(Dianne) Fox Writes

With the linens stripped and the few things Jasper owned already packed in a suitcase and out in the hall, Jasper’s room in the halfway house looked less inspiring than the room he’d left at Raindell. For all that he was free of the institution, his time at Wakely House had been difficult. The fault for that didn’t lie in the ever-shifting, ever-dangerous moods of the other residents, or the chaos spawned from their ‘mistakes’ like the drug raid last week or the drunken brawl in the kitchen last month. The fault was all — as it usually was — Jasper’s.

It was hard to be in the world. Harder than he’d ever dreamed. Without his cocoon of medications, he was a bare, ragged worm clinging to a branch. He certainly wasn’t a butterfly. This wasn’t a child’s story with an easy, happy ending. To Haruto’s dismay, Jasper had refused to give up his medications entirely. One to make him sleep, one to keep his seizures at bay. The other prescriptions from Dr. Avakian at Raindell had ended, but Jasper was still hoarding the last of each bottle.

“The more you fear, the worse you suffer,” Haruto had said at their last appointment. Samson, lying at Jasper’s feet, had whined sadly enough to make Jasper’s chest ache. “It is not the medications that bother me, Jasper; it is your fear. For this to work, for you to flourish, you must have faith.”

“I don’t know how.”

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