Matt pokes his head out of his room at the sound of breaking glass and me swearing.

“Tabarnak. Ben, voyons, là!” I shout, staring down at the mess by my feet.

“That didn’t sound good,” Matt observes.

I gesture at the floor. “I broke the fucking dragon bong, man!”

He comes to inspect the damage. “So you did. The mighty beast has fallen.”

He’s trying to look serious, but I see him biting his lip to hold back the smile that wants to explode across his face.

“It’s not funny!” I insist. “This fucking sucks, man.”

He pokes a shard of dragon tail with his foot. “I mean, you’ve gotta admit, it’s a little funny...”

I watch him bend over for a second to pick up the piece with the dragon’s head on it. He waves it in the air like it’s a puppet and speaks in a squeaky voice.

“I’m so stoned it feels like my head just fell off. Oh wait, it did!”

I roll my eyes, but now I’m fighting to hold my own smile back.

“Come on, let’s clean this up before someone impales themselves,” Matt urges.

I sweep and he vacuums. We leave the dragon’s head on the windowsill where the bong used to sit. I flop down on the couch and expect Matt to go back to his room, but he joins me.

“Should I be concerned that you were looking to fire up a bong at ten in the morning?”

I shake my head as I pull mon truc out of my pocket and start tossing it up and down. “I wasn’t going to use it. I was just...How do you say remuer? You know when you—” I make a few jittery motions with my arms.

“Fidgeting,” Matt supplies. “You were fidgeting.”

I nod. It’s been two days since the hotel room. I left Trois-Rivières not long after Molly did. I don’t know where I found the balls to bail on the gala, but somehow I managed to ignore the threat of my dad’s disappointment long enough to get on a bus.

I haven’t been able to focus on anything since. I pick things up just to put them back down. I start to make a sandwich and I give up halfway through. I can’t even finish a whole song on the piano before I switch to a new one. It’s almost as bad as when I was a kid: the little spaz at the back of the classroom who was always getting put in time out for jumping around.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Matt tells me. “You’ve been fidgeting a lot since you got back from Trois-Rivières. Is everything okay?”

I shrug, eyes on mon truc in my palm.

“How did it go with Molly meeting your family?” he prompts.

This time I just snort in answer.

“That bad, huh?”

“Worse,” I admit.

“That sucks,” Matt sympathizes, “but I suppose families often do.”

I give him a look. “Ben là, you have a perfect family. Every photo of you and your brother looks like the ones that come inside picture frames when you buy them. When is that little fucker coming back to Montreal, anyway? I like him.”

“When he is of legal drinking age,” Matt says firmly, “and for the record, no family is perfect. We’re not talking about my family, though. We’re talking about what’s going on with you.”

This is what Matt does. He sits you down, maybe offers you a beer, pretends like you’re just having a casual conversation, and bam! Suddenly he’s pulling some psychoanalysis shit on you before you even realize it.

“Nothing is going on with me, man.”

“Okay, then. What’s up with you and Molly?”

“Nothing is up with me and Molly.” I squeeze mon truc as hard as I can. “Nothing is up because we’re, uh, done.”

“Done?”

“Yeah. It got complicated, so we’re not, um, doing whatever we were doing before...anymore. We’re done.” I shrug again.

Matt doesn’t buy it.

“You can’t bullshit me. I saw what you were like with her, and I’ve never seen you like that before. That’s not something you walk away from just because it ‘gets complicated.’ What really happened?”

“That is what happened!” I argue. “You’ve all said it: I don’t date. I don’t have the attention span for it. That’s not...how I roll, man! I don’t take shit seriously, and that includes girls. Even girls like Molly.”

“So you admit she was special?”

“Of course she was fucking special!” I can’t help shouting. “I mean, have you seen her? That girl can do anything she wants. Nothing stops her. Nothing. Even when she gets in her own way, she doesn’t give up. She’s...she’s so like, high above me, you know?”

Matt covers his hand with his mouth and looks away. I hear him let out a snort.

“Quoi?” I demand. “What? What’s so funny?”

“Oh, come on.” He’s full on laughing now. “Don’t make me sing it.”

At that, I realize what I’ve just said, and so of course we have to take a minute to sing the chorus of ‘She’s So High’ in ear-splitting falsettos. Well, Matt’s is ear-splitting. His singing is infamous, whereas I do backing vocals for the band.

“But seriously,” Matt insists, once we’ve got ourselves under control, “why end things because you don’t think you deserve her? Why not work to deserve her? You seemed pretty fucking good for each other, if you ask me. So what if you don’t do serious? Nothing’s stopping you from changing that.”

Something is, though. Something has been stopping me my whole life.

I shake my head. “It’s not easy like that, Matt. It’s not something I can just decide. It’s...I...”

I clench and unclench my hands, grinding my jaw as I stare down at our stained rug. Matt just sits there, like he knows I need silence right now. I’m so close to admitting it, to finally saying the fucking words out loud, but they feel lodged inside me.

I suddenly hear Molly’s voice in my head.

You think I don’t know what it’s like to feel trapped, to feel like everything you need to say is stuck in your throat? I’ve spent most of my life feeling that way. Just trust me.

I didn’t trust her, though, and look where it got me.

“I have ADHD,” I blurt.

There’s a moment of silence before Matt nods.

“I know.”

“It isn’t something I— Wait.” I cut myself off when I process what he’s just said. “You know?”

“Uh huh. I, um, found those pills in the bathroom about two years ago.” He glances away and then back at me. “It all just sort of made sense, you know, with your truc and everything. I figured you had a handle on it, that if it ever became an issue for you, you’d bring it up, and, well”—he gestures between us—“looks like that’s where we are now.”

I’m too stunned to speak.

“You...you knew? For two years?” I eventually manage to ask him. “No one knows. Not even my siblings. Just my parents, some doctors. It...it...it’s not something you talk about, you know?”

He raises his eyebrows. “It’s not? Why?”

“You just...”

I trail off when I realize I don’t have an answer to that. I’ve always accepted it as part of the way things are: the sun rises, the world turns, and I don’t tell people I have ADHD.

“Remember what we told Ace when he started seeing a counsellor for all his drinking and shit?” Matt asks. I don’t answer out loud, but I remember the words before Matt speaks them for me. “No shame. I’m not saying you have to share it with everyone, but if you feel like it’s hurting your relationships to not tell people, maybe it’s worth breaking the silence. No one who cares about you is going to judge you, man. We didn’t judge Ace, and we won’t judge you.”

“It’s different,” I protest. “Ace was fucked up because of his past. He was fucked up because of what people did to him. He had a chance to fix himself. I just...never worked right from the start. I’m défectueux. No sense in making a big deal out of it. You have to live with what you’ve got. I should have remembered that before I got involved with Molly.”

“So you walked out on her,” Matt summarizes.

“I mean, technically she’s the one who left the room...” I notice him glaring at me. “Okay, yeah. I walked out on her. I backed down. It was for her own good, though.”

“You’re really gonna play the martyr?” Matt groans. “She was crazy about you, JP. Everyone saw it. If you were scared she’d leave you once she found out, you—”

“It wasn’t that,” I interrupt. “I mean, yes, it was that, but it was also...Like, I just kept thinking, what if one day I wake up and I can’t focus on her anymore? What if I go all poisson rouge and start looking for the next new thing to keep me busy? What if I hurt her because my stupid brain decides it needs a distraction from the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my whole fucking life?”

I don’t realize how worked up I am until I’m slamming my fist down on the couch cushion. My breath comes out in heavy bursts. Matt sits there, tapping his foot against the floor to fill the silence.

“The best thing that’s ever happened to you,” he eventually repeats. “You really think you would have just woken up and forgotten all about that one day?”

“No,” I huff, deciding to be honest. “I don’t actually think I would have done that, but I could have, and...and it’s just better this way, okay?”

He holds up his hands in surrender. “If you say so. At the end of the day, it’s your life, man. You do what you’ve gotta do.”

He gets up and moves into the kitchen, where I hear him digging around in the fridge. I stay on the couch, rolling mon truc against my leg. My skin feels like an itchy sweater that’s three sizes too small. I’m so agitated I want to crawl outside my own body.

Matt starts humming to himself. I jump up and point a finger at him.

“I know what you’re doing!” I accuse. “You’re pulling some reverse psychology bullshit or something, telling me I can do what I want, when really you’re just hoping I change my mind.”

He pauses with a loaf of bread in his hand. “Is that so?”

“Ouais, it is so,” I fume, “and it isn’t going to work. I did the right thing, even if it feels shitty. I did what I had to do.”

He slaps two slices of bread down on the counter and starts spreading them with peanut butter. “Okay.”

“Mon dieu. You’re still fucking doing it.”

“I’m not doing anything, but the fact that you’re reading into the conversation like this is probably a sign that—”

I let out a growl that leaves him laughing.

“Jesus, okay. I’ll let it go before you smash anything else in this apartment.”

I sit back down on the couch and drop my head into my hands. “I need to forget about her, Matt. She’s all I can think of. I already bought her fucking Christmas present and everything. I haven’t even known her that long, and she’s...everywhere in my life.”

He leans against the counter and starts stuffing his face with his sandwich. It’s sacrilege to waste bread with peanut butter when there’s perfectly good ham in the house, but I decide to let it slide. More for me.

“What did you get her?” he asks around a mouthful.

“Spray paint.”

He gives me a look.

“She likes street art,” I explain. “She knows stuff about every fucking mural in the city. It’s amazing. She does graffiti style stuff on the computer, but she’s never actually tried it on a wall before. I had this underpass picked out. I was going to take her there, surprise her with the spray paint...”

Matt’s staring at me like I’m the dumbest motherfucker he’s ever met.

“Remind me again why leaving her was the right decision?”

“You said you’d let it go,” I warn.

“Okay, okay.” He takes another bite of his sandwich. “So what’s the plan now?”

“The plan?”

“For your life, sans Molly.”

“I need a plan for that?”

He gestures up and down the length of me. “The situation just doesn’t seem to be particularly...solid right now.”

I slide mon truc back into my pocket and try to sit still. It’s impossible.

“Same old, same old,” I tell Matt. “I’ll go back to what I’m good at. I’ll go back to what I know. No more of this digging down deep shit.”

“Well that sounds healthy and sustainable,” he quips.

I growl again.

“What about your solo project? You still working on that?”

How the fuck does he know about that?

“My...my what?” I splutter.

“Those songs you’re working on,” Matt answers matter-of-factly.

“I’m not working on any songs.” The lie is the opposite of convincing.

“Oh.” He licks a glob of peanut butter off his thumb. “Was that supposed to be a secret too?”

I give up on faking ignorance and throw my hands up in the air. “How did you know?”

“Found some sheet music in the rehearsal room,” he answers. “Also, sometimes I think you forget that we share a bedroom wall. I’ve heard you fucking around with some new pieces. I’ve been waiting for you to share them with the band.”

“They’re not for sharing,” I say sharply, “and I’m not working on them anymore. It was all bullshit, just something to do.”

“Seems like you were putting a lot of work into it.”

“Well I wasn’t.”

I get up and head towards my room. Matt’s eyes follow me as I go.

“JP,” he calls, just before I shut my door.

“Yeah?” I reply, glancing at him over my shoulder. He’s straightened up, and he’s watching me with something that looks like regret, maybe even pain.

“You’re not defective, okay? You’re not. I don’t know what it’s going to take to convince you of that, but...you’re my friend, and I hate hearing you say that. It’s not true.”

I nod, but I know he’s wrong. I’m not going to let myself forget it.