A World Without You

by Beth Revis

  “Why?” I demand.

  “What?” Ryan asks, not turning from the filing cabinet.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  Carlos Estrada removes his hand, leaving behind a big wet stain soaking into the red file folder. He is still shaking his head no as I shift Sofía’s folder to the side. I blindly pick another one from the desk.

  Gwendoline Benson.

  I flip the folder open. Glued to the right side is a sheet of information about Gwen—a small picture of her, generic and square, her parents’ names, her address, her dad’s address, a list of pills. I had no idea that Gwen was on so much medication. I read the names of the drugs silently in my head, stumbling over the long, unpronounceable words.

  On the left-hand side of the folder is a list of notes in the Doctor’s scratchy handwriting. Across the top, typed in bold letters, is one word:

  Diagnosis.

  My brows furrow as I read the words the Doctor has scribbled underneath. Impulse control disorder (pyromania). Trust and abandonment issues.

  I slide Gwen’s folder away and open the next one. Harold’s. It’s structured just the same, with information on one side, including a list of medications and a series of diagnoses that don’t make sense. Ryan’s folder is similar, although I can recognize most of the notes on him: extreme narcissism, power complex, calculated manipulation, need to be in control, anger issues. Sociopathic tendencies. He likes to play with emotions, the Doctor notes, for fun, but when there’s something he wants, he’ll use any means to get it. His narcissism makes him believe that normal courses of events are directed at him; if there are no apples at breakfast, it’s because the staff hates him for being so clever, and he plots a revenge against them, either psychological or physical. The closer he is to a person, the more this tendency escalates.

  When the officials came, he thought they were out to get him. He always presumed that their arrival would doom him to military school. That he was the only one who had anything to lose.

  I look up, expecting Ryan to turn around and catch me in the act of reading about him, but he doesn’t. Carlos Estrada is gone.

  I open my own folder.

  There’s my name. My parents’ names. Phoebe. My address. A note that I had an “episode” while at school, another one during spring break at home.

  A list of medications.

  But . . . that’s not right. I’m not on any medications. I don’t take pills or shots.

  The Doctor said he was going to put me on meds, but aside from those pills that made me sleepy when I first got back to Berkshire, I haven’t taken any.

  Have I?

  My eyes skim over to the right-hand side of the folder to my diagnosis. DSM-5 is written near the top and circled several times.

  Bo’s case is far more complex than I previously suspected. Bo has exhibited signs of having a break with reality following Sofía Muniz’s death. His symptoms include prolonged delusions and, more recently, paranoia, both of which are exacerbated by insomnia. The lack of REM sleep likely feeds the symptoms, though Bo is unaware of the problem, often entering into a delusional state instead.

  Blood work indicated that no additional or recreational hallucinogenic drugs have been ingested, and Bo’s insulin levels are well above diabetic range. Scheduled brain scan and additional blood work within two weeks, at off-site facility in Boston, to examine the possibility of brain lesions. No neurodegenerative diseases in his immediate family history, but the prolonged delusions may indicate peduncular hallucinosis.

  FURTHER NOTES: Private sessions and group therapy show that Bo is experiencing a dissociative fugue with select amnesia indicative of something far more serious than his previous diagnosis. This is supported by the mental break he had while visiting his parents April 13–20. Although Bo’s paranoia has risen and he therefore is more reluctant to talk during therapy, he has alluded to hallucinations that seem to tie back to Sofía’s death.

  At parent conference prior to spring break, I discussed possibilities of a prolonged complex visual hallucination and grandiose delusion diagnosis and what that might mean for his parents. Sister indicated that some proclivity for violence existed prior to diagnosis and treatment. The tendency for violence has diminished with medication and therapy, replaced by more personal delusions that lead to withdrawal rather than demonstrative frustration.

  The last sentence is written with a heavy hand, making it stand out on the page.

  Regardless of the fate of the school, it is recommended that Bo be relocated to a more secure facility that can more closely monitor his health.

  I let the folder drop, and the sound makes Ryan turn.

  “Find anything?” he asks.

  Ripples radiate around him. The filing cabinet melts like candle wax, then I blink and it’s just the same as it was before.

  “Here, look at this,” Ryan says. He uses his telepathy to float a folder from the filing cabinet to me, but I don’t open it.

  “These papers make us sound crazy,” I say finally, staring at the closed folder.

  Ryan snorts. “Well, obviously.”

  “No, but look.” I hold up the folder detailing Ryan’s medical history, expecting Ryan to use his telepathy to bring it closer to him, but he just slams shut the cabinet drawer and walks across the office toward me.

  Ryan scans the contents of the folder. “Yeah, so?”

  “It says you’re a narcissist and have anger issues.”

  “Yeah?” Ryan shrugs and drops the folder on the desk.

  “It says I’m paranoid and have delusions.”

  Ryan doesn’t hide his sardonic laugh. “I figured you for a schizo.”

  I swallow down the bile rising in my throat. “We . . . we’re not crazy. We’re special.”

  “Yeah, ‘special,’” Ryan repeats, mocking me. “Like on the ‘special’ bus.”

  “No, I mean . . . our powers?”

  Ryan rolls his eyes. “This? Still?”

  “You floated that folder over to me using your telepathy!”

  Ryan picks up the folder and drops it back on the desk. “I tossed it to you using my hands,” he says. “Man, you are crazy. Like, really crazy. Damn.”

  The walls in the Doctor’s office ripple and twirl like oil mixing with vinegar.

  I glance down at the information in my folder. All the Doctor’s notes are about me after Sofía went missing. When Ryan’s powers were growing stronger. When he started the illusion.

  Ryan flips through his file, letting his eyes drift over the diagnosis the Doctor gave him. He casually gathers the forms and crams them into Dr. Franklin’s paper shredder. He watches with a smile on his face as the Doctor’s notes turn into nothing but long, thin strips.

  “Let’s go,” Ryan says, heading to the door.

  “It really is you, isn’t it?” I stand up slowly, pushing back the chair and moving against the wall, positioning the desk between Ryan and myself. I hadn’t wanted to believe it, even when all the evidence pointed to him.

  “The hell is wrong with you?” Ryan says, turning back toward me.

  “It’s you.”

  “What are you on about?”

  “It’s been you the whole time. It’s not the Doctor or the officials. It’s you.”

  “What the fu—?”

  I snatch my own folder. “You guessed I’d figure it out. ‘It is recommended that Bo be relocated.’ You’re trying to get rid of me. You’re doing all of this.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Ryan says, his voice dangerously close to shouting.

  “You. You. You can control minds. You’re controlling all of us. You’ve made it look like we’re all crazy, that the Berk isn’t for people with powers. You even have the Doctor scammed . . .”

  “You are nuts,” Ryan says, turning back to the door. “I mean, there’s crazy
, and there’s you. This is insane. Look around you. Where do you think you are?”

  I do look around. I see the Doctor’s license in psychiatry, and then I blink and see his doctorate in history. I see the diagnosis folders. And then they melt into dossiers detailing our individual powers.

  It’s all fake.

  It’s all an illusion. A brilliant, terrifying illusion.

  “Look, dude, face facts,” Ryan snarls. “Your little girlfriend died. Dead. Totally dead. If you would rather go to la-la land than admit that, fine. But me? I’m looking out for number one.” I stare hard as Ryan heads for the door. He turns to face me, but whatever he was going to say evaporates on his lips.

  He looks terrified. Of me. And the truth I now know.

  CHAPTER 55

  His fear makes my blood surge with power. Now that I see him for what he is, he can’t control me. I sweep the remaining folders back into Dr. Franklin’s desk drawer and get up, chasing Ryan into the hallway. All around me, the walls ripple as Ryan struggles to hold on to the world he has created. I see flashes of other people, other times—breaks in the timestream. An old man with fluffy white hair—Berkshire Academy’s first director, I recognize him from the portrait downstairs—walks by us, muttering to himself before disappearing.

  Small children wearing bright yellow camp T-shirts run by. The very last kid looks back at me and waves, and I recognize Carlos Estrada, his T-shirt darkening with water.

  Ryan sneers at me. “What are you looking at?”

  The other kids disappear. It’s just Ryan and me in the hall.

  I know what this all is now. My powers have been suppressed by Ryan, dampened by his mind control. But like a balloon that pops when it’s full of air, my powers have been bursting out around me. It wasn’t the timestream that was breaking; it was me.

  “Stop!” I shout as Ryan opens his door.

  The world blinks from reality to reality so fast that my head spins. Light streams out of Ryan’s window as if it’s still daytime, then turns into darkest night with the speed of a strobe.

  I grab Ryan’s wrist, holding on even as he tries to shake me off.

  “Let go, freak,” Ryan growls.

  “I know what you’re doing,” I say in a low voice.

  The world stills. The sun outside doesn’t move. The walls are steady. The ghosts of the past are gone. I am in control.

  “You can only shift what’s real,” I say. “You can’t create a whole new world, but you can shift it a little. So what does that say about you?”

  “What do you mean?” He tries to wrench himself free again, but I tighten my grip.

  “Your ‘diagnosis.’ You really are a narcissist, aren’t you? Can’t hide that fact, even in a world you made yourself.”

  Ryan shoves my chest with his free hand, and I have to let go. He backs into his room and slams the door.

  And with that sound, his false world shatters back into place. There’s a keypad by his door, bars on his window.

  I take a deep, shuddering breath. “I am in control,” I tell Ryan’s closed door. As the air escapes my lips, the illusion melts away again.

  I am in control.

  “You are,” says a soft voice to my left, the last word lilting up as if the speaker was asking a question.

  My heart thuds, hard, once, a pounding so violent that I actually clutch my chest. I whirl around on my heel.

  Sofía stands in front of her bedroom door.

  A grin cracks across my face like lightning. “I’m winning,” I tell her, rushing forward. “I can see through Ryan’s illusions, I know what he’s doing.”

  “You can see through the illusions.” There it is again, that slightly higher note on the last word.

  I reach for Sofía, but she steps back, holding her hands behind her back. Outside my reach.

  She shakes her head and backs further into her bedroom. I catch just a glimpse of her pale pink rug, her neon pink comforter on her bed, the fuzzy lamp on her nightstand—and then she closes the door in my face.

  “Sofía, wait—” I start, lunging for the door and throwing it open.

  The room is empty. The mattress is bare; the walls and floor unadorned. I stumble, bile rising up in my throat. No. No, I had control. I was back in power. I stagger away from her room and into the hallway.

  Ryan’s door is open again. He watches me with a smile as I scurry back to my room.

  CHAPTER 56

  Phoebe

  It’s Thursday. Almost time for Bo to come home for the weekend.

  But it’s like he never left. The house is quiet. Everyone walks around on eggshells.

  Actually, we all walk around as if we were eggshells. We’re all afraid of breaking here.

  Mom cleans more and more the closer we get to the weekend. The wood floors are like mirrors, the windows are washed, and there’s not a speck of dust to be found anywhere. That is, except for Bo’s room. Mom walks past his bedsheet-covered doorframe as if it weren’t there. And the gouge in the floor from Dad’s drill—she still hasn’t fixed that. It stands out even more now, a blemish against the rest of the perfect house, but it’s as if her eyes dance right over it.

  Dad practically lives in his office. I think he might be sleeping there, even though it’s only four doors down from his and Mom’s bedroom.

  Everyone is tense because this is Bo’s first weekend back since “the episode.”

  I hate that. I hate labeling what happened. When Bo flipped out at school, my parents called it “the incident.” And now we have “the episode.”

  It was a seizure of some kind. Call it what it is. It was a seizure that preceded delusions. I don’t know much else about it because no one will tell me. When Dad drove Bo to a clinic in the middle of the night, the doctors didn’t want to diagnose him without consulting Dr. Franklin first. And other than saying Bo needed to return to Berkshire Academy, Dr. Franklin hasn’t said much. At least not to me.

  There are pieces of Bo in every diagnosis I read about online: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression. The more research I do, the stranger the diseases I find: brain lesions and mind-controlling viruses, flesh-eating amoebas and bacteria and fungi. There are no cures, only temporary treatment options. Sometimes minds are just plain broken—they see the world in a fractured way. Does it really matter what we call the problem with Bo’s brain if there’s no way to fix it?

  It’s not like there is a name for the look in his eyes when he clutched at me, begging me to see the truth of a world that doesn’t exist.

  I have gone over that night a thousand times. In the quiet of every night since, when my mother shuts the door to her bedroom and my father shuts the door to his office and I shut the door to my room, in those long empty spaces where no one moves but everyone’s awake, I have relived that last night with Bo over and over and over again. The crazed way he insisted that his girlfriend wasn’t dead, that I knew more than I was letting on, that he had some sort of power over all this. I can still feel the way his fingers dug into my shoulders when he clutched me, trying to shake his reality into my brain.

  And I will never forget the way his eyes lost focus, the way his muscles seized. When you see seizures on television, they’re full of violent shaking, with people falling down and their bodies flopping around like a fish out of water, but that’s not what happened with Bo. Instead, he just went stiff as a board. His eyes closed, but I could see through his eyelids that they were still moving, violently shifting back and forth. His jaw went super tight, and his fingers became frozen claws. When Dad came outside, he couldn’t get Bo to walk; he had to pick him up by the shoulders and awkwardly shuffle him back inside while Mom called 911.

  I kept backing away until I hit the dining room wall, and I stayed there, my back pressed against the beadboard the whole time. I watched as the EMTs arrived, as Bo came out of the seizure only to pa
ss out. I stood there as Mom and Dad got into the car—Mom still in her pajamas and wearing a big overcoat—and followed the ambulance. I sank to the floor, my eyes still on the spot where Bo had been, and I fell asleep there, curled beside Mom’s china cabinet. When my parents came home the next morning, after checking Bo into St. Lucy’s, they didn’t even notice me. They walked right past the dining room, headed to their bed, exhausted from the night. Once I heard Mom snoring, I got up, walked up the stairs, and went to my room.

  Bo was at St. Lucy’s for almost a week so that they could keep an eye on him and do an MRI and some other scans. Mom was there every day, but Dad stayed in his office, working. When the hospital was ready to release Bo, they sent him straight back to Berkshire Academy. Dad didn’t even have to drive up; the hospital sent Bo in an ambulance.

  It’s been two weeks now, and he’ll be home in two days, and I don’t know how all of this is going to play out.

  Mom cleans. Dad works. And I . . .

  I just sit here.

  • • •

  At seven, there’s a knock on my door.

  “Yeah?” I call.

  The door budges a crack, then Mom pushes it open. She’s meek about it. “Dinner’s almost ready,” she says. She could have yelled for me from the base of the stairs like a normal mother, but she didn’t.

  In the distance, a faint beeping rises up from the kitchen. “Oh!” Mom says. “The tenderloin! Go get your father and come on down, okay?” She dashes down the hall—passing the office where Dad is—and runs down the stairs toward the kitchen.

  I push up from my bed, tossing aside the book I’d been reading.

  The floorboards creak under my feet, and when I reach Dad’s office, I knock on the wooden door three times with the back of my knuckles. “Dad,” I say loudly from the hall. “Dinner.”

  He grunts in response.

  I start down the stairs, but something holds me back. I turn around and head back to Dad’s office, the door cracked open from when I knocked.

  He’s standing by the window, but the curtains are closed. In his hands is a child-sized football, the kind Bo used to play with when he was in elementary school. Bo wanted to quit football in middle school, but Dad kept him in. But when Bo made the team at James Jefferson as a freshman reserve, he dropped out during the summer practice before school had even started. He made sure that Dad couldn’t reenroll him either, by flipping out on the coach and nearly getting himself suspended. I guess he actually got kicked off the team. But he did it on purpose.