Fangirl

him sitting in his car in the middle of the night, filling page after page with ideas that didn’t quite make sense, and they’d lead him back inside.
    They’d see him skip dinner; they’d count the cups of coffee. They’d notice the zeal in his voice.
    And they’d try to rein him back in.
    Usually it worked. Seeing that they were scared terrified their dad. He’d go to bed and sleep for fifteen hours. He’d make an appointment with his counselor. He’d try the meds again, even if they all knew it wouldn’t stick.
    “I can’t think when I’m on them,” he’d told Cath one night. She was sixteen, and she’d come downstairs to check the front door and found it unlocked—and then she’d inadvertently locked him out. Her dad had been sitting outside on the steps, and it scared her half to death when he rang the doorbell.
    “They slow your brain down,” he said, clutching an orange bottle of pills. “They iron out all the wrinkles.… Maybe all the bad stuff happens in the wrinkles, but all the good stuff does, too.…
    “They break your brain like a horse, so it takes all your orders. I need a brain that can break away, you know? I need to think. If I can’t think, who am I?”
    It wasn’t so bad when he got lots of sleep. When he ate the eggs they made him for breakfast. When he didn’t work straight through three weekends in a row.
    A little manic was okay. A little manic made him happy and productive and charismatic. Clients would eat awesome straight out of his hands.
    She and Wren had gotten good at watching him. At noticing when a little manic slid into a lot. When charismatic gave way to crazed. When the twinkle in his eyes turned into a burnt-out flash.
    Cath stayed up until three o’clock that morning, cleaning up his messes. If she and Wren had been here, they would have seen this coming. They would have stopped it.
    *   *   *
    The next day, Cath took her laptop to St. Richard’s with her. She had thirty-one hours to write her short story. She could e-mail it to Professor Piper; that would be okay.
    Wren finally texted her back. “are you here? psych final tomorrow. right?”
    They had the same pychology professor but were in different classes.
    “i’ll have to miss it,” Cath typed.
    “NOT ACCEPTABLE,” Wren replied.
    “NOT LEAVING DAD ALONE,” Cath texted back.
    “email the professor, maybe he’ll let you make it up.”
    “ok.”
    “email him. and i’ll talk to him.”
    “ok.” Cath couldn’t bring herself to say thanks. Wren should be missing that final, too.
    Her dad woke up around noon and ate mashed potatoes with yellow gravy. She could tell he was angry—angry that he was there and angry that he was too groggy for any of his anger to rise to the top.
    There was a TV in his room, and Cath found a Gilmore Girls rerun. Their dad always used to watch Gilmore Girls with them; he had a crush on Sookie. Cath’s computer kept falling asleep in her lap, so she finally set it down, and leaned on his bed to watch TV.
    “Where’s Wren?” he asked during a commercial break.
    “School.”
    “Shouldn’t you be there, too?”
    “Christmas break starts tomorrow.”
    He nodded. His eyes looked dull and distant. Every time he blinked, it seemed like maybe he wasn’t going to manage to open them again.
    A nurse came in at two in the afternoon with more meds. Then came a doctor who asked Cath to wait in the hall. The doctor smiled at her when he left the room. “We’ll get there,” he said in a cheerful, comforting voice. “We had to bring him down pretty fast.”
    Cath sat next to her dad’s bed and watched TV until visiting hours were over.
    *   *   *
    There was no more cleaning to do, and Cath felt uneasy being in the house by herself. She tried sleeping on the couch, but it felt too close to the outside and too close to her dad’s empty room—so she went up to her room and crawled into her own bed. When that didn’t work, she climbed into Wren’s bed, taking her laptop with her.
    Their dad had stayed at St. Richard’s three times before. The first time was the summer after their mom left. They’d called their grandma when he wouldn’t get out of bed, and for a while, she’d moved in with them. She filled the freezer with frozen lasagna before she moved out.
    The second time was in sixth grade. He was standing over the sink, laughing, and telling them that they didn’t have to go to school anymore. Life was an education, he said. He’d cut