The next morning, I brew a pot of coffee and make some scrambled eggs with toast. Or at least, I try. I end up burning the first batch of eggs and have to start over. The second attempt is too runny, but it’s edible.
Stanley sits in his wheelchair, holding a cup of coffee, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a button-down white shirt. I helped him into his chair that morning, but he insisted on getting dressed by himself. It took him an hour. I have no idea how he managed it, with his limited mobility. But then, he’s had a lot of practice.
“What are you going to do about college,” I ask.
“I called the school. Sent them a note from my doctor. They’re going to email me the assignments I missed.” He picks a bit of shell from his eggs. “I should be able to attend classes again, starting today. If you can drive me.”
I nod and pour myself some more coffee. “When.”
“Two thirty. I just have one programming class this afternoon.”
I wonder, not for the first time, how he affords college on top of everything else. I know he gets some money from his father, but is it enough? Even if his house is paid off—and I’m not sure it is—there’s still the electricity, the water bill, the gas, the property taxes . . . not to mention the hospital bills. Maybe his mother had a life insurance policy. Regardless, he probably doesn’t have a lot of spare cash.
“If I’m going to be living in your house for the foreseeable future,” I say through a mouthful of toast, “I should help with the bills.”
“You don’t have to do that, Alvie.”
“Yes, I do. I’ll get another job soon. Anyway, I don’t do well with idleness.” Already, I miss the animals. And while Stanley will still require some care for a while, he probably doesn’t want me hovering around him twenty-four hours a day.
“Well, if that’s what you want. . . . Any particular place in mind?”
“Anyplace that will have me. I’ve been sending in applications. It’s just . . .” I poke at the blobby, whitish-yellow eggs with my fork. “I have difficulty with some of the questions.”
“I can help you with them, if you want.”
I hesitate. “I can’t ask you for that.”
“I don’t mind. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about, you know. Job hunting is stressful for lots of people.”
“I don’t think many people have panic attacks while filling out personality questionnaires,” I mutter.
“You might be surprised.” His voice softens. “Let me help you.”
He sounds so gentle that, for a moment, I wonder. Maybe . . .
No. I can’t let myself start to hope again. He probably just wants me out of the house, even if he’s too kind to say so.
“All right,” I say.
Shortly after, the kitchen table is covered with a sprawl of papers that I printed out from the latest batch of online applications. Stanley picks up one for a burger restaurant. “So which parts are you having trouble with?”
“Everything.” My face burns. “The questions don’t make sense to me. I left a lot blank, and I don’t know if the answers I gave are any good. But I don’t know what else to say.”
“Let’s see. Um—there’s this . . . under ‘Describe your greatest flaw,’ you wrote bad at talking to people.” He shuffles through the applications. “And under ‘Are you a team player?’ you wrote no.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“I think that’s the sort of question you should just answer yes.”
I start to rock back and forth, pulling sharply on one braid. “In what sense can I be described as ‘a team player.’”
“They’re just asking if you’re willing to work with others.”
“Well, then that’s what they should say.” I rock faster.
He sets down the paper. “Alvie, it’s okay.”
I shut my eyes tight. My whole head feels hot. My hand drifts up to my braid and starts tugging again. I stop and sit on both my hands, because I don’t know how else to still them.
“You don’t have to hide that, you know. Not from me.”
I look up, surprised.
“Do that if it helps,” he says. “But listen to me. This”—he gestures toward the pile of applications—“is just a mind game invented by corporate bigwigs. These questions don’t mean anything. Your ability to fill them out has nothing to do with your worth as a worker or a person. This is just something you have to get through. I guess what I’m saying is, you don’t have to be completely honest. They don’t expect you to be. It’s not lying, per se. It’s finding the right words to present yourself in a good light. Everyone does it.”
I squint. It still sounds like lying to me. “These people are insane.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Everyone. All these so-called normal people.”
“What about me?” He smiles. “I’m so-called normal, right?”
I consider. “You’re an atypical neurotypical. I’ve never liked that word, though. Neurotypical. It implies that there’s such a thing as a normal human brain, and I don’t think there really is.”
“Oh?”
I take a slow sip of my coffee. “The corpus callosum—the stalk of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres—is thicker in musicians, particularly those who’ve studied music from an early age. Certain areas of the hippocampus are smaller in men, and also in people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Some people have a dominant left hemisphere; others have a dominant right hemisphere. Some people have language centers all throughout their brains, and some have them all clustered on one side. There are even neurological differences associated with different political and religious beliefs. Everyone’s brain is measurably different from everyone else’s. What does a ‘normal’ brain even look like. How do you recognize one. How do you create an objective standard by which to judge how normal someone’s brain is.”
“Well, in that case, you’re no more or less normal than anyone else, right?”
“Maybe.” The world doesn’t see it that way, though.
“Let’s keep going,” Stanley says. He picks up the sheet of paper in front of him and reads: “‘If you were a type of beverage, what would you be and why?’”
I wince. “You see what I mean. These questions are ridiculous. How am I supposed to answer something like that.”
“Absinthe,” he says.
I turn my head toward him. “What.”
“I tried absinthe once,” he says. “I was about fifteen. My mom and I were at a dinner party with a bunch of people, and I snuck some. One of my few acts of rebellion.” He smiles with one corner of his mouth. “It’s very strong alcohol. Cloudy green, like jade. It tastes sharp, almost bitter, so some people like to dilute it with water and sugar before they drink it, but I had it plain. It burned all the way down, but it made me feel giddy. Strong and completely weightless at the same time. Like I could fly.”
“Wait. So you’re saying you’d be absinthe.”
“No, I mean—” He clears his throat, ears reddening. “Never mind.”
Oh. I’m absinthe?
I’m still trying to puzzle out the meaning of this when he continues, distracting me: “Let’s see. ‘List your five best attributes.’ Well, that one’s easy. You’re smart, dependable, kind . . .”
I want to protest that I’m not kind, but I close my mouth, knowing he’ll just argue the point, like he always does. Instead, I listen to his voice as he reads.
I’m astounded at how easily he navigates his way through these baffling mazes of questions. It’s like some form of psychological jujitsu that he’s mastered without even trying. I try to focus on what he’s saying, but I find myself daydreaming and just letting his voice wash over me like warm water. I wonder what the inside of his brain would look like, if I could swim through it like a tadpole—if it’s filled with complex neurological structures designed for processing questions like What kind of beverage are you?
He says that I am absinthe. I still don’t know what this means, exactly. But I like the word and I like the way it sounds when he says it.
“Thank you,” I say. “For this. It helps a lot.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal.”
Even now, when I should be taking care of him, Stanley’s the one guiding me and easing my fears. There seems to be so little I can do for him.
He hardly ever talks about his own pain. But I know it’s there. Every day, in the hospital, I heard it in his voice and saw it in the flat, glassy sheen on his eyes, in the tightness around his smile. Sometimes he cries out in his sleep. He hurts more than most people could ever comprehend, yet still he smiles. And it’s not just physical pain he deals with. From what little he’s said about his childhood, I know the past still clings to him. Another way we’re alike.
I find myself thinking about that first night I spent at his house—the things he said to me. Things he never brought up again.
“So let’s see,” Stanley says. “This question, ‘Where do you see yourself in ten years?’ Ugh, I never like answering this one. How is anyone supposed to know that? But they’re basically just looking to see if you have goals—”
“You told me once before that your father physically abused you.”
He freezes. His expression goes blank, and the color drains from his face. “Jesus,” he mutters.
I know, immediately, that I’ve made a mistake. But it’s too late to take the words back.
He takes a deep breath and slowly sets the papers down. “He didn’t abuse me. It wasn’t like that. He just got carried away sometimes, and—why are we talking about this now?”
I pick at the edge of one thumbnail. “The night after Draco—I mean TJ—after he hit you that first time and broke your arm, I stayed overnight at your house. You said certain things about yourself—that you believed your parents would have been better off without you, that your existence was a mistake. I want to know who put that idea in your head.”
He closes his eyes briefly and rubs his forehead. “I was in a bad place that night. I was exhausted and doped up on pain medication. I barely knew what I was saying.”
“You seemed pretty lucid.”
“Christ, can we just—” He breaks off and lets out a short sigh. “Look . . . I know I have lousy self-esteem, but that’s my own problem. I’m not going to blame anyone else for it. He might be a coward, and God knows he’s not going to win any Father of the Year awards, but he’s not an abuser. Now, can we drop the subject?”
I lower my gaze. “Okay.”
We keep going through applications. I shuffle through the papers, my gaze sliding over the different questions without really seeing them. Stanley tries to sound cheerful when he gives me advice, but I can detect a difference in his tone. I’ve crossed a line.
For a few minutes, when we were talking about neurology and absinthe, things felt almost normal between us. But now he’s withdrawn into himself again.