Chapter Fifteen
The rest of the day passes quickly, minutes tumbling past, leaving a snowball of dread in their wake until the bell rings and it’s time to go home. I think about finding Hannah again, but for what? Our conversation earlier left me more rattled, not less.
“Hey, Bear,” Dad says when I get in the car. “How was your day?”
“Not great,” I say, and feel a wall come up between us, the wall that keeps him out. “Marshall’s in the hospital,” I add, and the wall comes down.
“What? Why?”
“He has a blood clot,” I say. “In his leg. And I guess it’s really risky for him because of his heart condition—”
Dad frowns. “Marshall has a heart condition?”
“He was born with a hole in his heart,” I say. “They were going to leave it there, but now because of the clot, they’re putting a device in to close it. Tomorrow.”
I’m looking out the window but Dad is looking at me, studying me, gauging my reaction to all of this. We’re still parked in the same spot.
“That’s a lot to process,” I hear him say.
I nod. And then, out of nowhere, but really out of everywhere, I say, “I talked to the school counselor today.”
“Oh, yeah? How’d that go?”
“Good. He wants me to come to a support group tomorrow. Before school.”
“Are you going to do it?” He’s trying to sound so casual but I can hear the hope in his voice.
“I guess.”
“I think that’s great,” he says. I can tell he wants to say something else but he doesn’t. Instead, he just backs the Jeep out of the parking spot and heads home.
As soon as we’re in the house I’m pulling out the phone-book and looking up the hospital’s main line, digging a pen from my bag to write the number down. My eye catches the folded pink paper in the inside pocket. no boyfriend!!!! it shouts. I ignore it and dial the number.
The only landline is in the kitchen, but it’s cordless so I take it outside as the operator connects me to Marshall’s room. It rings four times before he answers. I’m just about to hang up.
“Uh, hello?”
“Hi.”
“I should’ve known it was you,” Marshall says, and I hear him smile. “Calling the landline. So vintage.”
“Right?”
“Where are you calling from?” he asks.
“My dad’s,” I say, sitting down on the patio steps. “We just got home. How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay. Bored of sitting here with my leg propped up. How are you?”
“Hey, is your mom with you?” I ask instead of answering.
“No, I sent her home. She’s coming back with my dad and Hannah. Why?”
“Will you tell me more about the support group you went to? The one you told me about Friday night?”
“Sure. What do you want to know?”
“I dunno. What it was like. How it worked.”
“We basically just sat around a circle and talked,” he says. “When new kids were there, the doctor in charge would ask everyone the same question, the way he did on my first day. But most weeks it was more of a vent session. Not so much about our physical issues, but what we were feeling.”
“What was the point of it?”
“To feel better, I guess. The doctor in charged used to call it shrinking our dragons. He said that by putting them out there, naming our fears, they’d get smaller. Or less scary at least.”
A dragon is exactly what it feels like, my panic. Breathing fire in my gut.
“You still there?” I hear Marshall ask.
“Yeah.”
“Why did you want to know about the group?”
I hesitate. “I think I might go to one,” I say finally, haltingly. “A support group. Tomorrow morning, before school. Dr. I told me about it. I—I went to talk to him today.” These are just words, facts I am reciting, why is this so excruciatingly hard?
“What’d you think of him?” Marshall asks.
“Dr. I? He was fine. I’d met him before. Why?”
“People are mixed on him. Just wondering what you thought. The support group sounds cool. Is it the one that meets at the rec center?”
“Yeah. You know about it?”
“Not really. Only that it exists.” He pauses. “I’m glad that you’re going.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“What made you decide to do it?”
I’m quiet for a few seconds. It’s only one word, but that doesn’t make it easier to say. “You,” I tell him.
“Because I went to one?”
“More like you having a blood clot and needing a heart procedure.” I take a breath, just say it, pull the band-aid off. “I have an anxiety disorder,” I blurt out. “Since before the accident, before the thing with my mind’s eye. I get panic attacks, and . . . other stuff, too.”
“Like what?”
“Like really dark thoughts I can’t stop thinking.”
Marshall makes a sound in his throat, a cross between an ah ha and an oh man. “You’re worried about tomorrow.”
“So worried,” I whisper. This truth is terrifying to speak. It doesn’t feel smaller now that it’s out there. It feels like the biggest thing there is. “Aren’t you?”
“I’m not,” he says softly. “I’m a little sad, weirdly, that they’re closing it, after I got used to the fact that I’d have it forever. But mostly relieved that I won’t have to think about it anymore. And supes disappointed that I won’t get a cool Frankenstein scar to show for it.”
unlike you, frankenstein barbie
Heat floods my cheeks, fast and prickly. “Yeah, bummer,” I say sarcastically.
“I’m an idiot,” Marshall says quickly. “Obviously scars are hard for people who actually have them. I just think they’re cool. Especially yours.”
I don’t say anything.
“You won’t believe me because you haven’t seen them,” he says. “But your scars are most definitely the cool kids of all scars. Scar royalty.”
I stand up so I’m eye level with the window. The blinds are down so my reflection is impossible to miss. Less clarity of detail than the mirror in the school bathroom, but I can see them still, fourteen lines scattered along the left side of my face.
“I have, actually,” I say, with a punch of take that. “Seen them. I’m looking at them right now.”
“Really? What happened to avoiding mirrors?”
“What can I say? Today was filled with progress.”
“Go you,” he says. I hear his smile. “I’m really sorry to hear about the anxiety,” he says then. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“It’s not something I generally lead with.” or talk about ever with anyone
“How long have you had it?”
“Since seventh grade.”
“You were so young,” Marshall says.
“Yeah.”
“Are you getting treatment for it?”
“Not anymore,” I tell him. “It was pretty bad when it first started. I was pulling my hair out and stuff like that. It freaked my mom out. So she took me to therapy and put me on meds.” I fumble for a piece of hair, realize I’m doing it and sit down on my hand. “The therapy didn’t help and the meds made me feel worse, but it was easier on both of us if I let her believe that I was getting better. So I started hiding it more . . . twisting my hair instead of pulling it, making myself throw up when I’d have panic attacks so I could pretend I was just sick. Mostly, she bought it. Or she pretended to, so she wouldn’t have to deal.”
“And your dad?”
“He was here. I don’t know how much my mom told him. Not a lot, I’d guess.”
“Does he know now?”
“He knows how bad it got. After the accident, I couldn’t hide it anymore. It’s the reason I’m here, probably. He saw how messed up I was and freaked.”
“You’re not messed up,” Marshall says. “You’re human. We’ve all got our stuff.”
Annoyance flares in my chest. “Yeah. Well. You won’t have yours after tomorrow. I’m sort of stuck with mine.”
Neither of us says anything after that.
“I should probably go,” I say finally. “Homework and stuff.”
“Yeah. Okay. Good luck at the support group tomorrow.”
“Thanks.”
I hang up without saying bye and then feel so bad about it I almost call him back. He can’t help it that his broken places are fixable. It’s not his fault that mine aren’t. But the positivity is obnoxious, because it’s not actually based on anything real. Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t even see the people around him, not really — he just sees what he wants to see. No wonder Hannah gets so irritated when he tells her how awesome she is at piano. Inside she must be screaming YOU HAVE NO IDEA. What was it she said about him when we first met? He likes being the weird guy with the heart defect. It means he doesn’t have to try to be anything else. Meanwhile the rest of us are struggling to be anything other than fragmented, anything other than torn apart.
I go back inside the house.
The next morning, I spend a good twenty minutes trying to talk myself into driving myself. In the end I chicken out. I probably would’ve bailed on the whole thing had I not told Dad about it yesterday, which maybe subconsciously I did for that very reason, to make sure I’d go.
We pull into the rec center’s parking lot at seven twenty-two. Dr. I is sitting on the bench out front, the book he had yesterday in his hands. He smiles when we pull in.
“I’m proud of you for doing this,” I hear Dad say.
i don’t want to do this
“Thanks,” I mumble, and fumble for the door handle, dread churning in the space behind my belly button.
“You made it,” Dr. I calls when I get out of the car.
I glance back at my dad. He gives me a super awkward thumbs up.
“I’ll see you after school,” I say, and shut the door.
Dr. I stands as I walk toward him, pocketing his book.
“You ready?” he asks.
no
I shrug. “Sure.”
“Let’s do it then,” he says, then turns and heads inside. One foot in front of the other, I follow him, on autopilot now, the safest mode, because when I’m on autopilot I do not think. Not about my issues, or Dr. I, or the kids inside the building. On autopilot I just do, there is no space even for me to be.
Autopilot takes me through the front door. Then autopilot promptly sputters out. My legs stop moving and I am just standing there in the lobby, sweating. The heat is chugging from the vents. I tug at my scarf.
Dr. I points at an open door nearby. Voices inside, the buzz of several conversations at once. “It’s in there.”
“Okay,” I say, but don’t move.
“I’ll wait for you in the gym,” he says.
I start to shake my head, start to tell him I can’t do this, that I’d rather talk to him about my issues than wear them into a room full of strangers my age. But then there are footsteps behind me, and a girl in a puffy green jacket and Uggs is coming my way. I see the scars first, zigzagged and puckered, like a little kid drew lightning bolts across her cheeks with a stick. I blink, hard, willing my brain to behave, but of course it doesn’t. The scars stay put.
“Hey,” the girl says casually, her boots dragging with every step. “First time?”
“Um. Yeah.” I glance over at Dr. I.
“Go on in,” he says lightly. “I’ll see you when it’s over.”
“C’mon,” the girl says, and smiles. “You can sit by me.”
“Be present,” I hear Dr. I call from behind me. “Don’t let yourself check out.”
“I know it’s terrifying,” the girl in the green jacket says when we get to the door. “Walking into a room like this for the first time, with people you don’t know. But this is a safe place. You’ll see.”
I follow her in and take the seat next to hers. There are a dozen kids seated in twice as many seats arranged in a circle in the center of the room, drinking water from styrofoam cups, bagel halves on little paper napkins in their laps. My eyes hover on their knees, avoiding interaction. I feel myself start to retreat, to pull back from this moment. To check out.
be present
Reluctantly, I pull my eyes up, force my mind to engage. I immediately regret it.
My brain has painted wounds on every face in the room. There’s no pattern to it, no method I can see, everyone just looks messed up, from the boy in the beanie with the horrible bruises, to the girl with the braids and the skin-twisting scars, to the boy whose cheeks are burned so badly the skin is nearly peeling off.
i can’t do this
Shaking, I drop my eyes to the carpet, where it’s safe. My fingers are already in my hair, spinning, making knots, tugging at my scalp so hard it makes my eyes sting. Inside, behind skin and muscles, the walls are coming up, keeping reality out, keeping me in.
“Let’s get started,” the girl in the green jacket says to the group. The boy nearest to the door gets up to shut it. “As always, what’s said in this room stays in this room. The only other rule is honesty. We don’t lie to each other. Everyone agreed?”
There are nods around the circle.
“Awesome.” She smiles warmly. “I’m glad you guys are here. New peeps especially. Who feels like sharing today?”
“I’ll go,” a girl to my left says. My eyes are on my knees so I can’t see her face. “I’m Amber. I have an eating disorder. Anorexia. I started restricting when I was eleven. Not because I wanted to lose weight or anything. But because not eating made me feel safe.” I hear her take a breath. “My dad had – has – a gambling problem. On days when he was winning, he’d bring home steaks and he and my mom would drink champagne and dance in the kitchen. But on days when he was losing, which was most of the time, dinner was whatever I could find in the cupboard. A can of beans. Instant oatmeal. If that.”
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.