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His life is so neatly divided into Before and After.
He can barely remember things from Before, now, all washed over with the colors of what's to come. Every happy memory losing its brightness, leaving a sour taste in his mouth, uneasiness, like somehow he should have known. Every time he came to the cabin as a child, every laugh-filled trek through the woods, snowball fight, baseball game, becoming some kind of terrible scavenger hunt for clues. He gets lost for hours, combing through his memories, looking for the omens. Like one day he'll remember some dark shadow lurking in the corner of his family vacation and it will all make sense.
But After... After is a bitter blur of moments strung together with fragile string. Whole days and nights blurry from drinking, from the lethargy of medication, from the unholy combination of both that leaves his chest heavy and struggling to breathe. But he craves that, too, the feeling like sinking slowly into deep water, constricting his lungs. And some weeks he just doesn't remember at all—sometimes for no reason, just times he spent laying in bed all day, watching the reflection of the sun rise and set on the ceiling. His parents dragging him to therapy three times a week and he learns quickly what he can and cannot say. What things he can reveal and what things he must keep hidden in his left breast pocket. The narrow line between "I'm having a hard time coping" and "I should be put in the hospital"—and he never wants to cross into the latter. Not again. He remembers that part of Before all too vividly and sometimes it comes back in all-encompassing waves. When he smells vomit. When he sees that particular shade of green they painted all the walls. Bare feet on carpeted floors.
And he's been in and out of so many doctors by now, he's got a whole roster of them, referrals to specialists, and he hates them all and lies to them all but he can't imagine a world without them. Before or After. He's seen fucked up and it's the other people in his unit, the ones with acetaminophen toxicity, the ones who started doing meth at 16, the ones who cut themselves up and tattooed over it and cut it all up again. He doesn't like to think of himself as fucked up because he's seen what fucked up people do, and he's not as bad as them. Not yet—not ever.
The only good thing about the doctors is the meds. They make him feel more and less crazy at the same time, somehow, but they never work. Not really. Not for very long. So they switch him around, raise and lower dosages, and he grits his jaw through the nights he spends curled on the bathroom floor, sweating through his clothes and hugging the cold porcelain of the toilet. Withdrawals and highs and spending late nights with a locked door experimenting with the pills, which ones will let him sleep dreamlessly, which ones will give him that heavy and effortless high, which ones get him drunk the quickest. Which ones make him wake up days later, in a stupor, unremembering.
There's constants in his life besides the doctors. School, of course—when he can make it there. He's always had an IEP but now it's been jacked up, supersized, and he misses days and weeks at a time with only a pitying but knowing look from his teachers when he comes back. And Chris—all of his friends, really, but Chris has been his best friend for so long, and he doesn't mind the times that Josh can't find it in him to speak to him. Always forgives him when he comes back, joking around like nothing happened.
Suddenly it changes, or maybe it's not sudden, maybe it's something that's been building inside him for a long time. He spends days on end watching movies, all these horror flicks that he loved and then some he's never seen before, and his parents smile and whisper that he's finally getting back into his old interests again. And it's great and amazing and he can't think about anything but those movies, playing over and over in his head during class, so vivid it's like they're real, until Chris pokes him back to reality and teases him about daydreaming again. He's always been so up in the clouds, everyone says, and he feels like it—really feels like he's floating off of the surface of the planet sometimes. Like he could fly and fly up to reach the sun if he could just figure out how to get off the ground. The movies consume him, they fill up everything, and things take a different turn. Everything feels like the setup to a perfect shot. Life becomes a series of sets, of camera angles, and he's just an actor in them but at least he's the star, trying to get the cast of his life to play their roles just the way they're supposed to.
Fall approaches, the cold starts to come, and when he puts on his winter jacket the first time he's struck with the memory of the last time he had to wear it. Of his sisters. But it doesn't feel real—it's not real any more. It's the perfect tragic backstory for his character, driven wild with revenge, anger, ready to do anything to get his closure, and he slips into the costume of this movie version of Josh Washington until they are the same person. He's so happy now, so, so happy, and focused, and driven, and not depressed, the doctors were wrong about him entirely, and he doesn't need their pills any more because he knows who he wants to be, writer and producer and director but most importantly, he is the top-billing star of the show, and most importantly, he knows what he needs to do.