FIVE

AS DAISY AND I DROVE toward her apartment in Harold’s warm embrace, she wouldn’t shut up about the crush she was certain I had. “Holmesy, you’re aglow. You’re luminous. You’re beaming.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I honestly can’t even tell if he’s cute.”

“He’s in that vast boy middle,” she said. “Like, good-looking enough that I’m willing to be won over. The whole problem with boys is that ninety-nine percent of them are, like, okay. If you could dress and hygiene them properly, and make them stand up straight and listen to you and not be dumbasses, they’d be totally acceptable.”

“I’m really not looking to date anyone.” I know people often say that when secretly looking for a romantic partner, but I meant it. I definitely felt attracted to some people, and I liked the idea of being with someone, but the actual mechanics of it didn’t much suit my talents. Like, parts of typical romantic relationships that made me anxious included 1. Kissing; 2. Having to say the right things to avoid hurt feelings; 3. Saying more wrong things while trying to apologize; 4. Being at a movie theater together and feeling obligated to hold hands even after your hands become sweaty and the sweat starts mixing together; and 5. The part where they say, “What are you thinking about?” And they want you to be, like, “I’m thinking about you, darling,” but you’re actually thinking about how cows literally could not survive if it weren’t for the bacteria in their guts, and how that sort of means that cows do not exist as independent life-forms, but that’s not really something you can say out loud, so you’re ultimately forced to choose between lying and seeming weird.

“Well, I want to date someone,” Daisy said. “I’d make a go at Little Orphan Billionaire myself, except he wouldn’t stop looking at you. Hey, speaking of which, here’s a fascinating piece of trivia: Guess who gets Pickett’s billions if he dies?”

“Um, Davis and Noah?”

“No,” Daisy said. “Guess again.”

“The zoologist?”

“No.”

“Just tell me.”

“Guess.”

“Fine. You.”

“Alas, no, which is so unjust. I’m such a billionaire without the billions, Holmesy. I have the soul of a private jet owner, and the life of a public transportation rider. It’s a real tragedy. But no, not me. Not Davis. Not the zoologist. The tuatara.”

“Wait, what?”

“The tua-fucking-tara, Holmesy. Malik told me it was a matter of public record and it totally is. Listen.” She held up her phone. “Indianapolis Star article from last year. ‘Russell Pickett, the billionaire chairman and founder of Pickett Engineering, shocked the black-tie audience at last night’s Indianapolis Prize by announcing that his entire estate would be left to his pet tuatara. Calling the creatures, which can live to more than one hundred and fifty years of age, “magical animals,” Pickett said that he had created a foundation to study his tuatara and provide the best possible care for it. “Through investigating Tua’s secrets,” he said, referring to his pet by name, “humans will learn the key to longevity and better understand the evolution of life on earth.” When asked by a Star reporter to confirm he planned to leave his entire estate to a trust benefitting a single animal, Pickett confirmed, “My wealth will benefit Tua and only Tua—until her death. After that, it will go to a trust to benefit all tuatara everywhere.” A representative of Pickett Engineering said that Pickett’s private affairs had no bearing on the direction of the company.’ Nothing says fuck you to your kids quite like leaving your fortune to a lizard.”

“Well, as you’ll recall, it isn’t a lizard,” I pointed out.

“Holmesy, someday you’re going to win the Nobel Prize for Being Incredibly Pedantic, and I’m going to be so proud of you.”

“Thanks,” I said. I pulled up outside of Daisy’s apartment complex and parked Harold. “So, if Davis’s dad died, he and his brother get nothing? Don’t you at least have to pay for your kids to go to college or something?”

“Dunno,” she said, “but it makes me think Davis really would turn his dad in if he knew where he was.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Someone has to know. He needed help, right? You can’t just disappear.”

“Right, but there’s so many possible accomplices. Pickett has, like, thousands of employees. And who knows how many people working on that property. I mean, they have a zoologist.”

“It would sort of suck, having all those people around your house all day. Like, people who aren’t in your family just, like, constantly in your space.”

“Indeed, Holmesy, however does one bear the pain of overenthusiastic servants?” I laughed, and Daisy clapped her hands and said, “Okay. My to-do list: Research wills. Get police report. Your to-do list: Fall for Davis, which you’ve already mostly done. Thanks for the ride; time to go pretend I love my sister.” She grabbed her backpack, climbed out of Harold, and slammed his precious, fragile door behind her.

—

When I got home, I watched TV with Mom, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Davis looking down at my finger, holding my hand in his.

I have these thoughts that Dr. Karen Singh calls “intrusives,” but the first time she said it, I heard “invasives,” which I like better, because, like invasive weeds, these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway land, and then they spread out of control.

Supposedly everyone has them—you look out from over a bridge or whatever and it occurs to you out of nowhere that you could just jump. And then if you’re most people, you think, Well, that was a weird thought, and move on with your life. But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all the other thoughts until it’s the only one you’re able to have, the thought you’re perpetually either thinking or distracting yourself from.

You’re watching TV with your mom—this show about time-traveling crime solvers—and you remember a boy holding your hand, looking at your finger, and then a thought occurs to you: You should unwrap that Band-Aid and check to see if there is an infection.

You don’t actually want to do this; it’s just an invasive. Everyone has them. But you can’t shut yours up. Since you’ve had a reasonable amount of cognitive behavioral therapy, you tell yourself, I am not my thoughts, even though deep down you’re not sure what exactly that makes you. Then you tell yourself to click a little x in the top corner of the thought to make it go away. And maybe it does for a moment; you’re back in your house, on the couch, next to your mom, and then your brain says, Well, but wait. What if your finger is infected? Why not just check? The cafeteria wasn’t exactly the most sanitary place to reopen that wound. And then you were in the river.

Now you’re nervous, because you’ve previously attended this exact rodeo on thousands of occasions, and also because you want to choose the thoughts that are called yours. The river was filthy, after all. Had you gotten some river water on your hand? It wouldn’t take much. Time to unwrap the Band-Aid. You tell yourself that you were careful not to touch the water, but your self replies, But what if you touched something that touched the water, and then you tell yourself that this wound is almost certainly not infected, but the distance you’ve created with the almost gets filled by the thought, You need to check for infection; just check it so we can calm down, and then fine, okay, you excuse yourself to the bathroom and slip off the Band-Aid to discover that there isn’t blood, but there might be a bit of moisture on the bandage pad. You hold the Band-Aid up to the yellow light in the bathroom, and yes, that definitely looks like moisture.

Could be sweat, of course, but also might be water from the river, or worse still seropurulent drainage, a sure sign of infection, so you find the hand sanitizer in the medicine cabinet and squeeze some onto your fingertip, which burns like hell, and then you wash your hands thoroughly, singing your ABCs while you do to make sure you’ve scrubbed for the full twenty seconds recommended by the Centers for Disease Control, and then you carefully dry your hands with a towel. And then you dig your thumbnail all the way into the crack in the callus until it starts bleeding, and you squeeze the blood out for as long as it comes, and then you blot the wound dry with a tissue. You take a Band-Aid from inside your jeans pocket, where there is never a shortage of them, and you carefully reapply the bandage. You return to the couch to watch TV, and for a few or many minutes, you feel the shivering jolt of the tension easing, the relief of giving in to the lesser angels of your nature.

And then two or five or six hundred minutes pass before you start to wonder, Wait, did I get all the pus out? Was there pus even or was that only sweat? If it was pus, you might need to drain the wound again.

The spiral tightens, like that, forever.