Free How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets by Garth Stein Page B

say, so he doesn’t doubt its validity. Besides, he knows you should never argue with a kid’s dead mom.
    “I’ll take you down tomorrow and show you how it works.”
    “Okay.”
    “Good night.”
    “Night.”
    AFTER HE BRUSHES his teeth, Evan opens the medicine cabinet and takes out three pill bottles. He spills little white pills from one of them onto the palm of his hand. How easy it would be to kill himself this second. A handful of phenobarbital and a fifth of vodka and he’d be beyond the reach of stomach pumping, that’s for sure. It is Evan’s ongoing struggle. If some people feel a compelling urge to jump, then he has a compelling urge to swallow every pill in the container every time he opens it. Every single time he has to say to himself calmly, “Only two, Evan. Only two.”
    Only two.
    “I’ve really gotta—”
    “What?” Evan jumps. He’s so startled that he drops the bottle; the pills scatter in a million powdery-white directions. Pills, pills everywhere. He scrambles to scoop them up before they get wet.
    “Sorry, ” Dean says as he pees noisily into the toilet.“I really had to go.”
    Shit. Several have slipped down the drain. A few are soaking up puddled water on the counter. And these are serious drugs, too. You can’t just go back to the pharmacy and ask for a refill of barbiturates because you dropped the bottle. They’ll want to know what happened to the pills. These pills actually have value on the black market. Some people take them for fun.
    “Can I help?” Dean asks.
    “No, no, I got it.”
    Dean watches Evan for a moment.“What are they?” he asks.
    “Allergy pills.”
    “Oh. Sorry.”
    “No biggie. I have to get used to your being in the house. You startled me.”
    “Sorry.”
    Evan waves him off, and Dean goes back to the living room. Evan hears the springs of the bedframe flex as Dean climbs on. He looks down at the pills that are gathered near the drain stopper. Allergy pills. Jesus. What a stupid lie. What a stupid, pathetic lie.

H E WAS STILL in the hospital after the accident when he first learned he had epilepsy. He was lying in bed watching Magnum, P.I. with the sound off. His parents were there.
    “How are you feeling?” the doctor asked.
    “Fine.”
    “Good, good. Evan . . .” the doctor said, hiking up his hospital scrubs as he sat at the end of the bed.
    Evan waited for the doctor to speak. He was a hawklike man, long teeth, a hook nose, beady gray eyes behind thick glasses. Rough cheeks, oversized ears.
    “While you were asleep, we had to perform surgery.”
    Evan stiffened. Asleep?
    “You may not remember much of what happened before you got here. Do you remember?”
    Evan thought hard. He remembered things.
    “It’s very common, ” the doctor went on, “after a person has been in a coma for a time, for that person not to remember the events prior to the coma. Understand?”
    Evan nodded. But he remembered things.
    “It’s the body’s way of protecting you from trauma. Your body is censoring its own thoughts. Kind of nice, right?”
    Right. But he remembered a lot of it. He remembered a car. He remembered the street.
    “There was some bleeding in the membrane that surrounds your brain, and we had to relieve some of the pressure. You probably don’t remember. And that’s just fine. It was a relatively simple procedure.”
    A procedure. At twelve, Evan, a doctor’s son, already knew most of the medical jargon. A procedure is an operation.
    “There was also a small bone fragment we had to dig around a bit to find. We found it, but it seems that there is still some activity in that brain of yours.”
    With this, the doctor pointed to Evan’s head and grinned a long, toothy grin.
    “The EEG—the machine we use to monitor your brain waves—shows that your brain is sometimes working even when you think it isn’t.”
    The doctor glanced back at Carl and Louise, who stood underneath Tom Selleck, staring intently at Evan.
    But he