Page 56 of Glitterland
“You don’t have a fucking clue,” Niall yelled, over the chaos. “And I’ll tell you now, you can’t fucking handle it.” He threw his words down like swords. “What are you going to do when he won’t get out of bed or take his medication? When he cuts words into his arms, drinks when he shouldn’t, takes drugs when he shouldn’t, or sleeps with strangers who are bad for him?”
Darian flinched.
“Or what about when he keeps you up all night because he can’t sleep. Or has a panic attack out of nowhere. And, let’s not forget: what about when he tries to kill himself, again? Or he has another manic episode and won’t eat or sleep or stop talking, and thinks he’s…what was it again, Ash? Oh yes, Thomas Mallory, and the second coming of Arthur Pendragon.”
I stared at him, silent and stricken. I didn’t dare look at anyone else. Least of all Darian.
“What abaht it?” said Darian, finally.
Niall shook his head. “You have no idea, do you? You have to live with it, or the threat of it, every single day. Do you really thinkyoucould cope with that?”
“I dunno.” Darian shrugged. “Maybe it ain’t abaht coping or not coping. Maybe it’s just abaht wanting to be wif someone.”
“You’re so fucking naïve.”
Darian stood up. He was taller than Niall and frowning. “I don’t fink I am. I fink you just fink I am cos I don’t talk or fink like you do.” He paused. “I fink.”
I couldn’t stand it. Voices were swirling around me, talking about me but not to me.
“You can’t help him, Darian. You can’t make him better.”
“I didn’t say I was gonna.”
“You can’t make him happy either.”
Darian shrugged. “I fink I got the right to try.”
It was like being in hospital again. Reduced from the first person to the third. From subject to object. I was disappearing into other people’s sentences. I wanted to speak, but I didn’t dare. I didn’t know how it would sound. Whether my voice would break. If I would be plausible. If I had the right to want anything at all. What use to the sane, after all, were the words of the mad?
13
Then
I stood up, turned, and walked away, the lights blurring to smears in my eyes and Niall’s castigations stinging my skin as though I’d carved them myself. Again. By the time I’d stepped outside, I was running into the night.
Because that’s absolutely the way to prove your sanity.
I heard a voice calling my name, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t seem to breathe enough air.
And I felt paper-thin and utterly unreal. Shredded. All I wanted to do was put a barrier of distance between me and everything that had just happened.
If only I could also outrun myself.
Maybe it would not be so terrible, to disappear entirely, to drift away in fragments beneath the moon, like pieces of torn of lace.
To cease to be.
That was something I could never make Niall understand, though I don’t know how hard I’d tried. I had never wanted death, merely cessation; unfortunately, sometimes, they seemed to be the same thing.
Niall had done nothing but tell the truth, though he had wielded it like a weapon. But it was hard to forgive him for it.
And Darian? Oh, I couldn’t bear to think about Darian.
I had never felt quite so ugly, helpless, or naked. But it had been my own fault, for trying to pretend I was otherwise.
Was it cold? I thought it might be cold. It was certainly dark. But these considerations beat against me like my body was a window pane. I was visible, but unreachable. A prisoner of myself.
Where was I?
