Girl on the Line Read online

  “Ten,” I said.

  “Sometimes I am greatly optimistic, and others I am extremely pessimistic.”

  The world was such a beautiful place full of babies and flowers and parties and kisses and holidays and jewels and glittering shorelines on white sand beaches but the world was also a place of carcasses and graveyards and bullies and broken bones and darkness and in one moment a giggly car ride could turn into an inescapable inferno. So.

  “Ten,” I said.

  He kept on with the questions, checked boxes on page after page.

  Ten, ten, ten, I said.

  Dr. Shaw never asked me about my mother or my dreams. There wasn’t even a couch to lie upon in his office, just a creaky swiveling chair. There was no time to mention the car accident, because of the length of the questionnaire and the fact that our insurance only paid for a half-hour visit. Nor did we talk about my parents’ separation, how every week now, my sisters and I traded Mom’s house for Dad’s, and my parents didn’t even bother getting out of the car for the drop-off. How just a month after they separated, Mom had moved in with Levi, an acquaintance she knew through work. We didn’t talk about any of those things.

  “You have moderate to severe bipolar disorder,” Dr. Shaw told me in a flat, uninterested tone, the way someone might inform you you have food stuck between your teeth. “I’m writing you a prescription for Depakote, a mood stabilizer.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Bipolar? Because I’d said ten for everything? That’s how they diagnosed things? He handed me the paper and guided me gently back to the waiting room in the middle of the dark maze of offices. I collapsed in a vinyl chair next to a stack of magazines, looking at the indecipherable prescription in my hand and suddenly seeing an answer.

  Scrolling on my phone, I read the definition of bipolar disorder aloud. “A mental disorder marked by alternating periods of elation and depression.” Sounded plausible. About ten seconds later, I noticed there was a woman in the corner of the room, nearly hidden by the enormous palm plant. She was eyeing me like a curiosity.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She looked back down at her magazine. I wondered why she was there. Did she have bipolar disorder, too? She looked so normal. Did she sob for no reason sometimes, like while braiding her sisters’ hair, or reading a Robert Frost poem to her English class? Did she sometimes hate her own boyfriend because she loved him so much it seemed to physically hurt?

  Apparently I have bipolar disorder, I wrote in my journal.

  A sense of relief seemed to lift me, a lightness returning to my body, a spirit returning to my step as I headed out of the office. It was as if Dr. Shaw had handed me a key to myself, one I had always needed without knowing. So this was why I was the girl with big feelings.

  At the counter, I listened while the pharmacist rattled off every side effect of my new drug.

  Mild drowsiness, weakness, sleepiness; diarrhea, constipation, or upset stomach; changes in your menstrual cycle; enlarged breasts; tremors; weight gain or loss; vision changes; hair loss; an unpleasant taste in your mouth.

  A small price to pay, I thought, for feeling normal. For not weirding Jonah out anymore with my drawings of zombie girls in the margins of my composition books or by weeping and pulling my hair. For not making Marisol tell me “It’s time to lay off the Sylvia Plath, buddy” and give me the name of her mom’s life coach, Berry, who, of course, I never called. For not making Ruby and Stevie ask me why I was so sad all the time, and not making me answer, “Because life is sad.”

  Life isn’t sad.

  I’m bipolar.

  I gave the pharmacist my money and called Jonah for a ride home. I showed him the pills, hot pink, my favorite color, like they were made for me. Jonah didn’t seem sure what to say.

  “You don’t seem . . . mentally ill to me,” he said. “You’re just going through a lot.”

  The trees outside the window swayed with the breeze. The sky was bright and blue because in Goleta, the sky is always bright and blue. The median income is high, the schools are award-winning, the beach and mountains are paradise. I don’t know why Jonah would want to suddenly make me so sad, the pinprick to my balloon.

  “You were just in a car accident where you almost died,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, Dr. So-and-So seemed uninterested in that fact.”

  “Journey, I’ve known you since we were in grade school,” Jonah said. “I know you’re . . . mercurial.”

  “You and your SAT words—”

  “Listen. Don’t do that. Let me finish. Mercurial, sure. But you’ve always been sane. And lately, yeah, it’s been bad. Worse than I’ve ever seen you.” In a one-second glance my way before putting his eyes back to the road, Jonah looked at me with such love I shuddered. “You just went through something traumatic. If I’d been through what you’d been through, I’d be all over the place, too.”

  I didn’t say anything. He knew me better than anyone, and sometimes that was irritating.

  “And really, they just send you off with pills for that?” he asked softly. “You’re seventeen.”

  Sometimes the way he spoke to me made me think of my dad. Huge turnoff.

  “Wow, he’s not only cute, he can count, too,” I said.

  He was quiet and chewing the inside of his cheek, a thing he did when he was in his saddest, most unreachable place.

  “Is this what you want?” he asked.

  “I want an answer,” I insisted. “I want to not cry and scare everybody.”

  “You don’t scare me.”

  “Not right now.”

  “Just . . . don’t lose yourself,” he said. “Like my mom.”

  “Your mom’s clinically depressed, not bipolar,” I reminded him.

  His mother’s severe depression had long been controlled by heavy meds. Yeah, it meant she was able to do basic mom stuff like hit up the grocery store and go to work and drive her kids to school. But her spirit was weak. She slept a lot and watched a lot of reality TV.

  Jonah didn’t say anything else. Our car rides became like that when I got stubborn and gloomy—a mean sort of quiet, him turning the music down, each of us left to our own thoughts, except of course for me telling him “Brake, brake” every once in a while as I braced myself for a stop—I’d been like that since the accident—and him whispering, “It’s okay, babe.”

  When I got home, I thought a lot about what Jonah said and what that survey in Dr. Shaw’s hands must have looked like, tens all the way down. I thought, there is no way to either tell the truth or lie on a set of questions like that. Because what is a ten? What is a five?

  When I told Marisol about the diagnosis she rolled her eyes at me at first, thinking it was another phase, like that one month last year when I went to church and got really into it, or when I bought a Ouija board and thought I could see ghosts. But while my dad had some reservations, my mom was super supportive of the diagnosis. I had had some of the worst bad days of my life over the past six months—not saying it was because of their divorce necessarily, but it sure didn’t help—and since the car accident this past summer, there had been moments when I had scared everyone with my bouts of joy that crashed into from-nowhere weepiness. Dad, of course, gently asked if I might try some more “natural” remedies before jumping to meds, but accepted it when I told him hell no thank you. I wanted the strong stuff. My mom ordered about every book on adolescents and mental illness you could think of and became an expert overnight. Whereas she used to be frustrated with my “drama” and my “acting out,” now she seemed to have infinite patience for my mood swings. She even wanted to set up a meeting with my teachers so I could get special treatment—longer test times, forgiveness for late homework. But I didn’t want people outside my most tight-knit circle knowing. I wanted to pass for normal. I didn’t even like that my sisters knew, although they seemed to only understand it in the most simplistic terms: I was sad, I felt crazy, I had a condition, pills would fix said condition.

  I took t
he pills. Two of them. Twice a day. For days, then weeks. I experienced drowsiness and a delayed menstrual period and gained five pounds like the pharmacist had warned. Sometimes I spaced out in class, but I don’t know, it had happened before. I didn’t cry so much, but I also didn’t smile as much, either. Some days I was sure the pills were working. Some days I wondered if I’d been handed a neon-pink placebo.

  I’d started having terrible thoughts after the school year started, and I’d been too afraid to talk about them with anyone. Marisol would probably have cried if I confessed them to her. My parents would worry and call more doctors, who would prescribe more drugs.

  At first it arose as a silly, overdramatic solution to problems—something benign, like the time I forgot to turn in a paper and got a reprimand from Mr. Teasley, a harried, grumpy American History teacher a year away from retirement who mentioned this fact in class frequently. He dismissed the entire class early one day just to have a “heart-to-heart” with me. Nothing resembling a heart was actually involved in this discussion.

  “I’ve seen your kind before,” he said, sitting on the edge of his desk, arms crossed. There was a weird blurry reflection of myself in his glasses. “Smart but lazy.”

  Nothing riles me up more than being told I’m like everybody else. “I wasn’t lazy, I started the paper last week. I honestly forgot it was due today.”

  I had been forgetting things, writing things down wrong, procrastinating since I’d started medication. Maybe he was right, maybe I was lazy. I not only lived in a perpetual brain fog, I’d found it hard to care since school started. When the weather started turning—the air grew teeth, the leaves on certain trees yellowed—I turned with it. In the course of a lifetime, what did these papers and stupid quizzes matter anyway?

  “Well, I honestly think you’ll be lucky if you pull off a C this semester,” he said.

  He was being so patronizing I couldn’t help it. Haughtily, I said the words my mom used to say to me as a child. “I can do anything I want.”

  “That’s simply not true,” he told me.

  He proceeded to lecture me about my “attitude problem” and then veered into a long monologue about how happy he’d be to retire next year and move to Florida where rent is cheaper and the weather is balmy and beautiful, and never have to deal with students and their bad attitudes again. The bell rang and he kept talking. I looked out the window and watched the leaves skittering off the maples in the courtyard, students walking through patches of sunshine and laughing and putting their arms around each other and being normal humans. I had started my prescription two weeks prior. And my feelings, they were duller, but not at all in the way I wanted. This is what life feels like lately, I thought. Like I’m watching it through a window. Like I’m not a part of it.

  “Earth to Journey,” Mr. Teasley said, snapping his fingers in front of my face.

  I looked up, his wrinkled face eyeing me with slight disgust.

  “Okay,” I said, forcing a smile.

  “Okay?” He shook his head. “You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said. Forget it—you’re unreachable.”

  He waved a hand in the air and turned to his briefcase. I slung my backpack over my shoulder and headed out the door, into the sunshine, the sound of laughter, and thought, I want to kill myself. I pictured it, too, in horrible flashes.

  It was alarming to experience these thoughts the first time. Like some stranger had taken over my head. Like an uninvited guest had invaded me.

  And then that guest unpacked its suitcase and made me its home.

  The voice grew stronger.

  I didn’t win a poetry contest at school: “Kill yourself,” it whispered.

  Jonah and I had an epic fight because I thought he was flirting with Madison Jameson at lunch: “He’d be happy if you died,” it murmured.

  I woke up sweaty, teary, my heart a frightening drum, flashbacks of the car crash, smoke and flames: “It’s a mistake you lived,” it said.

  Marisol forgot to call me back. I couldn’t find my shoes. Look at this picture of my family from my junior high years, the way Dad’s hand rested on Mom’s waist.

  “Nothing matters anymore,” it yelled.

  The voice would be quiet for hours. Then something would happen, darken my inner skies, and it would come back, tempting me with an easy answer, a black hole to jump into, a trapdoor, a sweet goodbye.

  Love is

  a flame

  that burns

  your house

  down

  until

  your house

  is nothing

  but a memory.

  That was all the mess that led me here, to this hospital room, lying brain-sick in an adjustable bed. The memories of my diagnosis and subsequent downward spiral dizzy me. Mom and Dad left the hospital. It’s just me now, on my own to think about the worst thing I’ve ever done and wonder if I’m going to do it again.

  Jonah worried about me. That’s partly why I wanted medication, wanted an answer, a reason. But then it turned out even medicated, something was wrong with me. Those morbid thoughts took over. I was a cloud-headed girl with mud in her heart.

  The phone was to my ear last night. I stood in front of the mirror, a bottle of Tylenol in my hand, listening to Jonah cry and tell me he didn’t want to be together with me anymore.

  “I’m just tired,” he said. “I love you so much, but this doesn’t make me happy anymore.”

  “We were going to be together until we were saggy and gray,” I said.

  “We were friends before. We’ll always be friends, you know that, right? I love you, Journey.”

  “Jonah,” I said, looking for the right words, although I knew all I had now were wrong ones. “I want to kill myself.”

  “Don’t be dramatic.”

  It wasn’t drama, though; at least, it didn’t feel like it to me. That was the first and only time I ever said it out loud, but it had been rattling around inside me for months. I couldn’t see the future anymore. I didn’t know which version of myself I was.

  This black hole opened up between my gut and throat, an ache strong enough to out-scream everything else, a big ball of the pain from my family being blown apart, combined with the smashing of tons of steel and red-hot flames that should have ended me, and now this—this ballooning, marooning dread. This utter loneliness and hopelessness that could, in a second, suck up all the color and breath from me.

  I hung up the phone.

  Yesterday, I decided I was going to kill myself tomorrow.

  I compose a mental note to my past self as I lie in the hospital bed, reliving my poor life choices. It’s simple. To the point.

  Dear past self,

  Fuck you.

  I have never met the doctor before right now, the doctor who apparently oversaw this morning’s stomach pumping while I was still unconscious, but her name is Dr. Jaikumar and she is evidently very disappointed with me.

  “You know how close you were to not making it?” she asks, sitting on a stool next to me and watching me with brown, blazing eyes. “If it weren’t for a couple’s dog who went off trail after a stray tennis ball, you’d never have been found.”

  I planned it that way, behind the sprawling oak at the lake. A place you can’t see from the road or the main path. I don’t know if I’m glad they found me. I feel like hell. I’m still ambivalent on the whole living or dying question.

  “So you’re saying a dog saved my life?” I joke. Joking is what I resort to when I’m all out of ideas. The joke blows right by the doctor. She doesn’t even blink.

  “We recommend transferring you to a facility for teenagers so you can be observed for three to five days. Since you’re eighteen, you just need to give us permission and I can start the paperwork.”

  “What if I say no? Can I go home?”

  “Or,” Dr. Jaikumar says, standing up and looking down at me like the sick thing I am, “we could do an involuntary watch here at the mental ward of this hospital. But I
promise you, voluntary admittance to a facility for folks your age will be much nicer.”

  That’s no choice. When involuntary is the only alternative, voluntary isn’t really voluntary anymore, is it?

  I’m tempted to get salty with the doctor, but my throat still hurts, and I feel like I need to save what’s probably left of my voice for something more important.

  “Did my boyfriend ever come?” I ask hoarsely.

  She shakes her head.

  “So . . . voluntary?” she asks.

  Finally, I nod. She leaves me alone in the room and I don’t know what hurts more: my throbbing-with-nothing stomach, my scratched-raw throat, or my boy-shattered heart.

  Just kidding. I know.

  Present

  Today is my first day of city college, and I wake up nervous, trying on a hundred shades of lipstick before deciding to go au naturel. I come downstairs and Dad’s made my favorite apple cinnamon pancakes. I can’t eat more than a few bites, though, and it’s not just because Ruby is talking—loudly—about how cinnamon is legally allowed to have rodent hairs in it.

  “Stop,” Stevie says. “Why are you so gross?”

  Dad made Stevie’s pancake in the shape of a Mickey Mouse head, so this factoid is probably especially disturbing to her.

  “How are you feeling, kiddo?” Dad asks me.

  “Living the dream,” I lie.

  When he’s not looking, the rest of my apple cinnamon pancake meets the compost bin.

  “Delicious,” I say.

  I go back upstairs and change my pants three times. Then I decide on a skirt. Which means my shoes are all wrong. Mom calls me to emphasize how proud she is of me, asks me to text her and tell her how my first day goes. Thank you, sure, I will. I love you, Mom.

  “Journey?” Dad calls from downstairs.

  “Coming.”

  I can’t believe I’m going to college. City college, but still. As I step out into the sunshine and get in Dad’s same old car, on a morning that looks like so many mornings before it, everything is different and there’s no going back.

  There should be an opposite of déjà vu.