it ring, a familiar song in chiptune begins to play. Hannah squeaks over the music box. A ceramic ballerina twirls to a slower version of the song when she opens it. He laughs when they jump him for a hug, and all day he can hear the upbeat tones and the somber melody of “Frere Jacques” throughout the house.
Come February next year, he gets everyone together again to shoot another short film at Blackwood lodge, this time casting Matt in the lead role as an art school student during a nuclear winter. They film out in the ice and cold a lot, and by the time they all get to come inside after a long day of work, they're exhausted and dripping snow, huddling together in front of the fire or fighting over who gets the bath next.
They sit and talk, Chris leaning heavily into Josh's side, who makes of point of leaning all over Beth on his other side.
"Dude, you two are so heavy, you're crushing me!" she mutters, shoving at Josh half-heartedly.
Mike and Hannah, sitting on the actual couch, are talking about student council junk. Their thighs brush. Mike puts his hand on her shoulder and Hannah tousles his hair. Josh smirks over his shoulder at her and she flips him off when Mike isn’t looking.
There are birthdays, film contests that he wins and loses, Christmas, parties, and psychiatrist sessions scheduled further and further apart, until Josh sees his doctor only once every two months. He pops his pills and hangs out with friends, and sometimes there are headaches, or nausea, but it’s not like it was before.
Sometimes a voice at the back of his mind reminds him that he's worth less than anyone he knows who puts up with his shit. That even his parents want to separate him like a diseased limb, so he won't poison the rest of his family. It hangs over him at night, a wolf with its jaws opened wide around his head, as Josh clenches his eyes shut and hums to himself. Only his sisters' and his friends' voices are loud enough to chase it away.
Summer ends almost before it starts, and Josh, seventeen, realizes on the last day that he hasn’t written a single script. He sits down to write something, but the black cursor on his laptop screen blinks emptily after two hours. Even dragging Ashley and Chris over to bounce ideas off of is no help. Nothing sounds right. It all sounds boring, overdone. Worthless.
School starts and he gets frequent questions from the rest of the group about what he’s working on, and that it must be big since he’s been so quiet about his movies for the last few months. He shrugs noncommittally and changes the subject. At home he opens his laptop and watches the blinking cursor and nothing in his head sounds right when he clacks them out on the keys.
Sam catches him staring at the blank laptop screen one day, arms crossed as he slouches on the couch in the living room.
“Whatcha writing?” she says, dropping down beside him.
He resists the urge to close it, because it doesn’t matter anyways. “Nothing. At all. Don’t have a single idea left in me.” His voice comes out more hollow than he intends.
Smile slipping slightly, she leans forward, trying to get him to look at her. “Hey, don’t say that. The Josh I know always has a few dirty ideas somewhere in him.”
Huffing a laugh, he finally does close the laptop, letting it slide off his lap onto the cushion beside him. “Maybe I should make a movie adaptation of the Kama Sutra?”
Sam covers her mouth, trying to hide the laughter leaking between her fingers. “Dude, gross!”
“Hey, I never said I wasn’t,” Josh says. “Hannah’s upstairs, if that’s who you’re looking for.”
“Yeah, but I’m not in a hurry.” She kicks out of her running shoes and pulls her feet up on the couch like she lives there, which she practically does. “What’s up?”
He wants to tell her that he can't write, that he hasn't had a single good idea since last year, it feels like. What comes out instead is, "Not much, what's up with you?"
She tells him about school, going out with Beth and Hannah yesterday, the book she's been reading about endangered animals. He watches the way her eyes ignite when she gets protective, but he can’t bring himself to even tease her about it. Hannah finds them after a little while, scolding him playfully for trying to steal her friend, but then flops down on Sam’s other side and turns on a movie.
Josh makes a bunch of jokes as the terrible horror movie plays, until Sam and Hannah are dying laughing. He shoves that blinking cursor out of his mind.
He skips a few classes and sits at home in the dark, staring at the camera collecting dust on his shelf. He takes it down and turns it on, looks through the viewfinder as he lays on his bed, and hits record.
“I don’t know what to do,” he says quietly, watching the ceiling through the lens.
February comes again, but he finally has to disappoint them that he has nothing planned.
“Sorry guys, I guess I’ve just been so stressed out about graduating, I haven’t been able to write anything.”
“Hey, we understand. These dorks need to be focused on their studies anyways,” Emily says, nodding at the rest of the group. “I’ve seen your grades, Michael, and I’m starting to think only divine intervention will save your sorry ass.”
“Woah there, I’ll be fine. I’ve got the best study partner around.” Mike looks to Hannah, as if for confirmation.
“Well, I mean, I do my best, but I’m not a miracle maker,” Hannah says, and Mike groans as Emily high-fives her.
Josh shakes his head, and they make plans to go up to the lodge anyways, just to hang out and party. “To keep the tradition going, you know?” Agreement is unanimous.
Hannah begs and begs their parents to get a tattoo that semester at a tattoo parlor up at Blackwood. When they finally concede, she drags Josh and Beth with her to the lodge, and then drags him to the parlor when Beth refuses because Hannah will talk her into getting one too. Josh sits with her, returning the death grip she has on his fingers when the needle touches her skin, and tells her a story about the time he dared Chris to eat a ghost pepper and he actually jumped into the pool to relieve the pain. She laughs between “ow”s and he counts it as a win. When he takes a picture of her afterward, proudly displaying the new tattoo, she smiles fit to crack the sky.
Later she shows off her tattoo to Beth, who just shakes her head but still compliments it while Josh bounces onto her bed. He pulls a ripped magazine page out from under him, getting comfortable while Hannah complains about how painful it was, before turning it over curiously. When he reads the circled results, he lets it flutter to the floor and gets up again.
He grabs her elbow lightly to get her attention, before pulling Hannah into a hug. “You did good in there. Didn’t even cry once, baby sister,” he jokes.
She returns the hug tightly, says, “Hey, I’m only a year younger than you, and Beth is still younger than me. She’s the baby sister here.”
Beth protests, and Josh laughs, but he squeezes Hannah tighter, trying to convey more feelings than he knows how to express. Pride and worry and love and trust all rolled into a messy knot tangled in his chest.
Senior Prom is an extravagant and dramatic affair. Chris won’t ask Ashely to the prom because he’s afraid it will blow up in his face, in spite of Josh’s badgering and the fact that she has been dropping hints bigger than the Titanic that Chris should ask her. Her hints sink against his oblivious skull, and Josh invites them both over to play video games instead. He doesn’t have a date to it, either, and no one he can ask.
The week before prom, Josh walks past Hannah’s room and turns around after a few feet when he realizes what he heard through her door was crying. He knocks before entering to find Hannah face down on her bed, glasses on the floor, hugging a stuffed owl and trying to muffle her sobs.
“Who’s ass do I have to kick?” he asks when she trades the owl for him, clutching his shirt and hiding her face in his shoulder.
“Just mine, I think,” she says, and will say nothing else on the subject. Just hangs onto him as he tries to tell her everything will be alright, though he has no idea if it will or not.
A week later he offers to take a picture of Hannah, Sam, Mike, and Emily on their way out the door to the prom. Hannah, for once, doesn’t stand next to Mike, seems to cringe under the hand that he puts on her shoulder, and talks to Sam almost exclusively. It’s only when they’re getting into the rented limo, and Mike leans down to give Emily a peck on the lips, that the pieces click together.
The Alberta Invitational tennis competition is just a few weeks later, and Josh, Beth, their parents, and Sam all attend. It’s the longest Josh can remember being in the same place as his father since he was twelve, and they barely look at each other. Instead they watch Hannah beat contestant after contestant into the court, playing more ferociously than they’ve ever seen her play. She’s dripping sweat and probably aching all over, but she doesn’t slow or falter. She wins bronze, and stands amongst the top three grinning at the crowd, finding her family in it and looking each one square in the eyes.
They go out and celebrate afterward, and when they get back home to California the next day, Mike, Matt, Jess, Emily, Ashley, and Chris surprise Hannah at the door, dragging them all out to celebrate again at the nearest fast food place. Mike is the first to wrap his arms around her in congratulations, and talks to her the whole night.
Emily takes it with more grace than Josh might have expected. Instead of snapping at Mike for hanging off of another girl, Emily talks to Hannah just as animatedly about her victory.
“I’m glad you showed all those dudes what a woman is capable of! It’s like, you gotta show men their place sometimes, otherwise they feel like they can walk all over us and say what they want.”
Jess nods emphatically on Emily’s other side, leaning around her to say, “You kicked ass, and we’re all proud as fuck!”
Sam slides in next to Josh as he watches quietly from another booth, a wave of tiredness having swept out of nowhere. Probably all the excitement and travel.
“Looks like Hannah’s feeling a lot better,” she says, tilting her fries at him questioningly.
He takes one, but can’t bring himself to actually eat it. “Yeah, I think she is. She played like a pro and she deserves to have a good night.”
“I don’t know what Mike thinks he’s doing, though. He shouldn’t get her hopes up by flirting with her like that.”
Mike flicks Hannah’s nose teasingly, and she tries to grab his hand as he does it again, laughing. He’s looking her in the eyes, like she’s the only thing in the room, the corners of his mouth turning up in a soft smile.
“I think,” Josh starts, and then shuts his mouth.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Sam says, and Josh looks at her, startled. She nods at Mike. “I don’t know why he’s dating Emily, but there’s something there.”
Josh wonders when Sam gained the ability to read his mind.
His eighteenth birthday passes before he knows it, and he, Chris, Sam, Emily, and Mike all graduate. He applies to a nearby university and is accepted with no problems, enrolling in a double major of drama and psychology, and starts classes that summer.
Mike holds a party in July, sending out old-fashioned paper invites. Beth and Hannah RSVP the affirmative, but Josh declines, making excuses about classes. He doesn’t actually have a class that particular night, but somehow the thought of going out and socializing doesn’t sound as appealing as it used to. He ends up in bed, textbooks uncracked and lights out, the beginnings of a headache pulsing against his temples.
More often than not he comes home from class exhausted, but in spite of this, Josh finds himself lying awake at night, unable to sleep, staring at his ceiling for hours on end. It’s a familiar song, but this time he’s too old for Beth and Hannah to sing him to sleep.
One day he finds an almost empty bag of rubber bands under his bed, and he slips one around his hand. It’s dry enough that a single snap crumbles it against his skin. He sits on the carpet and snaps each one to dust against his wrist, until all that’s left are little pieces of rubber piled in his lap.
Dust sticks to his fingers when Josh takes down his camera. He turns it towards his face, hits record, and starts talking.
“I wanted to say,” he begins. Stops because he doesn’t know what he wants to say. The empty eye of his lens holds no answers. He turns the camera around, realizes the battery is dead anyways, and laughs.
He makes plans to go out with his sisters, Chris, Sam, and Mike one weekend, and very nearly backs out. But he hasn’t hung out with his sisters or Chris in what feels like a long time, and Sam sends him a text that morning suggesting they go to the camera shop Josh likes. The smile that makes its way to his face is real, but he has to force the energy to unlock his phone and reply that that sounds great.
They spend the day together, Mike practically hanging off Hannah. Beth rolls her eyes and Sam pretends to gag behind their back. Josh can’t tell what’s going on with those two--Mike has Em, but he’s acting as if Hannah is his girlfriend. He’s not sure if it’s any of his business, but if Mike does anything to hurt Hannah then he’ll have to make it his business.
Chris drags them to every electronic store in the mall, and Sam and Beth hit up the pet store to look at the hamsters and lizards.
While they’re watching the fish floating serenely in their tanks, Hannah puts a fake spider on Chris’s shoulder, and when he finally notices it and flips out, demanding someone kill it, Sam is quick to try to save it. They laugh at her as she slowly realizes the spider isn’t real, either. Josh steals the spider from her and drops it down Hannah’s shirt in revenge.
Sam bumps shoulders with him, and they share a grin.
They end up at the camera shop eventually, Josh browsing slowly through the shelves of high-end cameras and lenses. He ends up buying a new charger cord for his camera.
When he rejoins the group with his bag, Beth shoots him a curious look. “Finally got an idea for your next movie, brother?” she asks.
“Yeah, something like that,” he says off-handedly, mind already going a mile-a-minute.
The next day, he starts planning, and brings it up with his parents that night at dinner,. Melinda looks uncertain, but Bob overrides her small, “I don’t know, hon…”
“Aw, let them go. It’ll be good for them--get some fresh air, see the sights. Josh is old enough, and he hasn’t had one of his psycho episodes in a while. I think we can trust he won’t get them killed,” Bob says, barely looking up from the thick sheaf of papers he’s flipping through.
Gritting his teeth in a smile, Josh nods enthusiastically, and Melinda finally relents. “Alright, just be safe.”
After buying the tickets and setting up reservations, he drops the surprise on Hannah and Beth a week later.
“Cape Cod!” Beth jumps off of her bed, sketchbook and pens scattering everywhere. Hannah abandons her phone and rises from the floor, and they grab Josh at the same time.
“Are you serious?” Hannah says, tugging on his sleeve rapidly.
“Yeah--I mean, I figured, your senior year is about to start, and we didn’t get to go up to the lodge since I’ve got classes. So we should do something cool to celebrate, right?”
He holds in a laugh as they jump up and down and starts swinging his arms, their sing-song voices rising in unison. “We’re going to Cape Co~od! We’re going to Cape Co~od!”
They leave for three days in August, only a few days before school starts back for the youngest Washingtons. Josh brings his camera, and films almost constantly, catching as many of Beth’s small smiles and Hannah’s open-mouthed grins as he can. They swim in the sea and lounge on the beach, visit the local shops and wander the city. He gets a pedestrian to take a picture of them all together to send to their parents, but still sneaks in lots of selfies and videos of them splashing around in the water and building shining sand castles.
It’s the most energetic he’s felt in months, and it almost has him rethinking his plan, but he knows it won’t last. It never does. So he lets them bury him in the sand and buys them souvenirs out of gift shops and captures these last precious few moments with them where they have no worries or responsibilities to anyone but each other.
They return tanned and tired, but for days Beth and Hannah bring up their little vacation at every moment, reminding each other of this moment or that. Josh prints photos, burns DVDs, and gives them each a copy, their happy memories forever preserved in silver.
Though classes start back for him shortly after that, he spends more of his free time hanging with friends. He and Chris go to the movies and hang out in his room playing video games. It’s one of these nights when they’re just chilling on Josh’s bed, when Chris bemoans his dying 3DS--it’s touch screen barely works anymore and the battery life is less than half of what it was.
Josh looks at his own 3DS gathering dust on his dresser, and gets up to grab it, before turning with a flourish to present it to Josh. “Perhaps this will suffice, my good bro?” he says with a wink.
Chris takes it in reverent hands, and looks at Josh like he’s the second coming. “Are you--are you giving this to me, man?”
“Got it in one.” Josh flops back down onto his bed, landing on his open psych textbook.
“Dude, no, I can’t accept this!” Chris tries to hand it back, but Josh shoves it against Chris’ chest gently but firmly.
“Look, Cochise, I haven’t played it in months. Besides, yours is gasping it’s final breath right here on my bed, and I can’t bear to watch you weep when it finally dies,” Josh says, rolling on his back and putting his hands behind his head. “Keep it.”
Chris can’t really argue with that logic, and says quietly, “Thanks, man.”
Josh barely hears him. He’s looking around his room, at all the junk he seems to have collected that won’t matter in the future. He can’t leave these here, to become rotting relics that his parents will be forced to throw out eventually.
It almost becomes a game after that. He starts conveniently forgetting movies at his friends’ houses, or letting them borrow a game that he has no intention of getting back. He knows Hannah has been eyeing the bust of Nosferatu he has on a shelf, so one day he off-handedly mentions that he’s thinking of selling it, and Hannah jumps at the chance to take it off his hands.
To Sam he manages to give a bunch of his documentaries, because she’s as much of a nature nerd as he is a movie buff. He finds a way to sneak half of his video games into Chris’ hold and the other half into Beth’s. Jess and Ashley end up with a bunch of his books, because he keeps recommending them one and then insisting they take it to read.
It doesn’t take him long to figure out Matt actually collects trading cards, and Josh gives him a bunch, saying that he doesn’t really collect anymore. Matt is stunned at the selection he has, and takes them happily. For Mike, Josh has to do a little digging, subtly asking Hannah what Mike’s interested in. He’s surprised to learn that Mike is a bit of a history buff, since his family has such strong political ties, and ends up letting him “borrow” a bunch of biographies about directors.
He feels bad about wasting all the help Emily has given him over the years, covering for him in classes and helping him catch up. She already has everything she wants, so he winds up just hanging out with her and buying her lunch. She’s so high-strung all the time, and Josh does his best to distract her for a day with dumb jokes and a marathon of her favorite show.
It takes longer than he intends to write these silent letters to everyone, when there are so many days he can’t face them at all, for fear they’ll see the intent written on his face.
The leaves outside turn red and gold, and a chill enters the air. Sidewalks are lined with pumpkins and skeletal decorations. Josh looks out his window halfway through October and can’t think of a better time.
He takes his camera down, fully charged, and turns it on himself like a loaded pistol. Into the empty eye of its lense, he finally finds the words to finish the sentence he started months ago.
“I wanted to say goodbye.” The words are heavy on his tongue, but he forces them between his gritted teeth all the same. “I’m just so tired, all the time, and even though things were better for a while, it’s gotten worse. Just like it always has. So I’m not gonna play that game anymore. I’m sorry, to all of you. I’m sorry.”
Hannah and Beth are out shopping for Halloween costumes, since it's Beth's turn to choose the theme this year, and his parents are running errands. They’ll be back first, they’ll find him first, so Hannah and Beth won’t have to. Josh stops the recording but leaves it on and sets it on the bedside table, digs the bottle of Fluoxetine out of his sock drawer, and breaks the seal.
The first handful of pills goes down slow as he chews his way through them. The second is better, and he’s halfway through the third when he feels them hit his system like a full-body slap. His vision blurs and the room begins to spin, so he lays down on his bed and closes his eyes.
He doesn’t expect to wake up, but his eyes open next on a white hospital room, and he bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes copper to hold in a scream. A nurse is changing out the IV, while a doctor reads over his charts. She notices he’s awake and takes a seat by his bed, still writing, while the nurse works.
“Joshua, I’m Dr. Brenner. I just have a few questions for you, if you don’t mind?” She runs through a list on her clipboard. Do you remember your name? Do you know what day it is? Do you remember your birthday? Do you remember how you got here?
His tongue sticks on the last one. Of course he remembers, but does he have to say it? It’s bad enough he failed, does he have to admit his failure to a complete stranger, too? He manages a strangled, “Yes.”
“You’re lucky you survived, young man. If those pills hadn’t been expired and if your parents hadn’t gotten home when they did, you wouldn’t be here right now.”
Josh stares at the blank white wall opposite and says nothing.
Bob and Melinda are the first to be allowed in. His mother gives him watery doe eyes and kisses across his forehead and cheeks, while his father stands against the wall, as if he’s not sure who this stranger in the room is.
“You scared us so much, Joshua, how could you do this? What were you thinking, why didn’t you come to one of us if you were feeling so bad?” she asks, petting his hair and hugging him fiercely.
“I’m sorry,” is the first thing he gets out, and his eyes sting without his permission, but he takes a deep breath, refuses to let it out. “I’m sorry, I just— I couldn’t—” Something stops him, a small voice in the back of his head reminding him that it doesn’t matter what he says, because they won’t get it anyways. His mom will give him the same, sad stare and his dad will keep his distance and once he’s out of the hospital they’ll both continue acting as if everything is normal and like he didn’t try to kill himself.
“Where’s Beth and Hannah?” he says instead.
His parents give each other a look across the room, and his father is the first to say, “They don’t know you’re here.”
“Oh,” Josh says, because he shouldn’t be as surprised as he is that the Washington family is still trying to keep its dirty little secret from itself.
“Yet,” Melinda says quickly. “We just didn’t want to worry them too much. We’re going to tell them that you checked yourself into the hospital because you were feeling down.”
Josh swallows against the building thrum in his throat, not knowing if he wants to laugh at her pale euphemism or scream in frustration.
“Don’t tell your sisters,” his father says when the silence drags too long, finally pushing off the wall to stand at the foot of his bed. “It would break their hearts, and all we want is for them to have the normal, happy life you couldn’t get.”
His nod is mechanical, because what else can he do? He can’t tell his sisters that their parents came home and found him dying from an overdose on expired medication. He’s no more prepared to have that conversation than he is to have this one.
They leave after a few minutes more, his mother showering him in goodbye kisses and his father nodding from the doorway. He sits in the empty hospital room, watching the cracks in the white walls, as their words echo in his skull and the little voice at the back of his mind reminds him of all the reasons he swallowed those pills in the first place.
His psychiatrist visits him in the hospital, all wounded looks and heavy sighs, like he did this to her personally. She says, “What happened, Josh? We made such good progress, but you never brought up any of these feelings in our last few sessions. I could have helped you.”
Something tells him to shrug, and he avoids giving a concrete answer. She writes a stronger prescription and won’t clear him to leave until he agrees to talk about this with her in the next session she schedules. He’s so tired, so ready to just be done with the ordeal, he’d agree to anything at this point. She nods in satisfaction when he finally promises and gives his doctor the all clear.
It’s almost Halloween by the time his mother picks him up on his final day. When they arrive home, he stalls getting out of the car, watching the front windows of the large Washington estate. He remembers looking out his bedroom window, thinking it would be for the last time.
When he walks through the front door, Hannah and Beth are there to greet him, asking how he feels, complaining that their parents wouldn't let them visit.
He puts on his best reassuring smile, says his psychiatrist recommended checking himself in. It's a little relieving to be able to admit at least that much. No more lying about where he goes some days, when he comes home looking like someone’s put him through the spin cycle. Hannah says nothing to that, but she does give Josh a long, searching look. Like she’s looking at him for the first time, and seeing something that doesn’t quite mesh. He swallows, can’t look away. Doesn’t know if he wants her to see or hopes she’ll remain oblivious.
Beth slides her hand into Josh’s, then Hannah’s, breaking the moment and pulling them back to the present, where Josh realizes he can’t ever let them know how fucked up he his. Not if he wants them to stay his family, instead of joining his parents on the other side of the gulf between them.
“I know exactly what you need after being in the hospital for a week. Video game time with your favorite sisters!” Beth drags them by the hands up the stairs, into her room. She knocks a box of paints off her blue and yellow checkered bed and maneuvers them onto it before unwinding controllers.
“You’re my only sisters, dummy,” he says, voice quieter than he intends.
They play video games for hours, switching from Street Fighter to Rock Band to Mario Kart then Smash Bros., and his sisters chatter, taking over his usual job of filling the silence. Their friends think he was with his dad for the week, watching him work and helping out on the set of his newest movie. Not even Chris knows what he did.
Hannah tells him about the Halloween party Sam is throwing and shows him the postcard invitation between rounds. A lonely scarecrow sits in a field of golden wheat, a farmhouse in the background completing the picturesque scene.
“Hannah, Josh, & Beth” it says in Sam’s crooked writing. He can’t stop the spreading smile, the ache behind his ribs.
Eventually he begs off of another re-match, beyond exhausted, and takes the card to his room with him. He props it up against a lamp on his bedside table, before noticing the camera sitting innocuously next to it, in the same spot he’d left it. A thin film of dust coats it’s slick surface. Trembling hands take it, turning it around to see that the battery has died in his week away. No one even saw his note.
He plugs it in to charge and re-watches his note, before deleting it.
Halloween dawns cool and bright. Josh closes the blinds and sits in the dark, feeling like he's waiting for the world to end. He wants to call Chris, to tell him some stupid joke and to hear a friendly voice, but the whispering voice at the back of his mind asks him, “Why should Chris care?”
Josh doesn't have an answer, but he refuses to talk back.
He pulls open his nightstand's drawer, rooting around, looking for a rubber band or a hair tie. Something small and cool meets his hand, and he pulls out a pocket knife his dad gave him when he was ten, unaware of the fissure shuddering beneath their feet.
The short, stubby blade glitters like a guttering flame when he flips it open.
Josh finds the old scars on his fingers, and in the shadows of the room, his blood looks like sludge as it drips onto his shirt.
That voice says, “Get it out.”
“Shut up,” he hisses, and does it again, to another finger.
It's not enough, and he hates the pain, but he hates the voice even more. He should shove the knife into his ear, part his throat into a smile, peel his wrists like fruit. It whispers all the nasty ideas in a hideous voice Josh can barely separate from his own and he slices another line into another finger, hoping it will be enough to silence it.
A light knock on his door startles him, and the knife slips out of his hand. The realization of what he was doing flies out of nowhere, and he curls his fingers into his palm as if to hide the blood slipping through his knuckles..
“Josh? You ready for the party?” Beth calls, the doorknob rattling impatiently.
“Hey, c-can't a guy blaze in peace?” he says towards the door, grabbing a dirty shirt from his floor and wiping at his fingers
His sister scoffs through the wood, but the pause afterward is long. “You okay, bro?”
“Yeah, I’ll be out in a minute,” he calls.
Her shadow under his door shifts from foot to foot, before receding down the hall, and Josh looks at his bedside table, where the scarecrow in its field of wheat stares out at him blankly. He wipes at his fingers, trying to get the blood up, but it spreads and stains everything it touches.
Beth chose vampires as the theme this year—Josh is the vampire, while Hannah and Beth are vampire hunters. He pulls his costume on in a hurry, thankful for the black gloves that hide his hands, and joins his sisters downstairs, where they're liberally applying fake blood to plastic weapons.
“Hey, bro, ready to go?” Hannah asks.
Josh nods instead of speaking, unsure if his voice will come out steady.
The party at Sam's is spent wild and loud, dancing, playing dumb party games, and drinking. Beer is shoved into Josh's hands by an already buzzed Mike the moment he walks through the door, and whenever he runs dry, another one finds its way to him.
Chris, dressed as Aquaman, drags him into a game of beer pong that he is losing badly to Jess and Emily, while Ashley giggles from the sideline. Together, they manage an even more pathetic spectacle, and it's only due to the hilarity of watching Josh and Chris nailing their own cups instead of their opponents' that Jess and Emily are forced to forfeit from laughter.
Josh spectates, an intruder on a scene, watching his body joke and talk like mere hours ago he hadn't played mortician on his hand. His body takes another bottle, and he doesn't know if it's his decision or reflex that tips it to his lips. Only feels the bitter tide pull him farther out.
His phone alarm goes off sometime during the night, and he checks it to see a reminder to take his medicine blinking back at him. The small mint tin he keeps his pills in rattles when he fishes it from his pocket. He pulls one out, and his hand clenches around it, as if to grind it to dust, or to rear back for a throw.
It slides from his palm, just another piece of party debris joining the floor, and he spends the rest of the night drowning the phantom taste of medicine in bottle after bottle, smiling and laughing until the alcohol makes it sound real even to his ears.
Sunglasses shield his sensitive eyes when he sees his psychiatrist the next day, and when she asks him if he's hungover, he shakes his head, struggling not to hold it afterward as the room spins.
She talks about trying new medication and asks how his family is treating him, after his "attempt." The way she talks around the word, like someone too polite to speak the dirty truth, has him grinding his teeth. He can't say that his sisters don't know, that his parents pretend like nothing has happened. That voice in his skull wraps around the words, tells him to keep quiet, to act normal.
He doesn't know what normal even looks like, but he takes a wild guess that it's never going to be him.
When she brings up the day of his “attempt,” he doesn’t know what to say, even without the whispering voice at his ear. Does his best anyways.
“I didn’t want to waste any more time, I guess. I’d done what I needed to do, and it was a nice day.”
“So you had it planned? For how long?”
He looks away, lies. “Not long.”
There are bright red scabs across the pads of his fingers, and when she asks about them, he tucks them into the sleeves of his jacket, shrugs tightly.
“Have you been taking your medication?”
Silence is more telling than his words could ever be. Her mouth purses and she scribbles on her legal pad while Josh leans back on the black leather sofa.
At the end of November, the skin around her eyes puckers as she says, “I don’t think I can help you anymore, but I know someone who might be better suited to your situation. Call him and set up an appointment. I think it’s for the best.”
Josh nods dutifully while Dr. North writes him a prescription for Amitriptyline and a referral. It’s not the first time, and he doubts it will be the last.
Bob sighs tiredly at the news and Melinda pats Josh on the shoulder, but they shift uneasily. Josh can see he’s caught them going out the door, prior plans having them dressed-up and linking arms. He smiles and wishes them a goodnight, and his mother kisses him on the forehead gratefully.
The house is silent, Hannah and Beth spending the night at Sam’s. He raids the liquor cabinet, grabbing bottles without reading labels and locking the door to his room. Sitting on the floor, he pops a top and takes a swallow of something fiery, hacking through the first few.
The orange bottle of his new prescription reads a dosage of one pill twice a day. He pops two in his mouth since he’s already behind, and chases it with another swallow. A Playstation controller finds his hand, and he turns it on, letting whatever disc is in the system spin. The more he drinks, the more fun it seems, as he drives his character through a desert, running his car off cliffs and into wandering bad guys.
A shrill tone pulls his gaze to the phone on his bed, and a picture of Mike and Chris pretending to hump plastic skeletons in the Halloween section of the grocery store shines brightly. Chris' name glitters over a notification for an unread text.
Josh swipes the phone open, reads, “Hey, bro, wassup?” and writes, “I’m getting slowsshed an bpplayn a gammme!! Wanna join???”
Why bother? That voice asks him over and over, but it’s faint and inconsequential.
“You know it! I’m still achin’ from last night, and u know what they say about the hair of the dog that bit u!”
Snorting, thumbs tapping, Josh writes, “whateves man, get over her so i cn kickur assdin smassh”
Chris arrives and they toast with the bottles as Josh passes him a Wiimote. Every sip drives the voice farther out, and gives reality a colorful clarity. He curses as Chris destroys him in their first match, and then laughs when later in the night Chris can’t even drive straight to finish a kart race.
It’s on the tip of his loosening tongue as they flop face-first on his bed next to each other. The TV is looping music from the game, it’s past midnight, and Chris is warm and giggly next to him. Josh rolls onto his side, facing Chris, words halfway out, almost manages to say, “I tried to kill myself,” when Chris grabs Josh’s hand, holding it almost against the tip of his nose as he stares at it in utter fascination.
“What h-happened to your hand, dude?” Chris mutters, turning it this way and that.
Josh realizes he means the cuts on his fingers, and pulls away abruptly. He wants to say it--he wants to tell Chris, to have someone to talk to about this who won’t prescribe medication and give him disappointed looks.
But the words fall like ash to the back of his throat.
“I was helpin’ Hannah with a project for school and, uh, I uh, cut myself on a’ x-acto knife,” he says, the drunken slurring hiding the tremble in his voice.
“Bro, you should, like, put some bandaids on that, right?” Chris says, hand flailing on the bed for Josh’s again.
“Nah, it’s fine.” Josh tucks his fingers under him so Chris can't see the precision of each line, kicking lightly at Chris’ leg and smiling when he kicks back.
Josh sees Dr. Hill for the first time mid-December. The man is weird, but nice. He's got a morbid sense of humor, which Josh can appreciate, and when he notices how often Josh comes in hungover, he at least doesn't give Josh the same hang-dog disappointed look his last psychiatrist gave him.
Just writes “coping mechanism” on his note pad, which Dr. Hill always offers Josh a chance to read whenever Josh looks at it sceptically. Maybe it is a coping mechanism—he doesn't care what anyone calls it, as long as it shuts up the growling voice in his head.
Josh drinks and pops his new pills like they're candy, because nothing else can drive the voice out. It's easy, and everything feels better afterward. For the first time in a long time, he remembers the dark bottom of the pool, the flaring firework in his hand, and thinks that's what he feels like now. Somehow at peace in the bottom of this hole he's in.
He writes a short script for a short film, hardly any dialogue at all, about a woman who gets separated from her friends while hiking, going down the same trail over and over, unable to climb up or down the mountain, finding the remains of a strange creature. Wonders if he's the woman or the creature.
When Hannah sees the script open on his computer on Christmas Eve, she lights up.
“Josh, we have to do it, we have to! It's tradition.” She tucks her hands under her chin to smile pleadingly at him.
Beth and Sam look up from the coffee table, where they're playing a game of Monopoly and drinking hot chocolate. Beth is clearly winning, by the state of her colorful money pile, and Sam seems to gratefully abandon the board to come see what Hannah's looking at.
“Whoa, I didn't know you were writing something,” Sam says when she glimpses the script.
Beth crawls across the floor and leans on the couch, getting right in front of Josh to look at the screen.
“Hey, you don't even know what it is yet!” Josh lightly shoves Beth's head away and closes his laptop, both embarrassed and pleased.
“Come on, we all know it's a script,” Beth mutters. “Hannah's right, we should totally do it. You haven't gotten a chance to do anything for months, Josh, why not?”
“I'm not even finished with it yet,” he says, part of him not even sure if he'll be able to finish it at all. The start was surprisingly easy, after all this time of nothing, but he has no idea how to end it yet.
“I'm sure you'll think of something by February,” Sam says, flopping onto the couch next to him.
“Oh great, not you too!” He huffs, rolling his eyes, but his lips switch involuntarily into a smile.
Sam snorts as Hannah and Beth give him irresistible puppy dog eyes.
“Oh, fine!” he gives in. “But you have to clear it with mom and dad.” He kind of doubts they'll give him permission to use the lodge without their adult supervision, not after his breakdown a few months ago. But he can't help thinking that it would be nice to be able to finish this and film it, and finally update his YouTube channel.
His sisters immediately disappear to find their parents, already making plans with each other, leaving Sam and Josh on the couch alone. The lights on the Christmas tree pulse slowly, and the fake fireplace show Beth had found on Netflix is playing on the TV.
Josh buries his fingertips against his palm, says, “Merry Christmas, Sam.”
“Merry Christmas, Josh.” He's not sure if it's his imagination or accident, but her palm finds the back of his hand where it rests on the cushion between them. “I'm glad you're writing again. I was getting kinda worried about you.” She says it teasingly, and Josh grins flippantly.
“Just needed time to come up with something fresh. I'm not an idea machine you know. Cranking out scripts like some kind of factory worker for your cruel pleasure. I know you're only in it for the fame!” He puts his other hand over his heart and tosses his head back dramatically.
“Oh, sure, you're the factory worker, when we're the ones doing all the hard work for free. If anything, we're the ones laboring for your pleasure!”
“Fair point, Sammy. Guess I'll have to up your pay. Five cents an hour, and no more!”
“Oh, thank you, how kind you are, yes sir, right away sir,” Sam mimes bowing to him as Josh turns his nose up, and then they break into laughter, leaning against each other and shaking.
It feels so normal that it's strange, and when he gets himself together again, Josh takes another sip of his spiked hot chocolate, willing the moment to last. The warm hand against his, the comfortable silence, the absence inside him.
Miraculously, his parents consent to the trip. Josh supposes they're hoping that he won't do anything drastic with all his friends around, and that keeping busy with another project will pull him out of his head. In January, Hannah sends out the invitations and Josh finishes the script with a little help from Ashley and Chris. Something about this small accomplishment leaves him grinning for days, opening the word document every time he's on his computer just to marvel that he's finally written something after all this time.
He prepares for the trip as eagerly as Hannah and Beth, stocking up on alcohol and snacks, packing his equipment, counting down the days.
It's actually the best Josh has felt since October, and he can't wait for the trip to Blackwood.