My Boy's Wicked Smart

 The request form had been in the doctor’s pile for a few months when he finally picked it up. Or so he assumed. Many of them stayed there for quite a while. He should be better about it, he mused, but since most of them were the raving words from the jaws of madmen, he didn’t find it great literature.

 But, he reminded himself, ''these forms are all they have to look forward to. Once every year they get to fill one out. Once a year.''

 A different voice combated that one, but he forced himself to pick up one. Just one for tonight.







 I am the strangest child you ever knew.

 My favorite music was oldies. My favorite genre was horror. My best friend is Ben Affleck. I was honors student, straight As, who wanted to go to a community college. I was not scared, but I did not sleep at night.

 I don’t actually see daylight anymore, so I can’t say if I do, but the last time I remember sleeping at night was when I was fourteen. After that, zap. Most of my sleeping was done after school or in the wee hours of the morning. And why? I could never quite figure out for myself why. Maybe it was because I wasn’t trying hard enough.

 I normally stayed up till five in the morning or so, depending on the season, and then slept until my parents woke me at six. A good amount of it was devoted to blogging - Tumblr, to be precise - but not all. I’d re watch my old favorite movies, two or three a night.

 So on that particular night, it was Good Will Hunting.

 It had been forever. I felt somewhat guilty, as if I had not returned to speak to a dear friend. Such feelings were odd for a girl my age, sixteen, at the time, who should have felt no commitment to anyone but her closest friends, and especially not film characters. But, at least in my mind, they were my friends.

 And the reason they were was, because, in the words of Gerald Lambeau, they’d take a baseball bat to your head if I asked them to. But again, that’s how it felt.

 Because, at night, my nerves grate in the worst way and I can not sleep. I can only concentrate on the creaking noises and the footsteps in the attic.

 It was especially bad that night. I kept the lights on, that night. I had only been so scared once or twice before, in which instances I snuck out and slept over at one of my ‘friend’s’ houses. I completely used them. They were protection, one body between me and whatever went pop in the night.

 It seems so silly, now…

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> It was thundering out, and I was curled up on my bed, watching my movie. My brother was still awake, I could tell that from the Spongebob blaring on the television downstairs; but my parents were asleep, which meant that Will Hunting was a go. They had this thing against R rated movies, which I guess I understand better now.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> I am not very skilled with words, so I cannot begin to describe that night was like…

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> There wasn’t even noises, just the sound of the rain, which normally soothed me. Rain is a beautiful thing, if you ask me. God’s very own gift.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> There was this pit, growing at the very deepest bit of my stomach, that I could not ignore. I didn’t laugh at the same gags or smile when the same things happened, took their own familiar route. I didn’t even cry in the breakup scene, which was something I was infamous for.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> My nurse explains to me that what happened next was the unfortunate combination of a power outage and years of a lack of good sleep kicking in. I believe her. But she should have been there, then.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> The thunderstorm got worse, so bad that I had to unplug the earbuds and blast the movie out of a speaker to hear it. Then everything went out.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> I remember that my limbs,  just a moment before fluid, froze as if the temperature had suddenly dropped a hundred degrees. There was blackness, blackness my eyes couldn’t adjust to. The speaker stopped speaking.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> There was a sudden quiet, as if the eye of the storm. Then Morgan said, “My boy’s wicked smart,” and the screen blacked out as well.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> Then something cracked inside of me, and now I’m here.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> All I want now is to be able to watch my films again. They’re  my friends. I’d rather them than my family. Than people. Please.

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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> The doctor smiled a little out of sympathy. The old horror story tactic. It never worked. The story itself had been poorly written, not scary or suspenseful at all, and always guaranteed that the form, no matter how much he had tried to like it, got dropped in the decline bin.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> Twenty six years at an asylum can make you a hard man.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> The next day, he went to work like normal. But something wasn’t.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> There had been a suicide the night before. The subject had bitten through her tongue and bled out. Almost all of her blood had been spilled onto the white floors and walls that made up her cell.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> She was irreversibly dead.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> Not caring much about the particular girl anyways, the doctor dismissed it as a misfortune. It would only be a tragedy if the girl had actually had a family who cared or contributed to society, both of which were things she lacked.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> Or, the doctor thought with a sick brand of amusement, his mind flashing back to the form from the night before, good writing skills.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> The girl had been one of those writing kids, one of the ones who got to write twice a day for an hour. The writings were rarely checked, but now that she was dead, it was decided upon to check them.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> In a style horribly reminiscent of Jack from the Shining, she had written the same phrase over and over in her three year stay: My boy’s wicked smart.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> Only when he heard this news did the doctor begin to be even slightly paranoid.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> He went home, to a dark, lonely house and to an unmade bed, and attempted to sleep.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> But the phrase gnawed at his nerves, fraying them like some sort of rat hellbent on the destruction of the sanity he came to treasure over the years. Now the very same pit collected at the bottom of his stomach, making it feel like a black hole nestled in his body. He was not afraid of the darkness; there was nothing to be afraid of, that was ridiculous. At the same time, there was plenty to be afraid of; it wasn’t something he saw himself loosing sleep over, but as the hours slipped by he realized that, whatever he was afraid of, it was plenty.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> It was, he concluded, a childish fear of a boogeyman, or the night.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> His eyes fluttered shut, and stayed that way for but a few moments.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> He stood up and picked up a book.

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;font-size:11px;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica;"> He could stay up all this night. Just once couldn’t hurt.