L'Chaom Chapter Four: Choose Life
Chapter Four: Choose Life
‘See, I have placed before you today life and good, death and evil…and you should choose life.'
-Moses (Deuteronomy 30:15,19)
Peter ran up the stairs to the boys dorm two at a time, following on Scott’s heels and feeling worry gnawing at his insides like a caged animal trying to get free. Rabbi Kirsh followed closely behind him like a shadow, his own anxiety palpable in the air. They finally reached the door and Scott all but kicked it open.
Peter had seen this so many times he could no longer remember all of them, had seen Scott endure it months ago, had even been through it himself, but it was still as difficult to watch now as it was the first time.
Auggie and Ezra knelt near Chaim’s bed, futilely attempting to help the helpless boy. Chaim, curled on his side in a foetal position, arms clutched tightly around his knees, thrashed and moaned and screamed in agony as his body protested the lack of the drug that had held him in thrall for only Chaim knew how long. His entire body shook with a violence that scared him, and both he and Rabbi Kirsh were at his bedside immediately.
“Chaim, can you hear me?” Peter asked coolly, taking one of the boy’s hands as the other two Cliffhangers stood by Scott and watched nervously. He dimly heard Scott reassuring the other two and felt immense pride in him for it.
Chaim, in a brief and terrible moment of lucidity, raised his head to fix his startling hazel eyes on him. He was begging, oh God, he was begging.
“Do…you still have it?” his trembling lips barely allowed coherent words. “P-please, I need…” Peter shook his head, and the movement hurt.
“You know I can’t,” he said sadly, watching despair crash over the boy in waves and his head sink back to the pillow. “Scott?” he called behind him. He was at his side in a second.
“Yeah?”
“Go downstairs and ask Sophie to call the doctor,” he instructed. He nodded and was out the door immediately. The hope for relief gone, Chaim’s despair grew. The shaking worsened, until his teeth began chattering so hard Peter feared they might chip.
“Auggie,” he stretched out his hand blindly, not taking his eyes off the struggling boy on the bed. “I need something soft he can bite on, quickly.” Within seconds he had a rolled up pair of socks in between Chaim’s teeth. The boy clamped down on them and screamed.
“Sophie!” Scott nearly slid on the polished floor of the dining room in his effort to stop. Sophie dropped her toast on her plate and Eli, who she’d been talking to, looked up in worry. “Peter wants you to call the doctor,” he said, unaware of how loud he was shouting. “Chaim’s…he’s going through withdrawal - it’s bad.”
Sophie was out of her chair in an instant.
The minutes it took to get a hold of Doctor Burke felt like hours. Scott stood beside her, biting his thumbnail and tapping one foot nervously.
“Yes, hi, Doctor Burke,” she said, drawing the attention of Scott and now Eli who had just walked up behind her. “We need you to come up to the lodge as soon as possible, one of our students is going through severe withdrawal…” she nodded once, then said ‘no’ and looked up at Scott. “Do you know what he was taking?” she asked him. He shook his head. “No,” she repeated into the phone. There was another long silence, punctuated with yes and no responses, and then Sophie looked up at him again. “When did it start?” she asked. Finally feeling useful, Scott looked almost relieved to answer.
“Around six this morning,” he said quickly, and Sophie relayed the information to the Doctor. “I woke up when he started pu-” he stopped himself, looking self-consciously at Eli, “vomiting in the bathroom,” he amended. Sophie nodded, spoke again with the Doctor and hung up.
“Okay, she’s on her way now,” she said with something approaching relief. Scott sighed. “That was a very good thing you did, Scott,” she said, squeezing his shoulder. “You may have saved his life.” Eli blanched.
“He’ll be alright, won’t he?” she asked. Sophie looked on her with sympathy.
“We won’t know until tomorrow morning,” she said sadly, “some kids do survive this kind of trauma because they’re young, but if the chemical dependency was severe enough, yes, he could die.” She sighed again and looked up to where she knew the boy was struggling for his life. “Much of the deciding factors lie in the patient’s willingness to live. He has to choose life, but he’s already shown his disdain for his own existence.” She looked sympathetically at the other woman who was now close to tears. “If you pray,” she said, “I would do it now.”
Doctor Burke arrived fifteen minutes later, but for those waiting in the dorm, it may as well have been weeks. Sophie silently guided her up the stairs, everyone in the living room watching them go, knowing what a visit from Doctor Burke meant.
Relief was palpable when she entered the room. She knelt immediately by his bedside, setting up her equipment. Chaim was still shaking violently, but was in one of his brief periods of awareness.
“Please…” he begged her, “Do you have some?” The doctor pushed him back onto the bed and searched her bag for an IV.
“Chaim,” she said, “can you tell me what you were taking?” He tried to answer, but a sudden wave of pain wracked his body and he couldn’t. Without preamble she quickly tore open one of his sleeves revealing, as she’s suspected, the tell-tale ‘tracks’ from repeated injections.
“Heroin,” she stated. Scott turned away, shaking now himself. “I have to put him on a drip, bring him down slowly.” Rabbi Kirsh looked worriedly from the doctor to Peter.
“Tonight is Shabbos,” he said sadly.
“Not for him, it isn’t,” she said hurriedly, finding a vein and pushing the butterfly needle in. “He’s gonna have a rough night,” she muttered. As the medication flowed into him, Chaim began to slowly relax, putting everyone else in the room at relative ease. Dr. Burke sat back on her heels and made some notes on a small pad.
“I’ll…” Rabbi Kirsh started to say. He looked pale, drawn, and older than his years. “I’ll call his family. They will want to pray for him.” Peter nodded, lost in his own thoughts. Finished with her notes, the Doctor looked up.
“I need to go to town for supplies,” she said, looking around at them. “Someone will have to stay with him until I get back.” Peter opened his mouth to respond.
“I will,” Scott interrupted. Peter considered it for a moment, then nodded.
“Alright,” he said softly. The others began to file out as Dr. Burke collected her things.
“Here’s my cell number,” she said, giving Scott her card. “Anything at all out of the ordinary, call me. I shouldn’t be long.” Scott nodded, and took the card, using it as a bookmark for his worn-out copy of ‘A Separate Peace’. He dragged a chair over to Chaim’s bedside and sat, holding the book in his hands, but not reading it.
He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there, but he had clearly dozed off. Not that he could be blamed, however, he was woken up rather early that morning. Scott sat up in his chair and blinked lazily, looking around himself. He saw the medical gear on the floor. Dr. Burke.
Chaim.
That’s right, he was watching -
He shot straight up in his chair, looking up to find the other boy staring at him. He looked awful; pale and clammy, eyes dark and sunken. The doctor had given him just enough drug to keep his body from slipping back into shock, and so the result looked something like a zombie.
“Why?” the boy croaked at him. He barely had any voice left. Screaming will do that to you.
“What?” Scott asked him.
“Why…are you here?” Scott looked up at the door as if expecting the doctor to walk in at any minute.
“Someone has to stay to make sure you don’t hurt yourself.” It sounded harsher than he’d intended, after all, how long ago was he here?
“No,” Chaim wheezed, struggling to sit up and giving up almost immediately. “Why…are you here?”
“I volunteered,” Scott answered, but something told him that wasn’t what he’d meant. “You mean ‘at Horizon’, don’t you?” The other boy just stared at him. Scott sighed.
“Drugs,” he said, “same as you,” knowing full well it was a cop-out. Drugs are the symptom, not the cause; Peter had told him that his first day here, but he wasn’t about to share his secrets with this guy he just met yesterday. Hell, Peter didn’t even know how deep it went…
“Why?” Chaim asked again, starting to sound like a four-year-old. Scott grew increasingly frustrated with him. “Why…do we do it?” he asked. Ahh, so this was the existential question ‘why.’ Scott thought about it, and then realized how difficult it was to answer. Why had he turned to drugs? Why not alcohol or sex or some other self-destructive behaviour. Perhaps it isn’t the victim who chooses the vice, but the other way around. He’d have to think more on that.
“I wanted to feel better,” he said, without even realizing he was speaking. “Though the more I took the more I needed, the less ‘better’ I felt.” He looked up at Chaim, whose eyes had glazed over…probably relating all this to his own experience. Scott suddenly wondered if it was the same for him. No wonder Peter wanted them to talk so much. “Soon, I wasn’t taking it to feel good, it was to not feel bad.” He stopped, shocked by his own insight. “If it wasn’t for Peter,” he said quietly, but didn’t dare finish the thought. He looked up at Chaim, who had all over his face the look of a man dying of thirst watching another playing absently with a bottle of Evian.
“Nobody saw me,” Chaim rasped. Scott could see he was fading again, his eyes threatening to close on him. “At home,” he went on, “nobody saw me.” Scott felt a sudden stab of scared-relation to what he was saying. This was much too close to home. Only - no, it wasn’t entirely true - somebody had seen him, but it was by the very person he had wanted to ignore him forever. He looked up as the door opened and Dr. Burke rushed in with another medical bag. He stood and made to leave, but Chaim caught his wrist in a surprisingly powerful grip. “They still don’t see me,” he whispered to him, and Scott felt his knees go weak. “They only think they do.”
Scott sat in the living room, exhausted. He’d missed breakfast and lunch, but he didn’t care. That…that damned kid had given him too much to think about to care about something as trivial as food. All of his being had retreated within himself, into that dark place of pain he’d hidden away, even from himself. He hated thinking…thinking brought back memories he’d worked so hard to bury, and that was dangerous around Peter. He had a very deep suspicion that the Councillor was Telepathic, or that he’d somehow coax him into talking about it. One of these days he’d get careless and let it slip…and it would all be over.
“Scott?!?” Ezra’s voice finally pierced the fog around him. He jumped; suddenly they were all around him looking worried.
“What?” he demanded, feeling slightly defensive after just thinking about such…personal…things. It was amazing that other humans can be completely unaware of another’s pain. Ezra and Auggie exchanged looks.
“We’ve only been calling you for the past ten minutes,” he said. Scott frowned at him, but felt slightly embarrassed. He looked away, hoping they wouldn’t ask him why. He was beginning to hate that word.
“How is he?” asked Juliette. He looked down at her. He did like her, but she could be really annoying sometimes.
“How do you think?” he asked, a bit harshly. He stood, but had no idea where he could go to be alone. That’s what sucked about this school, he thought, there were always people watching you. He decided on the boathouse. It was the only place he’d ever had any sort of privacy…and the cold may succeed in driving all these thoughts away.
No one slept that night.
Even students who were completely oblivious to the life-or-death struggle going on in another dorm were curiously sleepless. It was hard to explain the odd feeling that settled over the school that night, but for those who did pray, they were up all night praying for Chaim.
In the Cliffhanger boys dorm, everyone spent the night drifting in and out of consciousness, but no one actually slept. Dr. Burke, sitting by Chaim’s bedside, checked the dosage on the portable monitor again with bleary half-lidded eyes. On a nearby cot, Peter tossed and turned, his eyes closed but his mind wide awake. He, like Scott a few beds over, was re-living his own turn in Chaim’s position, memories of that horrible experience preventing so much as a wink of sleep.
Finally admitting at nearly four in the morning that attempting sleep was pointless, Scott got out of bed, stretched and locked himself in the bathroom. Peter opened one eye to watch him go, wishing that he’d thought of that. He stayed in there until the sun came up over the trees, illuminating the room in an eerie half-light. He knew Scott would never admit it, but he would have sworn he’d heard him crying in there.
Ironically, Chaim seemed to have slept through the night. His heart rate had come down around 5am, and Dr. Burke had lowered the dosage twice already. By the time the first alarm clock went off at 7am, he was sleeping normally, and while he wasn’t ‘out of the woods’ as doctors liked to say, the worst of it was over. They would have been happy, had everyone not been such a zombie that morning. Instead, they were as relieved as their drained bodies would allow.
Peter sat up, massaging an aching shoulder muscle with one hand, noticing that Scott’s bed was still empty. Auggie and Ezra both stirred irritably at the shrill beeping that no one had bothered to shut off, and Peter reluctantly stood and did so on his way to the bathroom.
“Scott?” he whispered, knocking lightly on the door. “Come on, it’s time to get ready for breakfast.” There was no answer, and worry began whispering terrible things in his ear. He opened the door, which he was surprised wasn’t locked, and walked in.
Scott was sitting wedged between the wall and the small shower stall, head in his crossed arms and, without a doubt, crying. “Scott,” he whispered again, hoping not to startle him. If he’d heard him, he made no sign. Peter walked over to him and crouched on the floor in front of him. It was only when he put a hand gently on Scott’s arm that his head jerked up and he focused his rapidly blinking eyes on him. He’d been crying in his sleep.
“What’s wrong, Scott?” he asked gently. The boy looked around him, as if not sure where he was or who was asking. He looked lost…he looked vulnerable. He shook his head, as if trying to banish some memory.
“Nothing,” he said, closing up again. Peter sighed, wondering how long it would be until Scott finally stopped denying himself the help he came here for. Until he finally stopped hiding and opened up. He could see it on his face - it was killing him.
“It’s not nothing, and you know it,” he said suddenly. He hadn’t planned to, but here they are. Scott looked up sharply at him, as if in challenge, but then to his surprise, his defences melted around him and he nodded. He nodded.
“I know.”
“Do you want to talk?”
“Not yet.”
‘See, I have placed before you today life and good, death and evil…and you should choose life.'
-Moses (Deuteronomy 30:15,19)
Peter ran up the stairs to the boys dorm two at a time, following on Scott’s heels and feeling worry gnawing at his insides like a caged animal trying to get free. Rabbi Kirsh followed closely behind him like a shadow, his own anxiety palpable in the air. They finally reached the door and Scott all but kicked it open.
Peter had seen this so many times he could no longer remember all of them, had seen Scott endure it months ago, had even been through it himself, but it was still as difficult to watch now as it was the first time.
Auggie and Ezra knelt near Chaim’s bed, futilely attempting to help the helpless boy. Chaim, curled on his side in a foetal position, arms clutched tightly around his knees, thrashed and moaned and screamed in agony as his body protested the lack of the drug that had held him in thrall for only Chaim knew how long. His entire body shook with a violence that scared him, and both he and Rabbi Kirsh were at his bedside immediately.
“Chaim, can you hear me?” Peter asked coolly, taking one of the boy’s hands as the other two Cliffhangers stood by Scott and watched nervously. He dimly heard Scott reassuring the other two and felt immense pride in him for it.
Chaim, in a brief and terrible moment of lucidity, raised his head to fix his startling hazel eyes on him. He was begging, oh God, he was begging.
“Do…you still have it?” his trembling lips barely allowed coherent words. “P-please, I need…” Peter shook his head, and the movement hurt.
“You know I can’t,” he said sadly, watching despair crash over the boy in waves and his head sink back to the pillow. “Scott?” he called behind him. He was at his side in a second.
“Yeah?”
“Go downstairs and ask Sophie to call the doctor,” he instructed. He nodded and was out the door immediately. The hope for relief gone, Chaim’s despair grew. The shaking worsened, until his teeth began chattering so hard Peter feared they might chip.
“Auggie,” he stretched out his hand blindly, not taking his eyes off the struggling boy on the bed. “I need something soft he can bite on, quickly.” Within seconds he had a rolled up pair of socks in between Chaim’s teeth. The boy clamped down on them and screamed.
“Sophie!” Scott nearly slid on the polished floor of the dining room in his effort to stop. Sophie dropped her toast on her plate and Eli, who she’d been talking to, looked up in worry. “Peter wants you to call the doctor,” he said, unaware of how loud he was shouting. “Chaim’s…he’s going through withdrawal - it’s bad.”
Sophie was out of her chair in an instant.
The minutes it took to get a hold of Doctor Burke felt like hours. Scott stood beside her, biting his thumbnail and tapping one foot nervously.
“Yes, hi, Doctor Burke,” she said, drawing the attention of Scott and now Eli who had just walked up behind her. “We need you to come up to the lodge as soon as possible, one of our students is going through severe withdrawal…” she nodded once, then said ‘no’ and looked up at Scott. “Do you know what he was taking?” she asked him. He shook his head. “No,” she repeated into the phone. There was another long silence, punctuated with yes and no responses, and then Sophie looked up at him again. “When did it start?” she asked. Finally feeling useful, Scott looked almost relieved to answer.
“Around six this morning,” he said quickly, and Sophie relayed the information to the Doctor. “I woke up when he started pu-” he stopped himself, looking self-consciously at Eli, “vomiting in the bathroom,” he amended. Sophie nodded, spoke again with the Doctor and hung up.
“Okay, she’s on her way now,” she said with something approaching relief. Scott sighed. “That was a very good thing you did, Scott,” she said, squeezing his shoulder. “You may have saved his life.” Eli blanched.
“He’ll be alright, won’t he?” she asked. Sophie looked on her with sympathy.
“We won’t know until tomorrow morning,” she said sadly, “some kids do survive this kind of trauma because they’re young, but if the chemical dependency was severe enough, yes, he could die.” She sighed again and looked up to where she knew the boy was struggling for his life. “Much of the deciding factors lie in the patient’s willingness to live. He has to choose life, but he’s already shown his disdain for his own existence.” She looked sympathetically at the other woman who was now close to tears. “If you pray,” she said, “I would do it now.”
Doctor Burke arrived fifteen minutes later, but for those waiting in the dorm, it may as well have been weeks. Sophie silently guided her up the stairs, everyone in the living room watching them go, knowing what a visit from Doctor Burke meant.
Relief was palpable when she entered the room. She knelt immediately by his bedside, setting up her equipment. Chaim was still shaking violently, but was in one of his brief periods of awareness.
“Please…” he begged her, “Do you have some?” The doctor pushed him back onto the bed and searched her bag for an IV.
“Chaim,” she said, “can you tell me what you were taking?” He tried to answer, but a sudden wave of pain wracked his body and he couldn’t. Without preamble she quickly tore open one of his sleeves revealing, as she’s suspected, the tell-tale ‘tracks’ from repeated injections.
“Heroin,” she stated. Scott turned away, shaking now himself. “I have to put him on a drip, bring him down slowly.” Rabbi Kirsh looked worriedly from the doctor to Peter.
“Tonight is Shabbos,” he said sadly.
“Not for him, it isn’t,” she said hurriedly, finding a vein and pushing the butterfly needle in. “He’s gonna have a rough night,” she muttered. As the medication flowed into him, Chaim began to slowly relax, putting everyone else in the room at relative ease. Dr. Burke sat back on her heels and made some notes on a small pad.
“I’ll…” Rabbi Kirsh started to say. He looked pale, drawn, and older than his years. “I’ll call his family. They will want to pray for him.” Peter nodded, lost in his own thoughts. Finished with her notes, the Doctor looked up.
“I need to go to town for supplies,” she said, looking around at them. “Someone will have to stay with him until I get back.” Peter opened his mouth to respond.
“I will,” Scott interrupted. Peter considered it for a moment, then nodded.
“Alright,” he said softly. The others began to file out as Dr. Burke collected her things.
“Here’s my cell number,” she said, giving Scott her card. “Anything at all out of the ordinary, call me. I shouldn’t be long.” Scott nodded, and took the card, using it as a bookmark for his worn-out copy of ‘A Separate Peace’. He dragged a chair over to Chaim’s bedside and sat, holding the book in his hands, but not reading it.
He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there, but he had clearly dozed off. Not that he could be blamed, however, he was woken up rather early that morning. Scott sat up in his chair and blinked lazily, looking around himself. He saw the medical gear on the floor. Dr. Burke.
Chaim.
That’s right, he was watching -
He shot straight up in his chair, looking up to find the other boy staring at him. He looked awful; pale and clammy, eyes dark and sunken. The doctor had given him just enough drug to keep his body from slipping back into shock, and so the result looked something like a zombie.
“Why?” the boy croaked at him. He barely had any voice left. Screaming will do that to you.
“What?” Scott asked him.
“Why…are you here?” Scott looked up at the door as if expecting the doctor to walk in at any minute.
“Someone has to stay to make sure you don’t hurt yourself.” It sounded harsher than he’d intended, after all, how long ago was he here?
“No,” Chaim wheezed, struggling to sit up and giving up almost immediately. “Why…are you here?”
“I volunteered,” Scott answered, but something told him that wasn’t what he’d meant. “You mean ‘at Horizon’, don’t you?” The other boy just stared at him. Scott sighed.
“Drugs,” he said, “same as you,” knowing full well it was a cop-out. Drugs are the symptom, not the cause; Peter had told him that his first day here, but he wasn’t about to share his secrets with this guy he just met yesterday. Hell, Peter didn’t even know how deep it went…
“Why?” Chaim asked again, starting to sound like a four-year-old. Scott grew increasingly frustrated with him. “Why…do we do it?” he asked. Ahh, so this was the existential question ‘why.’ Scott thought about it, and then realized how difficult it was to answer. Why had he turned to drugs? Why not alcohol or sex or some other self-destructive behaviour. Perhaps it isn’t the victim who chooses the vice, but the other way around. He’d have to think more on that.
“I wanted to feel better,” he said, without even realizing he was speaking. “Though the more I took the more I needed, the less ‘better’ I felt.” He looked up at Chaim, whose eyes had glazed over…probably relating all this to his own experience. Scott suddenly wondered if it was the same for him. No wonder Peter wanted them to talk so much. “Soon, I wasn’t taking it to feel good, it was to not feel bad.” He stopped, shocked by his own insight. “If it wasn’t for Peter,” he said quietly, but didn’t dare finish the thought. He looked up at Chaim, who had all over his face the look of a man dying of thirst watching another playing absently with a bottle of Evian.
“Nobody saw me,” Chaim rasped. Scott could see he was fading again, his eyes threatening to close on him. “At home,” he went on, “nobody saw me.” Scott felt a sudden stab of scared-relation to what he was saying. This was much too close to home. Only - no, it wasn’t entirely true - somebody had seen him, but it was by the very person he had wanted to ignore him forever. He looked up as the door opened and Dr. Burke rushed in with another medical bag. He stood and made to leave, but Chaim caught his wrist in a surprisingly powerful grip. “They still don’t see me,” he whispered to him, and Scott felt his knees go weak. “They only think they do.”
Scott sat in the living room, exhausted. He’d missed breakfast and lunch, but he didn’t care. That…that damned kid had given him too much to think about to care about something as trivial as food. All of his being had retreated within himself, into that dark place of pain he’d hidden away, even from himself. He hated thinking…thinking brought back memories he’d worked so hard to bury, and that was dangerous around Peter. He had a very deep suspicion that the Councillor was Telepathic, or that he’d somehow coax him into talking about it. One of these days he’d get careless and let it slip…and it would all be over.
“Scott?!?” Ezra’s voice finally pierced the fog around him. He jumped; suddenly they were all around him looking worried.
“What?” he demanded, feeling slightly defensive after just thinking about such…personal…things. It was amazing that other humans can be completely unaware of another’s pain. Ezra and Auggie exchanged looks.
“We’ve only been calling you for the past ten minutes,” he said. Scott frowned at him, but felt slightly embarrassed. He looked away, hoping they wouldn’t ask him why. He was beginning to hate that word.
“How is he?” asked Juliette. He looked down at her. He did like her, but she could be really annoying sometimes.
“How do you think?” he asked, a bit harshly. He stood, but had no idea where he could go to be alone. That’s what sucked about this school, he thought, there were always people watching you. He decided on the boathouse. It was the only place he’d ever had any sort of privacy…and the cold may succeed in driving all these thoughts away.
No one slept that night.
Even students who were completely oblivious to the life-or-death struggle going on in another dorm were curiously sleepless. It was hard to explain the odd feeling that settled over the school that night, but for those who did pray, they were up all night praying for Chaim.
In the Cliffhanger boys dorm, everyone spent the night drifting in and out of consciousness, but no one actually slept. Dr. Burke, sitting by Chaim’s bedside, checked the dosage on the portable monitor again with bleary half-lidded eyes. On a nearby cot, Peter tossed and turned, his eyes closed but his mind wide awake. He, like Scott a few beds over, was re-living his own turn in Chaim’s position, memories of that horrible experience preventing so much as a wink of sleep.
Finally admitting at nearly four in the morning that attempting sleep was pointless, Scott got out of bed, stretched and locked himself in the bathroom. Peter opened one eye to watch him go, wishing that he’d thought of that. He stayed in there until the sun came up over the trees, illuminating the room in an eerie half-light. He knew Scott would never admit it, but he would have sworn he’d heard him crying in there.
Ironically, Chaim seemed to have slept through the night. His heart rate had come down around 5am, and Dr. Burke had lowered the dosage twice already. By the time the first alarm clock went off at 7am, he was sleeping normally, and while he wasn’t ‘out of the woods’ as doctors liked to say, the worst of it was over. They would have been happy, had everyone not been such a zombie that morning. Instead, they were as relieved as their drained bodies would allow.
Peter sat up, massaging an aching shoulder muscle with one hand, noticing that Scott’s bed was still empty. Auggie and Ezra both stirred irritably at the shrill beeping that no one had bothered to shut off, and Peter reluctantly stood and did so on his way to the bathroom.
“Scott?” he whispered, knocking lightly on the door. “Come on, it’s time to get ready for breakfast.” There was no answer, and worry began whispering terrible things in his ear. He opened the door, which he was surprised wasn’t locked, and walked in.
Scott was sitting wedged between the wall and the small shower stall, head in his crossed arms and, without a doubt, crying. “Scott,” he whispered again, hoping not to startle him. If he’d heard him, he made no sign. Peter walked over to him and crouched on the floor in front of him. It was only when he put a hand gently on Scott’s arm that his head jerked up and he focused his rapidly blinking eyes on him. He’d been crying in his sleep.
“What’s wrong, Scott?” he asked gently. The boy looked around him, as if not sure where he was or who was asking. He looked lost…he looked vulnerable. He shook his head, as if trying to banish some memory.
“Nothing,” he said, closing up again. Peter sighed, wondering how long it would be until Scott finally stopped denying himself the help he came here for. Until he finally stopped hiding and opened up. He could see it on his face - it was killing him.
“It’s not nothing, and you know it,” he said suddenly. He hadn’t planned to, but here they are. Scott looked up sharply at him, as if in challenge, but then to his surprise, his defences melted around him and he nodded. He nodded.
“I know.”
“Do you want to talk?”
“Not yet.”