While I Wait for Wounds to Heal by kissingcrime, 1/2

[accrues]

Title: While I Wait for Wounds to Heal 1/2
Fandom: The Social Network
Author: KISSINGCRIME
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Mark/Eduardo
Category: AU
Word Count: 17,500~
Summary: For the prompt Eduardo/Mark, psychiatric ward at the tsn-kinkmeme. psych ward!AU, following the movie...ish. Eduardo meets Mark at Cambridge General, Ward 16.
Beta: adela_nightmoon
Author's Notes: Most of this is from personal experience of being a patient in an open ward. As such, no major liberties were taken, except translating experiences culturally from Australian to American populations (which share many cultural similarities and psychology translates well across the two).
Warnings: descriptions of a psychiatric ward, mentions/thoughts of suicide and other negative internal mantras. Descriptions of drowning and panic attacks. Stigmatisation of mental disorders. If this is likely to cause you distress or otherwise trigger unwanted anxiety or depressive thoughts, be aware of how you may be impacted. I cannot warn strongly enough that this focuses a lot on unhealthy thought processes, so tread carefully.



Part 1 | Part 2 | Epilogue

Eduardo likes the peace war garden the best, partly for the oxymoron in the name.

Also because it’s quiet and it’s faulty; the mouldy statue that sits in the middle quietly lets the water flow up and over the side of the basin it’s supposed to pour into, trickling down the edges.

The little cupid, or fairy or whatever it is, has shit aim, he decides. Hardly any of the water finds its way back into the pipes. There has to be an auxiliary flow from somewhere, because the water that is meant to recycle through isn’t going anywhere near the desired drain.

No one stares here, or watches over ducked heads. There aren’t bodies in the corner of your eye, there and then gone again, flitting from room to room like a confused butterfly. There isn’t any pollen here. Eduardo’s somewhat happy with his metaphor. English was never his strong point.

Sometimes he likes to pretend he’s crazy, to just let his mind go on, listing similes that make no sense. Sometimes he says them out loud and in return he gets nervous titters or just sharp, confused glances. Occasionally he’ll do it on purpose, but not too often.

It’s sunny here, in the garden, his black button-down sponging up the heat, even his dark slacks shaded by the broken pagoda, are warming up.

He doesn’t mind, he decides. The sun is probably good for the warped fairy-gnome in the middle. Maybe he’ll get his aim right now.

This is where the crazy people go, but Eduardo’s not crazy.

Mark isn’t crazy either.

That isn’t why Eduardo doesn’t like him at first though; Eduardo doesn’t like him at first because his presence means Eduardo has to change places in the dining room.

Eduardo does not like change.

Everyone, the ward psychiatrists, the specialist psychiatrists, the psych nurses, the social workers and the ward nurses all know that Eduardo does not like change. It’s partially why Eduardo is still here at Cambridge General Ward 16, after a record three months.

People come through here like water running through the mortar gaps in bricks; they stay in one long stream for a little while, hit a crossroad and maybe find another way out.

Most of the time they just go sideways, and they can’t go back, so they either keep fighting or the stream just stops. Sometimes they find a way out, but Eduardo can do probability faster than anyone he knows, and the odds aren’t great.

Eduardo speculates online a lot. Most of the nurses don’t know, and Charlie doesn’t like it (but lets him, because he never loses, and it makes him happy for a little while) either. He likes to use his brain for something other than cards and fighting psychiatrists for a while.

He never loses, but he watches as those people run in and out of the ward, and two weeks later, they’re back, and spot twenty-seven in the dining room (room twenty-eight) opens up, nice and neat and in its place.

Eduardo likes to compare the ward to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He watches the drain when he’s treading water at the end of the hydro pool they’re allowed to share with the old people, thinks about characters he can’t name now from the book, and how hard he would have to jam his fingers in there for him to drown. Someone would notice quickly enough, probably. But suicide is more of a fleeting fancy these days, instead of an incessant occupation. Progress. Even he will agree with that.

He always feels guilty about those comparisons later though, because it’s nothing like it, really. But it is a hospital nevertheless, and everything does have its place, and number eighteen has always. Been. His.

But he’s moved to number twenty-one, and grits his teeth instead of arguing because Doctor Peris is still here at quarter to five and if he kicks up a fuss, he’ll end up in that office re-counting the amount of books in the glass-paned cabinet three feet to the left of Doctor Peris’ desk and nodding in appropriate places without supplying any information himself. He’s gone from being derided by his father for saying no, to being pitied and talked to softly by a psychiatrist instead. It would be nice to have a middle ground.

Charlie comes past with a tray and drops it on the table in front of him, white cup with the two little pills sitting benignly next to the potatoes and gravy. She just grins at his wrinkled nose and says ‘bed twenty is about your age. Yvonne thought it would be good for you to sit with someone your age.’

Eduardo thinks that this is an awful idea, but it’s Charlie, so he doesn’t say anything except a polite thank you when she finishes laying out all the trays.

Sam comes in next and sits in seventeen, Ellen slides along the wall to sit in sixteen, Harry lumbers into nineteen, and someone Eduardo has never met takes his spot at eighteen.

He feels a stab of jealousy.

When the chair next to him is pulled out, the jealousy is replaced with annoyance. So Eduardo projects all of the hostility he can into his body language (‘passive-aggressive’ warns Dr Peris in his head. ‘Maybe that’s why you interpret your father’s body language in that way’).

Bed twenty doesn’t seem to notice, just pulls the cloche off the top of the main plate and frowns at the poor excuse for a roast that lies on his plate.

The mashed potatoes in Eduardo’s side bowl aren’t bad. He leaves the peas from his roast but eats the rest.

Twenty leaves before he does, and doesn’t take any meds.

Eduardo finds out his name later from Chris, who knows everything because social anxiety has never been his problem and he talks to everyone, even those who do have social anxiety.

Mark. He has a Jewish last name, which Eduardo remembers quickly because any name with a -berg at the end of it goes straight into his long term memory after prep school home in Miami. Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg.

They bump into each other, literally, at the hydro pool. When they pull apart, Eduardo has to urgently reach out to stop Mark from falling into the pool. The other boy is wearing a thin tee shirt which shows off two waterproof plastic bandages, one on each wrist, and shorts, his flip-flops still on, though he looks like he’s just about to step onto the first little ledge in the water.

‘Sorry,’ Eduardo says, a little too late. He’s usually fastidiously polite but something about Mark has thrown him off his game. ‘Sorry,’ he repeats. He repeats it because he’s apologising for being late to apologise. Mark just looks confused.

‘Okay,’ he replies, then lets his foot fall onto the first step.

Eduardo swallows. ‘Um,’ he begins, ‘you have to take your shoes off first. It’s in the rules.’ He gestures quickly to the sign on the wall, which Mark gives a cursory glance before taking his flip flops off one by one, slowly undoing and redoing the pointless Velcro and lining the shoes up neatly next to each other at the side. He watches Eduardo with a slightly upturned mouth, then makes sure that the shoes are perfectly aligned.

Eduardo flashes him a brief, if confused, smile and begins to turn to go into the change rooms. In the corner of his eye he sees Mark purposefully knock one shoe three degrees counter clockwise out of perfect symmetry.

Eduardo keeps turning and goes to get changed. (When he gets back though, and goes to get into the pool, the shoe might accidentally get knocked three degrees clockwise. This is what he gets for living with Chris.)

Today he doesn’t stare at the grill on the bottom of the pool, instead he watches those waterproof bandages flash as Mark does laps up and down the side lanes.

Mark doesn’t like Harry very much. Eduardo thinks Harry is amusing, and Harry thinks Harry is amusing too. Most of the nurses like Harry, mainly because he likes to scare visitors.

It’s Charlie that tells Eduardo these things, but he knows the others nurses think it’s funny too, because of the stifled smiles he sees when they’re doing blood pressure and a visitor walks into the day room.

Harry likes to stare, in this odd crazy-eye intimidating way. Eduardo found this confronting at first, until he learnt to stare back and then smile. Harry would then grin widely, and turn back to the tv. One of us.

Mark doesn’t even lower his gaze, they just stay like that, locked in combat for about five minutes. Eduardo watches them covertly from his place in front of one of the patient-only computers and finds himself oddly disappointed when John walks in and growls at Harry to leave Mark alone.

Harry just grins, while John counts the room, marks it on his chart and walks away.

Mark sits next to Eduardo. There are three other seats free, any one of which would have been easier to get to because Eduardo likes to sit on the edge of the room, but he sits next to Eduardo.

Strangely enough, Eduardo likes this more than he finds it annoying.

Doctor Peris might call this progress. Eduardo finds it faintly disturbing.

‘These are running NT,’ Mark says. His voice isn’t very nuanced, but Eduardo thinks he picks up more than a dose of disdain, as well as a little bit of amusement.

‘Yeah,’ Eduardo finds himself replying. ‘They’re really slow too and the software has just barely moved past Netscape.’

‘There’s internet?’ Mark asks. Well, Eduardo thinks it’s a question, but it sounds more like a statement.

‘Usually,’ Eduardo says offhandedly, turning back to spider solitaire, ‘but I think someone shut the door on the phone cable and broke the wire.’

Mark seems to find the idea that the line to the computers runs through into another room amusing. ‘Where’s the port?’

Eduardo nods to the right with his head, at the door that seems inaccessible because of the bank of computer tables in front of it. ‘Padded room,’ he says with a grin that surprises him. ‘Don’t use it anymore so it’s a server room.’

Eduardo watches out of the very corner of his eye as Mark’s lips lift.

He only makes it through two games of spider solitaire. Before he was sent to hospital, he had never even opened the program and now it’s all he finds himself doing. He’s usually faster than this though, finding games that won’t work and flicking through them to ones he can do quickly and methodically, but he keeps getting distracted by Mark pushing his ID band up his arm every time it slips down to his wrist, sitting on the top of his hand. It’s too lose, it fits easily around the bone at the bottom of Mark’s thumb. Eduardo looks at the edge of the slightly dirtied bandage peeking over the crest of Mark’s wrist bone and supposes they couldn’t have closed it too tightly around those wrists.

Shaking his head doesn’t make the images of Mark sliding the band up his arm over and over and over again go away. Eduardo gives up on solitaire and goes to the kitchen to make coffee instead.

(Mark leaves the dialogue box up on the computer. It says ‘a wire costs $3.29. My sanity is worth a lot more’.

But the words are buried in a code no one at CG can read.)

‘I’m not crazy,’ Mark tells him bluntly, pouring a third packet of sugar into his coffee.

‘Me neither,’ Eduardo says, with a smile.

‘Why are you here,’ Mark asks, without asking.

‘Chickens made me do it,’ Eduardo tells him with a grin that makes his mouth taste bitter and walks away.

Mark is in the unoccupied bed one room down, sharing with Dustin. Eduardo mostly likes Dustin, they get along when they are forced to play on the N64. The nurses sometimes think it would be fun for Eduardo to do something that doesn’t involve the commute revolving around the ward, the peace garden and the pool and back, a slingshot route that only makes it to the garden sometimes. Dustin is loud and talks a lot of shit but Eduardo goes along with most of it, partly because Dustin got a long way further to suicide than Eduardo did, and when Dustin isn’t elated, he’s crashing and burning on lows and Eduardo knows all the details.

Eduardo prefers hyperactive Dustin, to be honest. His lows are a bit too much for any of them to bear.

Besides, Dustin is funny.

Eduardo has Chris. Chris is quiet, exceptionally neat, and always wears headphones when he listens to music. It’s a perfect fit, because Eduardo makes sure everything is straight and in order for Chris when he uses the bathroom or any other part of the shared room (unless the doctors have told Chris to do one little thing a bit different for the day, in which case Eduardo tries not to intrude) and Chris makes sure the music he listens to, some of which Eduardo has heard before and makes him curl up with anxiety every time, is kept low and safe within his headphones.

Neither of them are enabling each other, it just works out well.

So Chris meets Mark, because he often ends up perched on the end of Dustin’s bed after dinner at night. Eduardo doesn’t know what Chris talks to Mark about, he just does what he does every night at five thirty; he enjoys having the huge room to himself and watches tv too loudly so that he doesn’t have to press the speaker-remote to his ear.

One night, a week and a half after Mark arrives on the ward and Eduardo is made to move to twenty-one, Mark walks into Eduardo and Chris’ room and sits down on Eduardo’s bed. Eduardo freaks out because he’d been staring at the screen too long, and hadn’t even seen the shadow of Mark in his periphery.

‘Freaks out’ is the wrong term, though; ‘startles slightly’ is more apt, because freaking out happens regularly, and usually involves sedatives.

Mark doesn’t apologise though, just stares at Eduardo as he automatically touches his pulse, feeling the race of his heart slow incrementally from the shock.

‘Hi,’ Eduardo says.

‘Hi,’ Mark replies. He doesn’t blink. Eduardo hadn’t noticed that before; he doesn’t watch people dead on very often, and usually keeps his gaze trained on the floor. Eduardo stares back.

‘Chris is kissing Dustin.’

Eduardo sighs and his gaze flickers back up to the screen before coming back to look at Mark. ‘Yeah.’

Mark just looks confused.

‘Are they…’ Mark seems to be looking for the right word, but he appears to be looking for it via the top of Eduardo’s window.

‘Together?’ Eduardo finishes for him. ‘Here? Who knows? They just make out sometimes, when Chris is feeling safe.’

A slightly flushed Chris comes in thirty seconds after Eduardo has stopped talking. Mark is still staring at the top of the window.

‘Shark Week is on,’ Chris tells Eduardo, who glances at him.

‘Cool,’ Eduardo replies. He doesn’t really care about Shark Week, but he reaches over and turns his own tiny set off so that the low static-y rumble from his speaker-remote doesn’t bother Chris.

‘I have an idea,’ Mark says, and then disappears.

Eduardo gets a text from his sister half an hour later that says ‘bored, got sent to my room because I brought you up. Know any good ways of escaping second story buildings?’

Eduardo wants to throw up in the bathroom, but someone would probably notice. Instead, he pulls out one of the sheets of paper that have accumulated on his bed stand and goes through Proactive Problem Solving.

Reading it makes his mouth taste bitter, and all he sees in the paper is how it could help someone else. So he rolls over on his side and listens to inane chatter on the radio instead, staring out the window as the sky dims outside.

Mark doesn’t line up for pills at nine that night, when most of the patients do. There isn’t a set time for it, but mostly the nurses like it to be done and over by nine-thirty so they don’t have to chase patients at change-over. Eduardo is last in the line to get his, he spent the last ten minutes reading and re-reading the notices on the wall about using hand sanitiser in the ward. Charlie hands the cup over and Eduardo shakes the tablets into one hand so she can fill the cup with water for him to wash them down with.

‘Have you seen Mark?’ She asks, and he startles, a little confused, but just shakes his head. Why would he? he thinks. He has just as much chance to see Mark as anyone else in this tiny ward.

So he heads off to bed, and lets the pills he just took slide him into sleep.

He gets woken up at a time too late in the night to be night-nurses doing rounds, and far too early in the morning to be breakfast or early morning bloods.

His bleary eyes take in Mark, face ghost pale, standing next to his bed, some kind of candy twisting from his mouth.

‘I want to show you something.’

‘Mark?’ Eduardo groans, ‘It’s…’ he fumbles for his cell on the cabinet next to him. The metal hospital bed squeaks with every movement, and Chris groans from the curtained segment partitioning the room. ‘twelve-twenty.’

‘Yeah,’ Mark agrees. ‘I want to show you something.’

It turns out that Mark goes through red vines really fast when he’s working on a new idea, and since thefacebook, as they’re calling it, is taking a lot of his energy, he’s completely run out. Of the two cafés on the hospital campus, only the one near the locked ward has any kind of confectionery, and it does not stock red vines. It has caffeine of all varieties, but not red vines.

So Eduardo signs them off campus, telling Charlie that he and Mark are going for a walk, and they head out the gate. There’s a supermarket fifteen minutes walk away, so they aim in that direction, Mark jogging lightly to keep up with Eduardo’s long, impatient strides.

‘Chickens made you do it,’ he reiterates.

‘Yep. What’s your excuse?’

Mark shrugs one shoulder. ‘Not meant to be here,’ he says. ‘It was an accident.’

Eduardo snorts. ‘Okay,’ he says.

‘I know what you being a part of something means to your father,’ Mark says, and the bluntness of it makes Eduardo go cold.

‘No,’ Eduardo says. ‘I don’t think you do.’

He picks up Reese’s Pieces while Mark buys enough red vines to make an entire kindergarten hyperactive for a year. While Mark pays, he types out a message to his sister. ‘Drainpipes work,’ it says, then; ‘miss you.’

He turns off his phone.

He choked on the words, when he decided to say them. They were bigger than his throat could handle, thick and heavy. It was like pulling the constant and eternal weight sitting on his chest up through his lips, bare for everyone to see.

She just looked at him, and pulled a bit of lint absentmindedly from the bedspread.

‘I want to kill myself,’ he told her.

‘I won’t let you,’ she answered him.

She was the one to call the ambulance the day he downed the bottle of pills. It was stupid, and impulsive. The social worker at the children’s ward, the first one he’s in, asked him why he did it that day and he told her that it was because it was peaceful, finally.

He was asked if he wanted to move, and yes, god yes, did he want to leave that ward, with the screaming and the rocking, the endless noise that drills into his skull.

He wanted to leave the cries-crash-thud-shuffle-click, the sounds of moving someone somewhere safer.

No one asked him anything about that day after that.

Dustin comes home from weekend leave with a hip flask of vodka in his bag, tucked near the bottom. He flicks the N64 on with his toe and the noise that the console makes through the old tv makes Eduardo turn from his computer.

Chris returns Dustin’s high five reluctantly, staring at his hand for a second afterward before carefully putting it back down on the arm of the couch.

Mark just stares at the computer screen until Eduardo leans over and turns the monitor off. Mark protests, mumbling something about code that Eduardo doesn’t understand. But he lets himself be led over to the four off-white plastic chairs in front of a tv that must have dated from the early nineties.

Drinking alcohol while being a patient of the ward, whether it’s alcohol at home on leave or in the ward itself, is strictly prohibited. But none of the four boys in the day room are on alcohol programs, and if they’re careful, they won’t be screened.

Blood pressures have been done for the evening, they were very careful to wait until they had been noted before anything that might skew them was added to the equation.

The hip flask is passed around while Dustin presses A for screen after screen, choosing characters and maps and finally they’re on split screens, waiting for some creature sitting on a cloud, that Eduardo can’t remember the name of, to count down from three.

Whether it’s the alcohol mixed with the high dosage of SNRI’s he’s on, or his own slightly girlish sensibilities, the four screens makes Eduardo think of the John Meyer song, Split Screen Sadness. He just glares at the screen for a second, shakes his head and laps Dustin all the way to victory.

Hours later it’s just Mark and Eduardo, playing Super Smash Bros, Eduardo’s Pikachu making angry noises while Mark’s Link systematically destroys him over and over again.

Mark says ‘it was her fault,’ and Eduardo says ‘hmm.’

But then Mark presses Start, and Link freezes in mid air, the pixels distorted halfway through an action.

‘This girl, at college,’ Mark says, still staring at the suspended elf. ‘She-’ he waited, and an eternity passed.

‘Did what girls do,’ Eduardo finishes for him.

‘I did something stupid, I was blogging, it was stupid. I made a website.’

‘Like thefacebook?’ Eduardo asks, feeling the warmth of the vodka fill his cheeks when he stands, settling there even after he scoots the chair closer to Mark and retakes his seat.

Mark blinks. ‘It compared girls against other girls. I didn’t have any friends at college. No one would talk to me. After the website, it seemed like everyone hated me. Once it was over, after the administrator’s board at college put me on a stupid kind of probation, I walked back to my dorm. I was staring over the bridge at the river, when a guy just pushed me, and I fell. I woke up in emergency, wet, and on antibiotics for whatever is in that water. They thought I had tried to kill myself.’ He shrugs.

Eduardo just stares at him. He really wants to kiss him, is leaning in despite his best intentions when Mark presses start again and pushes Pikachu off the ledge one more time. They watch as the game pushes through to the awards screen.

‘I’m going to bed,’ Mark says, and leaves the room.

Mark doesn’t mention that night, and neither does Eduardo. They dance around it, an invisible pillar that neither addresses, they just peer around it occasionally, consideringly.

Eduardo says ‘it never really had much to do with the chicken’. Mark looks at him, waits a minute and then goes back to the computer screen in front of him, typing lines and lines of the code that builds the website. ‘The chicken was just the end point.’

They grow thefacebook on the slow computers in the day room. Mark complains bitterly about the processor speeds, but whenever he tries to hide in his room with his own laptop for hours, he discovers what Eduardo found out in his first week; if you hide for longer than four hours, they make you do something. Anything.

So Eduardo and Mark sign out of the ward and go to the peace garden or the prayer room in the tiny Christian chapel, and don’t talk about secular Jewish views. Mark types and Eduardo lays on the grass or the carpet and stares at the ceiling, thinking or talking.

His medication is being upped, and he feels woozy, watches the world from outside his body sometimes and lets himself float. So while he floats, he talks about the world, ideas and investment. He talks about his family and the friends he thought he’d had before. He opens his heart up more than he had ever done to a psychiatrist before, and Mark codes. For hours.

Maybe it’s enabling, that his actions mean that Mark is allowed to be ‘wired in’ for hours, because they’re not in the ward, but in a perverse way, that’s how they react to the nurses. It’s the patients against the staff, because alliances are drawn in love, war, and psych wards; and even if it’s not helping your friend in the overall picture, the battle must be won.

So thefacebook is built, the domain is registered, servers are bought and things come together quickly, especially when Mark goes home on weekend leave. (Eduardo never goes home on weekend leave. His psychiatrist has tried numerous times but isn’t allowed to actually force him.)

They go live, and Mark spends the next ten minutes just staring at the computer screen unfazed by anything Eduardo says to him.

They argue about monetizing the site. It’s their first real fight, and it makes Dustin walk carefully for the door of the room, Chris hurrying after him.

Things settle on the ward. Dustin’s meds are working and he’s stabilised for a while. Chris is making progress, and then…

Mark starts getting better too.

The meds they swapped him to are working, and whispers pass through group before Christiana walks into the room and tells them off sharply for gossiping. Dustin pulls a face at her from the side. Eduardo just looks at his hands, neatly folded in his lap.

But the truth stands: give it a week and Mark’s going home.

It’s a Friday and Eduardo is sitting on the grass outside the front door to the ward, his sleeves neatly folded up to the elbow, reading a book Indian style. His wristband slides down over his palm so he gives up on the book for a second to slide it all the way up his arm to where it pinches the skin, so it won’t bug him again. There’s a brief push on his shoulder, and then there’s Mark, smiling that small smile that means far too much for so little body language.

He’s not fighting a lump in his throat, he’s not. The emotion he’s feeling cannot be hurt or sadness, because he’s processed all of those emotions over the past months, catalogued and noted each one, quietly slid under the known tag of ‘parental issues’.

This is something else, something uncontrollable he feels that lies just under his sternum, inches away from his heart.

Eduardo stands up, ignoring the book as it lies, cover getting a little damp from the slightly dewy grass.

‘They told me I have to come back to see someone.’ Mark is looking over Eduardo’s shoulder at the closed glass doors of the ward. Eduardo’s back feels tight and he knows it can be seen in their reflection, but Mark isn’t the best at reading body language.

‘Yeah,’ Eduardo replies. They look at each other, and then the doors whirr open and Dustin comes crashing down the steps, Chris looking on after him with a weary expression on his face.

‘Hello manic Dustin,’ Eduardo comments dryly. Dustin just grins at him.

They swap numbers and say their goodbyes. It’s anticlimactic. No one cries, or runs after the car as it speeds away. There are no frantic text messages of love and platitudes, just a blond, a redhead and a brunet standing by the curb as the blue sedan pulls away from the cul-de-sac.

That pain under Eduardo’s sternum has turned to a hollow feeling which is much more familiar. Dustin nudges him.

‘Mario Kart?’

Eduardo doesn’t even shake his head, just picks up his book and heads back into his room. Chris comes along later but doesn’t try to pull him away from the slowly darkening hospital room.

Charlie tries, and fails, to get him to leave the room. Eduardo does three crosswords. He falls asleep still clothed.

Chris leaves a week after Mark does, smiling and looking like he’s in control of his compulsions at least for a little while. He’ll be in and out, Eduardo knows, because it’s standard for a patient with symptoms that don’t really remiss. Chris’ bed is empty for a day and a half so Dustin fills it whenever orderlies aren’t in the room, though they stare a little accusingly at the grinning ginger that just messed up the neat bed when they come in. Dustin talks to him, and Eduardo feels a little lighter, just for a while.

At the end of that day, Dustin sits on the edge of Eduardo’s bed, with one leg folded under himself and the other hanging off the side. ‘I read the paper that day, some teenager being accused of animal cruelty because of forced cannibalism.’

Eduardo swallows, and puts his book down carefully, bookmark brushing against the spine.

‘I didn’t want to tell you before because I didn’t know how you’d take it, but I’m telling you now, because I think it’s important.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Eduardo says, looking him dead in the eye. ‘It was the tipping point for my father, that’s all.’

‘Hey,’ Dustin grins. ‘You’re CFO now. Thefacebook is great. It’s going to be great.’

‘I’m going to have to explain this to my father,’ Eduardo said, and the journalist looked at him sympathetically but not really comprehending. That quote ended up in the article. Anyone who read the tiny piece somewhere toward the back of the paper where the comics and crosswords were, knew a little bit more about Eduardo Saverin after that.

‘I know what you being a part of something means to your father.’

Mark is excited, extremely so, about a meeting that’s coming up. He tells Eduardo about it when he comes back for his weekly psych check-in. The meeting is in a month and it’s with a man named Sean Parker who Eduardo hasn’t really heard of until now. When he googles him once Mark has gone home again, he’s bombarded with story after story that convinces him that this guy is bad news.

Mark won’t listen. They exchange slightly icy text messages with no give from either side. The final text message before Mark comes back for his next psych appointment says i’m out here. i need your support, but you’re still in there, not here.

Eduardo ignores his cell after that. He stops his vague search for advertisers too, shuts himself off from thefacebook for a while. Whenever Dustin brings it up, mentions the coding he’s been able to do now that he’s stable - Eduardo hadn’t even known he was a programmer before Mark - Eduardo changes the subject or blocks him out completely.

The last visit Eduardo gets goes like this:

‘You need to come out and meet Sean with Chris and I. It’s great, Wardo, really.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You can,’

‘Maybe.’

then a text

‘we need you out here, Wardo. M.’

Dustin goes home. The ward goes back to the way it was before Bed Twenty, and Dustin and Chris became more than just fellow patients, became friends. It should be the same, Eduardo should feel the same, but it’s not. He feels trapped, not safe and warm. He feels lonely instead of free, and Charlie’s smiles don’t hold the same comfort.

On the Tuesday after Dustin goes home he has his usual enforced psychiatrist-related hour of silence. Instead of staring into space, he finds himself spending the whole time telling him everything, everything. He tells him about Mark and Chris and Dustin, about thefacebook and Sean Parker. He’s pretty sure he’s never seen anyone write so fast or look so shocked.

He still knows how many books there are on that shelf, but at least now he has someone nodding along in agreement about how much of a wild card Parker seems to be. Dr Peris doesn’t exactly agree with Eduardo, not in words at least, but it feels better to have shared with someone who wasn’t going to bite straight back.

He decides, somewhere toward the end of the session, that he’s going to take weekend leave.

Dr Peris almost falls out of his chair but nods enthusiastically, writing details down in Eduardo’s fairly blank file.

Eduardo says he can’t go back to Miami, and Dr Peris agrees completely, which endears him a little bit more to Eduardo. But he has to go somewhere that has been established as safe and solid. Eduardo proposes Mark’s family (Mark’s constant insistence has left an open invitation for Eduardo) and after a few conversations between the hospital and the Zuckerbergs, Eduardo is set to leave the ward on Friday and come back late Sunday night.

It takes less than half an hour. Everyone runs around quickly organising things, while Eduardo just sits and blinks.

Everything is going so fast.

He doesn’t know just how out of control it’s about to get.

New patients come in: a slender girl with shoulder-length black hair and sharp eyes shares the room that was Mark and Dustin’s with another black haired girl, shorter with soft features and skin the colour of milky coffee. Their names are Alice and Christy. Christy, they discover three days later, has a penchant for setting things on fire.

(She gets moved to the closed ward after the lock-down and the fire brigade, and the hours spent in the kitchen while patients gossipped and drank bad tea and even worse coffee. Eduardo sits by himself in the corner. Had Mark, Chris or Dustin been there, he would have had someone to talk to. Instead, he has his knees pulled up to his chin and he just watches the calamity, letting the acrid smell of burning fabric drift past him.)

Despite the excitement, Eduardo just feels cold. He spends more time in his room, and occasionally doesn’t even get dressed until he is prodded out of his room by Charlie or one of the other nurses to go over to the pool.

One night, after the new patient sharing his room has pulled the curtain around his little compartmentalised area, Eduardo pulls his curtain aside and slips into the hall. The tiles are cold on his bare feet and they make him shiver, but he keeps going. Halfway down the long walkway of closed, impersonal hospital doors, he slides down the wall next to the room labelled ‘the pink room’.

For the first time in months, Eduardo cries. He cries in the darkened hallway, late at night where there’s a reprieve from the watching eyes and the open arms of comforters.

All day Friday, Eduardo goes through the motions of his usual routine with a heavy feeling in his stomach. He’s nervous and excited at the same time, hesitating over the morning menu sheet and wondering whether he should tick boxes for that night’s evening meal in case Mark decides he doesn’t want Eduardo after all.

In the end, he doesn’t fill it out at all, just leaves the yellow sheet of paper on the table.

It feels like a victory, but he’s not sure why.

Charlie is the one he signs out with that night. She smiles at him and checks to make sure he has all of his meds for the weekend.

‘Eduardo,’ she says softly, one hand on his left arm, ‘come back if you need to. Call us if you have to. We’ll send a cab, someone will come get you. Do not feel like you have to stay out if you feel uncomfortable. Promise me.’

He nods.

‘Promise me,’ she repeats.

‘Okay,’ he says, and feels a little patronised, ‘I promise.’

Mark picks him up and they drive quietly away from the hospital. Mark isn’t exactly one for pointless conversation, so it’s not uncomfortable. Eduardo just looks out the window and watches sights he had almost forgotten.

They stop off at a Safeway on the way. Mark leaves Eduardo in aisle three with a ‘I’ll be back,’ and disappears.

Eduardo doesn’t know quite what happens after that. His head fills with grey nothing, throat closes over. He has never, ever had a problem with large or small spaces or strangers, but right at this moment, alone in a strange place where it feels like he can’t escape, he begins to sweat. He can feel is pulse racing, and the room swims. He leans against the shelves lining the aisle, one hand on a large bag of basmati rice. He wants to vomit, heat creeps up his chest and his arms while cold rushes down his spine. He feels like he’s underwater, upside down but upright, hot and cold and completely overwhelmed.

It’s gone just as suddenly as it came, leaving only a trace of panic, and his slightly damp undershirt.

Mark comes back brandishing a pint of milk. He grabs a bag of rice from the shelf and a couple of packets of ramen from a few yards down the aisle and then Eduardo follows him to the checkout.

Eduardo doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t call Charlie.

He does want to go home, but he’s not a coward.

Mark’s family are wonderful. His mother, Eduardo learns, is a psychiatrist. She passes the rice to him and explains that this is one of the reasons C let Eduardo stay with them.

Eduardo is slightly amused that Mark was in hospital when his mother was a psychiatrist, but he doesn’t say anything.

The dining room is barely on the edge of warm, but Mark doesn’t seem to agree. He pulls his hoodie off, and Eduardo catches a flash of those plastic-wrapped wrists before he looks away.

Something worries at the back of his mind, but he pushes it aside.

One of Mark’s sisters won’t stop staring at him. She complains loudly just after Eduardo spoons some more beans onto his plate, after that she stares grumpily at her plate.

Eduardo has this feeling Mark may have kicked her, but he doesn’t mention that either. There are so many unsaid things building up in his brain, but he’s used to staying silent.

The night is comfortable, quiet and safe. The awful panic doesn’t come back, and Eduardo settles a little. He doesn’t see Mark’s eyes lie on him after he’s closed his eyes, just drifts off into his soft, medicated sleep.

Five minutes before they are meant to meet with Sean Parker, Chris meets them outside the restaurant, rubbing his hands together and blowing on his fingertips. Eduardo breathes out and watches the air fog in front of him.

The dinner doesn’t go exactly how Eduardo had expected it to go. Parker is not the level of awful that Eduardo had envisioned. He’s worse.

‘A million dollars isn’t cool. Do you know what’s cool? A billion dollars.’

After completely winning Mark over he freezes Eduardo out completely and Eduardo is left there only barely listening in. Chris seems to be engaged, but he’s playing with the napkin from the table, folding it into three even parts, then unfolding and refolding it again in the exact same way.

Ten minutes go past without Eduardo opening his mouth at all. Then Sean says ‘do you kids want some drinks?’ and things get worse.

‘We’re underage,’ Eduardo says quickly, and Sean just rolls his eyes.

‘They won’t card you,’ he laughs. Mark is looking at Eduardo with a disgruntled, exasperated expression. ‘Four Beck’s?’ He raises one perfect eyebrow, and quicker than any of the three can argue, Sean’s placed the order.

Eduardo pushes his away from him as soon as it arrives, and Sean looks at him, that eyebrow raised again, but with a completely different meaning this time.

‘Don’t drink?’

‘He’s on leave from hospital. If they found out, he’d get kicked out,’ Mark says, and yelps when Chris’ leg shifts next to Eduardo’s. Eduardo assumes Chris kicked him under the table.

‘Hospital? You sick or something?’

‘It’s a psych ward,’ Mark explains, his face the usual deadpan. Eduardo feels sick, betrayal rushing through him. He knows Mark doesn’t mean anything by it but it hurts nonetheless. He swallows around the uncomfortable pressure in his throat, buried beneath his Adam’s apple.

‘Yeah,’ Eduardo says into the sudden silence. ‘Excuse me,’ and then he all but bolts for the men’s room, jogging once he’s pushed the main bathroom door open and crashing into one of the two stalls, barricading the door behind him.

He lets the hot-cold feeling rush over him, strips off his suit jacket and loosens his tie completely. His shirt has cuff-links on it, hiding his ID band, so he doesn’t bother trying to roll the sleeves up, just pulls the bottom out from his slacks and lets the cool air rush under it. It doesn’t seem to help much but at least it’s something. He slams the lid of the toilet down so he doesn’t have to look at the water, and presses his open palms to the cool walls of the stall. Sweat beads along his spine, he can feel the moisture sitting there, uncomfortable and slipping down beneath his shoulder blades.

He lets himself collapse onto the floor. No one is here to see him fall, it’s okay. The tiles are a comfort, cool and constant and dry. He lets the feelings pass in quiet solitude, feels the rush of blood in his head subside and drain into his peaceful stability.

He’s vaguely aware of noise outside the door, Chris calling ‘Eduardo,’ and then the noise of him bending over to look under the stall, then ‘shit, Eduardo!’

Eduardo groans then frantically scrabbles for the lock on the door, pulling it in and coming face to face with Chris. ‘It’s fine,’ he babbles quickly. ‘It’s fine. I just- I just dropped something.’

Chris is obviously not convinced. ‘Your tie,’ he says, and gestures to the line of silk that has fallen from Eduardo’s neck and onto the floor.

‘Yeah,’ Eduardo says, scooping it up and snagging his jacket off the door’s hook. He splashes his face at the sink and then pulls his tie on and adjusts his collar before he slips the coat back on. Chris still looks concerned. ‘I’m fine,’ Eduardo says.

Chris just blinks at him, and then washes his hands twice before they leave.

Fine, Eduardo thinks. I won’t say anything if you won’t.

The conversation after that is more than a little stilted. Sean still just talks to Mark but he keeps flicking little glances at Eduardo, like Eduardo’s about to freak out right then and there and put a knife to his throat.

A part of Eduardo wants to just yell ‘I met them in a psych ward. It’s not just me,’ but he doesn’t. He has practice in not saying things. Mark doesn’t even try.

He lasts the entire weekend and doesn’t even say anything when they’re alone together, Mark driving him back to the hospital, eating a red vine and indicating simultaneously.

‘So what do you think,’ Mark says finally once they’ve pulled into the only free park outside the ward. It’s a disabled park, but Mark doesn’t seem to care. Eduardo unbuckles his seatbelt and lets it whip home over his body.

‘Yeah, sure, let’s drop the ‘the’,’ he says wearily.

‘I mean about Sean.’

Eduardo sighs and closes his eyes. ‘I don’t like him, Mark.’

‘You ran off during the conversation.’

‘You told him I was in a psych ward,’ Eduardo snaps. He loops his arm through the strap of his overnight bag and pushes the passenger door open. ‘Thank your mom for her hospitality for me.’

He storms into the ward. If Mark waits outside the hospital at all, Eduardo doesn’t know.

Three days later, Eduardo is in the day room when the PA calls out his name and bed number to collect a phone call. There is an extension in the linen room, where the door can be locked and privacy can be ensured. This is the first phone call he’s ever gotten via the hospital; he has his cell, so why would anyone call the ward?

He finds out when he answers it: it’s his father, whose calls he’s been screening for months.

After a few minutes of awkward Portugese, his father slips into English and says;

‘Now when are you going to stop this nonsense and come home?’

The room pitches. All of his hair stands on end, stomach tumbling. He can’t hear anything except the buzzing in his ears, can’t see around the murky blackness that’s edging his vision. He blinks, tries to form words, but all he can find in his minds eye is white white white blankness.

‘Pai,’ he says instead, forcing the words past his teeth, rolling off a tongue that feels swollen. He doesn’t collapse but the cold in his lower back is too much, prickling and achingly icy. He crumples to the floor, knocking towels flying. The heat between his cheekbones and ears pulses in a steady rhythm now, thrumming a war drum.

He feels pathetic, but he’s frozen, words all jumbled and there and present now, but nonsensical and wrongwrongwrong. He hits the call button.

Two nurses pull the door open. One is called Eleanor, the queen bee of the ward. The other Eduardo doesn’t know that well. Eleanor whispers across to the other nurse to go get Charlie, and then it’s just Eduardo and Eleanor in the tiny room.

‘Eduardo. Eduardo,’ his father snaps impatiently. ‘Why are you being so disrespectful? I asked you a question.’

Eleanor reaches over with a tenderness Eduardo had never seen in her before and prises the phone from his icy, rigid fingers.

His ear is hot where the receiver was. The lack of noise there hums with nothingness.

‘Eduardo,’ Charlie says and oh, when did she get there? ‘Eduardo, can you blink for me?’

He hadn’t realised he wasn’t, but now it’s obvious. His eyes ache, feeling the way they did after a windy day at the beach in Miami. He blinks.

‘Great. Can you swallow these?’

They’re tiny and white. Easy. He takes them both together, and swirls the water that downs them afterwards around in his mouth before swallowing. Charlie offers him her hand, and it’s obvious afterwards that yes, he can stand. He’s up before he realises the effort it takes him, feeling the world right itself around him again, just a little.

His heart is still tearing itself apart at the seams.

Charlie takes him back to his room, and he feels like a little child again, lost in the giant space in his head, in his body. Not long after, he’s fully submerged, gone into the sweet depths of the tiny white pills.

Mark calls, Eduardo answers. Somewhere in there he says yes to something and then phone banks eighteen thousand dollars (eighteen always feels significant to him now) across to the related account labelled thefacebook.

Had he been more cogent, he might have argued with the concept of California, and maybe waited a few days before finally giving into Mark. He’s starting to see a pattern here. Mark asks, Eduardo listens, and Eduardo gives.

At least that phone call didn’t have any Portugese in it.

Mark does ask him to come out to California though. Eduardo can’t. He can’t. He tells Mark that, smiling as he does so, reaching out to the end of his bed with his toes and feeling the lazy stretch tug up his body. He feels loose, his eyelids warm and heavy and comfortable. He hasn’t had the capacity to feel this safe in weeks.

The money flies across to Mark for the summer.

The next day he can barely think through the intense anxiety gripping at his stomach. It would be poor form for him to rescind the money he’d given Mark, but the idea of California, based solely on the insistence of Sean Parker, doesn’t fill him with great confidence.

When he’s forced to talk about the phone call and what happened in the linen room, he chokes on his words, swallows around them. They stick to the roof of his mouth like peanut butter, not wanting to come out. Dr Peris looks at him with a tinge of disappointment in his eyes and Eduardo feels this clenching motion in his abdomen that makes him want to cry.

‘My father,’ he finally grits out, forcing the words out after five attempts.

Dr Peris believes he knows what’s going on between Eduardo and his father. Eduardo likes to think that Dr Peris is oversimplifying the situation if he thinks it is just based on the same Freudian bullshit all psychiatrists seem to fall back on.

(But then again, maybe he’s right, and maybe it is almost that simple. All roads seem to lead back to his father somehow.)

An hour and a half of fighting past roadblocks in his mind that frustrate him and make Dr Peris smile encouragingly passes. Eduardo swears that by the end of the session his psychiatrist just wants to reach out and slap him into talking. But no physical violence has occurred by the time the PA announces lunch and Eduardo slides down the hall, head down. The hallway consists of off-white tiles inter-spliced with blue ones. He counts them to the guest day room and then stares at the walls until he hits the kitchen. He sits in eighteen; has done since Mark left, since no one made him move.

There’s a tap on his shoulder and nervous fidgeting sounds from behind him. The weird silence that Eduardo has held himself in since the psychiatrist’s office breaks. He turns his whole body around in his chair and looks up to see blue eyes and well combed blond hair. Chris laughs self consciously and runs his hand through his hair, letting his sleeve fall back to show his white hospital band.

‘Hey,’ Eduardo says quietly.

‘Hi,’ Chris replies. He takes a seat at number nineteen. Eileen is out for the night he explains (and Eduardo marvels at how fast Chris picked up the ward’s grapevine again) so he might as well have dinner with Eduardo.

Eduardo pokes at his peas once his plate arrives, while Chris fidgets with his knife and fork before pulling them out of their safe paper bag and holding them firmly in his hand. Eduardo is impressed.

‘I’m doing better,’ Chris says with a grin. Eduardo ducks his head away.

‘I-’

‘How are you?’ Chris asks offhandedly, spearing a baby carrot and shoving it whole into his mouth.

Eduardo shrugs and empties a packet of margarine spread into his mashed potatoes. Chris just looks at him knowingly.

‘How’s Dustin?’ Chris hasn’t moved from staring at him, hasn’t twitched his fingers on his cutlery.

‘Mark is good,’ Chris replies evenly. ‘Excited about going to California. He got a group of programming students from Harvard together and made them audition for internships. His audition process wasn’t the most normal from all accounts.’

‘You weren’t there?’

Chris shrugs and finally scoops some peas onto his fork. ‘I’ve been spending time with my parents. They’re still a little freaked out about me going into hospital, so I’m trying to calm them down.’

‘Mmm,’ Eduardo accedes, turning back to his food.

‘I’m going back to Harvard next semester. I’ve changed all my classes to audits for this semester, easier than getting fails marked down.’ He hesitates. ‘Were you at college? You know, before?’

Eduardo lets his face slip into a half smile, eyes on his plate and away from Chris. ‘I didn’t go back after the winter break,’ he replies, voice muted. ‘But I was doing Econ at Harvard before.’

‘I think I saw you in the Yard somewhere during Freshman year,’ Chris says. ‘You looked familiar.’

They finish their meals in silence, and Eduardo is playing with his half-melted Dixie cup when Chris says, tentatively, ‘are you going to go back?’

It’s not like the thought hasn’t occurred to him before, but he likes to push it away. It’s easier than focusing on all those things that would make his father happier, to even strive for reaching the barest minimum of his acceptance. Disappointing him completely is more freeing. Eduardo hates himself when he goes to sleep each night, just before the meds kick in, the slow guilt that rises from the hollow of his collarbones, sliding up the right side of his larynx and resting like a tie to his heart. The whisper that follows just cries ‘I want to kill myself’ and he pushes itt away each night. It had become weaker as the distance had stretched between him and Miami, but after the phone call, it had returned with a vengeance.

‘Perhaps,’ he murmurs, and leaves the table.

Dinners are early at the ward, so it’s still light out when he signs himself out of the ward. He heads for the peace war garden, ignoring the slow stride of footsteps behind him. After he folds himself into the white bench a couple feet from the statue, he just waits for Chris’ appearance.

‘He misses you,’ Chris says quietly, standing in front of him.

Eduardo has been thinking about his father, and is confused briefly before he realises that Chris means Mark.

‘He says he needs you to go out to California.’ Chris says, pondering. He eyes the bench off before taking a step toward it. He licks his lower lip. ‘But I think he just needs you next to him.’

Eduardo’s jaw works. ‘I-’

‘You can’t, I know, Eduardo. But,’ he sighs. ‘I do think it would be... Sean-’

‘Sean Parker?’ Eduardo spits, standing up. ‘Sean Parker is not a part of this company.’

‘I know,’ Chris says quickly, holding his hands out in a placating gesture. Eduardo sighs, and all of the fight drains out of him. He collapses back onto the bench, one hand pressed against his temple.

‘I want to go out to California; I want to keep an eye out for Sean. I’m trying,’ Eduardo admits before he can stop himself. ‘But it’s so hard.’

Chris has obviously weighed up the pros and cons of the bench, and he stretches his hoodie down so that the edge touches his thighs before he sits tentatively on the edge of the seat.

‘I know,’ he swallows. ‘I’m back here, aren’t I?’ He smiles.

Eduardo looks at him. All of a sudden his heart just burns too hot and a shiver ripples across his shoulders. He leans into Chris’ space, lips near to the blond’s.

Chris pulls back, stands up. ‘No,’ he says hastily, ‘no, Eduardo-’

The hurt of rejection is like a punch to the neck, painful and winding.

‘You don’t want me,’ Chris says quickly. ‘You want something else. I can’t give that to you, Eduardo,’ he says, and backs away. Eduardo closes his eyes and lets the pounding pain in his head die away to the disappearing footsteps of Chris.

Eduardo is in the kitchen that night staring out at the parking lot, the lines on the asphalt glinting in the light radiating from the windows around the long ward. He started out reading a book that Dr Peris recommended to him but now he’s just listening to the sounds of the ward rustle around him, beeping in some rooms, soft murmurs in corridors and shuffle, shuffle shuffle of slippered feet.

The dining room is the biggest room in the ward. It’s just the standard college dining room set up: long tables and chairs with little sticker numbers to differentiate the places. There are two doors, one that connects with the far side of the ward where Eduardo never goes because it’s usually return patients with PTSD or something else that needs hospital returns for evaluation. Then there’s the door next to the fridge which is where Eduardo usually comes in.

Chris comes in quietly, entering from the PTSD-RV end of the room. He pulls the chair opposite Eduardo away from the table and folds himself into it. Eduardo watches in his peripheral vision, not turning away from the window.

‘I’m sorry,’ Chris says softly.

It’s happening so often now that Eduardo is beginning to stop noticing it, but his throat tightens for the n-th time that day. He smiles wanly. ‘Don’t be, it was my fault.’ He doesn’t turn away from the window but he sees Chris’ fingers moving, spinning a silver object around on the table.

‘I’m only here for a week,’ Chris explains. ‘They want to readmit me a few times this year.’ He frowns down at the table.

Eduardo looks away from the window. Chris has moved his hand away and Eduardo sees the spinning silver is a tiny tin shark.

‘Yeah,’ he replies. He clenches his teeth together and then says, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’

Chris just smiles. After that, it’s not even awkward.

He’s just sitting in his room a few days later when;

‘Wardo!’ Eduardo’s face grins before his conscious brain figures out what’s happening. Then a large Dustin is hitting him on the shoulder with the flat of his hand.

‘Hey Dustin.’

Dustin faces him, a broad grin on his face. ‘Just dropping Chris off,’ he says. ‘It’s after visiting hours anyway.’ He looks up at the clock where it very plainly tells them that it’s a quarter to ten.

Chris stands to the left of him, a couple feet back. Eduardo looks over Dustin’s shoulder to see Mark leaning awkwardly on the door frame of his room.

‘Hi,’ he says. Mark blinks a couple of times, says ‘hi’.

‘Well,’ Chris says, smiling a little. ‘I have to go find Eleanor before they start worrying that I’m not coming back.’ Dustin reluctantly follows him out of the room, pushing past Mark.

‘You’re going to California soon,’ Eduardo says off hand.

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you sure you want to?’

Mark just blinks at him, hand in one pocket. ‘We have over a hundred and fifty thousand members now, Wardo.’

‘Congratulations,’ Eduardo says dryly. ‘Congratulations.’

He knows it’s pointless now, but it seems only right to broadcast his concerns about Sean, though Mark is looking at him like Eduardo is the one that’s paranoid.

Okay, so he might be a little paranoid, but he’s been so out of the loop that he feels like he’s barely holding onto the concept with his fingertips. He points out the things that worry him most; the drugs and Sean’s apparently loose morals.

‘You don’t know that any of that’s true,’ Mark says.

‘You can read about it.’

‘And I can read about you torturing birds,’ Eduardo sucks in a sharp breath, feeling like he’s been winded. ‘Since when does reading about something make it true?’

Eduardo turns toward the window and closes his eyes.

Sometimes the room feels too big for its contents. The bare bed next to him, which has held three different people across the last three weeks, in and out like a stone skipping on the surface of a lake.

Even the stone that skips the longest always sinks inevitably, Eduardo thinks.

There’s movement behind him as Mark sits down on the empty bed. Eduardo waits a few beats, tries to control his aching heart. He turns around to Mark’s apologetically blank face before joining him on the bed. The silence is awkward. Not just a slight quiet while they consider what’s been said, but awkward while Eduardo frantically thinks of something to say, knowing that Mark isn’t even trying.

‘I bought you an open ticket to Palo Alto,’ Mark says bluntly. ‘Out of the account you opened. If you want to come to California.’

Eduardo doesn’t know what to say in reply to this. He opens his mouth to reply when Dustin is a whirlwind of ginger and grins all of a sudden, standing in the doorway. Chris is behind him, a little red, eyes on Dustin’s shoulder.

‘Well we should go,’ Mark says, actually looking at Eduardo. Eduardo is looking at his own bed, slightly rumpled next to the window.

‘I’ll be back in a few days,’ Dustin promises, body toward Eduardo but his eyes on Chris. Chris smiles and Eduardo can’t stop himself from doing so also.

‘See you then,’ Eduardo says.

Dustin comes back to see Chris, but Eduardo doesn’t see him. Eduardo is sure it has nothing to do with him, even as he sets his signet ring spinning on the top of Dr Peris’ desk. Dr Peris has always said that this was a sign of nervousness, Eduardo playing with his ring, but Eduardo chooses to ignore it when it happens. Dustin is busy with Facebook; the site is getting bigger and bigger.

Dr Peris comes in while the ring is on its second rotation. Eduardo slams his palm down on it to stop the whirring noise of metal spinning on wood, but the psychiatrist just smiles.

‘How are you doing, Eduardo?’

Eduardo looks at his hand, laying bare and obvious on the doctor’s desk.

‘Fine,’ Eduardo says. ‘I’ve been thinking about some things.’

Dr Peris looks like he’s ready to jump on this and ask about these ‘things’, the kind of open statement psychiatrists would love to get more information on. But he stops himself for some reason and says ‘Eduardo, I think it would be good for you to go home. Maybe not Miami,’ he amends, as Eduardo’s body stiffens, ‘but somewhere in Cambridge, stay with some friends? Student housing at Harvard is cheaper during the summer vacation period, I’ve heard.’

Eduardo lifts his hand to look at the silver ring.

‘I’ve been thinking about my father.’

Dr Peris sighs, and clicks open his pen.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Epilogue