Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

There was no shortage of that—night offered all of the cold, wet air you could ever want.

“Okay,” I said. “Air. We’ve got it.”

“You missed art today,” he said. There was no particular inflection behind it, just a statement of fact.

“I did,” I said. “I was—”

I was about to say “not feeling well” when he cut me off.

“You were researching at the National Gallery?”

I hadn’t told him this particular little fib. I’d told Jazza. When had they had time to exchange that information? And why had they exchanged it? And why hadn’t I come up with something better to tell Jazza? Because I’d been busy , that’s why. Okay, better question—when was I going to shut up and explain this?

“I…yes. I was doing my project? That Mark is having me do? Because I’m behind?”

“You missed art history to work on art history?”

“Well, it sounds stupid when you put it like that—”

“What’s the project on?”

“What?”

“What were you doing research on?”

This took me completely by surprise. I couldn’t think of any paintings. Any. In the entire world.

He knew. I had never gone to the museum. In the chill and the dark, with the damp creeping into my clothes, the world was suddenly very foreign and unfriendly. And when I didn’t answer, he stood up and paced in front of the bench.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he said.

“Do what?”

He inhaled loudly through his nose and ground one of his heels slowly into the grass.

“On Wednesday night,” he said, “where did you go?”

“What?”

“Wednesday?”

Wednesday…what had I been doing on Wednesday?

“You were with some guy,” he prompted me.

Of course. On Wednesday I had gone out with Callum. Callum, he of the many muscles, who almost played professional soccer. The fact that Jerome knew who I was with made me…well, actually kind of furious.

“Did you follow me or something?”

“No, I didn’t follow you. A few of the year elevens saw you.”

I handled that badly. I raised my hands in apology.

“Sorry,” I said. “I mean…he’s a friend of mine. Just a friend. You’re being paranoid.”

That was probably the wrong thing to say. In fact, I was 100 percent certain that was the wrong thing to say, but I said it anyway.

“Paranoid?” he said. “You’re lying to me.”

Well, he was right about that. But all the things he was thinking, those were wrong. Which meant that I had to do some very fast talking. Where, where, where could I have been?

“I was at therapy !”

And I said it loudly. Really loudly. I startled him, I startled myself, and I startled some little creature crawling around near the trash next to the bench, because I heard it scurry off.

“Therapy?” he said.

“Therapy,” I repeated.

“And that guy…”

“Is in my therapy group.”

“So you’ve been going to therapy and you decided to…”

“Lie?” I said. “I said that to Jazza because she asked where I was and the museum was the first thing I could think of. I never said anything to you because I didn’t want you to have the girlfriend who always talked about her therapy. I mean, I’m already American. That would make me super American. Don’t you think we’re all in therapy or something?”

I don’t like admitting this about myself, but I lie well. I come from a long line of people who can tell a story, who can elaborate on reality. I can sound convincing. And my words were having the right effect. Jerome was finally looking at me.

“There’s nothing wrong with therapy,” he said.

“I never said there was. I just don’t want to talk about it all the time. I don’t always want to be the girl who got stabbed, okay?”

All that, perfectly true. In fact, so true that my eyes were watering a bit and my voice cracked a little.

“You can talk to me,” he said. “You can tell me what’s going on. That’s kind of the point.”

I hated this. I hated lies, and I hated pity. I think I hated pity more. I hated looking damaged and weird and Jerome wanting to talk about feelings. I was so sick of feelings.

“I want to help,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry—”

“Forget it,” I said. “The point is, there’s nothing going on. There’s nothing to tell you.”

Oh, except that I took down a murderous ghost today. And went to a mental institution to interview a murderer. Except for that.

“I can’t believe I did this,” he said.

Now his voice was honeyed with guilt, and my stomach was churning slowly, like a soft-serve ice cream machine.

That was what did it. The guilt. This emotional mess that I didn’t want and I didn’t need. I liked making out with Jerome and I liked that Jerome existed in the boyfriend sense, but I didn’t want to deal with all of his feelings about my feelings.

“We shouldn’t do this,” I heard myself say.

“Do what? Fight?”

“This,” I said again, and flopped my hands around in a way that was supposed to mean us. This thing that we were.

Amazingly, Jerome spoke hand-flop. I saw it hit him, and I saw him try to deflect it by quickly looking away, as if it didn’t hurt.

“Break up,” he said. “That’s what you want.”

This wasn’t his fault. I had lied to him—not because I was evil, but because I had to. My life was a disaster and I was sick of problems and he was just one more. Breaking up made things simple. For me, anyway.

I felt queasy now, and I just wanted it all to stop. I wanted to go inside.

“I’m going in,” I said.

He didn’t reply. It seemed so harsh, what I was doing. I hadn’t planned it, and I seemed to be moving on autopilot, walking away, leaving him there on the bench.

Then there was Jazza. Jazza, I was certain, had asked me where I was for a reason. She had reported it to Jerome. My suspicion was confirmed when I stepped into the room and she immediately pulled off her headphones. German mumblings leaked into the air. She set the knitting aside like she might have to make a sudden leap out of the window.

“You’re back early,” she said, her voice wavering a bit.

I sat on the edge of my bed and faced her. Jazza was too compulsively honest to keep up any façade.

“Did you talk to Jerome?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Are things okay?”

“I wasn’t cheating.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“But he did.”

I could see her choosing her words carefully—plucking each one delicately out of the lexicon in her head, as if she were picking up tubes full of explosive chemicals.

“I don’t know what he thought,” she said. “But he was concerned. And confused. And…I think you’ve been coping with this, and no one knows what that’s been like for you and we all respect that and…it’s…it’s hard to know? What you’re thinking? But I told him to just talk to you and…”

“We broke up.”

A widening of the eyes.

“Oh…but…no! But…nothing was…”

“I just can’t do this right now.”

“Oh.”

A more final oh. An oh that sounded understanding. She got off her bed and came and sat next to me on mine.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“That’s all anyone has asked me for weeks.”

“Oh, I’m sorry…I…”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I really am. I might even be too fine. I should be upset, but I’m not. I’m just…nothing. I just did it. I had to.”

All of that was true. I didn’t really know why I had done it—why I had just broken up with the only actual boyfriend I’d ever had. But I just knew I had to.