August, 1986
Lindsay lay on her bed, listening to the Smiths on her Walkman and staring up at the ceiling. She wanted to go to sleep, her head was aching, but she didn't want to leave her room and risk running into Michael. But only extreme circumstances could cause her to skip her nightly skin care routine, so she would just have to wait until she heard him either go downstairs or go to sleep.
She froze as she heard a knock on her door. She didn't say anything.
"Lindsay?" Michael said. She hesitated, then sighed.
"Come in," she groaned. She glanced up at him as he came into her room, then looked back up at the ceiling. He sat at the foot of her bed.
"Sorry about earlier," she heard him say over the music. "I shouldn't have gotten mad."
She hesitated, then took off her headphones and sat up. As she did, she felt a wave of dizziness. She blinked and waited for it to pass. It did, but she still felt a little lightheaded. That had been happening a lot lately.
"I just don't know what to do," he said desperately. "I don't want you to be mad at me, or to avoid me, but I can't just do nothing. I don't think you realize how dangerous what you're doing is."
She opened her mouth to make some retort, but then closed it. As annoying as he was being, it was hard to be mad at him when he looked so desperate to help her. She remembered the list of potential health problems he'd thrown at her during the intervention. But it wasn't that serious, she hadn't lost that much weight. She sighed and swung her legs off the bed and scooted over to sit next to him. "I think you're overreacting," she said.
"I am not overreacting."
"Well, no one else seems to think anything's wrong, you're the only one—"
Her voice caught as she thought about how little attention everyone else in the family had paid her. Michael had tried several times to convince their parents to make her see a doctor, but their mother maintained that she hadn't noticed any weight loss and their father had been gone for the last two weeks on a 'business trip,' though she suspected he was really off screwing his secretary. She was glad that Michael hadn't had any success in convincing them, of course, but she couldn't help but feel hurt that they seemed to care so little about her. She realized with a dull aching that Michael was the only one who had paid any attention to her, and she'd been pushing him away.
"Sorry," she said quietly, looking down at the floor. "It's just…I'm sorry." She swallowed as a lump rose in her throat and her eyes filled with tears.
"If you talked to a therapist, they might be able to help—"
"Can we please just not talk about that right now?" she interrupted, her voice breaking. "Just for one second can we talk about something else?"
"Yeah, okay," he said. She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. She felt another wave of dizziness, worse than the last, along with that shaky, clammy feeling that had become familiar to her.
"I, uh…I'm kinda tired, I think I'm gonna go to sleep now," she said, struggling to find the words as the room started spinning.
"Oh. Okay," he said, seeming a little hurt. He got up to leave.
"No, wait," she said guiltily. "You can stay, it's okay."
"It's okay, if you want to sleep—"
"No, really," she insisted, grabbing his arm. "Please stay."
The surprise in his face told her that was a weird thing to say, but her thoughts were too clouded to remember why. She just didn't want him to think she was mad at him.
"Okay," he said, and sat back down.
"Let's just talk," she said, relieved to feel at least some of the dizziness passing. She could do this, she just needed to focus.
"Alright. What do you want to talk about?"
"I don't know," she said, trying to search her foggy brain for something. There wasn't much to talk about, she'd been sitting alone in her room all summer. "We could talk about Dallas," she suggested, remembering how much fun they'd had watching it together last spring. "The new season's starting next month. We can finally see how Bobby's still alive."
"Oh yeah," he said. "They'd better have a good explanation."
"I read that there are three possible answers, and they taped all three just so the cast and everyone else wouldn't know which was the right one."
"Really?"
"Yeah, it cost them like, thousands of dollars."
"Wow. Did it say what the answers were?"
"Yeah," she said, struggling to remember the article. "One of them was that it was all a dream, which would be terrible."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah, that's what I said when I read it."
"You mean him dying was a dream?"
"Not just that, the entire season."
"Ugh," he said indignantly. "That is terrible!"
"I know, right?" she laughed. It surprised her. She couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed. She felt a sudden urge to hug him, or something, she was just so grateful to him for distracting her from her misery, but she couldn't do that, it would be too weird. The dizziness returned again. No, no, she couldn't pass out in front of Michael.
"What were the other two?" he asked.
"Um…one of them was…I think someone, uh…it was an imposter, he got plastic surgery to look like him so he could steal his money or something," she said, swaying slightly and gripping her bedspread as if that would help.
"That's even worse!" he laughed, apparently not noticing the difficulty she was having concentrating.
"Better than the dream one," she said confusedly.
"No, even that would be better, at least it would make sense."
"Yeah, I guess," she agreed, just so she could stop talking. It was taking all her concentration to keep him from noticing how disoriented she was.
"What was the third one?" he asked.
"Um…" she said, distracted by the spots appearing in her vision and the ringing in her ears. "I don't remember." She shouldn't have asked him to stay, she should tell him to leave now, but she didn't want to, she didn't want him to go. "Sorry…sorry I got mad earlier," she said instead.
"Don't worry about it, it's fine."
"I miss you," she said, suddenly needing him to understand. "I just…wanna be alone most of the time right now. It's not because I'm mad or something." It wasn't entirely true, but it should be, she had no reason to be angry when he was only trying to help her.
"It's okay," he said. "Just know that I'm here if you need me."
"I know," she said, her heart breaking as she thought about how she'd been treating him, how she'd always treated him, when he was the only one who cared.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew she shouldn't as she leaned against him and rested her head on his shoulder, but she couldn't remember why, and he was so warm and familiar and good. She felt him tense slightly, surprised. She wished he wouldn't, why did he have to make this awkward, when she just wanted to be close to him? But then he was shifting underneath her, and then his arm was around her, and she was wrapping her arms around him and breathing in the warm, clean smell of his shirt, but it wasn't enough, she couldn't get close enough to stop this terrible, empty longing.
"I'm sorry," she whispered as the room spun around her. "You've been so…nice and…I dunno."
"Are you okay?" she heard him say, but his voice was so far away.
"Yeah," she murmured. "Don't…don't worry…"
It felt like she was falling, falling backwards down a long black tunnel, and she was vaguely aware of him moving underneath her and saying her name, but she couldn't anymore, she couldn't keep it from slipping away…
