All Things New, page 15
I look over at her now. She’s staring at a spot on the wall across the room. I only see her in profile, but the part of her face I see is covered in fading bruises; streaks of green and yellow from old wounds. “There was so little in my life that I could control,” she says then. “Except what I ate. It started as a game, to how little I could put in my body each day. How disciplined I could be. How different from my dad.” Her voice catches. I watch a tear slide down her cheek. “My freshman year, I weighed eighty-four pounds. I was hospitalized for anorexia and spent four months in a treatment center. I guess that was a breaking point for my mom, because while I was gone, she left my dad and filed for divorce. Which itself was — is — complicated for me. But for the best, I think.” She wipes her eyes, brings her gaze back to the circle. “It’s still hard, dealing with my old habits. Stress is a big trigger for me. I’ll start restricting without even realizing it, and I’ll justify it in my mind, saying I wasn’t hungry or whatever. Which is crazy, right? Who do I think I’m fooling? Myself? It’s so dumb.”
“I do it, too,” the boy sitting across from her says, and inside I’m shouting SO DO I. The boy’s face is a mosaic of colors, red and purple and blue and green, every shade and stage of bruise. “I’ll tell myself I’m washing my hands for the tenth time because I got them dirty, or that I’m repeating a certain word over and over again in my head because I like the way it sounds,” he says. “I know it’s my OCD, but I pretend it isn’t, because in a way that lets me off the hook. If it’s not a compulsion, then I don’t have to stop.” His voice breaks a little. He wants to get better, he says then, but he doesn’t know how. His OCD is still stronger than he is, a bully he doesn’t know how to fight, and the medications his doctor has prescribed have only made it worse. My skin crawls with recognition. i know what that’s like
As he talks, he picks at his cuticles, dig dig dig, until they start to bleed, then he sucks each finger until the bleeding stops. I see myself in this ritual, can feel my hair between my fingers, the tug on my scalp, the tiny burst of relief when I’d pull the strands out. Watching him I’m swept up in sadness. why do we rip ourselves apart?
My throat tightens, and again I feel myself disengaging from this moment, from its sharpness, its acidity, its sting.
Eyes back on the boy’s face. I force my brain back in.
A girl with braids and combat boots and a pink spider web of scars goes next. She’s been coming to this group since sophomore year, she says. Since just after her little brother died of lymphoma. Her parents got divorced eight months later, and she’s been splitting time between them ever since. “Not that either of them ever really looks at me anymore,” she says softly. “Which is okay. I mean, it hurts, but I get it. It’s just hard because I want to talk about him, but my mom just can’t, and my dad won’t let me even say his name.”
Her story slams into me, sucks the air from my lungs. The emotion comes fast, hard, a tidal wave in my chest. I press my palms to my eyes, will the tears back.
“You ready today?” I hear the girl in the green jacket ask. I shake my head quickly, sure she’s looking at me, but when I lower my hands her eyes are on the kid two seats down from me. His face is swollen and bloody, like he just walked out of a fight. “Adam?” the girl says gently.
The boy hesitates, then shakes his head. The wounds on his face make it difficult to look at him, so I stare at the buttons of his plaid shirt instead.
“You sure?”
He doesn’t look at her. “Yep.” The bruise beneath his eye turns a deeper shade of blue. Or did I make that up?
i’m making it ALL up, I remind myself. none of these wounds are real
“I’ll go,” the guy beside Adam says. Other than a thin white scar above his left eye, his face is completely clear. “Most of y’all know me. I’m Ayo. I’m a senior. I’ve been coming to this group since the beginning of this year. I was at public school before that, failing most of my classes, getting into dumb fights. I got expelled about a year ago, and it was either this or juvie.” He shrugs. “So I came to Crossroads. And from my very first day, things got better. A lot better.” He grins. “I’m not gonna lie, a lot of it’s because of my girlfriend. Vanessa. We’ve been together four months. She’s in the dance program here.” He looks over at Adam. “But the main thing was this group,” he says. “Talking about the crap I was dealing with, opening up. I’d never done that before. Put words to it, you know? It made a big difference. ‘Cause, like, we’ve all got stuff, right? What’s the point of pretending we don’t?”
All eyes are back on Adam. He stares at the carpet, his hands in fists at his sides.
All at once I want to shake him, this kid I don’t even know. I want to shake him until he can’t hide it anymore, until the truth comes roaring to the surface and he’s forced to let it out.
shrink the dragon
And suddenly it’s not Adam I’m frustrated with. It’s me.
Fast, before I think about it, I put my hand in the air.
“I’ll go,” I say, ignoring the wobble in my voice. Heads turn in my direction. I stare at my knees. “I’m Jessa. I’m a junior. I was in bad car accident a couple months ago, back in L.A. where I used to live. That’s how I got the scars on my face.” I almost stop there. A bad car wreck, that’s reason enough to be here. I don’t have to say anything else.
shrink the dragon shrink the dragon
“I was having a panic attack,” I say finally. “In the car. Driving home from a party where I— I’d just found out that my boyfriend was cheating on me.” Beside me, the girl in the green jacket sucks in a breath. “The accident wasn’t my fault or anything,” I say quickly, realizing how it sounds. “The other car ran a red light.” The room is completely silent. My foot bounces beneath me.
“Panic is a thing for me,” I make myself say. “It’s been a thing, for years, since right after my dad left, but I used to be really good at hiding it. At making people believe that I was okay. As long as I looked good on the outside, nobody really questioned what was going on inside. No one cared. And because of that, I could hold it together, sort of. Keep it in. But . . .” My throat goes tight. “I don’t have that anymore. Now . . . all of me is broken. Literally. All of me. My brain, my heart—” My hand drifts up to my cheek. “My face.”
Moments pass where I’m not speaking. It crosses my mind that I could just leave, right now, get up and walk out, never do this again. I pull my hand back to my lap.
“There’s a guy here,” I hear myself say. “At Crossroads. We’ve been hanging out for a few weeks. As friends. And when I’m with him . . . I don’t feel as messed up. Not, like, in a denial way, how it used to be. More like maybe the fact that I’m messed up is okay.” My voice starts to wobble again. I let it. If I stop talking I might not start again. “But I found out yesterday that he’s dealing with some medical stuff and now my panic is out of control again. No one’s acting like it’s that serious, but I’m convinced something terrible is gonna happen. That–” My throat clamps up, squeezing my voice into a whisper. “He’s gonna die.”
And then the levee breaks, and I am crying.
The girl in the green jacket lays her hand on my arm. Seconds pass. A minute, maybe two. Tears and snot run off my chin. Someone hands me a box of tissues. “Sorry,” I mumble, so embarrassed, awkwardly wiping my nose. “I don’t usually do this.”
“This is how you deal with it,” the girl in the green jacket says. “You cry. Sometimes you scream. You let out whatever it is you’re feeling, and you keep letting it out until you can breathe again.”
“We’ve all been there,” another girl says.
“Some of us are still there,” the boy with OCD says.
I suck in a breath, feel my lungs inflate. My head is filled with static, not thoughts exactly, just noise, as if my brain doesn’t know what channel to choose.
“It gets easier,” someone else says. Ayo, I think.
And then the baton passes and it’s someone else’s turn. The girl two seats down from me whose older sister is bipolar and just went off her meds. The others aren’t staring at me in pity or disgust. No one is even looking at me anymore. Their eyes are on the girl who’s sharing her story now, trying to shrink her dragon, putting it out there for all of us to see.
we’ve all got stuff
It’s so much work pretending that we don’t.
The girl who’s talking, she’s crying pretty hard now. The boy beside her is holding her hand. And in this moment I think I understand what the girl in the green jacket meant when she said this place was safe.
There is shuffling around me. The meeting is over. The circle dissolves as people stand and move their chairs out of the ring. I stay where I am as the room begins to clear. One by one the others head out, back outside, to the real world, to the places where it isn’t so safe.
“Hey,” a voice says. Ayo, standing beside me with a backpack on this back. “What’d you think?”
“It was cool,” I say, then feel like an idiot for being so blasé. “I mean. Not what everyone is going through. That’s all horrible. But, like you said . . . opening up.”
“The honesty is dope, right? Sucks that no one ever does it except in here.”
“How often do you come?”
“Both days, every week. Most kids bail when they feel like they’re better or whatever, but for me, it’s like, better isn’t a one-time thing. You don’t, like, ‘get’ better, it’s more like you are better, and then the next day you aren’t. But maybe you aren’t as bad as you were. You know?”
I smile. “I do, actually.” I get to my feet.
“Some of us walk down to the gas station after group,” Ayo says when we get to the main lobby. There’s a group gathering by the front door. “Candy run. You wanna come with?”
I think of Dr. I, waiting for me in the gym. “Um. I can’t today. Next time?”
“That mean you’ll be back?”
I hesitate, because I haven’t decided yet, and after all the honesty, I don’t want to lie to him.
Finally, I nod, and decide. “Yeah.”
“Cool,” Ayo says. “And, hey, I hope everything goes okay with your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I say quickly. Too quickly.
Ayo laughs, and puts up his hands. “Hey, girl. You don’t need to convince me.” I feel myself flush.
“I’m not really sure what he is,” I admit. “I just want him to be okay.”
Ayo grins. “See? Gets easier.”
“What does?”
“Being honest,” he says.
“It still feels pretty freaking hard,” I say.
“That’s why you’re coming back Thursday,” he says, flashing another grin as he jogs to catch up to his friends.
Chapter Sixteen
Dr. I is in the gym where he said he’d be, sitting on the bleachers, reading his book. He waves me over.
“So how’d it go?” he asks. I see him see my puffy eyes, the splotches that must be on my cheeks.
“Good,” I say vaguely, expecting him to poke a stick at it, good how?
“Good is good,” is all he says. Then he stands and pockets the book. “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s walk over.”
I follow him out the door, down the rec center’s manicured sidewalk, replaying the things I said in the circle, second-guessing them now, worrying I said too much. At the same time, there is a sort of lightness in my chest, as if saying those heavy things somehow let the heaviness out.
“How’s that paper coming?” Dr. I asks as we wait for the light. “The one on Dorian Gray?”
“It’s not,” I admit. “I haven’t even started and it’s due tomorrow.”
“Twenty-five hundred words on the separation of soul and body, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Want some help?” he asks, and I bob my head because I think he’s offering to get me out of it. “I think it’s a trick question,” he says instead.
“Huh?”
“Your topic. I don’t think Wilde believed it was possible to separate the soul from the body. I think that’s the whole point of the book.”
so much for a way out
“But isn’t that the trade Dorian made with the painting?” I ask. “Losing his soul to keep his face?”
“That was the trade he thought he was making, certainly. But that’s not what he ultimately got. The painting didn’t take his soul out of his body. It turned his soul into a body — it created a physical representation of something that had only been abstract up to that point. The invisible became visible, bringing Dorian face to face with the terrible truth of who he’d become.”
The light changes and Dr. I starts across the street.
“He couldn’t escape himself,” I say, catching up to him, a weird feeling in my chest as I say it. neither can i
“That’s part of it,” Dr. I. says. “But I think Wilde was getting at something even more nuanced than that. I think he was saying that Dorian couldn’t see himself — not without the painting. Remember, the novel was as much about art as anything else. I think Wilde was showing his readers that sometimes fiction is more honest than fact.”
“More honest how?”
“Consider what happened in the book,” Dr. I replies. “The portrait of Dorian started changing, supposedly to reflect the state of his soul— but his soul wasn’t actually getting older and uglier. A soul is immaterial, remember? Think about our buddy Descartes. So it can’t age or get ugly. Only the body can do that. But you walk away from the book understanding that what was on that canvas was more ‘true’ than the ‘real’ Dorian, even though, really, the painting was just a symbol of reality, not reality itself.”
“My brain hurts,” I say dryly.
He smiles. “That means the wheels are turning.”
“Ha. You’re an optimist.”
“Have to be, in my line of work. Otherwise the job’s too depressing.” As we hit the sidewalk, the morning bell rings. “Just don’t overthink it,” Dr. I says then, stopping at the place where the sidewalk splits. “Your paper. You read the book, you understand the idea. Write from your gut and you’ll be fine.”
“I think you’re overestimating my gut,” I say. A kid on a skateboard shoots me a funny look as he wheels past, and suddenly I am hyper aware that I’m openly chatting with the school shrink. “I should get going,” I say, pointing vaguely at the building.
“Class.”
He nods. Doesn’t budge. He seems to sense my sudden awkwardness, my intense need to bail. “Good luck with the paper,” he says. “And I hope everything turns out okay for your friend.”
I’d momentarily forgotten about Marshall’s procedure. The light feeling I left the group with is pushed out by dread.
“Thanks,” I mumble, and start across the courtyard toward school.
Hannah isn’t under the stairs or at her locker. I didn’t really expect her to be here today with Marshall’s procedure happening this afternoon, but the fact that isn’t she sends me back into a spiral just the same.
I make myself verbalize it. Not to a room full of also-broken people this time; just to one. Myself, in the bathroom mirror, halfway through second period when the panic gets so intense I’m jittery with it, ankle bouncing furiously beneath my desk. Which, in a weird way, sort of feels like progress. The old me would’ve been frozen with fear, trapped by it, while at the same time trapping it, burying the anxiety so deep it couldn’t possibly escape. Now I’m wearing it right on the surface, harder to hide, easier to fight.
And fight it I am, or trying to anyway, as I stare at the mirror and watch my mouth move with the words “I’m scared that Marshall will die” over and over again. But this is only half of it, I know that. The what but not the why. The bathroom is empty so I try to finally do it, dig deeper, get down into the dirt like the shrink in the hospital said.
The truth is buried at the bottom, covered in muck.
i’m afraid marshall will leave because every one leaves
He might not walk out the way my dad did, or cheat like Wren, but that doesn’t mean I can trust that he’ll stay. He might not be a bad guy, but he doesn’t need to be. The world isn’t safe, or fair.
Then again, the things I’m most afraid of aren’t the things that actually happen. It’s the things I don’t expect that destroy me. My dad leaving. My friends pretending like I didn’t exist. Wren cheating. The SUV that ran that red light. I never saw any of that coming, and it came anyway. So maybe, just maybe, if I’m scared that something will happen to Marshall, nothing will.
please don’t let anything happen to him
please let him be okay
Instinctively, my eyes flick to the ceiling. And even though I’m pretty sure there’s no one up there to hear me, there never has been, and definitely not someone inclined to help, I ask for something else.
please let me get better
let me finally be okay
I mean my scars and the aphantasia and the hallucinations that haven’t stopped. But even more than that I just mean me, whatever is separate from all that.
Then, not my thoughts but a man’s voice, echoing in my head.
“I know it’s scary, but you’re okay. Do you hear me? You’re okay.”
My mind scrambles. For a split second I can’t place them, these words, they strike me as random and strange. Then my thoughts clear, and I remember him. The man in the white coat who appeared at my window right after the accident and fixed my wrist and told me I was okay, stretching the word out to three syllables, oh-oh-kay. The man no one else saw.
why didn’t anyone else see him?
I rub my left wrist. It still aches a little, on really cold days. Which is most days, here. Is it possible that the bones were never out of place, that the man never reset it, that I imagined the entire exchange? Imagined, code for hallucinated, because that’s what I’m really asking. Did no one else see him because I made him up?
