Page 41 of First Verse

I shake my head.

He nods decisively. “Kick her to the curb tonight, then crash at your parents’ for a few days. Eddie and I will move her shit out and get the locks changed. Okay?”

A frenetic energy sizzles through me. Not fear or panic. Something far more dangerous.

Hope.

I nod. “Okay.”

* * *

As desperate asI am to see Evangeline, I know she isn’t the answer to my problems. She can’t change the way my brain works, can’t protect me from the feeling I’ve had since I was a kid that I was different from my peers.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought of it as the Shadow.

There are three manifestations. Sometimes it’s subdued or muted, usually when I’m hyper-focused on music. For minutes or hours, I’m able to forget about it.

Other times, the Shadow overtakes me like a fog, becoming a veil between me and the world. It’s a haze that numbs me. Separates me. Those are the times I withdraw because I’m afraid that when people look at me, they’ll see it. Mywrongness.They’ll recognize I’m not like them and everything I’ve worked for will vanish.

The third manifestation is the worst. When the Shadow isn’t distracted or numbing me, it hovers around me as a constant threat. When triggered, it snaps closed like a medieval Iron Maiden, piercing me with dozens of sharp spikes. I’m hypersensitive. Raw, exposed nerves and emotions. The world and all its madness and loudness invade me, overwhelm me. I lose perception of time. Lose control of my breath and senses.

I panic.

When I was six, I drew a picture of the Shadow. A crayon kid surrounded by a cloud of swirling black and purple with needles sinking into the small body and making it bleed. My mom found the drawing and showed my dad. They put me in therapy. I don’t remember the therapist’s name, but her voice was soft and I liked her smile. We played with sand trays and drew pictures more than we talked.

I stopped going after a year. My parents and the therapist seemed excited about me not coming back. It was a celebration to them, but I was sad. I’d liked the one hour a week I spent in her office full of toys and no expectations.

More than that, though, I liked that my parents were happy. So when the Shadow next appeared, I didn’t say anything. Didn’t draw any pictures. I kept my weird thoughts to myself and started watching how other kids acted. Classmates at school, Rye and Evangeline on the weekends. I learned to mimic them, how they interacted with each other and adults. I was still a quiet kid, but I learned to smile more. Say the right things.

Pretend there was no Shadow.

When the topic came up again, I was eleven. My parents were worried because one of my teachers expressed concern that I didn’t have friends at school. But by then I’d become adept at faking normalcy. I convinced them I was fine by making friends I didn’t really want. A lot of friends. I joined after-school activities: drama, musical theater, and even soccer for a couple of years. I went to birthday parties and hangouts. Spent my free time at home entertaining my younger siblings, playing guitar with my dad, and learning piano from my mom.

I distracted myself, which distracted the Shadow. During the day, at least. Almost every night, I’d wake up gasping and shaking beneath an enormous pressure on my chest. When the numbness invariably came, it was a relief because for however long it lasted, I could sleep.

Then Evangeline and I wrote a song.

It was the first time in my life the Shadow actually disappeared. Almost like it had been waiting for that moment. Waiting for her and our music.

For years afterward, I went through each week knowing that relief was coming in the form of Evangeline every weekend. Being around her, making music with her… she made me feel both normal and extraordinary.

I overheard my mom once referring to Evangeline as an old soul. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now. She was a calm kid. Slow to anger. Perceptive and compassionate beyond her years. She always smiled with her eyes. She always knew what she wanted. Said what she thought. She was brave. Real. Those traits only grew as we did.

Unlike me, her insides have always matched her outsides. She’s never been a fraud pretending to be someone she wasn’t.

With her influence, I stayed in control of the Shadow until I was almost twenty. And when I lost it, it was also because of her. Because my mom showed me a picture of her at her senior prom. A grinning boy had his arm around her waist. She was smiling up at him. I asked who he was, and my mom told me he was Evangeline’s new boyfriend.

That night, the jaws of the Shadow snapped closed with more force than ever before. It wasn’t my first panic attack, but it was by far the worst. There were moments when I thought I’d die from it, alone and unable to call out.

The next day, shaky and weak from the worst night of my life, I texted a friend who I knew stole Xanax from his mom. I’d tried them before. They didn’t make the Shadow disappear, but they dimmed its effects.

He offered me Vicodin instead.

Relief.

I knowEvangeline can’t fix me.

But she’s still my favorite high.

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