It’s gone dark. I open my eyes when I feel a buzzing beneath my waistband. There’s a chill on my skin that reminds me I’m lying on a cold floor, wearing shorts, and I left our air conditioner on. My mouth is a cotton mill, drier than sawdust, like I haven’t had a drop to drink in a decade. I need water.
I’m about to stand when I feel that buzzing again. I realize real quick that it’s my cell and without a second’s more delay, I snatch it up and hold it to my ear. I don’t bother checking the caller ID. Don’t need to. It could be aliens trying to sell me apocalypse insurance for all I care. I just need to hear another voice.
‘Norah?’
‘Mom.’ I’m hoarse.
‘What’s wrong with your voice? Are you crying?’
‘No. No,’ I assure her. Words are sandpaper scratching layers off my throat.
Suck it up.
I don’t want her to worry. I want her to get well and come home. I don’t reach for scissors when she’s around to talk to, don’t end up bleeding and passing out on the bathroom floor in a flood of tears. ‘I just have a bit of a sore throat.’
‘Could be allergies. Have you had the windows open?’
God. I miss my mom.
My body unfurls, and it’s a wonder my bones don’t creak. Muscles I didn’t know I had are protesting about being mashed against the ground for hours.
I hoist my butt up. Blood is glue; the sponge between my legs is stuck to my skin. I don’t peel it off because the cut will only start pouring again, and the last thing I want to do is deal with it.
I slump downstairs, take the last step twice, and collapse in Mom’s recliner. The sponge stays. I’ll rinse it off later but will never stop seeing it soaked in my blood.
Mom asks me about schoolwork. Even in the midst of her car-crash trauma, she’s remembered my Macbeth assignment is due tomorrow. The ball shape my body is in tucks up a little tighter. I wish I could tell her that it’s been sent back and I’m just waiting on my grade. But I can’t. I couldn’t write my own name right now, let alone one thousand five hundred words. I force a hum, which she seems to take as a good sign because she doesn’t push further. Why would she? I’m a great student; all my assignments are in early, never late. Not until now. I’m grateful when the conversation moves on and she starts talking to me about a TV show that she’s watching. I pull the knitted blanket off the back of the chair, drape it across my body, and sigh with relief when she finally mentions that she’s coming home.
I sleep away Sunday in a sorry attempt to forget about the angry sting that radiates down my thigh.
It’s Monday, the beginning of a new week. A fresh start. A clean slate. The chance to do everything I didn’t get to do on Friday . . .
Or not.
I don’t remember the last time I felt this bad.
Wait.
Yes, I do.
It was the day after the last time I found solace in scissors.
Instead of embracing productivity, I act like a slug, dragging my butt around the house, trying to bury myself in a black oversize sweater. I’m in mourning mode. I make the couch my bed and fry my brain with daytime TV. Misery covers everything in a thick layer of lead, making even the simplest task heavy and hard work, so I just don’t bother doing stuff. On the plus side, I’ve become a pro at not looking out of the windows, having been transformed from diligent watcher to barely-able-to-hold-my-own-head-up bystander in a single slice.
Dr Reeves phones the house around lunchtime. At first I let the machine pick it up, but then she starts muttering about maybe, possibly, probably moving her last client’s appointment to Tuesday morning and signing off early to come over and check on me.
Hell. No.
That would be the worst. I look like I just woke up from a decade of being dead; smell a little like I have too. There is nothing invisible about my illness right now. She cannot see me.
I roll off the couch, crawl over to the phone, and call back.
Faking perky is easy. I make up some BS about keeping my brain busy with homework and go all Stepford-Wives-excited over a cheese soufflé I just cooked up. Both lies, but she’s blissfully reassured within ten minutes, and I resume living like a mannequin on the couch.
On the third morning, I wake up, open my eyes and snarl at the ceiling. An orchestra of blackbirds is fine-tuning their vocal cords right outside the window. I turn my head, snarl at them too. They’re lucky I lost interest in archery before I could buy a bow and arrow. Stretching sleep from my limbs, I roll over and look at the clock above the fireplace. It’s 11.00 a.m. Wow. I’ve really got to move. I don’t want to – depression is a cold concrete slab crushing my chest – but Mom is due home today. The room needs airing, and I have to make myself look less like the living dead. She can’t know how badly I’ve been regressing.
There was a time, back when my friends stopped calling, that I exchanged words for grunts and lived in my pyjamas. I spent so long coddled in soft cotton, it’s a wonder it didn’t fuse to my skin. Pants were reintroduced into my routine at about the same time I stopped looking for control in a pair of nail scissors.
Still, I lie on the couch for another ten minutes, snuggling up to my blankets and listening to the sound of my stomach growling. It must think my throat’s been slit. I’m starving, but my insides have been too tight, too sore, to eat anything. It’s like recovering from a stomach bug. My internal organs feel delicate, like they’ve been bashed around. That’s accompanied by a soft swish of uncertainty, but if I don’t eat, my periods will stop. I don’t want that to happen again. That’s when Mom first called Dr Reeves and, besides making an appointment, she recommended these rancid shakes that I had to spend a week forcing down my throat.
Petulance makes cleaning up last a century longer than it should. I stomp around with a piece of toast hanging from my mouth. Drag away one chunk of bedding at a time, back to my room, which has been sandblasted with sunlight and transformed into an oven. I tuck in the corners of my duvet with malcontent and beat my pillows to a pulp before laying them neatly back on my bed. A couple of bats fly out of my closet when I open the doors. It’s a cave in there. In total contrast to the rest of the room, it’s colder than a morgue, too out of reach for the sun to touch. I loathe every frozen fibre as I pull on jeans and a skinny sweater.
The mumbling of cuss words starts as I make my way downstairs, but I stop dead in my tracks when someone knocks on the door. They knock again.
‘Mom.’ I figure it has to be her. I hope she hasn’t been knocking long. Maybe I should have left the bolt off the door. I ski across the laminate in my socks, undo the lock, face exploding into a smile.
But it’s not my mom.
‘You don’t go to Cardinal.’ Luke. I automatically take a step back and cower behind the sleeve of my sweater.
‘What?’
‘You said you went to the same school as me, but you don’t.’ He doesn’t sound angry, which I can’t make sense of, because now he knows I lied to him. ‘I’m guessing you didn’t have a cold the other day either.’ Twice. Now he knows I lied to him twice. ‘That was French you were speaking to me, right?’
‘Did you . . . check up on me?’ My teeth tear at skin on the side of my thumb.
‘No.’ He holds up his hands like I just fired warning shots. ‘Of course not. Not at all. See, I made friends with this guy called Simon.’ The dude from the party, the one with the horn-rimmed glasses who drives a Nissan. I knew his name was Simon. I hold off on sharing this revelation. Now is probably not the time to be awarding myself Brownie points. ‘He remembers you.’
‘Erm . . .’ I’m speechless because I’ve been caught lying, obviously, but also a little bit because I’ve been remembered by somebody other than my mom.
‘He says he remembers you collapsing in class.’
I clear my throat, stare at my feet and make my big toes touch. ‘Busted?’ I’m hoping I look as adorkable as he did when I found out he was faking knowing French.
‘Cute.’ He smirks. ‘Simon said that was four years ago.’
‘It’s more like three years, ten months, and eight days ago,’ I correct. Because that helps.
‘So it’s all true?’
I nod. Bite down on the side of my mouth until the sting brings tears to my eyes.
‘Okay,’ Luke says at last, but something else is on his mind. He starts fidgeting, shifting his weight from leg to leg and looking anywhere, everywhere, but at me.
‘What?’ I push as gently as possible.
‘Are you sick?’ he asks after a thousand awkward years have hobbled on by. Of all the ways I imagined my crazy coming to light, this wasn’t one of them. ‘I mean, you don’t have to answer that. I just have this hunch—’
‘Yes,’ I interject. ‘But I’m almost a hundred per cent certain it’s not what you’re thinking.’ Mental health is usually the last place people go when they think about someone being sick. That, and, well, I’m a tall skinny blonde with baby-blue doe eyes and have what my grandma used to call the sweetest smile.
I’ve heard You don’t look mentally ill at least a half a dozen times in the past four years, a couple of those times from my former friends. I blame the media, stereotyping ‘mentally ill’ and calling every murderer since Manson crazy. People always seem to be expecting wide eyes and a kitchen knife dripping with blood.
‘And what is it exactly that you think I’m thinking?’ he asks, and I have to catch myself from crashing to the floor. People rarely challenge me. Or maybe they would if I let people get close enough to try. His eyes slim to slits as he watches me. Suddenly I have no idea what is happening in his head.
‘I . . . I don’t know.’
‘You think maybe I could come in?’ He’s wearing boots today. No mismatched laces to melt my mind. I picture us sitting, drinking coffee, me being normal and not doing anything to embarrass myself. Mom would freak, in the best kind of way, if she came home to find me chatting with a boy. ‘I don’t have to,’ Luke says when the silence starts to stretch.
‘No,’ I squeak, then push my fingers to my lips and feel my cheeks being swallowed by fire. ‘I mean, yes, you can come in.’