Читать книгу Peeves - Mike Waes Van - Страница 6

I’m not going to start at the beginning because that would be my birth and it’s probably gross and boring and I don’t actually remember it. And I’ll also save you the full “origin story” of my superhuman ability to be freaked out. The “previously on” version is that I woke up one night two years ago and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I started dry-heaving and sweating and crying and shaking. I was so convinced I was dying that my parents rushed me to the ER. When the doctor saw me, she literally laughed in my face. “It was just a panic attack.” As if that made it feel any less like a near-death experience. With the scribble of a pen and a rip off a prescription pad, she assured me it would most likely be a one-time thing. But those sounds are something I’ve been very used to hearing ever since.

And I still wake up in a panic some nights. Except now I’m in a different home. Or homes, really, because the divorce ended with two of them. And even though that went down a few months ago, it’s just one more trigger for the panic to pull. Once I start to worry, it’s only a matter of time. And so many things make me worry. It can start with a comment or an irritation or even a noise or a smell, and then I’m off. I can’t stop it. “You’re too young to be so stressed out,” is what my parents would say. But any twelve-year-old can tell you that grown-ups don’t have a monopoly on grown-up feelings. That is, if any twelve-year-old were willing to talk about it. That was one of my problems. Maybe my biggest problem.

But that was before the “incident” in Old Wayford. Before the end of life as I knew it.

And that ending actually begins with my name.