What They Always Tell Us Read Online Free

apple juice, housed in a simple plastic bottle with a green and yellow label. He twisted off the yellow cap, paused, and then took a swallow. His throat burned after he took the swig. He took another and then another, though each swallow was hard—much harder—than taking a shot of the cheap rum. The burn felt like little needle pricks down his throat. He felt like he needed to vomit, and he did manage to puke out a little bit. But his throat felt scalded, so he held the rest in and started coughing. He remembers someone finally opening the door to the bathroom—he hadn’t locked it. He remembers a lot of cussing from some of his classmates and a blond girl he didn’t know who kept calling him Alan and asking what his last name was: “Last name, I need your last name!” Commotion, the awed faces of those who had ignored him, jolted out of flirting and boozing into something surreal. He doesn’t remember seeing Kirk or Tyler or the girls, though they must have been there. He remembers the paramedics, and then the bizarre stares of anguish he got from his parents at the hospital. Oh, and James, the look on his face—pure disgust. The hospital psychiatrist, a pinched-looking man trying so hard to be kind, even he seemed baffled.
    The psychiatrist he ended up seeing was a different doctor named Tim Richardson. He specialized in dealing with adolescents, supposedly. His office was in the shaded front room of a house he shared with his wife and young child, whose pictures Alex saw on his desk, framed portraits of familial bliss. At first Dr. Richardson—he said to call him Tim, but Alex felt weird calling an adult by his first name—would mostly chat with him about school and stuff and then slowly work his way to questions about the incident: “Why did you want to end your life, Alex? Is this something you’d thought about a lot? What made you feel like you wanted to die? Do you still want to die, Alex?”
    The questions exhausted Alex, because he didn’t think he knew the answers. He just remembered how he felt that awful night, and the days and nights leading up to it. One day he’d felt as if he fit into the world, and the next he felt badly out of place. Still, even though therapy and all the talking seem pointless to him, Alex shows up each Wednesday after school, right on schedule, to sit there and talk with Dr. Richardson, trying to convince the doctor—and everyone else—that he’ll never hurt himself again.
     
    Coming up on Burger King, Alex almost drives right by, but at the last second he slows and turns into the parking lot. “Is this okay?” he asks Henry.
    “I don’t have any money.”
    “I’ll spot you.”
    Henry nods.
    Alex sits in the car a moment before shutting it off. He scans the lot for familiar cars—Lang’s bumper-stickered ( MEAN PEOPLE SUCK ) Mercedes, Tyler’s maroon Explorer, Kirk’s gray Bronco. But none of their cars are here—the coast is clear.
    They get out and enter the heat and fried smell of the place. Mostly solitary diners on this Saturday night, maybe some travelers, though this franchise is miles from I-59. Alex takes a closer look around only after he has ordered his chicken sandwich and onion rings, Henry’s fries and chicken tenders. There are no teenagers, only two kids who look Henry’s age, maybe a bit older, throwing fries at each other in a booth.
    “To go,” he tells the cashier, an older woman with a pleasant and effortless smile that reassures Alex.
    “To go?” Henry asks.
    “I don’t want to eat here.”
    Henry accepts this with a shrug, and Alex fidgets while he waits for his order to be bagged and handed over.
    And then they come in: Tyler and Kirk. He knew this would happen eventually, maybe he even hoped for it to happen: to run into his old friends, to see them away from school, and for them to see him.
Them
—they have become a collective unit in his mind.
    With these two here, Alex thinks that the girls can’t be far behind, some of