Insane Read online

  I scoffed, not sure who I felt more sorry for right then; the boy or the woman. Then the boy started screaming obscenities, though I noted he didn’t make a move to get away from where he was sitting. Surely if he wanted the woman to go away so much, he could just move. And the woman still kept talking, as if oblivious to the guy’s rage, shaking her teddy at him.

  I shook my head. “What a douche,” I muttered to Chester.

  He frowned at me. “Who?”

  I waved a hand toward the boy, who was still yelling. Nobody else seemed to have even noticed him losing his temper. The nurse should probably have been calling for guards and Haldol, but she was just picking at her nails. I raised my eyebrows at Chester. “Uh, the guy throwing a raging fit at Teddy Woman? You see anyone else acting douche-like?”

  He glanced at the boy and then back to me, giving the exact same look people normally gave me when they heard me talking to an invisible person. I glared at him. “What? Why are you giving me that look?”

  Chester grimaced. “He’s not saying anything, Callie.”

  I blinked, and then scowled at him. “What are you talking about? Are you deaf? He’s shouting–” I stopped myself, because the look on Chester’s face was scarily serious. Slowly, he shook his head. I swallowed and looked over at the boy. He’d turned his head, leaning his chin in his hand. I could still hear him yelling for the woman to leave him alone…but his mouth wasn’t moving.

  I snapped my head back around, staring at Chester. His brow was furrowed, eyes shadowed with concern. Oh my God, I thought, I’m actually going crazy. Then I looked around me, at where I was, and realised how laughable that thought was.

  Across the room, I could have sworn I heard the boy snort. “Join the club,” he muttered. I watched his mouth, but his lips were pressed into a thin line of irritation. I gasped and clamped my hands over my ears. I couldn’t believe it. After all this time trying to convince everyone I was not crazy – trying to convince myself I was not crazy – now I really was hearing voices.

  Suddenly, it felt like the ground shifted under my feet. I felt sick and dizzy. I couldn’t be crazy. Yeah, I saw my dead best friend’s ghost, but that was because he was really there. I don’t know how I knew he was there and not just a figment of my imagination, but I did. That didn’t make me insane – it didn’t even make me feel insane. Not the way hearing this new stranger’s voice did. But then, crazy people didn’t always know they were crazy, right?

  Was I one of those poor clueless crazies? Had the ravens just come home to roost at last and I was just now glimpsing my own crazy?

  No. No, no, no, no. I couldn’t be crazy. I wasn’t crazy. Someone else had to be yelling. But nobody else in the room was. Nobody was on their feet spitting curses like the voice inside my head…

  The voice inside my head.

  Oh God.

  I jumped out of my chair and bolted from the room. The nurse yelled at me to stop, but I was already bursting through the doors and down the hall. Two burly guards were walking down the hall toward me, holding Styrofoam coffee cups and chatting casually. When they heard the nurse yell, they looked up from their conversation and saw me running at them, like, well, like a lunatic.

  Immediately, they dropped their Styrofoam cups, spilling coffee across the shiny floor, and charged at me. “Oi, you, where do you think you’re going?” one of them yelled. I screeched to a halt, my white hospital-approved shoes slipped on the linoleum and making a horrible squealing sound.

  I held up my hands in a gesture that was part defence and part surrender. “My room,” I gasped. “I just want to go back to my room.”

  Looking angry, the guard who’d yelled grabbed my arm. He didn’t look familiar, so I guessed he was new. “Good, ‘cause that’s the only place you’ll be going.” His grip on my arm tightened warningly and I winced. That was going to leave a bruise.

  Behind me, the nurse came tearing into the hallway. “Oh – Oh, thank God you got her. She just up and ran out all of a sudden!” the nurse gasped, looking flustered.

  The guard holding me grunted. “Well, she didn’t get very far. We’re just going to take her back to her room. Right, Stuart?” He looked at the other guard, who was staring at the nurse.

  Stuart blinked. “Huh? Oh, yeah. We’ll take her back – if that’s okay with you, Jeanne?” he asked the nurse, his cheeks turning pink.

  Jeanne the Nurse blushed, smiling, and pushed back a lock of dull blonde hair that had come loose of her ponytail. “Oh, yes. That’d be good. Thanks,” she said, looking down shyly. Clearly there was some sort of crush going on between the two of them. Wonderful – romance in an asylum, I thought.

  Me and the guard holding me both snorted at the same time. I glared up at him as he glanced down at me, and I thought I saw the corners of his lips tip up in a tiny, wry smile. I looked away. He cleared his throat and said, “I can take her back myself. Finish your break, Stuart.”

  Stuart pulled his eyes off Jeanne for two seconds to shoot a grateful glance at is buddy. “Uh, yeah, thanks.” He went back to staring at the nurse, who giggled.

  My guard mumbled something under his breath, turned me around and began marching me down the hallway toward my room. Once we reached my door – with a tiny white plaque with the numbers 104 on it – he finally let go of my arm to fish in his pocket for his master key. He pulled it out, stuck it in the lock, twisted, and pushed the door open.

  I expected him to shove me inside and slam the door, but instead he held the door open and swept a bow. “In you go, my lady,” he said with a grin. I stared at him. Still grinning, he straightened and shoved his brown hair back out of his warm grey eyes. He had a sharp sort of face, all pointy cheekbones and pointy chin and pointy nose, but his smile made him look friendly, which was more than I could say of everyone else in this place. And he looked young, too. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four.

  “Well, are you going in, or do you just want me to hold the door all day?” he asked, but his tone was playful – a stark contrast to the way he’d yelled at me when he’d thought I was attempting a poorly-executed escape.

  More wary of him when he was acting nice than if he’d been treating me like crap the most of the other guards did, I gave him a wide berth as I slid past him into my room. He chuckled at my skittish performance. “I’m no’ gonna bite you, girl. No need to be scared of me.”

  I just continued to stare at him silently, and then he shrugged and started to close the door. I bit my lip, considering for a split second, and then lunged forward a step to catch the edge of the door just before it slid completely shut. “Wait,” I said.

  The guard paused and pushed the door back open a few inches. He looked at me expectantly. “Yeah?”

  I stepped back and asked, “What’s your name?” It couldn’t hurt to make a friend of a guard in this place. If nothing else, it might give me someone sane to talk to.

  He grinned again, making the corners of his wrinkle. “Roland John Thompson. But you can call me RJ.” He stuck out his hand. “And you are?”

  Cautiously, I shook his hand. He had dry, rough skin and strong fingers – strong enough to crush my hand if he wanted. “I’m Callie Campbell,” I replied.

  RJ nodded. “Nice to meet you, Callie. If you don’t mind, I should be getting back to my partner before he makes a complete fool of himself flirting with that nurse.” He let go of my hand and I moved back again as the door clanged shut.

  I frowned at the door for a minute, bemused by the guard’s kindness. Then I remembered why I’d wanted to return to my room so badly. I sank onto my bed and put my head in my hands.

  I wasn’t crazy. There had to be a logical explanation for the voice I’d heard. Maybe…maybe it had been someone in another room, and I had just thought they were nearby because they were so loud. Some of the patients on the Fourth Floor could get pretty angry sometimes.

  So that was it. It had been some guy on another floor yelling. Except he’d been yelling about a wom
an shoving a teddy in his face. But there had to be more than one crazy teddy woman in the building, right? I mean, the odds of her pissing off one guy at the same time as another teddy lady was shoving a teddy in the face of a guy on my floor were…well, not good. But I didn’t care. I was going with the coincidence theory, because I liked it better than the I’m-actually-nuts theory.

  Coincidence. Not crazy. Yeah.

  I blew out a breath and collapsed backward, sprawling on my lumpy mattress. I closed my eyes and rolled onto my side, desperate to go to sleep before my shaky logic trembled apart.

  Chapter Two

  ** Casey **

  Silence. It hummed inside my skull. Perpetual. Irreversible. Maddening.

  I hadn’t always been deaf. I had been born with the ability to hear perfectly well. In fact, I’d sometimes valued my hearing more than anything else. The only son of a wealthy workaholic lawyer who was rarely home, I’d grown up on a fancy estate, been home-schooled all my life, hated by my step-mother because I would inherit every penny when my father died and she would be out on her ass. So, my only companions had been the squirrels that ran around the gardens, the snotty sons of my father’s friends who I hated…and music.

  My mother had been a musician – a talented violin player. She had loved all music. She had always played music around the house, everything from Mozart to Tim McGraw to Billy Talent. Instead of reading me bedtime stories, she would sing to me. By the time she died of cancer when I was eight, I had developed a love of music equal to hers.

  Since my dad was never in the house to hear it – always working, leaving me with Taylor, the nanny, and Miss Dollard, my home-school teacher – he bought me a kick-ass stereo system for my tenth birthday. I would blast my favorite CDs until the windows rattled and the house was filled with the pounding bass of rock or the classical ribbons of Beethoven.

  When I turned twelve, my step-mother joined the family, and I knew from the minute I saw her, we weren’t going to get along. I was almost certain she was a gold-digging bitch, but my dad seemed to really love her, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt and avoided her like the plague as much as possible, which was all the time, except for occasional family dinners when dad was home instead of at the office or in court and insisted we all eat together.

  With the new addition to the family, my real mother came to the forefront of my thoughts even more often, and I decided I wanted not just to listen to music, but to play it. So dad bought me a guitar, a drum kit, and a music teacher. Later came a keyboard, a violin, an electric guitar – which I instantly fell in love with and named Suzy – and a recording studio in the basement.

  By the time I was fifteen, I could play every instrument better than my music teacher could. He called me a prodigy. I’d moved on from just playing music, but to creating it, too. I’d written and recorded my own demo album. My music teacher, Mr. Masters, said I should send it to a record label, that with my father’s influence and money I could be famous, but I refused. My music was just for me. It was personal. Every song was like a journal entry. My music became as natural and essential to me as breathing.

  I loved it.

  Listening to it. Creating it. Feeling the notes come to life under my fingers, tasting the words becoming lyrics in my mouth. More often than not, I slept on the yellow sofa in my cosy little soundproof studio, with its fuzzy orange walls and my instruments around me. I blew off my home-school teacher to practise chords. I forgot to eat most days, until I moved the mini-fridge from my bedroom to my studio. I knew I was addicted. Obsessed. And I didn’t care.

  Then my dad got shot. Apparently, some of the friends of a drug dealer he helped put away were kind of pissed about their leader being put behind bars. They shot him one night in the parking lot outside the firm where he worked. One bullet in his thigh, and another in his chest. Unsurprisingly, idiot gang bangers don’t have an accurate picture of human anatomy. The bullet in his chest missed his heart by an inch. It pierced his lung instead, though.

  Luckily, dad’s secretary was just leaving, too, and saw the whole thing. She called the cops and an ambulance. She even managed to identify one shooter and another guy – stupid, angry people should not shoot people under street lights. You’d think gang bangers would know that, but apparently not.

  After four hours in surgery to remove the bullets and fix the damage to his lung, the doctors told me and my step-mum that dad would live, but he’d be in the hospital to recover for a while.

  My step-mother was hysterical to start with. Then she got angry. She argued with dad about changing his will. I’d left his hospital room to go grab him a can of Pepsi – he’s addicted to the stuff, the way most dads are addicted to coffee – from the canteen a couple floors down. By the time I got back up to his private room, I could hear my step-mother screaming from down the hall.

  Furious that she would throw a hissy fit now of all times, while dad was lying in a freaking hospital bed, I ran in, just as she was yelling, “Where will I go when you die? I’ll have nothing! You’re leaving everything to that spoiled, bratty freak you call a son!”

  I flinched. Spoiled? Yes. Bratty? Maybe sometimes. But I’d never thought myself a freak. I’d never been called a freak before, and I was surprised at how much it hurt, even coming from this woman I loathed.

  I still remember the look on my dad’s face as he lay in the hospital bed, staring at the woman he’d fallen in love with four years after my mother died, listening to her call his only son a freak. His red-brown hair was streaked through with a handful of strands of grey I was sure hadn’t been there before he was shot, and there were dark bags under his eyes. The corners of his lips were white, there were wrinkles around his grey-blue eyes which normally looked like laugh-lines, but right now just looked like signs of age. His face, which had been pale with pain and blood-loss, flushed red with anger. I had never seen him so angry, and for a moment, I was surprised and pleased that he was angry with her over me.

  As my step-mother stood there, shaking with fury, my father looked at me over her shoulder, seeing me rooted to the spot with shock, still holding the can of Pepsi I’d gone to get for him and my guitar, Suzy, strapped across my back – because I never went anywhere without her. His freak son, who lived in music and loved his guitar like a person.

  For a long time, he just looked at me, as if he’d never really seen me before. Then his eyes softened and his mouth hardened into a resolved line. He turned his gaze back to my step-mother and said in his most even, lawyerly voice, “My son is not a freak. He has more talent in his little finger than most people have in their whole bodies, including you. By the time I get out of hospital, I expect you to be out of my house. I’ll give you money to find modest accommodation for yourself, but I want you to leave. And I never want to see you again.”

  There was a long, painful moment where she just stood there with her mouth open, fury and shock making a vein bulge in her forehead. Then she cast me a burning, venomous glare and, without another word, turned and stalked out.

  Once she was gone, my dad turned to me, locking his steady eyes on mine, and said, “You are not a freak, Casey. You’re amazingly talented. Your mother would be proud of you.”

  When I got home that night, she was waiting for me. As I stepped into the opulent foyer, all the lights were on, and she was sitting on the wide, beige-carpeted staircase. She had her head bowed, and I thought she was crying and hadn’t heard me come in. I started across the foyer, meaning to go right past her and up to my bathroom, dying for a shower after spending three days at my dad’s bedside without a break.

  But she stood up when I reached the bottom step, and lifted her head. I was struck by the splotchy tear-stained mess of her face, but it was the blazing, savage hate in her eyes that brought me to dead stop on the second step. She smiled at me, more a baring of teeth than an actual smile. “Let’s see how amazing and talented you are when you can’t hear your precious music,” she hissed.

  She raised her hand
, and all I saw was a glint of silver metal – a letter open, I was told later, that she’d grabbed from my dad’s study – before she leapt at me. Now, normally, I’m a pretty tough guy to knock down. I’m six foot two, and I do work out. At fifteen, I was already five eleven, and not exactly lanky. So it was a testament to how absolutely stunned and unprepared I was for the attack that a five foot five, one-hundred-and-ten-pound housewife tackled me to the floor.

  I flew off the stairs case with her clinging to my chest like a rabid ape, and my head hit the polished wooden floor hard enough that my vision went entirely grey. But it was nothing compared to the pain of the metal being stabbed into my left ear, ripping through my eardrum and shredding my ear canal. I don’t remember screaming, but I think I must’ve. I definitely passed out for a few seconds, and when I came to, I felt hot blood pouring down either side of my face and matting in my hair. My step-mother stood over me, her perfect Chanel dress rumpled and bloody. Her mouth was open as she laughed, but the only thing I could hear was a ringing inside my head.

  Through the pain, it took me a couple of moments to realise what she’d done. That the ringing wasn’t an effect of my head hitting the floor, that the deafness wasn’t going to be temporary. All in a flash of blinding clarity, I realised she’d taken from me the one thing that gave my life meaning – my music.

  The rage that boiled up inside me took my breath away. I’d never been an angry person really, but this fury, this hate, was like a living thing inside me, clawing to escape out of my chest. I reached out and grabbed her leg, pulling her off her feet. I couldn’t hear her scream or the crack of her head hitting the floor like mine had. I rolled over on top of her, pausing as vertigo washed over me, closing my eyes as the world spun erratically around me like I was inside a tumble-drier. She thrashed under me, scratching my face and arms, trying to gouge my eyes. Her mouth moved as she screamed at me, but the world was on mute.