Page 1 of Backward Motion

Chapter One

Sam stood in the locked bathroom stall at work and stared at his hands as if willpower alone could still the tremor. He closed the toilet lid and sat down, placing his phone on his lap. It buzzed incessantly, the message bubbles popping up in quick succession.

Where are you?

We’ve got a lot riding on this.

Don’t fuck this up, Sam.

He tried to do the breathing exercises he’d read about online—smell the flowers, blow out the candles. But his chest felt as though someone was sitting on it, and he couldn’t get his hands to stop shaking.

His team was presenting to an upscale clothing company that was looking to transfer a considerable portion of its marketing budget to the agency. His boss had given him the job to see if he was up to running an account of that size on his own. Sam spent weeks tweaking the pitch and had stayed late the previous evening to make sure everything was perfect. He arrived at the office that morning feeling nervous yet confident. And then, minutes before he was due to present, he’d begun to spiral.

He knew what it was. The panic attacks had started several months back. He’d been able to keep them under control for the most part, but they were getting more intense, and he was having trouble pulling himself back together. He reached into his pocket for the small vial of pills, popped two, and swallowed them dry. Theywould make him cloudy, but it was better than this shaky mess of a person.

On his lap, Sam’s phone rang. It was his boyfriend, Felix. He felt a flood of relief and fumbled to bring the phone to his ear. “Thank God. I don’t know what to do. I have this huge presentation, and I’m falling apart—”

“Sam, babe, chill for a second, okay? It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.”

Something about Felix’s easy confidence calmed Sam, and he nodded, trying once again to slow his breathing.

“Quick question—can I borrow a couple bucks? Hayden’s late again.” Felix gave an exasperated sigh.

Hayden, who ran the gallery where Felix worked, seemed to think paying his employees was optional. Felix liked to pretend it annoyed him, but Hayden also looked the other way when he showed up for work buzzed or called in sick to attend a music festival. In that moment, trembling in a toilet cubicle, Sam envied the simple nature of the man’s problems. Besides, it wasn’t like Felix ever had any trouble getting Sam to spot him.

“Are you short on rent?” Sam asked.

“Neil’s in town from LA, and we’re planning to hit the regulars tonight.”

Sam’s blood froze. Neil was Felix’s ex. Felix had a thing about showing his exes a good time. He would stay out until the next day and feign innocence when questioned.

“I—no, you can’t.”

The silence stretched through the phone.

“Is this about Neil?” Felix asked finally, his voice icy. “You always get like this. You’re so controlling. I can catch up with old friends if I want to.”

There was a beep in Sam’s ear, and he looked at his phone to see a call waiting from his boss. “Yeah, but you’re not just catching up, are you?”

“You know what? Fuck you, Sam.”

Felix hung up, and Sam lowered the phone, his stomach churning as he looked at the time. He saw it unraveling—business school, the years spent trudging through low-paying internships. When he’d landed this job in Austin, everything he’d sacrificed had seemed worth it. How had it all gone so horribly wrong?

The fear rose thick and fast, lurching up his throat and stinging the back of his mouth. He lifted the toilet lid and hurled the contents of his stomach into the bowl.

Chapter Two

Sam woke, as he had for the past month, in his childhood bedroom. It no longer looked anything like when he’d lived at home. Gone were the Lady Gaga posters and the collage of his favorite actors, their pictures cut from magazines and assembled on black craft paper. The pinboard displaying inspirational quotes in cursive had been taken down and donated. Now the walls were lined with shelves holding tubs of fabric and foam stabilizer. A large cabinet housed rows of miniature plastic storage containers filled with tiny sparkling discs of every color. In recent years, his mom had gained a not-insignificant following on Etsy, selling sequined purses and totes, and had transformed the room into her own personal craft studio.

In honor of his unexpected return, his parents had unearthed the old rollaway bed from the garage and parked it in the middle of the room. It creaked as Sam turned over, the metal slats digging through the thin mattress and into his ribs. He’d refused his mom’s offer to pick out a new bed, something cheap and sturdy from one of the big-box stores, because what was buying furniture if not an admission that he was back for good?

He reached for his phone and checked it instinctively, a habit from another life when he would find his home screen stacked with alerts: emails from work, texts from friends, drunk missed calls he would not be returning. It stared at him blankly. Sam wasn’t sure if he felt relief or disappointment. He’d been oscillating between the two ever since his parents had brought him home from the airport.Escaping Austin had been like removing an iron collar cutting off the air to his lungs. But coming back to Oakdale meant he was shackled in a different way.

If there was a place that perfectly summed up Sam’s deepest feelings of weakness and inadequacy—a place that, over the years, he’d made unreasonable attempts to avoid—this would be it. Oakdale was his worst fear realized. After a decade away, chasing one dream after another, he had plummeted back to earth.

He threw on some clothes and headed downstairs for breakfast. His father sat at the dining table while his mother made coffee in the kitchen. He’d hoped he was late enough to avoid one of his dad’s pep talks, but the man was leisurely flipping through the newspaper, savoring the square of buttered toast in his hand.

“Look who’s up,” his mother said, breezing over and kissing him on the top of his head as he sat down at the table.