THREE YEARS AGO
The hospital admitted a mean, skinny boy today. Pink shades flood his face in a butterfly rash, its wings kissing his nose.
He cradles a cardboard box in his arms, stalling at the door of his new room. It used to belong to someone else. Not knowing what state that someone else left in brings hesitance to his step.
Eventually, he settles on the bed, the way you do on a bed that isn’t yours yet. His legs hang off the edge, shoes weighing down his ankles like cinder blocks welded to sticks.
“I don’t need to change schools,” he says, looking out the window with a reclusive attitude.
“You should try to make some friends, Neo.”
Neo’s mother fumbles with the cross around her neck. She stands as far into the corner as she can. Her stress runs rampant, a kind of untouchable worry for her child that makes her grow distant.
“C’mon, son.” His father is a taller man, big-armed, big-voiced, the opposite of Neo. He looks like he calls coffee joe and complains about the government. “Just because you have to stay here for a while doesn’t mean you can’t meet some new people. Once you’re back in school, you’ll have a fresh perspective. Get your head out of those books, yeah?”
“This is a hospital, dad,” Neo says. “The only people I’ll meet won’t be here long.”
I don’t hear any more than that.
My post is at the nurse’s station today, which happens to be right across his room. Since he’s new, the blinds aren’t closed, and the door is propped open. My curiosity gets the better of me when it’s given such a chance.
Eric notices.
“Have you met him?” he asks, going over charts, checking boxes, doing whatever it is Eric does. I shake my head no. “Why don’t you bring him his dinner tray?” He points at the cart. “Strike up a conversation.”
“Conversation?”
“Conversation.”
“I don’t know how those work.”
“He probably does. Bring him his tray.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“Yes. I have work to do, and you haven’t moved in hours. So get.” Eric’s pen is a mighty weapon. It pokes my forehead relentlessly, but Eric isn’t wrong about my not moving.
Doctors, patients, nurses, and techs walk through this hall all day. I watch them from behind the desk like a barnacle stuck to a ship’s hull. My life is spent people watching from different hulls throughout the hospital. Most moments I witness are fleeting, a few seconds’ worth of emotion to feed off of until the patients or visitors or strangers depart. Those moments sate my curiosity long enough to wait for the next one.
But there’s something different about Neo. He’s quiet. Silence starves my curiosity. So, around seven, when his parents are gone, I bring Neo his dinner.
He’s alone now.
As it turns out, alone, Neo has a lot more noise to him.
On the other side of the door, the cardboard box keeps watch, now empty. Papers spread about Neo’s bed, the sheets submerged in a sea of inked lines.
He is a boat, writing manically, without pause, pen dancing across the waves. A book rests in his lap. It ties the room together, a splash of color. The title, bold lettered, atop a cover withered at the edges, reads Great Expectations.
Neo doesn’t notice me gawking at first. He only glances in my direction, then, realizing I don’t have the look of a staff member, he glances a second time.
Suspicion laces his tone. “What are you doing?”
“Eric told me to bring your tray.”
Neo thins his eyes, flicking them to the tray and then back to me. “Did my parents send you?”
Ah. For a moment I thought he was worried I had plans to poison him. From his tone, I gather being sent by his parents would be much worse.
“No, Eric did.” I motion to the food, offering it. “Your tray.”
Neo doesn’t say anything to me after that. He just puts the tray on the bedside table and returns to his ocean. Before I leave, I catch a sliver of a line at the top of the page.
Humans have a knack for self-destruction. Only those of us who love broken things will ever know why.
Neo quickly shuffles the piece of paper beneath the others and shoots me a look. My curiosity isn’t welcome. I bow my head in apology and turn around, leaving Neo to his words and his books.
Despite his attitude, I leave pleased.
Because Neo isn’t quiet at all.
Neo is a writer.
—
For the next week of nights, I bring Neo his food. Every time, I steal a detail. He doesn’t brush his hair. His hands are impeccably clean, his fingers lean and long. His clothes are a size too large, baggy around his arms, never so much as a shade livelier than gray. He likes apples. He always eats his apples.
He spits out his pills. When his father visits, he is anxious. He flinches at little movements. When his mother visits, he is calm. When his parents visit together, he is sad.
Neo’s hand sometimes drops the pen. It wanders to his arm, thumb, and forefinger overlapping around his wrist like a noose. He squeezes till his knuckles go white. As if the bone could be made smaller.
As the nights go on, I grow bolder. I begin stealing his work.
You see, Neo and I never exchange any greetings. He never says thank you, and I never say you’re welcome. Our communication is a transfer of sustenance and a peek at a sentence or two.
Destruction is addictive, he writes. The more I am, the less I want to be. The less I am, the lesser I want to become.
That particular line plays with my head. It takes up space.
In a neighboring hall, I pace and ponder it.
Just as I turn on my heel to pace in the other direction, someone knocks into me. Our chests collide, and a tray loses balance in the person’s hands, clattering to the floor. It’s a familiar tray. One full of food I left in Neo’s room a half-hour ago.
Neo stands there for a moment. The plate’s been knocked upside down, jello cup split, and water spilled. He sighs at the mess.
It’s odd seeing him here. I don’t know what to make of him not sitting in a bed surrounded by literature.
“Just leave it,” he says, dropping to his knees, his pants wrinkling around sickly thin thighs. I wonder how such things can hold him upright.
I follow him to the floor and help him tidy up.
Neo scoffs. “You got that much of a savior complex?”
“No,” I say. “But I think you have an eating disorder.”
Neo’s face pales, snapping up, staring at me.
His body turns to stone.
I blink at the silence and the shred of space between us. I’ve never noticed how protruded his cheekbones are till now, nor how intense his eyes become when a sliver of emotion passes through.
“Whenever I bring your tray and come back to get it, only half the food is gone, and the plastic wrap is missing,” I explain, putting the empty cup on the left and the jello cup on the right. “I assume you wrap the food in it and then flush it down the toilet. If you were purging, your doctors would’ve noticed by now.”
Once the plate is at the center, napkins seeping the liquid, I finally meet Neo’s gaze. He still stares. Only it just now occurs to me that it isn’t confusion looking back at me.
It’s panic.
I pick up the tray, awkwardly handing it to him, trying to return some familiarity to our relationship, before asking, “Are you okay?”
Neo doesn’t answer. He doesn’t take my offering either. His face contorts, teeth tight against each other like grinding stones.
He grabs the corner of the tray and flips it over, its contents clattering against the tiles. Then, he marches off, leaving me to clean a second time, now, on my own.
—
That night, despite our encounter, I bring Neo his dinner.
He’s not writing. His anger has subsided. Instead, he bites his nails, twirls his pen, and taps his fingers like his mother does.
“Did you tell anyone?” he asks.
I put his tray down on the bedside table and shake my head.
He thins his eyes. “Why not? What do you want?”
“I’m not sure what it is I want,” I say. “But I’m not good at talking, so no, I haven’t told anyone.”
“Are you autistic or something?”
“No.”
“So you’re just weird?”
“Yes, I’ve been called weird before. But you’re not good at talking either.” Neo scowls, waiting. Insults come in two parts. “You’re mean,” I explain. “I don’t like what you say.”
“Get out, weirdo,” he mutters. He uncaps the pen with his teeth and lays it to his ocean. He doesn’t pay any mind to the plate of food.
I pay mind to his body. His clothes are loose, but they don’t conceal as much as he thinks they do. His skin is grayer, his neck and ankles considerably thinner than they used to be. He hasn’t left because he isn’t getting better. He’s getting worse.
It occurs to me that no one but Neo and I know about this part of him.
It’s a secret.
Secrets make people vulnerable. Vulnerability is an isolating force. It pushes people away.
“I like what you write,” I say, hand on the doorknob. Neo glances at me, and for a moment, I think, finally letting his guard down. “Your writing sounds like music.”
—
The next day, when I put Neo’s tray down, he doesn’t look up. Instead, he holds out something for me.
“A book?” I ask, looking at the cover. It’s rich with blues and gold, a pair of eyes looking back at me, and The Great Gatsby written in thin, elegant letters.
“Yes,” Neo says. “Read it.”
“Okay.”
I walk to the corner of the room and sit in the chair, opening the book to page one.
“Wha- not here!”
Neo doesn’t like company, I forget. His vulnerability doesn’t like it. So, I read on my own. In the hall. In waiting areas. In doctor’s lounges. In the gardens. I read anywhere I can till the pages I have left become fewer than the pages I’ve consumed.
“You almost done?” Neo asks, passing the nurse’s station.
“Mhm,” I nod, from behind the desk, enthralled in Gatsby’s torrid affairs.
Neo doesn’t say anything else. He places another book in front of me. This one is Lord of the Flies. It’s a bit smaller, a pig bleeding from the eyes on the cover. It takes me a day to read. I bring both books back to him that night.
“I didn’t like this one,” I tell him.
Neo quirks a brow, an apple in his hand. “Why not?”
“I don’t like violence.”
“It’s not real violence,” he says, tucking the books back in that box.
“It feels real.”
“Weirdo,” Neo grumbles. He grabs another book and hands it to me. This one is called Wuthering Heights. The cover has an old house on it, a woman and a man in the foreground beneath dreary skies.
There are so many books Neo teaches me. My curiosity turns absolutely fatal. It wonders about all those beautiful things Neo writes and what stories his mind could possibly conjure.
“Could I read something of yours?” I ask.
“No. Go away.”
And so, I’m off to read Wuthering Heights.
The next morning, I run, beyond eager to tell Neo how wonderful this story is. That it’s my favorite yet. That there isn’t a single word I could stop at. That despite the violence, this must be a masterpiece if it isn’t considered one already. I sprint to his room, no tray in hand.
“I thought we were past this!”
I skid to a halt before I even reach the door. It’s shut, but through the wall, voices bleed.
“Honey.” Neo’s mother. Through the blinds, I see her tight hands soften on her husband’s elbow. “Calm down.”
“Don’t defend him,” Neo’s father says, only it’s not said, it’s bitten. Papers crumple in his fist, papers I recognize. Neo’s mother holds the cross around her neck. Then, his father starts to tear Neo’s stories to shreds. Slowly. In full view of his son.
“It’s fine. You’re just confused. You’re young. I can’t blame you,” he says, creeping closer to the bed, his quiet footsteps threatening. He lifts the papers, tossing their remnants at Neo’s feet. “But don’t let me find this filth again, you understand?”
I don’t hear anymore. I just see Neo staring out the window, his face blank of anything. Only his thumb and forefinger move, tightening the loop around his wrist.
—
That night, I don’t bring Wuthering Heights when I arrive with Neo’s food. I set the tray down on the side table and observe the carnage. The cardboard box is knocked over on the floor. The books are gone, all but Great Expectations cradled in Neo’s arms.
“It’s not Monday,” Neo says. His voice is drained, wet at the back of his throat. He picks up the apple off the plate.
Mondays are apple days.
“I think apples grow any day they want.”
“Thank you,” Neo says, but he doesn’t take a bite.
I don’t ask him about the shredded pieces of paper on the floor or the broken pen oozing ink. I don’t ask where his books have gone, and he doesn’t ask me about Wuthering Heights.
“Are there TVs in this place?”
I nod. “Do you want to watch something?”
Neo shrugs. “Okay.”
TV rights are an expensive commodity. Sick kids get the perks when no one else is around. Eric’s generosity (and desperate attempts to get us to leave him alone) win us the remote.
Neo and I watch movies all night. During, Neo chews on his apple and spits into the trash when he thinks I’m not looking. Out of the room, distracted, he seems more at ease. If there’s one nice thing about books and movies, it’s that they can make you forget for a while.
Forgetting is an essential part of grief.
When I see Neo the next morning, I lay a copy of The Great Gatsby in his cardboard box and kick it under his bed.
That ever-suspicious brow of his rises. “I didn’t give you that.”
“I took it from the library.”
“You stole it?”
“I suppose.”
“Weirdo.”
“Can I read your stories now?”
“I don’t write stories.”
My head snaps in his direction. Never has one of Neo’s sentences quite broken my heart till that one.
My own grief morphs into tightness in my gut. Neo’s writing is something precious, even if it isn’t mine. It’s another secret we share. I read once, on the very corner of one of his pages, Paper is my heart. Pens are my veins. They return words I stole, blood to paint a scene.
If that’s true, a cemetery is all that remains of Neo’s heart. It lays in a pile of rubble on his bedroom floor like the outline of a dead body. He hasn’t bothered to pick up the pieces. He knows his heart will only shatter again if he does.
Neo’s father is a taker, and he has nothing material left to steal. When it’s only him who visits, Neo is never unscathed. The first time, it’s a bruise, bottle green, and patchy purple. When Eric asks what happened, Neo says he fell in the bathroom. The second time, it’s blood, the back of Neo’s head stained with splatter spots. Some of his hair has fallen out, or, more likely been pulled.
There are other incidents, but we never talk about them.
So, every day, I bring Neo apples. Every day, he eats them to the core. We watch movies at night. We go to the library in the afternoons. He says he’s learning French, so I help him when time allows.
There are days we can do none of those things. There are days pain lashes at Neo without warning as his body rejects itself, an aggressive civil war.
There are days I think I’ll lose him. The worst days.
In a particularly bad fit, his skin becomes waxy, sweat lacing the sheets. Neo clenches his fists, lying supine, roughing out his breaths.
I scoot my chair closer to his bed during the worst days. My hand sneaks beside his. I press the back of my fingers to his knuckles. I can’t do much for him, but I can be another body, another soul, so that he knows he isn’t alone.
The worst of the worst days comes when Neo was supposedly well enough to go home for a few weeks. He returns through the E.R. His face is bruised from forehead to chin, all down one side as if he’s been shoved into something. Both bones in his wrist are cracked down the middle, and he can’t move his spine for the larger part of a month.
“Neo,” I whisper. “Have you told anyone?”
“It wasn’t him,” he says.
“Your wrist is broken, and your back–”
“It wasn’t him,” he snaps at me, reverting to his silence. “Just leave me alone.”
I don’t leave. I just join him in silence. But the tear that rolls down his face isn’t lost on me.
The worst days subside eventually. Neo finds the means to sit back up when the weather warms. He doesn’t spit out his pills as frequently. He starts to eat more. And it takes a few months, but Neo finally considers writing again.
I am determined. I steal pens from Eric’s station and ask for notebooks. Eric obliges since I won’t stop bothering him. He returns with fifty-cent composition books made of cardboard and thin, lined sheets. I toss them, loud enough for Neo to hear, into the cardboard box. As we mulled over books, I make noise with it. My foot nudges the box. I innocently pull it out from under the bed and let it slowly slide back. Neo never misses my attempts to draw attention to the tools. Actually, he goes to great lengths to ignore them. It isn’t until I put one of the notebooks directly in his lap that he considers it.
It’s difficult to ignore what you love, even when its existence is as conditional as what you hate.
Neo brushes the edge cautiously, like a palpable heat rises from within. The blank pages daunt him. It’d been a while. Once he lets the pen’s weight settle in his palm and summons the courage to lay it on paper, Neo, drop by drop, recreates his ocean.
He writes every day now, at random times, on random surfaces. He and I watch movies on Eric’s tablet at night and read during the day. He takes notes in the margins of the books and pauses the movie to grab a page when an idea strikes.
We take walks when Neo has the strength. We lay in the gardens for air when it’s cool. He writes on my shirt sleeve on a particularly sore morning, on his pant leg too. We hide his stories together. I bring him food, and when his parents arrive, he hands me the box. I swear, at times when I return with it, that he breaks a smile.
—
Tonight, something changes.
Tonight, Neo and I’s routine breaks. Tonight, dinner tray in hand, I slip an apple from the basket in the cafeteria on the way to his room. But alas, when I open the door, Neo isn’t alone.
“You get results like this again, we’re taking you home. I don’t care if I have to force it down your throat–”
Neo’s father stops talking the moment I walk in. He stands over his son’s bed, papers clutched in his fist, this time in the shape of blood work. It looms over Neo, although he doesn’t flinch. He lets his head hang like whatever comes his way will come, and that is that.
“I’m sorry, I should’ve knocked,” I mumble, tucking my chin to my chest. Neo sits, the lower half of his body under the covers, his face downcast same as mine. Hair covers his eyes, his thumb and forefinger shaking around his wrist.
“It’s fine,” his father says. Politely so. He ushers me forward with a wave. “Bring it in.”
That man doesn’t frighten me, but one of my rules is never to interfere. I can’t break it. There are many moments I wish I could’ve, but this moment may be the greatest of them.
Neo’s father either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about the pain whimpering through Neo’s lips when I lay that tray down. He stares at him, not with hate or anything so grotesque. He looks at Neo with expectation, a nod of encouragement his final say.
He’s going to watch Neo eat. Because eating disorders aren’t about vanity. They’re about control. And he wants to take whatever his son has left of it.
—
When the door shuts behind me, I can’t bear to leave. I barnacle myself to the nurse’s station and wait. I wait for over an hour. I wait and wait, the clocks mocking me, slowing in time’s favor. I wait till Neo’s father finally leaves. I wait till he slips his coat on, disappears down the hall, and into the elevator.
Then, I sprint.
I slam the door open. Neo isn’t in his bed. The room is bare in darkness, sheets undone, cast aside. There are no torn books or pages. Only the tray I’ve come to memorize the weight of sits upside down on the tiles, discarded, like the day Neo flipped it over in his anger. Only now, it’s empty.
Retching breaths and light peek under the bathroom door. I go to it, dread in my throat. On the other side, a boy sits, a fraction of himself.
Neo’s back slams against the wall, vomit staining the edge of his mouth. Tears fall from bloodshot eyes, the realization dropping in his chest, sending spasms through his chest.
It was never supposed to go this far.
He pulls at his hair. The heels of his palms cover his eyes. He bangs his head and pushes himself into the wall like he wants to become a part of it. Like he wants to disappear.
Vulnerability craves isolation. Desperation weeps in it.
He fights at first. When I kneel to his level, he pushes me away with clenched fists, whining. I don’t say anything. I give him my arms and my quiet and hope that’s enough to coax his fear away. I hope it’s enough as he collapses and cries into my shoulder.
“I hate him. I hate him so much,” he says, heaving for air. My palm drags over his spine, drawing slow rhythms to guide his breaths.
“He loves me because he has to,” Neo cries. “That’s worse than hating someone. He knows I’ll never be who he wants me to be. He knows I’d rather die here than be who he wants me to be. I’m no one in that house. I have nothing there!”
His voice is a chorus of rough notes, his anger cracking. Even before he was sick, Neo’s life wasn’t his. It was never his. Wet sobs unravel a hurt beneath the surface as he comes to terms with the fact that it may never be.
“I am nothing,” he says, without air, like a ghost. Like it’s true.
“You’re not nothing.”
“I’d rather be nothing than hate myself.”
Neo’s shredded poems and pages ache like phantom limbs. He bites his lip to hold in a whimper, a grieving cry for them. He cries for them and the boy his father will never let him be.
“You know, I used to believe in God,” he says. “He makes me hate God.”
Love and hate aren’t interchangeable. They don’t mean the same thing, but they are not opposites. If it were a doctor or a nurse forcing this pain onto Neo, this humiliation, he wouldn’t care. He doesn’t. They have no constitution in his life past fleeting moments. His father is a powerful animal in that regard. He loves Neo and Neo loves him too. Even if it’s because they must. Love gives people the power to be treacherous. Being hurt by someone you share such a thing with is draining—a needle under the skin or a knife in the rib.
Hate is a choice. Love is not.
There’s nothing so out of our control as that.
“You don’t owe him anything,” I whisper. “You’re allowed to love books and broken things.”
—
Neo’s dad doesn’t come back for a long time. Business trips, Neo tells me. His mother comes instead. For what she lacks in warmth, she makes up for in patience. It doesn’t matter how long it takes for Neo to make eye contact or pick up a fork. She waits. Sort of like me. I think that makes Neo feel safe. Great Expectations never leaves his possession, but at least the loop around his wrist loosens with time.
One day, I stop bringing Neo his trays. Instead, I just bring apples, and he gives me books. The cycle of exchange continues until one day, as he writes and I read next to him…
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Sam.”
“You like love stories, right, Sam?”
“Mhm.”
“Have you ever been in love?”
An uncomfortable question. One that brings up vulnerabilities I don’t know how to share.
I shrug, looking at the ground. “I don’t remember.”
“Then you haven’t,” Neo says. “You’d remember.”
My fingers stiffen around the book in my hands.
“Maybe I don’t want to remember.”
Neo’s never experienced my pain. Only his. But he has no cages for pity in his soul—only blunt remarks, wit, and at times, a little softness.
“Sorry,” he says. Softly.
“Do you have a love story for me?” I ask.
“No.” Neo reads over the last few lines he’s written. Then, he picks up the small stack of papers filled to the brim with ink, making sure they’re even. “But I didn’t add any violence.”
Then, the extraordinary happens.
Neo offers me a treasure from the sea.
He frowns at my awe. “What the hell are you smiling for? Take it.”
I do. I take it like the most fragile thing in the world. Because when a writer gives you a gift as precious as their work, they give you their trust, their control, their heart put to paper.
Before I leave, Neo calls for me.
“Sam,” he says. I glance at him over my shoulder, and he glances back. “What are we watching tonight?”
I don’t make it a habit to converse with patients. My curiosity never asks for it. When I look at Neo, at the weeks I’ve spent getting to know him, I realize between our silences that this is not the start of a conversation.
It’s the beginning of a friendship.
