Author's Notes:

I lied; there's going to be one more chapter after this. Writing this one out, I just felt like I wanted this one to stand more on its own.

Lyrics are from Amy in the White Coat by Bright Eyes, and the movie referenced but not named is Pay it Forward.

Chapter 3

Driving home, Seth considers that there's another other reason that he went tonight—and he's going to consider it having gone, despite huddling in the back and booking it for the exits at the first hint that things were coming to a close, and, admittedly, not really catching much of what anyone was saying, focused as he was on reviewing and refining both an alias, and a haphazard plan to pretend he didn't speak English, on the off-chance that anyone tried to approach him.

So yes, he can check off that he went, but now he supposes it could be time to grapple with the other thing.

It would probably be too neat and too cliché to say that things had ever gone back to normal after The Trauma, but around Seth's thirteenth birthday, things started to settle a little, to feel a little quieter.

Seth had finally started to feel like his parents could look at him without thinking about The Trauma, that he could enter a room and wouldn't be interrupting his parents having their umpteenth discussion/argument about What to Do About Him.

Things weren't perfect, but they were more okay.

Until Cohen Family Movie Night.

He should've known it was going to blow up, because it had been a suspiciously good day.

He'd had bar mitzvah practice earlier in the day, and his parents had both come along. The practice was kind of awkward and embarrassing, but the car ride home was nice.

He doesn't remember how it started, just that he and his dad were riffing about his mom's awful WASP-ish attempts at Hebrew elocution, and his mom was laughing good-naturedly and seemingly only pretending to be offended.

"Honey, I love you, but we're going to be the laughingstock of Bar Yahm."

That had made his mom snort, which wasn't a very his mom kind of thing to do.

And then he could swear that she started butchering Hebrew words on purpose, just to keep the whole thing going, and his mom could be a lot of things, but playful was rarely—if ever—one of them, but she turned to Seth in the backseat and gave him a little smile as she blithely said "Hash-hem, is it?"

That easy energy had followed them into the den that evening, and Seth had sat between his parents, cradling the big popcorn bowl on his lap, his dad on one side of him, his arm slung across the back of the couch, and his mom on the other side, clutching a sweaty glass of white wine in one hand and idly playing with Seth's curls with the other, another distinctly un-his-mom kind of thing to do.

And things were fine and easy, until the kid from The Sixth Sense was sitting on a bus station chair, counting out his money.

A man approached the Sixth Sense kid and tried to get him to go with him, offering to buy him a ticket, and-if his sinister intentions hadn't been telegraphed clearly enough-reaching out to try to touch the kid's face.

Seth can't remember if they watched the rest of the movie. He just remembers his mom's sharp intake of breath and her hand drawing away from his head, and his dad fumbling out some kind of attempt at making sure that Seth wasn't going to have a mental breakdown, instead of letting the moment pass like a normal person would.

His parents often weren't great at figuring out what actually upset him.

That scene didn't upset him.

That scene fascinated him, and that's what upset him.

Upset him, terrified him, whichever.

And so it was that the next day, while perfectly understanding what a horrible idea it was, he'd snuck into his dad's office when his parents were at work and swiped the Blockbuster case off his desk.

And then, continuing to understand perfectly what a horrible idea it was, he rewound and fast-forwarded the tape until he had isolated that scene. And he kept watching it and rewatching it.

Which is what his father walked in on, him watching a pervert trying to abduct the creepy Sixth Sense kid, over and over and over and over.

It was always the wrong parent who caught him doing everything.

If he broke a precious family heirloom, undoubtedly his mom would be the one to find him standing over its shattered remains, but if he were crying or puking or trying to surreptitiously download some porn or figure out why some invisible force was compelling him to watch this bus station scene over and over again, Sandy Cohen was bound to make a grand entrance.

His mother was constitutionally incapable of acknowledging anything she didn't want to be true. His father was constitutionally incapable of just letting a horrendously awkward and confusing moment go without comment, or at least without snitching to Seth's therapist so that Dr. Max could help analyze what a disgusting freak Seth had become.

He didn't know why he was so fascinated by the scene, why some part of his brain insisted that he watch it over and over, and the watching it over and over didn't actually help clarify anything for him.

It wasn't like he liked it.

He really, really didn't like it.

But still there was something about it that lit up some part of his brain.

He'd tried to play dumb with his dad and with Dr. Max.

He was terrified and fully convinced that he'd be put in a straitjacket and carted off to a mental hospital, and the only tool in his arsenal was to do what he did best and dig in hard with a completely ludicrous and transparent lie.

And Dr. Max had pressed a little, but he was pretty wise to the signs when Seth had become an immovable object, so instead he'd just offered some gentle theoreticals.

Seth can't remember the particulars, just something along the lines of "Well, if you ever found yourself…" or "it's not uncommon for people who've experienced trauma..."

So Seth still didn't get it, but he got enough from what Dr. Max was saying, and from Dr. Max taking the whole thing in stride, not seeming overly surprised or overly concerned, or like he was mentally sizing Seth for a straitjacket.

It was something Seth had become good at, using therapy to get helpful information, while giving away very little about his own feelings and experiences.

He supposes that might be part of what Dr. Max means when he claims that Seth is always trying to heal in isolation, and that he can't overcome feeling fundamentally like a disgusting freak without like, acknowledging the things he does and says and thinks about that make him feel like a disgusting freak, or that he even feels that way at all.

A lot of the time, Seth can keep that feeling somewhat at bay, can deny its existence and negotiate with it until it's just background noise and assure his therapist that he feels the right things; The Trauma obviously wasn't his fault, he's obviously not bad or gross or defective because of it, and he obviously isn't doomed to have a horrible life because of it.

Obviously.

Obviously.

Lately though, those feelings have been different, harder to negotiate with.

Some part of him has wanted to download that movie with the Sixth Sense kid again, to rewind and fast-forward it again and again. Some part of him wants to sit up in his room and listen to that one Bright Eyes song on repeat, or read and reread that passage in that one book that gave him that weird prickly feeling across his brain, or scour the internet for books and movies and songs and poems, for more weird prickly feelings across his brain.

He'll be having dinner with his dad and Ryan-

You're a bag of warm fluid.

or talking to Summer-

You're the corpse in the class

or having sex with Summer-

You walk so near to your locker

and it will take a concerted effort to hear what they're saying-

You lay so low in the grass

or to manipulate the Chopsticks in his hand, or feel Summer's skin against his, or to breathe in and out normally.

He's no longer at the bottom of a pool; he's in the darkest depths of the ocean, and he can't figure out where the surface is, or even if it exists anymore.

So he went to the group tonight and he's driving home now and he wishes he could say that any of it felt any better or less like he was drowning, but whatever, he went, and without anyone actually making him do it, which he's supposed to feel good about, so obviously he does feel good about it and obviously he feels like he's going to find the surface again.

Obviously.

Obviously.