The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B Read Free Page A

turned the knob.
    “It’s important.”
    “Yeah, for sure.” Adam exhaled and opened the door. “You got it,” he lied.

CHAPTER 3
    Adam thought about Robyn nonstop all week, and every week for three weeks straight. Big love and his OCD made that pretty much inevitable. If he were an artist, he would have drawn her. If he were a writer, he would have written about her. If he were allowed a smartphone, or even a regular PC, he would have scrolled and dug and searched. But he wasn’t so he didn’t and he didn’t so he couldn’t.
    Adam had gotten into a bit of a thing last year, scrolling endlessly for hours, counting the blinks of the cursor, images, words, the letter
m
, among other things. It took longer and longer for it to feel “just right.” Therefore, change of meds and no more personal devices. Now he just
thought
. They couldn’t take away his thoughts, though most of the time he wished they could.
    Adam thought about her smile, her voice, her legs, her black hair and her sky-blue eyes. It was a checklist:
eyes, legs, smile, voice, legs, hair, eyes
.… He thought about her so much that he’d been semi-mute during the last two Groups. Both sessions were painful, except for the looking-at-her part. And he wasn’t the only awkward one. Four sessions in and everyone still seemed weirdly shy or something. So far, Group had all the esteem-building properties of your first middle-school dance—the one that was held in the
small
gym. Wolverine was the only one who consistently stepped up to the plate. Problem was, he stayed there
and
emitted a full-on masculinity vibe while whinging about his bat-shit hypochondria. “Did you know that almost one hundred superbly conditioned young male athletes die every single year from hidden cardiovascular diseases like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy? I’m sure I should be on some kind of diuretic.” He just
had
to be crazier than Adam. Unfortunately, Wolverine also moved and looked like the hockey player he’d been before he’d convinced himself that the off-gassing in the ice rink would kill him. Worse yet, Adam was convinced that Robyn was in Wolverine’s sightline. Even worser, he was tall.
    Today would be different. “My kid’s a talker,” Adam’s mom always used to say. “He could talk a cat out of his pajamas.” It was time. He would say stuff. For sure.
    Adam used his walk over from school as a time to test-drive topics. Walking took twenty minutes longer than the bus, but the added exercise had the advantage of making him feel righteous,
plus
he could scroll through possible talking points along the way. On the one hand, he wantedto be helpful. So far, Green Lantern rarely said anything and Captain America looked seriously preoccupied. Thor could only be counted on to growl randomly when he wasn’t catching up on his sleep. Even Snooki and Wonder Woman were pretty much comatose, and Adam would’ve pegged the both of them as talkers. This left the therapist in a lurch with Wolverine. Adam was uncomfortable with lurches and very uncomfortable with Wolverine.
    He liked Chuck. They all liked Chuck, and not simply because he was the only psychiatrist in the city who specialized in adolescent OCD issues. Adam had to make this work for Chuck. And he had to do it while looking tough and tall and badass.
    He considered bringing up the letter. The new one that had come last week. It was for sure some twisted thing because it had freaked out his mom even though she’d tried to keep it a secret again. But it was his mother’s letter, so this was complex. It was
her
problem, right? But the letter had upset her, and therefore it had upset him, so in the end it was
his
problem.
No
. He knew things like that now, the whole separating-of-issues issue. Still, Adam worried. But at least now he knew that he shouldn’t. He also knew better than to discuss anything that had to do with his mother. A badass does not talk about his mom.
    So he had come up with five mom-free