I drive around for a while. I don’t even know where I’m going. My mind drifts, and my body moves on autopilot. When I come back to myself, I’m sitting in the parking lot of my old grade school, a large, institutional-looking beige-brick building with narrow windows.
Why did I come here? I haven’t set foot in this place for years.
Sometimes, in my dreams, I still see the hallways—the olive-green tiles and dull blue lockers. I remember the musty, papery smell, a blend of old carpet and laminated posters and sawdust.
Some of my memories are dim, because I spent much of my time here in a drugged haze. Dr. Evans, my psychiatrist, kept increasing the dosage of my antianxiety medication, but no matter how many pills I took, I could still feel the pressure building inside of me.
“I wish I didn’t need the pills,” I told her once, during our weekly meeting. “I wish I didn’t have to control my feelings all the time.”
“Symptoms,” she replied. “The medication controls your symptoms.”
I left the office feeling as though she had eaten some invisible part of me.
Reflected sunlight strikes the school’s windows, turning them molten gold. My vision goes fuzzy. And suddenly I am ten years old, a small, wiry girl with braided hair, pale skin, and a blank expression. I shuffle down the narrow hallway, watching my blurred reflection in the shiny tiles.
There’s a burst of laughter. Ahead, I see a group of three boys clustered around a smaller, chubbier boy whose eyes are pink and puffy from tears. I recognize him. Last year, his father committed suicide. People talked about it.
“You know why he killed himself, right?” a voice says loudly. “It’s because he couldn’t stand having a fag for a son.”
More laughter.
The blood pounds in my head, louder and louder. A red mist slips across my vision. Slowly I approach.
One of the bigger boys turns toward me, grinning. “Hey look, it’s Robo-tard—”
My fist slams into his teeth, knocking him backward. His arms flail.
The fight itself is a blur. They pull my hair and grab me and try to push me down, but I just keep hitting and kicking them. Drops of blood spatter the tiles. A punch lands on my stomach, but I barely feel it. I bite down on a hand, and there’s a scream.
I’ve lashed out at bullies before but never like this. I’ve snapped. I don’t know why it took the sight of them hurting someone else to make it happen, but it feels so good that I can’t stop. When it’s all over, the boys are scurrying down the hall, and I’m slumped against the lockers, panting and sweaty. There’s blood on my knuckles.
Later, I sit in the principal’s office, fidgeting in the hard plastic chair. My left cheek aches. A bruise is already forming.
The principal looks at me with his tiny, dark, shrewlike eyes.
He doesn’t like me. I know this because, once, after a meltdown and a visit to his office, I pressed my ear to his closed door and overheard him talking to his secretary: There’s something unnatural about that girl. Sometimes she seems like a little adult, and sometimes she’s like a wild animal. I never know how to handle her.
“I’m not sure you really understand the seriousness of what you’ve done,” he says. “You injured three other students. Several witnesses have said you attacked them unprovoked. I know you have unique challenges, and I’ve tried to be tolerant, but I can’t have this kind of violence in my school. Do you understand?”
I glare. “What they said to that boy is worse than what I did to them.”
He breathes in slowly through his nose, then exhales. “You should have found a teacher, or come straight to me and told me about it.”
“I tried that before. I tried it when it was me being hurt, but nothing ever changed. If you think I’m going to keep taking it, you’re an idiot.”
His mouth is a small, flat line. He picks up the phone and dials.
Shortly after, Mama arrives in the principal’s office. He tells her what happened. She listens in silence, her face getting paler and paler.
“I’m very sorry, Ms. Fitz. Your daughter needs more specialized care than we can give her. As I’m sure you’re aware, there are schools for children like her, which will be better able to provide for her needs.”
Mama clutches the strap of her purse. The skin around her fingernails turns white. “You can’t do this to us.” Her voice sounds small and shaky, like a little girl’s. “Please. She—she was making so much progress—”
“This will be better for Alvie,” the principal says. “For all of us, you included.” His voice changes tone, going soft and syrupy. “You’re under a lot of strain, aren’t you? Working full-time, caring for your daughter alone. You need a rest. Perhaps if you had some extra support—”
Mama lurches to her feet. The principal tenses, grabs a thick binder and holds it up in front of him like a shield. I shift in my chair. Mama is breathing hard, glassy-eyed. “You don’t know the first thing about me,” she says. “You don’t know what I’ve been through. Don’t tell me what I need.”
“Of course.” He fidgets. “I just mean—”
“What I need is for you to give my daughter another chance. She deserves to have a normal childhood. Do you understand?” Her voice is getting higher and higher. “If you expel her, I swear to God, I will sue you for everything you own. I’ll bring down this entire school.”
His face tightens. “Ms. Fitz, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. And take your child with you.”
Her fingers twitch and curl inward. She looks like she might lunge across the desk and grab his throat. “None of you understand.” The words are thick and choked. “You don’t know how hard she’s tried—how hard I’ve tried. You think you can just rip that away? Don’t you see—?”
“Mama,” I whisper. “It’s okay.”
She blinks a few times . . . then the tightness in her face loosens, and her shoulders sag. She turns away. “Let’s go, Alvie.”
When we leave the school, the air smells like rain, and clouds hang low in the sky. Little bits of gravel crunch under my shoes as we walk to the car. During the drive home, Mama doesn’t talk. She doesn’t even turn on the radio. I kick my feet. Outside, crows sit on the telephone wires, watching us.
“Mama,” I say, “do you know that a group of crows is called a murder.”
Silence.
“They can be called a flock, too. But sometimes people call it a murder of crows.”
Still nothing.
“Crows are really smart. They break off pieces of leaves or grass and use them as tools to get at food.”
“Alvie, please. Not now.”
When we get back home, she starts brewing a pot of coffee, then seems to forget about it. She wanders around in the kitchen, grabs a rag, and starts to wipe off the table, even though it’s already clean. She gets down on her knees, opens a drawer, and takes out a small piece of paper. I’m not close enough to see it, but I know what she keeps there. It’s a picture of my father—the only one she has. He’s standing in the sunlight, holding the handles of a bicycle, smiling. He’s tall and lanky, with very short hair and thick, black-framed glasses. There’s a date scratched onto the back in pencil; it’s from a few months before I was born.
I grab an oversized, floppy plush rabbit from the couch and sit on the living room floor, the rabbit in my lap. After a few minutes, she puts the picture away, comes in, sits on the couch, and looks at me with tense lines around her eyes and mouth.
I wait for her to ask me questions about what happened, but she doesn’t.
“You were so close, Alvie. You almost made it to the end of the school year.” She rests her elbows on her knees, and her head falls into her hands. “Why now?”
I curl into a tighter ball and hide my face against the rabbit.
“Just tell me, please.” Her voice breaks. “What is it you want? I’m trying, but I don’t know how to help you. Tell me what you need. Tell me how I can make this stop. Should I send you to more doctors?”
“I don’t want to go to doctors anymore,” I say, my voice muffled against the rabbit’s fur.
“What, then? Am I supposed to do what that man says and send you to a special school? To one of those places where half the children can’t even talk?”
“I could just stay at home. You could teach me.”
She pushes her fingers through her hair. “Honey, that’s not . . . You need to learn social interaction. Keeping you isolated would be the worst thing. I want you to have a life. I want you to have friends. I want you to have the chance to go to college someday, and have children of your own. That will never happen if we don’t fix this.”
She puts her hands over her face. “I keep having this dream,” she whispers through her hands, “where you’re forty years old and everything is still the same. You’re in your room all day, drawing those mazes over and over. I’m trying to do what’s best for you, but it’s so hard. It’s so hard to know what’s right.”
My arms tighten around the plush rabbit. I curl into a tiny ball, the rabbit’s head tucked under my chin, and begin to rock back and forth. I can’t look directly at her, but I’m very aware of Mama’s soft sniffling, her hitching breaths. Each one hurts.
“Sometimes,” she whispers, “you seem so far away.”
I don’t know what she means. I’m sitting right in front of her.
“It’s like this thing is getting worse,” she says. “Like you’re drifting away, and I can’t save you.”
Her words don’t make any sense to me. But I know that she’s sad right now, and I know it’s my fault. My fingers dig into the rabbit’s plush fur. I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing, of making her hurt even more, so I don’t say anything.
She draws in a shaky breath. “I’m sorry.” She wipes her eyes and gives me a wobbly smile. “Let’s go out. We’ll go to the lake. How does that sound?”
The tension eases out of me. I like the lake. “Okay.”
As we drive, Mama says, “We’ll get through this. You’ll see. Things will change. I don’t know how, yet, but I really believe they will. Do you want to listen to music?”
“Yes.”
We play a cassette tape. I rest my cheek against the window. My breath fogs the glass as fields and houses roll past outside. There’s a tightness around the base of my throat, like an invisible wire. “I’m sorry I’m so much trouble, Mama.”
At first she doesn’t say anything. “It’s not your fault, honey. If anything, it’s mine.”
I shift in my seat. Outside, fields and strip malls roll past.
“You were such a happy baby.” Her voice is very soft, like she’s talking in her sleep. “You were perfectly normal. And then you started school, and suddenly there were all these . . . problems, and you couldn’t seem to play with the other children. Sometimes you would come home and just sit on your bed rocking back and forth . . .” Her voice breaks. “The doctors all say that it’s just something that happens, that the parents have nothing to do with it. But I keep thinking, what if they’re wrong? What if it is something I did? Or what if I could have changed it, if I’d recognized it sooner and gotten you help before all the trouble started or . . . I don’t know.” She rubs at the corners of her eyes. “I feel like I—I failed you.”
It’s not like that. I know it’s not. But I don’t know how to make her understand. I don’t have the words.
When she speaks again, her voice is barely audible: “I miss the real you.”
A chill runs through me. I am real, Mama, I want to say, but suddenly my throat is locked.
“I know you’re still in there, though,” she adds quickly, as if realizing she’s made a mistake. “Just . . . underneath . . . everything.”
I can see the lake ahead, blue and peaceful, but the sick feeling in my stomach won’t go away. I’m not “in there,” Mama. I’m right here. Don’t you see me?
When we get to the lake, Mama spreads a picnic blanket on the sand and puts out sandwiches. I sit next to her, holding a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and looking out at the glassy smooth water. It’s part of Lake Michigan, Mama has told me, but just a little part; the lake is so big, it touches four different states, but this beach feels small and private. The sand is a little white crescent with a fringe of trees around the edge.
I take a bite. The sandwich feels dry and gluey in my mouth. I try to focus on the warmth of the sun, the cool breeze, and the soothing rush of the little waves lapping the shore.
Mama reaches out to stroke my hair. I’m not expecting it, so I flinch a little, and she pretends not to notice. “I love you so much. You’re my world. You know that, don’t you?”
A lump of sandwich sticks in my throat. I swallow it down.
I miss the real you.
I wonder which “me” Mama is talking to.
“You know that, don’t you?” she says again.
I manage a tiny nod. Normally I would say, I love you, too. But I’m suddenly too afraid to speak at all.
A hermit crab crawls slowly across the sand. I shut out everything else and observe the movement of its segmented legs, the wavering of its antennae, the gleam of its tiny bulbous eyes.
“Miss? Excuse me, miss?”
I look up, blinking. An overweight man with thin, graying hair stands outside my car, squinting at me. “May I ask what you’re doing here?”
I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting in the parking lot outside the school. But I’m surprised anyone is here this late. “Nothing.” I shift the car into reverse.
“Do I know you?” the man asks in a strange voice.
I freeze and look up again. It’s my old principal. He’s heavier than I remember, and there are more lines etched into his face, but he has the same tiny, watery eyes. “No,” I say. “We’ve never met.” Before he has a chance to say anything else, I pull out of the lot.
The windshield wipers swish back and forth, cutting through the rain. The world is a gray haze.
My phone buzzes. There’s a text message from Stanley. Are you okay? I stare at it until the words blur.
I pull over and text back: Fine.
You left so suddenly.
Sorry.
After a minute, he texts: Are you free tonight?
I reply: Meet me at 8. Buster’s.
I glance in the rearview mirror. My complexion is pasty, making the dark circles under my eyes stand out. My lips are chapped and bitten.
If I am going to see Stanley, I have to at least try to make myself presentable. I don’t own any makeup—I’ve always hated how it feels on my face—so I scrape together a few dollars from change buried under the seat cushions in my car and buy a small jar of foundation from the drugstore. I spread some over the dark flesh under my eyes and look in the rearview mirror. Not a big improvement, but it’s something.
You’re a beautiful, intelligent young woman, Stanley said last night at his house. It’s absurd, but I don’t want to give him any reason to stop thinking that.