I say. “I’m only interested in figuring out exactly what happened to me, so I can help the police find Astrid.”
Ted shakes his head. That’s not what’s important, I expect he’ll say. But when he actually speaks, his voice is deeper than it’s ever been. If I didn’t know him better, I’d say he was choked up.
“You think I don’t want that too?” he asks. “You think that, all these years, I haven’t wanted you to figure out who did this to you? Do you really think me so… inhuman?”
I gape up at him. My heart is not a fist right now. My stomach does not whirl. It’s warm. Buzzing a little. Like I’ve downed a shot. I’m about to respond when Eric pushes the door open and steps onto the porch, holding a black garbage bag in one hand, a book in the other. Ted glances at him, then throws out his arm like a bar in front of Eric’s chest.
“Where do you think you’re going with that?” he asks. His voice sounds normal again. Hard. Authoritative. Not pleading for anything.
“To the trash can?” Eric says. “You asked me to take out the garbage.”
“Not that. The book.” Ted grabs it out of Eric’s hand.
“Oh. It was on top of the trash can in the kitchen. I assumed you meant to throw it away. It’s one of Brennan’s, so…”
“Throw it away? Are you mad? I was showing it its place.”
“Showing it its…?” Eric trails off and shakes his head. “Okay, sorry.”
Ted mutters under his breath, rapid and incomprehensible, before spinning around to head into the house. When the door slaps closed behind him, Eric looks at me, waiting for me to explain.
“He does that,” I say, “whenever a new Brennan book comes out. He puts all his old ones near the trash cans. ‘Rubbish belongs with rubbish,’ don’t you know.” I smile a little, shrug one shoulder. “There’s one in the bathroom, too.”
Eric gives an elaborate roll of his eyes, then winces. Puts his fingers to his temple. “I think I just strained a muscle,” he says.
When we go inside, Ted’s at the kitchen counter, flipping through the book Eric almost threw away: The Desolation of Fear.
“Ridiculous!” he bellows, to no one in particular. “Look at this, look at this.” He opens one of Brennan’s older books, The Isolation of Terror, and rummages around until he finds what he’s looking for. “These passages are almost identical! He’s plagiarizing himself!”
He snaps the older book shut without showing us the passages. “Yet somehow, this copy-and-paste disgrace is on the bestseller list, even though he continues to shackle himself with freshman psych ideas. No wonder he doesn’t have a true following—just the drooling sheep who’ll buy anything they see on TV. Trust me, at his bookstore events, where there are real people, it’s always crickets.”
That isn’t true, of course. I’ve only attended one of his events, but it was clear that Brennan could captivate a crowd. The bookstore was strange, with murals of birds on every inch of empty wall space, and there was even a parrot in a cage, right near the podium where Brennan stood. The parrot kept picking out random snippets of Brennan’s talk and interrupting him with a piercing voice. “Fear cycle!” he squawked, or “Echoes of trauma!” If it had been Ted up there, he would have gotten angry and flustered, but Brennan never once faltered. He made jokes out of it, made the audience grip their stomachs laughing, and when his talk was over, they leapt to their feet to applaud.
“And wait,” Ted says. He marches toward the bathroom off the kitchen, returns with another of Brennan’s books. “This one was published between the other two. And look!” He opens the cover, shoves the jacket copy toward our faces, too close for us to actually read it. “Same ideas! It’s basically his Exam Experiment all over again!” he shouts.
He yanks the book back and whips to the title page. “Oh, but here we go. This is the best part. This is why I don’t throw these books away, Dr. Eric. To prove what a fraud he really is. Here, look, read it.”
Ted points the page toward Eric, who squints at the inscription scrawled across it. “To my talented friend Ted—May these new ideas inspire you.” Eric flicks his gaze back at Ted. “That’s nice,” he says.
“Nice?” Ted hisses. “The ideas aren’t new at all! How could they be, when he insists on betraying his true self, his