Free Juicy by Pepper Pace Page B

just agree with whatever Dad said. If Dad said that the sky is the ocean then she would probably say, ‘Wow when did that happen?’
     
    Troy had no choice but to get away. But where does a seventeen year old computer geek run away to? He would not go to his sister Lorie’s house because Lorie had two small babies and a husband that looked at him as if he had a contagious disease. Bob, his brother, was always buddy buddy with him. They didn’t have a tight relationship since he was twenty-two years older, but he did put forth an effort.
     
    So that’s where Troy headed. Bob was single and maybe he’d let him crash there and help him to get a job. Of course his brother would probably not allow him to blow off his entire senior year. So Troy was okay with the idea of completing his senior year at his brother’s place. Bob was so much younger than Dad, maybe he could understand what he had tried so hard to tell his parents. The drugs were changing him; making him into an un-person.
     
    They had started him on Ritalin when he was a kid. Then he had stopped running around the house and bounding up and down in class. His parents were older and thought that giving him medicine to calm him would allow them the opportunity to take a break from a boy like him; who one minute was running in circles and then the next was staring blankly into space. Years later when the blank stares, tics and stuttering had become a cause for comment from their friends and from his teachers, they sent him to doctors who diagnosed him as bipolar.
     
    It was the beginning of the mood stabilizers and anti-depressants. He didn’t think that he was manic depressive or depressed at all. He thought his moods were fairly stabled. He had seizures and tremors. He wasn’t sure how that equated to being bipolar.
     
    His parents spent a great deal of money sending him to psychologists that would say that his thoughts were disconnected and not cohesive. He would argue that it had a lot to do with the fact that he was on a heavy course of lithium, prozac as well as anti-convulsive medications! Troy didn’t blame the medicine; some people probably needed to take all of that stuff, but not him! He felt like everyone just wanted him to shut up and to go with the program.
     
    Only thing is that he never would.
     
    Troy showed up at Bob’s doorstep two days after running away. Bob immediately grabbed him in a bear hug and then he hurried to the phone to call their parent’s despite Troy’s protests.
     
    ‘Yeah, he’s right here, standing in my living room.’
     
    Troy had been very pissed. He had asked Bob not to call them until he’d had a chance to talk to him about how he was feeling and to get shit off his chest. Bob had just acted as if he hadn’t said a word.
     
    He thrust the phone at Troy. ‘Dad wants to talk to you.’ He had written his parents a long and tedious letter detailing the reasons for his departure. Now it was almost like everything had been for nothing.
     
    ‘Troy! Why did you runaway?!’
     
    Oh my god…it was for nothing!
     
    ‘We’re on our way, you stay right there! Did you take your medicine?’
     
    Oh my god…
     
    Bob paced back and forth lecturing him about how irresponsible he was being, and how Mom and Dad weren’t young and antics like this was bad for them and if he could stop having so many problems…
     
    He said nothing.
     
    When his parent’s arrived Bob gave him a pat on the shoulder as if they had shared a long brotherly moment and he got quietly into his parent’s station wagon and was driven back home. Medicine was dispensed, an appointment to the therapist made and then his parents returned to their routine.
     
    When Troy disappeared the next night, he didn’t bother with a note, phone calls; nothing. He would not contact anyone in his family until his eighteenth birthday some eight months later; and then only for the purpose of having his social security checks forwarded to him.
     
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