Survive

Начало книги

It is ten minutes before ten, and normally I’d be staking out a chair for Group. That’s the kind of thing you worry about in an institution like Life House. I guess that’s good, in a way. The challenge of Group is to find a chair as far away from Old Doctor as possible without sitting too close to Big Stink, otherwise secretly known as BS. BS is Ben, and he’s the only boy on Life House D, which is specifically for cutters and suicides, and he smells like urine baked at three-fifty for forty minutes. You don’t want to sit next to BS for an hour. I mean he is extra sweet and all and we’ve had some nice conversations, but an hour of inhaling his fumes can cause brain damage. Sometimes the logistics are tough, so I get there early and wait. I’m a planner.

But today I’m not participating in Group. Instead, I’m flying home to New Jersey for the first time since arriving in Idaho three hundred and forty-five days ago. My plane leaves in exactly six hours, nine minutes, and thirty seconds according to the pocket watch my father left me. It is old, but I trust it. He’s dead, but I still trust him more than anyone else I know, and I certainly trust his pocket watch a lot more than I trust the airlines and the schedules they almost never keep. But I can’t worry about that now. The fact remains: I’m leaving Life House, my home away from home for the past year, in six hours and nine minutes flat. Ticktock ticktock.

Читать дальше →