No One Tells Everything by Rae Meadows

or binders allowed). Then you write: wake up, take pill, breathe—all of which you then cross out—then: try to sleep, pee, eat. You add at the bottom ‘find God,’ and laugh, but you’re only laughing because you’re supposed to laugh at something like that, like a character would do in a movie. But there’s no camera here and you don’t think it’s funny anyway. So you stop and drag your pen over and over and over it.
    “How are you feeling today?” your attorney asks.
    He wears a pinkie ring and he drives a gold Lexus–or so he tells you. He seems to like you better lately. Well, you know he doesn’t like you but he is less fearful of you, less disgusted. He thinks you seem a little more in control.
    “Fine,” you say.
    He’s all business. You wonder how much he makes for this visit, how much Charles Sr. shells out to have him drive here to ask you how you are. In the fluorescent light of the visiting room, you can see stray hairs on his smooth head and you make yourself look elsewhere. The hairs are there, though, in your periphery when you look at him and when you close your eyes.
    “We’re conferencing Thursday to try to work out a tentative proposal for a trial date. The longer we wait the better. The further out from media accounts the better. Did you see the doctor this week?”
    “Yeah,” you say. “I see him every week.”
    Dubno looks different now than he did to you at first. Smaller. Less powerful. He doesn’t ask much of you other than to believe that you are mentally ill, for the good of the case. You know he believes you did it though he’s never asked you. But to be fair, you know it doesn’t matter to him or his job. He says he believes you were sick, and that makes you not entirely culpable.
    “Good. His testimony will be important,” he says.
    On the yellow legal pad that rests on his crossed leg, he scratches down notes even though you are not saying anything. The letters he makes are long and narrow and the lines that form them don’t connect. The words he writes float on the page and when you stare at them they start to move, as if to rearrange themselves.
    “We’re weak on people who can testify on your behalf. None of the boys from the fraternity. We’ve contacted all of them.”
    Even though you knew this, it hurts to hear.
    “She would have,” you say.
    “Who would have what?” he asks.
    “Sarah.” You laugh silently as you cry. “She would have testified on my behalf.”
    Inside your skull you can feel the battle between self-preservation and the powerful beast of your memory. If you look closely you think you can still see blood under your fingernails.
    “Okay, okay. Take it easy.” Dubno reaches his hand to touch your arm, then stops and rubs his chin instead.
    You lean back to make him feel better, to make him feel further away from you. The suppressants go to work and blanket the bubbling crevices of your brain.
    He underlines something three times then checks his watch.
    “Charles. Your parents want you in treatment, not in prison. This is only going to happen if we win. Insanity is not an easy thing to get a jury to decide on.”
    The stray hairs on his head flutter, though you feel no breeze in the dead air of the room. You wonder if he senses with them, like antennae. You want to smooth them down.
    “They’ll be here next week?” he asks.
    “Who?”
    “Your parents,” he says, trying to look like it’s not weird that you didn’t know to whom he was referring.
    “Oh. Yeah,” you say.
    Kathy and Charles Sr., dressed up, so painfully out of their element in the jail. They’ll look like forms cut from plywood when they stand in the vestibule waiting for your arrival, his arm around her waist like they are posing for a formal portrait. Your mother, as always, in freshly applied coral lipstick. She has been wearing the same shade all your life.
    “I talked to your father last night about some particulars,” Dubno says.
    He taps his notepad on