Chapter Seven
what if I don’t recognize her?
It’s less of a question, really, more of a statement, i will run into hannah and not know it’s her and she’ll drop me or hate me or think i’m a freak.
I try to tell myself there’s nothing to worry about. According to the handout from the hospital, most people with aphantasia have no trouble recognizing familiar faces. Which has been true so far for me. I knew who my parents were right away, and eventually my doctors. But Hannah’s face is hardly familiar yet. I’ve known her all of one day.
And there it is again, that all-consuming thought, running on a loop in my brain: i will run into hannah and not know its her and she’ll drop me or hate me or think i’m a freak.
It’s all I can think about as my dad pulls into the school parking lot the next morning. The sidewalk in front of the building is crowded with bodies, kids hanging out before the bell. As the line of cars in the drop-off line inches forward, fear erupts in my chest.
“Can you drop me off across the street?” I ask abruptly.
“Across the street?” Dad looks confused. “Why?”
“I just— I want to walk. I need some air.”
He points at the clock on the dash. “It’s already eight twenty-five, Bear.”
“I’ll walk fast,” I say, fighting panic, i don’t want to get out here. “Please.”
He nods and pulls out of the line of traffic, looping around to head back toward the street.
I point at the red brick building across the street. A bank. “You can drop me off there.”
Silence. Not, sure, honey or whatever you want or any of the other things I expect him to say. Still, he pulls out of the school parking lot and across the main road. “I’ll wait here until you get inside school,” he says when he parks.
“You don’t need to—”
“I wasn’t asking, Bear.”
I get out of the car without looking at him.
“I want to talk about this,” he says, leaning across the passenger seat. “This afternoon, when I pick you up.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Jessa,” he says calmly. “I know I haven’t been there. I know you’ve been handling all of this on your own. But that doesn’t mean you should be.”
“Pick me up here,” I say brusquely, and shut the door in his face.
There’s a handful of kids waiting at the crosswalk with skateboards and bikes. I feel my dad’s eyes on my back as I join them, willing the light to change so we can cross. When it does I follow them across the street, hanging back a little to make distance between us, walking faster when the little orange hand starts to blink. On the other side, they stick to the sidewalk, hop back on their skateboards and bikes. I walk across the grass instead, my hands jammed in my coat pockets to keep them out of my hair. My left wrist, the one I fractured, aches from the angle and the sharp, grey cold. My eyes, those are pinned on the patchy brown grass. The yard gives way to sidewalk cement then a slick concrete floor. The cold, still quiet becomes heat and movement and noise. I’m inside.
I follow the route I drew on the inside of my hand, paranoid I’d get lost, even though Dr. Voss told me that most people with aphantasia can find their way around without a mind’s eye. Down the main hallway, take a right on C. I get there without using my map. My locker is in the bank at the far end, number 413, on top. I wrote my combination on my hand, too. The hall is too crowded now, people on both sides, so much noise. There’s a kid two lockers down with giant burns on his face. My hand is shaking as I turn the dial.
The little pink rectangle is the first thing I see when I open my locker. It wasn’t there yesterday because I definitely would’ve noticed if there were a slip of paper the color of baby Tylenol laying on top of my chemistry textbook. It’s impossible to miss. I can’t remember the last time I took baby Tylenol, the last time I saw those chalky chewable pills. The color, though, is somehow lodged in my brain. I couldn’t picture it if I tried, but the second I see that pink piece of paper, that’s the thought I have, baby Tylenol, then, just as quickly, office slip.
I could ignore it. Grab my book, let the paper slide down between my other books, pretend I never saw it, get on with my day. But then tomorrow there’d be another slip in my locker, and maybe that one would be yellow, or blue, which ever color means second warning, last chance before we call for you over the intercom, you should’ve just come on your own.
I have experience with office slips. In eighth grade I got them all the time. Every Friday, practically, after being tardy to fifth period four times in a row. My math teacher didn’t care why I was late to class every day; she never even asked. She just reported me to the office every fourth time, protocol, and carried on with remedial math. Not that I wanted her to ask. If she had, I would’ve shrugged and said I lost track of time, the same thing I told the principal every Friday. He never did anything about my lateness, which means he must’ve known about my anxiety, or at least about my parents’ divorce. He’d just sigh and ask me to please try to do better and then give me a pass to return to class. I couldn’t tell them the real reason that it took me until ten minutes after the bell to feel calm enough to leave my perch in the girls’ bathroom, when I knew the sinks would be empty and the halls would be too.
Just thinking about eighth grade makes my stomach hurt. It was so much worse than seventh grade, the year the panic attacks started, when I still didn’t know how bad they’d get, or how completely my friends would bail when they did. Eighth grade was when I found all that out. I didn’t know Mom would start dating Carl on Valentine’s Day and marry him in Vegas three months later. I didn’t know we’d move to the Valley that summer and I’d go to a new school that fall and a cute lacrosse player would ask me out, changing everything, changing me, pulling me out of the dark. My insides squeeze. I also didn’t know that lacrosse player would break my heart two years later. In eighth grade all I knew was how sad and scared I was, and how impossible it seemed that I’d ever be anything other than that.
Pretty much exactly how I feel right now.
Someone opens the door at the end of the hall and there’s a whoosh of cold air. The pink slip flutters. I grab it before it slips behind my books.
“Hey,” someone calls. “You’re Jessa, right?”
he’s talking to me
Now that I’m aware of his presence, I see him in my peripheral vision. A guy, a few lockers down. Baggy blue cords and a hooded sweatshirt, wavy brown hair that’s sticking up in places, maybe like he styled it that way, maybe like he just woke up. For a second I am frozen, puppet strings jammed. Then I give them a yank and my head is turning and I’m trying to smile but can’t. In the same motion I crumple the office slip in my fist.
“I’m Marshall, Hannah’s brother,” he says, slamming his locker shut. I jump a little at the sound, metal on metal, that particular crunch. Marshall notices, and winces. “Sorry,” he says quickly.
I feel myself recoil, retreat back into myself, embarrassed by whatever Hannah said to make him react like that.
i met this girl yesterday she has issues she’s a total freak
“So Hannah said you’re from L.A.,” he says easily, slinging his backpack over his shoulder.
make friends
deep breaths
I try again to smile. “Yep.”
“I love L.A.,” he says.
There’s no way this is true.
“I see the doubt in your eyes,” he says, grinning. “You don’t think I’m L.A. enough to love L.A. The pasty whiteness of my skin screams I hate sunshine and attractive people.”
The smile finally comes. He’s right, it sort of does.
“And you aren’t wrong,” Marshall goes on. “I do sort of hate sunshine and attractive people — present company excluded, obvi — but I will always love L.A. because Kelly Taylor lives there.”
I try to keep up. Sunshine, Kelly Taylor, he called me attractive.
“From 90210?” I ask, and gently push my locker shut. Metal sliding into metal, I see the latch catch.
He nods solemnly. “Kelly was there for me during a really crucial time in my life.”
My mind darts to That Summer, shades drawn, air conditioning turned all the way up, when I didn’t take a shower for three weeks, when I couldn’t get off the couch in Carl’s basement. The slickness of my pillowcase, the smell of dirty hair. The gnawing feeling in my stomach because I could never remember to eat. The theme song I heard once an hour for days on end. Hundreds of episodes in random order, the original series mixed in with the new. It doesn’t matter that I can’t see it in my head, the memory lives in my gut. The sensation of it. The emptiness, the longing, the fear.
“Diet pill Kelly or guidance counselor Kelly?” I ask, making an effort, trying not to be rude. But my voice sounds wrong. Too tight, too heavy for this moment. Because I am not in this moment, not any more, I am back on that microsuede couch, drowning in the darkness, buried in it.
If Marshall hears it, he has to hear it, he doesn’t let on.
“Both,” he answers. “But only because Netflix tricked me. I was nine episodes into the new series before I realized it was a totally different show. And by then we knew about Harry’s illegitimate son and I mean, c’mon. Who could stop there?”
A few seconds pass, then a few more. This is the part where I’m supposed to say something, the birdie comes to me, this is how conversations work. Marshall blinks. His eyelashes are ridiculous, thick and long and unruly, like blades of wild black grass.
deep breaths
I fumble for my hair. It’s braided today, pulled forward on the left to hide my scars, but I can feel them peeking out, pulsing with a tingly sensation, look at us. Marshall fiddles with the zipper on his hoodie, the teeth on the track coming apart and then clamping together again, open shut open shut, a mechanical, maniacal mouth. I swallow thickly, clutching the base of my braid like it’s a rope. Marshall is smiling casually, naturally, as if this isn’t completely awkward. But it is awkward, so awkward. I can’t remember what he said, what I’m supposed to say next. The pause is too long, I am out of sync.
“So you and Hannah are twins,” I say finally, randomly, so painfully. “That’s cool.” I die inside, killed by the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, please just let it end. It’s not just the conversation that’s awkward, it’s me, my stiffness, the weird way I’m holding my head, chin angled away from him to block my scars, nothing to see here folks.
“Allegedly,” Marshall says easily, zero weirdness, as if I didn’t jump topics mid-thread. “But she hates cake so I have my doubts.” The randomness of his non-sequitur somehow diminishes the weirdness of mine.
“All cake?” I ask, on time this time, totally in sync.
He nods. “She says it smells like skin.”
“Skin?”
“Only the chocolate smells like skin,” comes Hannah’s voice from behind me. “The vanilla smells fine, it just tastes gross.” She appears beside us, in a dress and tights with the longer side of her hair in a dozen tiny braids and as soon as I see her my fears that I wouldn’t recognize her disappear.
Marshall looks at me. “We had to have a cookie cake at our birthday every year, which, in case anyone is wondering, is just a big cookie with frosting on it. Not a cake.”
“I see you’ve met my brother,” Hannah says wryly. It’s obvious, now, that they’re related, even though her hair is red and her skin is darker and his eyes are deeper set. They have the same wide mouth, identical freckled noses that scrunch up when they laugh.
“I was just about to ask Jessa how you did yesterday,” Marshall says. “Whether you covered all the really important stuff, like where the attendance nazi keeps the late passes and the exact spot on the vending machine to pound with your fist to get free SunChips.” He turns to me. “It’s actually more of a triple punch — one, two, three.” He karate chops the air with his hand. “The technique is crucial.”
“Ignore him,” Hannah says. “His awkwardness is a disease.”
“You are not a regular human,” Marshall says to her. “Regular humans need SunChips to survive this place. And copious amounts of cake.” He looks over at me. “Unless you’re like my sister and completely obsessed with your craft, this place sucks the first week.”
Hannah rolls her eyes. “Marshall hates the Arts.”
“Not so,” Marshall says. “I love the Arts. The Arts are not pretentious and self-important. The Arts do not uses phrases like verisimilitude and transversal.”
“He literally submitted a petition to the principal saying he needed a language interpreter for Art Criticism,” Hannah tells me.
“I maintain that the class was not in English.”
Hannah rolls her eyes. “Shut up. Art Crit is a great class.”
“No joke, there were moments when I legitimately thought the teacher was punking us,” Marshall says to me. “There is no such thing as a ‘carnival of ephemeral futility’! It doesn’t even work as a metaphor!”
I laugh unexpectedly. This laughter is lightness, helium in my chest.
“I knew it,” Marshall says, and grins. “I have an ally. In this carnival of ephemeral futility, I am not the only circus freak.”
step right up ladies and gents come see the girl with the broken face
“Don’t ruin it for Jessa,” Hannah says, punching her brother in the arm. “She might like it here. There are things here to like.”
“There are,” Marshall says. “Like the fact that the classes are pass/ fail and we don’t have a football team and the cinnamon rolls are made of Crisco and crack.”
“Maybe if the classes weren’t pass/fail you’d know what verisimilitude and transversal mean,” Hannah says dryly.
The bell rings. The pace of the hallways picks up. Lockers slam, bags jostle. Everyone is in motion, on their way to somewhere else. I am going nowhere. I am standing still.
“You coming, Jessa?” I hear Hannah say.
I yank the puppet strings, head up, smile, nod, and follow her down the hall.
“Meet you on G at lunch?” she asks when we get to my English class. So casually, like it’s not even a question. Like we’re already friends. Immediately I have the thought, if only it were that easy. And then I have the thought, maybe it is.
I wait until the morning announcements have started to uncrumple the pink wad of paper in my fist, smoothing it out on my desk.
Jessa Gray is handwritten on the line at the top. Then, in pre-printed type, please report to: and a column of options, five checkboxes. The square in front of the words the guidance counselor’s office is marked with an oversize X, as if the person who filled out this out did it with flourish. Or glee. Chest tight, my eyes drop to the bottom of the slip where that same person has written in loopy script, Please stop by Dr. I’s office to schedule a new student consultation. Welcome to Crossroads! There’s a smiley face drawn at the end.
A “new student consultation” sounds generic. NBD. An invitation more than a request. The band around my ribcage loosens a little. I wad the paper back up and shove it into my bag, telling myself I’ll deal with it later, knowing I probably, definitely, won’t.
For the next fifty minutes I try to focus, but there’s a girl two rows over with a jagged scar down her cheek. I can see it in my peripheral vision, daring me to look. I hear almost nothing my teacher says.
Hannah is waiting for me by the water fountain after chemistry. Her fingers peck at her thighs, the notes of a song only she can hear. It’s as if the activity of the hallway is happening somewhere else, or maybe it’s just that she is somewhere else, on a piano bench somewhere, in a music room, on a stage. Watching her, I feel a sharp pang of envy. she has an escape. I’ve never had anywhere to go, nothing separate from me to hold my thoughts, to keep them from spinning out of control and going everywhere and nowhere all at once. No matter where I go, there I am, stuck in a loop on the Circle Road, round and round again, strong and hopeful hearted through the dust and wind up just exactly where I started. It’s the reason I picked that particular Shel Silverstein poem when I read online somewhere that reciting verses from memory can calm the mind down. The words just fit.
Hannah sees me and her hands go still.
“Practicing?” I ask.
“Trying,” she says, making a face. We start down the hall toward the practice room. “It’s the second piece I’m working on for my audition. Mad Rush by Phillip Glass. I have to play eight eighth notes per measure in my left hand against four eighth note triplets in my right. I should have it by now, but I keep tripping up on the triplets.”
“You’ll get it,” I say.
Annoyance flashes on Hannah’s face.
“Or maybe you won’t,” I blurt out. “Honestly, I don’t even know what an ‘eighth note triplet’ is. I was just trying to be supportive.”
The annoyance evaporates, palpably, whoosh. “Ugh. Thank you. Can you and my brother please hang out?”
“Um. What?”
“He’s always telling me how great I am, that I’m too hard on myself. But he knows nothing about music. Literally, nothing. Unless you count rap, and sorry, I just don’t.”
For some reason, this makes me laugh. “Marshall’s into rap?”
“I know, right? I’m pretty sure he started listening to it just to annoy me, but now he’s obsessed. It’s mostly just awkward because he’s so white and so, I dunno, I-grew-up-in-Colorado-with-a-heart-condition, but he walks around listening to Chance The Rapper and wearing ridiculous oversized headphones.”
My brain stalls on the words heart condition. I remember what she said yesterday, about her brother not being able to do regular school.
“Is he— okay?” I ask, my own heart weirdly pounding at the thought of something wrong with his.
“Oh — yeah. He has a hole in his heart. Which, when you get to know him, is, like, the greatest irony ever.”
“Wow,” I say. “An actual hole?”
“Pretty much. His is in the wall between the two upper chambers. They saw it on the ultrasound before we were even born. The doctors were hoping it would close on its own, but it never did.”
“And that’s okay? A person can have a hole in their heart and be fine?”
“If the hole is small enough, yeah. His is right on the borderline, I guess. The longer he goes without any symptoms, the better the chances he never will. And he hasn’t had any symptoms yet.“
We reach the practice room. Hannah pulls open the door.
“I think he’s secretly happy they never fixed it,” Hannah says as she follows me in. “He likes being the weird guy with the heart defect. It means he doesn’t have to try to be anything else.”
There’s an odd note in her voice when she says it. Jealous and judgy at the same time.
“That must’ve been hard for you,” I say neutrally, knowing somehow that if I probe she’ll shut me down. i know because it’s what i would do
“Yeah, I guess,” she replies, just as neutrally.
She drops her bag on the floor by the piano bench and digs out her music. There are chairs arranged in a semi-circle in the center of the room today. were there chairs here yesterday? As I try to remember, I find myself wondering what exactly I’m doing with my brain. What is memory without a mind’s eye? Pages of a diary I’m trying to read in the dark. Panic flutters in my gut as I strain to picture it. Something, anything. This room, the ocean, my mom’s face.
“My parents couldn’t afford to pay for lessons when I was little,” I hear Hannah say. “We were born eight weeks early and had to be in intensive care for two months, which I guess is crazy expensive and my parents barely had insurance. Then there was all the stuff with Marshall’s heart and a billion specialists that didn’t take insurance. There wasn’t a lot of money left over for music lessons.” She sets her music on the stand and gets situated on the bench.
“So how’d you learn to play?” I ask.
“YouTube,” she replies. “I just watched instructional videos over and over again until I could play whatever song they were teaching, and then I’d move on to the next one. From the very first song I was hooked. I mean, I sucked obviously. I couldn’t read music, I didn’t know the notes. I was pecking out Happy Birthday on a paper keyboard. But somehow even before I could play, I knew. Piano was my thing.”
My thing, emphasis on the my, as if everyone has a thing.
does panic count?
“So what’s Marshall’s thing?” I ask.
“People,” she says without hesitating, and starts to play.