Read Online Black Box by Julie Schumacher - Free Book Online Page B

watch Mom get all bent out of shape, that’s your decision. I’m just trying to stay awake at school like everyone else.” She was looking at me, tight-lipped, trembling, waiting.
    We were both waiting. Leaves were falling from the tree above us.
    “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not going to tell.”
    “Thanks, Elvin,” Dora said. “Sorry if I’ve been a jerk lately.”
    “You aren’t a jerk.”
    We started walking again. “Being in a piss-poor mood is one of the side effects of some of these drugs,” Dora said. “Freaking mood swings and irritability. Did I mention that?”
    “No, but I guess I’m finding out about it,” I said.
    We cut across the Baylors’ yard and saw Mr. Baylor in his bathrobe at the kitchen window. He lifted his newspaper and pretended not to see us.
    “Wacky old buzzard,” Dora said.
    The bus was out on the main road with its blinker on. Dora grabbed my sleeve at the elbow and ran. “Pick it up. Move your legs!” she yelled, holding on to me and laughing. “Come on, Layton, can’t you
run
?”

38

    A good day. Two good days. Dora went to school and came home and didn’t seem to care about the kids who gawked and whispered about her in the hall. At dinner, she entertained us with an imitation of her science teacher, Mr. Pflaum.
    And then a bad day. Dora refused to get out of bed. My mother called in sick to work, brought Dora’s pills upstairs in a cup, and told me to eat something before I went to school.

39

    As a precaution, my mother said (not that anything was wrong, and not that Dora wasn’t doing well, because of course she was), my parents had decided to sign all four of us up for family therapy.
    “You’ve got to be kidding,” Dora said.
    “Of course I’m not kidding.” My mother smiled a tight little smile. “It’ll give us a chance to talk to each other. And to meet other families. Families who might be going through…”
    “Going through what?” Dora asked. She was back to picking at her fingers.
    “Well, through something similar. To what we’re going through.”
    When Dora asked what “we” were going through, my mother said she would rather get into that conversation at a later time.
    The group met on the fourth Friday of every month at Lorning. (“My favorite place. They have such a nice mental ward,” Dora said.) On our way to our first session, she draped one of her legs across my lap and fell asleep in the car.
    The group—about eighteen of us—met in a conference room with a low, pockmarked ceiling. We sat in a circle of plastic chairs. The girl on my right had a lot of metal in her face and what looked like a homemade tattoo on the side of her neck. I couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe a bat or a butterfly.
    Dora passed me a note by scribbling something on a slip of paper, then crumpling it up and dropping it at my feet. I picked it up.
K jmtc jgt yaacqqmpgcq,
it said.
I love her accessories
. Dora had drawn an arrow pointing toward the tattooed girl.
    The woman who was running the group—I noticed that she blinked every few seconds as if wearing ill-fitting contact lenses—asked us to reflect about our family’s methods of communication.
    After several minutes of discussion, the family across from us tried to agree that they wouldn’t yell at each other as often. “Not so much as we’re used to,” the mother said.
    The blinking woman said she thought everyone in the room could probably benefit from the family’s comments. Calm and consistent ways of speaking were especially important for people with depression and mood swings, she said.
    I took a pen out of my pocket and wrote back to Dora.
Aqw lctcp vqnf kc: yjcv gq kv jgic vq zc fgrtguugf? You never told me: what is it like to be depressed?
I crumpled the note and tossed it under her chair. She quickly stepped on it without looking. A minute later, she bent as if to scratch her leg, then picked the note up.
    One of the fathers on the opposite side of the circle complained