Chapter 88

He didn’t know what he’d been telling Luca, and it didn’t matter. 28: “You’re gonna kill someone, for real, for just being gay.”

It took six weeks—six whole, miserable, boring weeks—before Luca could really think again. Six weeks of being upset for reasons he couldn’t remember, not being able to tell the difference between his dreams and the real world, and veering between wanting people to go away and leave him alone, and panicking when they did.

And then, finally, the doctors began to dial the drugs down.

That was a bad week, too, really, because it was either too low, and everything hurt, or too high, and Luca would go all fuzzy again. But eventually they sorted it out, and left Luca in this comfortable cocoon where his feet were oddly numb, and his broken arm would itch like mad, but the hurt was simply a dull ache separated from his brain by a thin, drug-induced shield.

The ultimate downside was that it was fucking boring.