The Museum of Us by Tara Wilson Redd

Author:Tara Wilson Redd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2018-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

Roberts is here but I’m not listening to her because I am panicked over George. So good to see you wheeling yourself around these days. Isn’t there anything you want to tell me? Blah, blah, blah, blah, such great progress. I hear her like elevator music under my blinding panic. I keep saying the shortest thing possible because I really want to tell her to leave.

Finally she does and I wheel myself to the door and wait for the shark to arrive. I know she will come back as soon as the hallway clears. I watch. In the one still moment between parents and meds and checks and balloons, slippery as a villain, Eleanor makes her way down the hall to me. She’s like George: unpredictable in a predictable way.

She’s surprised to see me at the door.

“Are you going somewhere?” she asks. She sounds almost worried.

“No, I’m waiting for you.”

“Good. Don’t listen to what anyone out there says. They’re all against us.”

“Listen, I need to talk to you. About dreams.”

She smiles a toothy smile under the toothy smile of her shark hood. “So you believe me now. See, I was a dreamer too. That’s what they said about me. Well, now I’m a schizo paranoid manic depressive whatever. But I used to live in a dream.”

“Can I ask you something?” I say.

“Anything your heart desires. I speak only the truth.”

“When you hallucinate, do you feel like you’re hallucinating?”

“Is this about George?”

“Yes.”

“You said he’s not a hallucination.”

“But can something become a hallucination?”

“Sure. I don’t know. Why? Do you want him to be?”

I nod. “I have to see him. And I can’t get to him.”

“They poisoned you.”

“I know. I believe you.” I point to my untouched dinner.

Eleanor hesitates. For the first time, I see doubt in her eyes.

“What is it?” I ask.

“There is one way I know….”

“How? Eleanor, I miss him. I need to see him.”

“What a nice hallucination.”

“He’s not always nice.”

“Hot.”

“He gets angry sometimes,” I confess. “I don’t know how that’s possible. I don’t know what that means.”

“My parents never get angry. It’s because they don’t care,” she says.

I can remember the last time my parents really fought. That’s what caused the crash. They were fighting because—

I shake my head and the thoughts evaporate.

“Does your boyfriend get angry?” I ask.

“Sure. We had one fight where he broke my finger. Then I put him through a window and that was the end of that.”

I can imagine her in a beautiful dorm room, the way I imagine dorm rooms in boarding schools must look. Him stealing into her room and the fight they had. The way Eleanor smiles makes it so clear how much she loves him. The whole story of her life is in that smile. She looks at her hand like she loves the memory of it, how he fell out the window with a shocked little yelp.

“Imagination is a form of control,” Eleanor says. “I read that in a book once. Fantasy is control and that’s what makes it so satisfying.

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