Transmission

“But this…” Kevin didn’t know what to say. Didn’t this prove what was happening? Did anyone think he could have just made something like this up?

Apparently, Dr. Yalestrom wasn’t convinced though. She took back the picture, folding it carefully as though she didn’t want to have to look at it. Kevin suspected that the strangeness of it was too much for her.

“I think it’s important that we talk about the things you’re seeing,” she said. “Do you think those things are real?”

Kevin hesitated. “I’m… not sure. They feel real, but a lot of people now have told me that they can’t be.”

“It makes sense,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “What you’re feeling is very common.”

“It is?” What he was experiencing didn’t feel very common at all. “I thought that my illness was rare.”

Dr. Yalestrom moved over to her desk, placing Kevin’s drawing in a file. She picked up a tablet and started to make notes. “Is it important that other people shouldn’t experience what you’re experiencing, Kevin?”

“No, it’s not that,” Kevin said. “It was just that Dr. Markham said that this disease only affects a few people.”

“That’s true,” Dr. Yalestrom agreed. “But I see a lot of people who experience hallucinations of some kind for other reasons.”

“You think I’m going crazy,” Kevin guessed. Everyone else seemed to. Even his mom, presumably, since she’d been the one to bring him here after he’d started talking about them. He didn’t feel like he was going crazy, though.

“That’s not a word I like to use here,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “I think that often, the behavior that we label crazy is there for a good reason. It’s just that often, those reasons only make sense to the person concerned. People will do things to protect themselves from situations that are too difficult to handle, which seem to be… unusual.”

“You think that’s what I’m doing with these visions?” Kevin asked. He shook his head. “They’re real. I’m not making them up.”

“Can I tell you what I think, Kevin? I think a part of you might be attached to these ‘visions’ because it’s helping you to think that your illness might be happening for some kind of greater good. I think that maybe these ‘visions’ are actually you trying to make sense of your illness. The imagery in them… there’s a strange place that isn’t like the normal world. Could that represent the way things have changed?”

“I guess,” Kevin said. He wasn’t convinced. The things he’d seen weren’t about some world where he didn’t have his disease. They were about a place he didn’t understand at all.

“Then you have the sense of impending doom with fire and light,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “The sense of things coming to an end. You even have a countdown, complete with numbers.”

The numbers weren’t a part of the countdown; that was just the slow pulsing, growing faster bit by bit. Kevin suspected that he wasn’t going to convince her of that now. When adults had decided what the truth of something was, he wasn’t going to be able to change their minds.

“So what can I do?” Kevin asked. “If you think they aren’t real, shouldn’t I want to get rid of them?”

“Do you want to get rid of them?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.

Kevin thought about that. “I don’t know. I think they might be important, but I didn’t ask for them.”

“The same way that you didn’t ask to be diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “Maybe those two things are linked, Kevin.”

Kevin had already been thinking that his visions were linked to the disease in some way. That maybe it had changed his brain enough to be receptive to the visions. He didn’t think that was what the psychiatrist meant, though.

“So what can I do?” Kevin asked again.

“There are things you can do, not to make them go away, but at least to be able to cope.”

“Such as?” Kevin asked. He had to admit to a moment of hope at the thought. He didn’t want all of this going around and around in his head. He hadn’t asked to be the one receiving messages that no one else understood, and that just made him look crazy when he spoke about them.

“You can try to find things to distract yourself from the hallucinations when they come,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “You can try reminding yourself that it isn’t real. If you’re in doubt, find ways to check. Maybe ask someone else if they’re seeing the same thing. Remember, it’s okay to see whatever you see, but how you react to it is up to you.”

Kevin guessed he could remember all that. Even so, it did nothing to quiet the faint pulse of the countdown, thrumming in the background, getting faster a little at a time.

“And I think you need to tell the people who don’t know,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “It isn’t fair to them to keep them in the dark about this.”

She was right.

And there was one person he needed to let know more than anyone else.

Luna.

CHAPTER FOUR

“So,” Luna said, as she and Kevin made their way along one of the paths of the Lafayette Reservoir Recreation Area, dodging around the tourists and the families enjoying their day out, “why have you been avoiding me?”

Trust Luna to get straight to the point. It was one of the things Kevin liked about her. Not that he liked her liked her. People always seemed to assume that. They thought because she was pretty, and blonde, and probably cheerleader material if she didn’t think all that was stupid, that of course they would be boyfriend and girlfriend. They just assumed that it was how the world worked.

They weren’t together. Luna was his best friend. The person he spent the most time with, outside of school. Probably the one person in the world he could talk to about absolutely anything.

Except, it turned out, this.

“I haven’t been…” Kevin trailed off in the face of Luna’s stare. She was good at stares. Kevin suspected that she probably practiced. He’d seen everyone from bullies to rude store owners back down rather than have her stare at them any longer. Faced with that stare, it was impossible to lie to her. “All right, I have, but it’s hard, Luna. I have something… well, something I don’t know how to tell you.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Luna said. She found an abandoned soda can and kicked it down the path, flicking it from foot to foot with the kind of skill that came from doing it far too often. “I mean, how bad can it be? Are you moving away? Are you changing schools again?”

Maybe she caught something in his expression, because she fell silent for a few seconds. There was something fragile about that silence, as if both of them were tiptoeing to avoid breaking it. Even so, they had to. They couldn’t just walk like this forever.

“Something bad then?” she said, sending the can into a trash container with a final flick of her foot.

Kevin nodded. Bad was one word for it.

“How bad?”

“Bad,” he said. “The reservoir?”

The reservoir was the place they both went when they wanted to sit down and talk about things. They’d talked about Billy Hames liking Luna when they were nine, and about Kevin’s cat, Tiger, dying when they were ten. None of it seemed like a good preparation for this. He wasn’t a cat.

They made their way down to the edge of the water, looking out at the trees on the far side, the people with their canoes and their paddle boats on the reservoir. Compared to some of the places they went, this was nice. People assumed Kevin was the kid from the wrong side of town leading Luna astray, but she was the one with the knack for squeezing past fences and clambering up derelict buildings, leaving Kevin to follow if he could. Here, there was none of that, just the water and the trees.

“What is it?” Luna asked. She kicked off her shoes and dangled her feet in the water. Kevin didn’t feel like doing the same. Right then, he wanted to run, to hide. Anything to keep from telling her the truth. It felt as though, the longer he could keep from telling Luna, the longer it wasn’t really real.

“Kevin?” Luna said. “You’re worrying me now. Look, if you don’t tell me what it is, then I’m going to call your mom and find out that way.”

“No, don’t do that,” Kevin said quickly. “I’m not sure… Mom isn’t handling this well.”

Luna was looking more worried by the moment. “What’s wrong? Is she sick? Are you sick?”

Kevin nodded at the last one. “I’m sick,” he said. He put his hand on Luna’s shoulder. “I have something called leukodystrophy. I’m dying, Luna.”

He knew he’d said it too quickly. Something like that, there should be a whole big explanation, a proper build-up, but honestly, that was the part of it that mattered.