Dr. Spanger held up a photograph, one Emma must have included in the letters. “Who are these people?”
I leaned forward to look at it. It was a picture of two older ladies in a rocking chair, one cradling the other in her lap like a baby.
“I have no idea,” I said curtly.
“There’s writing on the back,” she said. It says: ‘We’re finding new ways to help those who’ve had parts of their soul removed. Close contact seems to work miracles. After just a few hours, Miss Hornbill was like a new ymbryne.’ ”
Eyem-brine, she pronounced it.
“It’s imm-brinn,” I corrected her, unable to help myself. “The ‘i’ sounds are flat.”
“I see.” Dr. Spanger set the photo down and steepled her fingers beneath her chin. “And what is an … imm-brinn?”
In retrospect maybe it was foolish, but at the time I felt cornered, like I had no choice but to tell the truth. They had letters, they had photos, and all my flimsy stories had blown away in the wind.
“They protect us,” I said.
Dr. Spanger glanced at my parents. “All of us?”
“No. Just peculiar children.”
“Peculiar children,” Dr. Spanger repeated slowly. “And you believe you’re one of them.”
I stuck out my hand. “I’d like to have my letters now.”
“You’ll get them. But first we need to talk, okay?”
I retracted my hand and folded my arms. She was talking to me like I had an IQ of seventy.
“Now, what makes you think you’re peculiar?”
“I can see things other people can’t.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw my parents going increasingly pale. They were not taking this well.
“In the letters you mention something called a … Pan … loopticon? What can you tell me about that?”
“I didn’t write the letters,” I said. “Emma did.”
“Sure. Let’s switch gears, then. Tell me about Emma.”
“Doctor,” my mother interrupted, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to encourage—”
“Please, Mrs. Portman.” Dr. Spanger held up a hand. “Jake, tell me about Emma. Is she your girlfriend?”
I saw my dad’s eyebrows rise. I’d never had a girlfriend before. Never so much as been on a date.
“She was, I guess. But now we’re sort of … taking a break.”
Dr. Spanger wrote something down, then tapped her pen against her chin. “And when you imagine her, what does she look like?”
I shrank back in my chair. “What do you mean, imagine her?”
“Oh.” Dr. Spanger pursed her lips. She knew she’d messed up. “What I mean is …”
“Okay, this has gone on long enough,” my father said. “We know you wrote those letters, Jake.”
I nearly jumped out of the chair. “You think I what? That’s not even my handwriting!”
My dad took a letter out of his pocket—the one Emma had left for him. “You wrote this, didn’t you? It’s the same writing.”
“That was Emma, too! Look, her name’s right there!” I grabbed for the letter. My dad whipped it out of reach.
“Sometimes we want things so badly, we imagine they’re real,” Dr. Spanger said.
“You think I’m crazy!” I shouted.
“We don’t use that word in this office,” Dr. Spanger said. “Please calm down, Jake.”
“What about the postmark on the envelopes?” I said, pointing at the letters on Spanger’s desk. “They came all the way from London!”
My father sighed. “You took Photoshop last semester at school, Jakey. I might be old, but I know how easy that sort of thing is to fake.”
“And the photos? Did I fake those, too?”
“They’re your grandpa’s. I’m sure I’ve seen them before.”
By now my head was spinning. I felt exposed and betrayed and horribly embarrassed. And then I stopped talking, because everything I said seemed only to further convince them I had lost my mind.
I sat fuming while they talked about me like I wasn’t in the room. Dr. Spanger’s new diagnosis was that I’d suffered a “radical break with reality,” and that these “peculiars” were part of an elaborate universe of delusions I’d constructed for myself, complete with fantasy girlfriend. Because I was very intelligent, for weeks I’d managed to fool everyone into thinking I was sane, but the letters proved I was far from cured, and could even be a danger to myself. She recommended I be sent to an “in-patient clinic” for “rehabilitation and monitoring” with all due haste—which I understood to be psychiatrist talk for “looney-bin.”
They’d had it all planned out. “It’ll just be for a week or two,” my father said. “It’s a really nice place, super expensive. Think of it as a little vacation.”
“I want my letters.”
Dr. Spanger tucked them back into her folder. “Sorry, Jake,” she said. “We think it’s best if I hold on to them.”
“You lied to me!” I said. Leaping at her desk, I swiped at them, but Spanger was quick and jumped back with the folder in her hand. My dad shouted and grabbed me, and a second later two of my uncles burst through the door. They’d been waiting in the hall the whole time. Bodyguards, in case I made a break for it.
They escorted me out to the parking lot and into the car. My uncles would be living with us for a few days, my mom explained nervously, until a room opened up for me at the clinic.
They were scared to be alone with me. My own parents. Then they’d send me off to a place where I’d be someone else’s problem. The clinic. Like I was going in to have a hurt elbow bandaged. Call a spade a spade: it was an asylum, expensive though it may be. Not a place I could fake swallowing my meds and spit them out later. Not somewhere I could dupe doctors into believing my stories about fugue states and memory loss. They would dope me with antipsychotics and truth serums until I told them every last thing about peculiardom, and with that as proof that I was irredeemably insane, they’d have no choice but to lock me in a padded cell and flush the key down a toilet.
I was well and truly screwed.
*
For the next several days I was watched like a criminal, a parent or uncle never more than a room-length away. Everyone was waiting for a call from the clinic. It was a popular place, I guess, but the minute there was an open room—any day now—I would be bundled off.
“We’ll visit every day,” my mom assured me. “It’s just for a few weeks, Jakey, promise.”
Just a few weeks. Yeah, right.
I tried reasoning with them. Begging. I implored them to hire a handwriting expert, so I could prove the letters weren’t mine. When that failed, I reversed myself completely. I admitted to writing the letters (when of course I hadn’t), saying I realized now that I’d invented it all—there were no peculiar children, no ymbrynes, no Emma. This pleased them, but it didn’t change their minds. Later I overheard them whispering to each other and learned that in order to secure me a spot on the waiting list, they’d had to pay for the first week of the clinic—the very expensive clinic—in advance. So there was no backing out.
I considered running away. Snatching the car keys and making a break for it. But inevitably I’d be caught, and then things would be even worse for me.
I fantasized about Emma coming to my rescue. I even wrote a letter telling her what had happened, but I had no way to send it. Even if I could’ve snuck out to the mailbox without being seen, the mailman didn’t come to our house anymore. And if I’d reached her, what would it have mattered? I was stuck in the present, far from a loop. She couldn’t have come anyway.
On the third night, in desperation, I swiped my dad’s phone (I wasn’t allowed one anymore) and used it to send Emma an email. Before I’d realized how hopeless she was with computers, I’d set up an address for her—[email protected]—but she was so firmly disinterested that I’d never written her there, nor even, I realized, bothered to tell her the password. A message in a bottle thrown into the sea would’ve had a better chance of reaching her, but it was the only chance I had.