Remember When **Under MAJOR Editing**

Chapter 2

"You keep this to yourself," he snarled.

I blinked at him. My brain rushed through scenarios, painting him as the hero, and finally gave up. There was no way he could be our hero when his first words to me were a command to keep things quiet. I stammered, "Keep . . . How . . . ?"

"They're taking her to the loony bin in Fort Walton," he interrupted me. "With any luck they'll dope her up, and she'll be back at work in six weeks. You want to spread it around town that she's nuts and ruin her career, go right ahead."

I tried to hear pain in his voice, sorrow at what my mom had done, remorse for the hand he'd had in driving her to this point. Emotions like these must be behind his unsympathetic words.

But all I heard was anger. Embarrassment that his friends and business partners and employees might dish about him and his tabloid-worthy private life. Fear that my mom would lose her job and he'd have to share the proceeds of his water park with two families instead of one.

"Don't even tell those little twins, you understand me?" He leaned forward and looked straight into my eyes as he said this. It was the closest his body had come to my body since he arrived. He would not hug me. He would only invade my personal space to emphasize that I'd better not spill this secret to my best friends.

Without waiting for my answer, he stood. "Don't move," he barked, not looking at me. I assumed he meant me because I was the only other person in the room. He was already walking toward the vestibule.

Oh God, oh God. He might threaten Officer Elks into promising silence, but he had no idea who Dade was, or how little Dade cared about anybody. There was no threat my dad could make to Dade that would shut Dade up if he thought spreading the news about my mother would hurt me. Dade would think he was ruining my life, but really he would be ruining my mother's—because even if she started to recover from her mental illness, she wouldn't recover much if she lost her job and the community's respect.

I saw all this unfolding in front of me as my dad swung open the glass door to the vestibule and leaned into Officer Elk's personal space, and there wasn't a thing I could do to stop it from happening. Dade's green eyes widened as my dad growled at Officer Elks. I couldn't make out all of what my dad was saying, but when you can kiss your job good-bye floated to me through the glass, I turned away from the black rectangle of night. I stared at the white doors to the emergency room. My thumb found the chip in my fingernail polish and rubbed back and forth across it. I didn't need to see it to know it was there.

The vestibule door squealed open. "Mya," my dad called. "Let's go." He stood alone at the threshold to the darkness. He must have chased Dade and Officer Elks away.

I gestured toward the emergency room doors. I thought he would know what I meant by this. When he raised his eyebrows in expectation, I realized I would have to explain even this to him: that I didn't want to leave her. I opened my mouth and had no words for any of it.

"They won't let you see her anyway," he said. "The loony bin won't let you see her either. They say it's to protect you from her, and to protect her from you. To remove her from the environment. They'll let her call you when she's ready to see you."

He was saying what I'd been thinking. I'd been blaming myself and hoping that self-blame was natural in these circumstances but ultimately silly. He was telling me it was not silly. Even the mental hospital thought it was my fault that my mother had done this. I still didn't want to believe any of it, but I felt myself falling down that slope without anything to grab to save myself, except this:
I whispered, "When I first got here, they told me maybe I could talk to the hospital psychologist about what happened?"