Fix by J. Mann (highly illogical behavior .TXT) 📕

attempt to

bring me on board

with your hat phase. But it

was the first time I

stuck one of those hats

on my head.

I needed to tell you

something I hadn’t told you.

Something I should have told you

six months earlier.

Something I should have told you

right then, sitting in the car.

But when you clapped your hands

in corny glee

at the sight of me in that

silly visor—

I couldn’t.

For the same reason

I hadn’t told you

all the hundreds of times

I’d meant to.

Because it hurt to

wipe away your joy, Lid,

for any reason.

But especially

for this reason.

Eve and the Serpent

I’M NOT AWAKE. OR ASLEEP. I’M SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN.

I like it here.

Suspended.

“How are you tonight, Miss Abbott?” he asks. His voice is soft inside my ears. I like it when he calls me Miss Abbott. Although I like it even more when he calls me Eve.

“I am…” But I really don’t know how I am, so I just return his question. “How are you, sir?”

He does that bowing thing, where he tips the large eye of the telescope down toward my rug. “I am always well when I’m with you.”

My telescope is so nice.

I sigh.

“Yes, Eve?” he asks, making every hair on my head tingle. He doesn’t move but seems to breathe in slowly, ready to absorb all I’m about to say.

“I am… wondering about my spine.”

“Nineteen degrees,” he says.

“Nineteen degrees,” I repeat. “Fifty-seven degrees closer to zero than I was before. And I hope… I hope that it looks straight. I think I can feel it, you know? I think I feel the straightness.”

He doesn’t respond, and now all I feel is trapped, alone, in some hot place… and hoping? For what?

“Never mind,” I mumble, reaching into my drawer and riffling about for a Roxy. I’ve hidden a nest of them in an old sock so the empty bottle would prompt my mother to refill the prescription.

Sucking up a bit of spit, I swallow. It’ll take more than a Roxy to bring me back to the cool, suspended place—it’ll take a Roxy and ten minutes. And before the seconds can tick by, fear flutters in my chest. Who am I now? Like this. I don’t want it anymore.

Arthritis. Osteoporosis. Kyphosis. Lordosis. Spondylolisthesis. Impaired mobility. Diminished lung capacity. Enlarged heart. Early death. These are real. Real results of staying crooked. And anyway, it’s too late.

Too late.

“Say something,” I beg.

In the quiet seconds that follow, the fear whips itself into anger. “Say something, you shitty lump of plastic.” The words rush out of me, sucking the breath along with them, my heart beating against its hard shell. Because I’m talking to a telescope. A goddamn telescope.

He remains silent.

But the anger is a flash. It sizzles and disappears. Or maybe it’s the Roxy slowly taking effect. Smoothing out the wrinkles inside me. And in the emptiness, the darkness, my heart slows to a thump.

“You’re not shitty,” I whisper.

He laughs. And the happy sound soaks through my skin. The minutes have added up. And with them, my thoughts drift off in another direction.

“So… who are you, really?”

“A shitty lump of plastic?” he says.

“Or… the devil,” I suggest.

“So ambitious.”

“You did make that pact with me. Remember?”

“Minnesota,” he says. “Of course I remember, Eve.”

The drug is filling me with every good feeling in the world—he is filling me with every good feeling in the world.

“What’s it like being pure evil?” I ask.

“Is the devil pure evil?”

“He made hell, didn’t he?” I say.

“Did he? I thought god was the creator.”

“Hmm. Interesting,” I murmur. “I’d think about this if I could think.”

“Yes,” he says, “the Roxy.”

“Why do you say it like that… the Roxy?” First Nancy, and now him. Everybody just thinks they can talk about my Roxy.

My mouth feels hot and I wish I had enough strength to sit up and drink the glass of water sitting next to my bed, and then I wish that not only did I have the strength to sit up and drink it, but that it had ice floating in it, a lot of ice… and that it was an orange soda.

“Eve.”

“Listen, I’m tired and want to sleep. If you are some old snake come to tempt Eve,” I say, using my fingers to air quote it, although they’re under my covers so I’m not sure why I do this, “you should forgive my lack of politeness.”

“Although if I am the Serpent, Eve, forgiveness really wouldn’t be my thing.”

I can’t hold back a sleepy smile—and once again the sound of his voice erases my anger like waves erase footprints from sand, and an overwhelming feeling of needing to touch him washes over me. I reach out, but he’s just beyond my fingertips. I close my eyes and imagine his sleek coolness, my mind stretching out flat and comfortable. Outside the wind whistles and moans.

“March.” I sigh. “In like a lion, out like a lamb.” A quote my second-grade teacher, Miss Fuller, taught us.

“It’s February, Eve.”

Miss Fuller had us team up with a partner. One of us had to draw the lion and the other the lamb. Lidia picked the lion. So I drew the lamb.

A gust of wind strikes the house, rattling the windows. But I’m warm. Very warm. And safely wrapped in my staples and plastic with my Roxy pulsing through me.

“You don’t like the cold,” I say.

“I don’t?”

“Because you’re the devil.”

“Oh, right.”

“That’s why you wanted Minnesota to disappear.”

“No, Eve, you wanted Minnesota to disappear.”

His words send a shiver through me.

“Ah, but the devil is a liar,” I point out through a large yawn.

“If the devil were truly evil, Eve, he’d tell the truth.”

Lies, Lies, Lies

Waiting for Bogdani to begin

class, I felt a tapping

on my brace. A very familiar

tapping.

Thomas Aquinas.

“I do not answer people who knock on me.”

A lie.

Next, I felt him scribbling.

“You best not be drawing on me.”

“Es

un gato,

Eve,” he said.

“Everybody loves

cats.”

Though I agreed with this,

of course, I’d

never admit it to

Thomas Aquinas.

His real name was Thomas Aquino,

though due to this being