I expected it to thrash its claws and curl and uncurl its tail. But it didn’t. I felt like I was holding a heavy shell. I pulled it out of the water.
“Thank you,” the lobster said.
“You’re welcome,” I replied. I dropped it on the ground.
Blue Eyes stumbled, but didn’t lose his grip on me. The lobster sat there for a moment, then started crawling along the tile.
I reached in for another. And another. And another. And pretty soon the entire tank of lobsters was crawling across the tile floor of the Meijer supermarket. I didn’t know where they were going, but they seemed to have a pretty good idea. Blue Eyes dropped me with a huff and we both landed in a puddle of cold water. He stared at me, his glasses clinging to the tip of his nose.
“Do you do this all the time?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Just today.”
He smiled.
Then the yelling started. Hands grabbed my arms and jerked me to my feet. My mother was shouting at me, pulling me away from the tank. I looked past her. The lobsters were already gone. Freezing water dripped from my arm.
Blue Eyes still stood in the puddle. He picked up my abandoned Yoo-hoo bottle and waved good-bye. I tried to get my mother to stop, to go back so I could ask him his name.
She just walked faster.
Part One: The Tank
Chapter One
Sometimes I think people take reality for granted.
I mean like how you can tell the difference between a dream and real life. When you’re in the dream you may not know it, but as soon as you wake up, you know that your dream was a dream and whatever happened in it, good or bad, wasn’t real. Unless we’re in the Matrix, this world is real, and what you do in it is real, and that’s pretty much all you ever need to know.
People take that for granted.
For two years after that fateful day in the supermarket, I thought I’d really set the lobsters free. I thought they’d crawled away and found the sea and lived happily ever after. When I turned ten, my mother found out that I thought that I was some kind of lobster savior.
She also found out all lobsters looked bright red to me.
First she told me that I hadn’t set any lobsters free. I’d gotten my arm into the tank before she’d appeared to pull me away, embarrassed. Then she explained that lobsters only turn bright red after they’re boiled. I didn’t believe her, because to me they had never been any other color. She never mentioned Blue Eyes, and I didn’t need to ask. My first-ever friend was a hallucination: a sparkling entry on my new resume as a crazy person.
Then my mother had taken me to see a child therapist, and I’d gotten my first real introduction to the word insane.
Schizophrenia isn’t supposed to manifest until a person’s late teens, at the earliest, but I’d gotten a shot of it at just seven years old. I was diagnosed at thirteen. Paranoid got tacked on about a year later, after I verbally attacked a librarian for trying to hand me propaganda pamphlets for an underground Communist force operating out of the basement of the public library. (She’d always been a very suspect type of librarian—I refuse to believe donning rubber gloves to handle books is a normal and accepted practice, and I don’t care what anyone says.)
My medication helped sometimes. I knew it was working when the world wasn’t as colorful and interesting as it normally was. Like when I could tell the lobsters in the tank were not bright red. Or when I realized that checking my food for tracers was ridiculous (but did it anyway because it calmed the prickle of paranoia on the back of my neck). I also knew it was working when I couldn’t remember things clearly, felt like I hadn’t slept in days, and tried to put my shoes on backward.
Half the time, the doctors weren’t even sure what the medicine would do. “Well, it should lessen the paranoia, delusions, and hallucinations, but we’ll have to wait and see. Oh, and you’ll probably feel tired sometimes. Drink a lot of fluids, too—you can get dehydrated easily. Also, it could cause a lot of fluctuation in your weight. Really, it’s up in the air.”
The doctors were oodles of help, but I developed my own system for figuring out what was real and what wasn’t. I took pictures. Over time, the real remained in the photo while the hallucinations faded away. I discovered what sorts of things my mind liked to make up. Like billboards whose occupants wore gas masks and reminded passersby that poison gas from Hitler’s Nazi Germany was still a very real threat.
I didn’t have the luxury of taking reality for granted. And I wouldn’t say I hated people who did, because that’s just about everyone. I didn’t hate them. They didn’t live in my world.
But that never stopped me from wishing I lived in theirs.
Chapter Two
The night before my first day of senior year at East Shoal High School, I sat behind the counter at Finnegan’s diner, my eyes scanning the dark windows for signs of suspicious movement. Normally the paranoia wasn’t so bad. I blamed it on the first-day thing. Getting chased out of the last school was one thing—starting at a new one was something completely different. I’d spent all summer at Finnegan’s trying not to think about it.
“You know, if Finnegan was here, he’d call you crazy and tell you to get back to work.”
I spun around. Tucker leaned against the door to the kitchen, hands jammed in the pockets of his apron, grinning at me. I would’ve snapped at him if he weren’t my only informant about East Shoal—and my only friend. Gangly, bespectacled, hair black as an oil slick and always perfectly combed forward, Tucker was a busboy, waiter, and cashier here at Finnegan’s, not to mention the smartest person I’d ever met.
He didn’t know about me. So his saying that Finnegan would call me crazy was pure coincidence. Finnegan knew, of course; his sister was my latest therapist, the one who’d gotten me this job. But none of the other employees—like Gus, our mute, chain-smoking cook—had any idea, and I planned on keeping it that way.
“Har har,” I replied, trying to act cool. Beat down the crazy, said the little voice in the back of my head. Don’t let it out, you idiot.
The only reason I’d taken the job here was because I needed to appear normal. And maybe a little bit because my mother forced me to take it.
“Any other questions?” Tucker asked, walking over to lean against the counter next to me. “Or is the crusade over?”
“You mean the inquisition. And yes, it is.” I kept my gaze from wandering back to the windows. “I’ve been in high school for three years already—East Shoal can’t be that much different than Hillpark.”