Free Black Box by Julie Schumacher Page B

“The thing is,” I said, but just then my father came into the bedroom. He kissed me on the forehead and handed my mother two bottles of pills. “Where’s Dora?” he asked.
    My mother tilted her head in the direction of Dora’s bedroom door, which was closed. We could hear loud music, mainly the throbbing bass of the speakers.
    I picked up a sock. “What are the pills for?” I asked.
    “Dora’s prescriptions,” my father said. “They’re going to try something new.”
    “What kind of pills are they?”
    My father opened his mouth to answer, but before he could say anything, my mother held up her hand: “I don’t think Elena needs to know that.”
    My father closed his mouth and pretended to zip it.
    “Why are they trying something new?” I asked. “How would they know if something was wrong with the old pills?” I held a striped sock in one hand and a plain one in the other.
    My mother tucked the pills in her pocket and shook out a pillowcase with a snap. “What are you getting at?”
    “Nothing. So are the new pills antidepressants?”
    “I’ll be downstairs if anyone needs me,” my father said. He left the room.
    I decided to segregate ankle-from kneesocks. “Maybe you should get Dora a different psychiatrist,” I said.
    “I don’t think so.” My mother shook out another pillowcase.
    “Jimmy’s mother hated Dr. Siebald.”
    “That’s enough, Lena.”
    “Jimmy says the doctors at Lorning just lock the kids up and give them drugs, and if we don’t even know whether the pills Dora’s been taking do her any good—”
    “I said
that’s enough!
” My mother was clutching the rim of the laundry basket. “Whatever you’re trying to say, I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t help to have you latching on to half-baked theories that you’ve picked up at school from people who wouldn’t know a hospital from a hole in the ground. I don’t have time for that, Elena.”
    Maybe you should make the time,
I thought. I left the socks where they were and went back to my room.
    About ten minutes later I heard my mother carry the laundry basket downstairs. I listened for footsteps and the clink of dishes in the kitchen. Then I went into my parents’ room and opened their closet and unzipped the outer compartment of my mother’s blue suitcase. She always hid our birthday presents inside it. I found the two bottles.
Lindt, Dora,
each of them said. I copied down the information from the labels and zipped the prescriptions back into the suitcase.
    The music pounded, louder and louder, in Dora’s room.

45

    The new pills (she started taking them the next morning) didn’t make Dora drowsy. They made her angry. She called my father a jackass.
    “You people don’t give a crap about me,” she said.
    I’d already promised she could trust me. Who did she mean by
you people?

46

    “Were you checking the bathrooms again?” Jimmy asked.
    I had just flopped down at the desk next to his. We were in Mr. Clearwater’s room, supposedly reading the morning paper. Every Monday we spent the first fifteen minutes of the period trying to find relevant or “stimulating” articles about current events. Most of the kids read the comics or did the puzzle.
    “If you keep this up, your teachers are going to think you’ve got dysentery.” Jimmy crossed his legs at the knee and leaned back in his chair, the newspaper open on his lap. He actually read it; other than the faded long-sleeved T-shirt and the partly shaved head, he looked like a businessman on his lunch break. “Besides,” he said, “didn’t you tell me that you hate to miss class?”
    “I should probably be checking the locker room,” I said. I was still breathing hard. “But Dora doesn’t like gym.”
    Mr. Clearwater decided to get out from behind his desk and circumnavigate like Columbus around the room. He was jiggling a piece of chalk in his hand. “Mr. Zenk? I’m sure you won’t mind if I ask you to cease and desist from all