I sat on the bed and waited for him to finish howling. My wait would have been shorter if Martin hadn’t joined in. Finally, Flinch gasped, shook his head, and wiped a couple tears from the corners of his eyes.
“Done?” I asked.
“Yeah. No, wait…” He snickered, snorted, chuckled a bit, then nodded.
“Did Martin fill you in?”
“Nope. He figured it would be better if I heard the details straight from the corpse’s mouth. So, what’s going on?”
I told him everything, including the news about Cheater and Lucky. And the part where I killed the guy. When I mentioned that, Flinch shook his head and said, “Wasn’t your fault. You were defending yourself.”
“Everything I do is my fault,” I said.
“If I let myself feel guilty for everything I did,” Martin said, “I’d be a mess. Actually, maybe that’s why I’m a mess.”
“We’re all a mess,” Flinch said.
“Not you. You’re like a celebrity, now,” I said.
“Hardly. I’m just one of a billion guys trying to find an audience. Even on the networks, half the comics you see are awful. Besides, who’s more messed up than people in show biz?”
“Still, it’s totally awesome that you were on TV,” Martin said.
Flinch’s grin returned. “Yeah. It doesn’t seem real. But it’s hard to feel happy when my friends are in trouble. Having a hidden talent can stink.”
“Being fifteen can stink,” Martin said. “Too young to drive. Too young to make good money. Everyone treats you like a kid, but all I hear is ‘act like a man.’ No way I’d want to act like some of the men I’ve known.”
“I’ll take you guys over any adult out there,” I said. “Even if you are too young to do anything useful.” And for the first time since I’d awakened in the room with the gorilla on the ceiling and the rippling walls, I actually believed I had a fighting chance to survive this mess.
quadratic equations
FLINCH DOVE PAST me, landed on the bed with a belly flop, and shot his arm toward the bedside table. “I got it,” he said. As he put his hand on the phone, it rang.
“Show off,” I said.
He flashed me a smirk and lifted the receiver. Before he could speak, I yanked the phone from him and shot it across the room to my waiting hand, then returned his smirk as I said, “Hello?”
“Hi. It’s me. I saw Lucky again.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s spacy. I think they’ve got him on meds. Probably an antipsychotic, given the listless way he was—”
I cut him off. “I get the idea. Did you talk to him?”
“Sort of. There was a nurse with him, so I had to be careful. I didn’t tell him you were alive. I was afraid it would mess up his head.” Cheater paused after each sentence. I guess his face was still sore. “But he wasn’t completely gone. He was smart enough not to talk out loud. He came over to my bed and thought about what happened to him. At least, as much as he was capable of thinking clearly. Everything was blurry. Like when you try to read the newspaper after it gets wet.”
“Did you learn anything?” I asked.
“Yeah. He was somewhere with a whole bunch of lost stuff that he couldn’t reach, and he totally flipped out.”
“That’s rough.” I thought about the stress our talents put on us. Next to Lucky, Cheater and Martin probably had it the hardest because they received stuff whether they wanted to or not. I guess it was rough for Flinch, too. I was surprised they didn’t all get overloaded.
“I think he takes a couple walks a day,” Cheater said, breaking into my thoughts. “I’ll keep an eye out for him.”
“Great. Do you know how much longer you’ll be there?”
“Maybe a couple days. I want to go home now. I feel fine. But you know how doctors are. They want to keep you in the hospital. That’s counter-productive. Do you have any idea how many people get sick from being in a hospital? It’s called iatrogenic illness. Which is ironic, since Hippocrates’s first rule was to do no harm.”
After Cheater finished his brief lecture on the history of medicine, I hung up, then told Martin and Flinch what I’d learned.
“Oh man,” Martin said, shaking his head. “That’s brutal. Lucky always had a hard time coping. But this really stinks. We have to do something for him.”
“After we rescue Trash’s butt,” Flinch said.
Martin pointed at me. “Yeah, your sorry butt is first in line, Trash. And more urgent than Lucky’s problems. At least we know he’s somewhere safe.”