Jessica and I stood in front of a closed hospital room. The room number, five-hundred seven. It’s painted a gray tone, letting it stand apart from the rest of the snow white hallway. Why am I paying attention to these minor insignificant details rather than doing anything meaningful? It all has to do with what’s beyond this door.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked Jessica.

“Is something the matter?” Jessica asked back.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Nothing really. Just don’t expect much.”

With the warning now out, and now that Jessica is more confused than she should be, I open the door. It opens a crack at first, before fully revealing what’s inside. Sitting on the bed, with a tray of a meal having been eaten a few minutes ago, Ty stared out the window, teeth showing thanks to a fantastic grin.

He looked at peace, as if he hadn’t just gone through an event that would traumatize most people. That smile reflected the sunlight pouring through the window. He breathed calmly. His arms and legs relaxed into the comfortable hospital bed. Even the arm wrapped in a cast looked as if it was in zero pain. As if I had never done anything to him except be a minor hindrance.

I turned to Jessica to see how she was reacting to the situation. She didn’t look any better. In fact, I’d say that the stare she gave off was much worse than anything I saw Ty pull off. It was a look of familiar suffering. She stared at Ty with a face that yelled about nostalgia and eyes that wanted to forget. But they can never forget.

I shut the door behind us, still keeping a watch on Jessica. Ty hadn’t reacted to us entering, but once the door squeezed shut, he turned to us, his smile brightening. He really didn’t look like an adult. He still looks like there’s something holding him back from growing that beard he wants so badly.

“Harmony, Jessica, what are you doing here?” Ty asked in a jovial tone. 

Jessica walked to Ty’s side. She looked at him with eyes withholding a hidden message, and Ty looked uncomfortable from the way she stared at him. He looked over at me and mouthed the words help, but I couldn’t help. I didn’t know what he wanted help from. 

Jessica sat in a chair beside him and continued to stare at him. The atmosphere, which was most likely much lighter before we entered, slowly crushed us with a weighty pressure unlike anything I’ve witnessed before. I’ve had to deal with situations in way worse conditions and more at stake, but without uttering a word, Jessica somehow brought a forgotten emotion to surface. The true emotion of being out of one’s depth.

“How are you feeling, Ty?” Jessica asked.

Ty continued to smile. “Oh, I’m doing peachy. I just have this broken arm and a constant headache, and my throat feels like it’s on fire, but otherwise, I’m going fine.” 

Ty wasn’t wrong about the on fire part. With each word coming out of his mouth, he had to slow down and pause between every few words. His voice gave off a terribly grating sound that was dissimilar to someone grinding their nails on a chalkboard, except that board is made of very sensitive flesh. 

“You know, now that I think about it, Jessica, we never actually talked like normal.” Ty said. “Every time we meet up, all we ever talk about is the past. I did this. You did that. We both did this and that. We never talked about how we’re doing now, so why don’t we talk normally tomorrow?” 

Jessica didn’t respond. She gazed at Ty, judging every action and word he said or did. When she didn’t answer back, Ty scratched the back of his neck like the main characters that I’ve seen do from those cartoons he watches. That smile stays put.

“You know that’s not what I meant.” Jessica said.

This time, it was Ty’s turn to be confused. However, it was always his turn. 

“What do you mean by that?” Ty asked.

“I mean, how are you doing up here?” Jessica tapped the side of her head. 

“I don’t know why I would act any different. I just broke an arm. There’s nothing to fret about.”

Jessica scowled, spit frothing from her mouth. Her eyes became as red as the color of her hair, and her face took that color as well. Ty leaned away from her, and I took a step away as well. I didn’t understand what she was about to do, but I wasn’t going to stand anywhere near her with that taser in her purse. 

“We are not doing this again.” Jessica said in a strained voice. “You can’t just ignore the issue like last time.”

“Ignore what issue? I’m just healing up from breaking my arm. That’s something that happens to everyone.”

I sighed and leaned against a wall, my hand covering my head. Ty’s been like this since the police left him alone once they got their account. I told him what to say after Jessica told me to tell him, but once they left, he started acting confused about the real reason he’s here. 

When I asked him about how he was feeling, he said fine, but his arm hurt like a bitch. Nothing out of the ordinary, except I noticed he sounded somewhat off. There was an uncharacteristic amount of calmness in his voice. The way how each word smoothly cascaded off his tongue with no hint of a stutter, or even a single halt. Nothing about the way he spoke sounded like he had just been kidnapped, beaten, then witnessed someone die. I remember what happened the first day I saw someone die. I don’t think I left my head for years, until I started taking that pain and fear I felt, then placed it in other people.

Ty, however, sounded like he hadn’t moved from his bed, and all that ever happened was he fell and broke his arm. To test it, I asked him about his time in his kidnapper’s basement. The way he looked at me, and the way he sounded, made it seem like he was genuinely confused. What basement? What kidnapper? Those words slid down his ear, but couldn’t fully make it to his brain. 

“You want to know what I’m going to do once I get home.” Ty said before giving Jessica time to speak. “I’m going to sit down and write. I’m going to finally get at least ten chapters in, then go on one big editing spree. Then I’m going to play those special games.” Ty looked at me and winked. “You know what I mean, Harmony.”

“Can you please just listen?” Jessica said.

“And then what I’m going to do is go to sleep, wake up, and have a nice cup of coffee. The doctors said that it wouldn’t be good to have all that caffeine running through my system while I was injured.”

“Ty!”

“And then I’ll go out with you again, Jessica. I’ll finally do what I should have done long ago, and we can go back to living life like a comedy. Like how things should be.”

Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this behavior. Not just in general, too. If I were to get a nickel for each time I’ve seen someone act like this, then I’d have at least five nickels. Ty would count for two of those five nickels. I always thought it was weird that after I had taken advantage of him we went back to acting like normal. Considering how cubbi act after trauma like that, I would’ve assumed a human would react five times worse. However, after that talk, he acted as if that entire event had never happened. I could also point to when he figured out my identity. He did keep his distance for a time, but he got used to the fact I’m a cubbi almost instantly. 

At first, I just assumed it was because Ty was just an easygoing human. I thought that he just got over things like that easily, but now that I’m witnessing this, I can’t help but come to a different, much more pathetic conclusion.

“We’ll laugh and laugh, then when my arm heals, we can just put this all behind us. There’s no reason to think about it. There’s no reason for it to be a big deal.”

Ty’s response to trauma is to push it away and pretend like he’s living in a world full of comedy. His reason to make everyone smile isn’t just because he made a bet with the world. He wants to make everyone smile so he can feel justified for pushing away his grief. If everyone’s smiling, then there’s no reason for him to frown. I don't even think he actually knows he's doing this himself. From Jessica’s reaction to this situation, I can only assume this wasn’t the first time it’s happened. 

Jessica bowed her head and stared at her feet. I think she realized there was no getting through to Ty. She stood and Ty held out his non-busted hand for her to shake. She sighed and grabbed his hand and squeezed. They shook and Ty let go, but Jessica’s hand stayed for a bit longer before she retracted it. 

“By the way, Ty. It’s not tomorrow.” Jessica said.

“Huh?”

“I’m busy tomorrow, so we’re rescheduling our outing for tonight. Once you get home, we’re going out. I’ll come pick you up.”

For the first time since the police left, Ty looked completely shocked and out of it. I don’t know why, but his eyes looked vacant. They darted around, searching for something so that he could say anything. 

“Alright.” That was all Ty said. He coughed and turned his smile back on, the sunlight unable to reflect off of those teeth of his since he faced away from the window. “I’ll see you tonight.”

Jessica nodded before walking away. Before she left, she wished him good luck on his way home, leaving me and him alone together. 

“So, are we leaving?” Ty asked.

“Don’t you need the doctor’s permission?” 

“They already said I could leave some time ago.” Ty turned back to the window. “I just wanted to finish looking at this scenery.”

I looked out the window, intrigued by the scenery that kept him from leaving his bed. Outside the window towered the Juxten Plateau. I never realized how huge it actually was, but as I stared from five stories high, yet the plateau surface still was out of eyes reach, that’s when the true scale of it manifested. From atop it, even when looking down and seeing how small everything is, there’s no proper sense of scale. All I knew was we were taller than everything else. Only when I’m looking up at it, I can tell how massive it truly is. If only the buildings weren’t in the way all the time, everyone in the city could witness it.

“We leaving?” Ty asked once more.

I took a deep breath and looked at him. “Yes, we’re leaving.”

After everything, from a kidnapping, witnessing torture, and breaking an arm, I can finally bring Ty back home. Home will still be the same to him, since he’ll believe nothing has changed.