Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

  “Honey, people would just want to help you,” she says.

  “I don’t want people’s help. I want to do it myself.”

  Mom’s eyes dance for a moment, even as her lips form a frown. “You know, when you were tiny, you were the same stubborn thing. Buckling you into the car seat, you’d smack my hand. ‘I do it myself.’ Getting dressed in the morning, I’d try to help you pick out your clothes: ‘I do it myself.’ Of course you’d end up in a tutu and pajama pants and a witch hat, and couldn’t be talked out of it. I couldn’t help you tie your shoes. I couldn’t do anything for you without a fight.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She reaches out and touches my cheek, looks at me like I’m a little thing still wearing a tutu and a witch hat, not a grown person with faded purple hair and heavy eyeliner. “Don’t be sorry you are the way you are.”

  Mom and I have had a lot of tension since the suicide attempt. She navigates around me like I’m a grenade with a pin missing. I fear, sometimes, that I lost her respect in a way that I don’t with Dad. Hearing these words coming from her right now means a lot.

  Her face softens. “What’s your plan?” she says. “Pitch me.”

  I sit up straighter, turning the catalog and the flier around so they face her. “So ASAP I’d segue into this interim program where I’d do a bunch of makeup work at home until January, when next semester starts. That way I could salvage my grades this semester and knock out physics, which I got a D in last year. I’d take college classes next semester and maybe even get a job. Maybe by June I’d have money saved up and could move out on my own.”

  “That’s ambitious. All that stress. Do you think you could handle it?”

  “I’m ready for it,” I say. “Mom, I want to move on so badly. I want to grow up.”

  “I have to wonder if this is mania talking.”

  I roll my eyes. “Everything I do shouldn’t be reduced down to symptoms you WebMD’d. I’m sleeping fine. I’m eating fine. Taking care of myself better than I ever have, actually. Have you ever seen me exercising before? Enjoying fresh air? Meditating?”

  She bites her lip. “I don’t know.”

  “I made a huge mistake. I know that, and I’m trying to piece myself together again. You need to trust me. If I thought I was manic, I would tell you.”

  Outside, Levi pulls up into a disabled parking spot in his enormous white Suburban, honks the horn extra long.

  “He is so obnoxious,” I say. “Can’t he text?”

  “He’s old-fashioned,” she says.

  We get up and go to Levi’s gas guzzler. I get in the back, sitting next to Chewbacca, who pants and smiles even though he smells like halitosis and dirty laundry. Not his fault he stinks, though. I give him a hug and ask how his day went. He moans me a story. Chewie and I always have the best conversations. Levi is listening to Hank Williams, of course, who croons about being so lonesome he could cry. Talk about a depressive. The entire genre of country music could use a Prozac prescription.

  “So,” Mom says to Levi as we pull into the street. “Journey’s going to go to college next semester. She’s thinking of getting a job, too.”

  She says it like she’s proud of me. Holy mother.

  “We could use another pair of hands at the boot store,” Levi says.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I say, while thinking hell to the no.

  “College already,” Levi says. “You’re pretty stellar.”

  “She really is,” Mom says.

  When I notice my reflection in the mirror, I sit up straighter, finger-comb my hair that’s growing out. And I realize that at some point, while I was busy pining after a boy who hurt me, or thinking of dying or scared of dying or trying to die, I became a grown-up.

  Roll with it, self. Keep breathing in.

  There’s no way to make what has happened un-happen.

  Dear future self,

  If I dared to have a dream for you, it would be this: that you go to college, even if you don’t graduate; that you get a job and your own place, even for just a little bit; that you fall in love again, even if that person breaks your heart.

  Dear future self, I hope you live.

  Wolf, who I’ve begun to think of as the Wolfman for no apparent reason, did some spring cleaning randomly in November, and today I actually get to both see and sit on his couch for the first time. Now that I am aware of just what a neon shade of orange it is, I can guess why he didn’t exactly mind when it got buried in clutter last time. From here I can read the spines of the books in his library much better. Bunch of holy books from every denomination, beat-up and faded. He tells me he was a monk for thirteen years before he became a psychologist. I can imagine the charm of a monastery, the minimalist rooms and uniforms, the quiet solitude and early mornings, chanting and prayer. But I can also imagine my brain eating itself alive.

  “I thought I went there to serve God,” Wolf says, knocking on his leg like a door, which is a weird thing he seems to do when he’s pondering something deeply. “But in the leaving, in the breaking away and realizing everything wasn’t . . . what I thought it was—leaving the monastery is how I found myself.”

  He seems uncomfortable talking about himself. But fair’s fair—I’ve been spilling my guts for weeks now.

  “Soooooo, why did you leave?”

  “I don’t know what your beliefs are,” he says quickly. “I’m just saying, for me, it didn’t pan out. Once I unraveled a single thread in the story, it all seemed to unravel along with it. The teachings no longer made sense to me.”

  I’m not thinking about monks or the Wolfman. I’m thinking, of course, of myself, of the structures I live within. I’m thinking of the idea that everyone should graduate high school and go away to college. I’m thinking that if you have big feelings a pill will fix it, that if you try to kill yourself you’re crazy. All the things the world tells me that I feel doubt about. There’s so much passion inside me, a fire I don’t know what to do with. I, too, want to “find myself”—a phrase said so much it lost its meaning.

  Wolf agrees the middle college idea looks promising.

  “Should I do it?” I ask him.

  “Do you want to?”

  “I mean, can I?”

  “Are you asking my permission?”

  “I’m asking your professional opinion.”

  “I think you should do what makes you fulfilled.”

  “I won’t know if it fulfills me until I do it, though.”

  He cleans his glasses with his plaid shirtsleeve. In the silence, my own words ring in my ears. I hear the word fulfilled. I hear the words do it.

  “I’m going to do it,” I say.

  “I think that’s wonderful,” he tells me.

  He puts his glasses back on and smiles at me like this is what he hoped to hear.

  I’ve been avoiding telling Marisol about my new academic plan because I know it’s going to involve some ugly tears and possibly even bitterness. The best course seems to be to tell her at school, a public place, where she’s more likely to keep composed. Same goes for me. Bestie tears are contagious.

  However, the time and place make little difference. Marisol is so devastated when I tell her about middle college it’s as if I’m dying of a rare disease.

  “No you’re not,” she just keeps saying.

  This during lunch break, when we are eating soggy tacos. The middle college paperwork has been filed in the guidance office. Hooker just signed his final autograph. I break the news that tomorrow will be my last day at school.

  “No it’s not,” she says.

  This is why I have waited. This is why I loathed the idea of telling Marisol about my plans.

  “My best friend is not leaving me in the middle of our senior year,” she says, her voice rising.

  “I need to start over,” I say.

  “That’s what next year is for!” she almost shouts.

  “For you,” I say. “For me, my next year starts right now.”


  “You are messing with me,” she says, shutting her taco box and wrapping her long scarf around her neck. She wraps it so many times it swallows the bottom half of her head.

  “What are you doing?” I laugh.

  She pulls it off. “How can you seriously be laughing right now?”

  “You should’ve seen yourself—”

  “You are such a diva,” she says, voice shaking. “Why can’t you make an exit like a normal person?”

  I sit up straighter, cock my chin. “Because I am not a normal person.”

  She gets up with her bag and walks away, leaving me alone on the lawn with tacos hardly appetizing enough for a hungry dog. My cheeks go hot and I wonder if I’m making a huge mistake. Or if something is wrong with me for not caring that this is it, I am really going. There’s a rush about it—the dare of starting over—a spontaneity that I can only compare to joyriding in a car, or skinny-dipping in a cold ocean, or staying out past curfew.

  Or wrecking something, a voice whispers. Or taking a bottle of pills.

  It’s not like that, though, right? It’s not like that.

  I get up to toss my things in the garbage and am tackled from behind by a warm hug and sniffling sounds. I turn around and embrace Marisol.

  “And you tell me I’m dramatic,” I say.

  “Shut up,” she says. “I’m going to miss you.”

  “I’m going to miss you, too.”

  “We’ll still see each other?”

  “All the time.”

  “You’re going to get your license and come have lunch with me sometimes here?”

  “Sure I will. And you can have lunch with me on campus.”

  “I don’t want to lose you, JoJo,” she says, pulling back, raccoon-eyed from smeary mascara.

  “I’m literally going to school in the same city. You’re the one moving states away.”

  “I almost lost you already this fall,” she says.

  “City college does not equal attempted suicide.”

  “Can’t you just stick it out?”

  “Marisol,” I say, tired of arguing—with her, with myself. Tired of the fight that is life. “I need this, okay? I need this to keep going and have something to look forward to. Otherwise, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  The bell rings and we walk.

  “Congratulations,” she says brightly as we part ways outside my fifth-period class.

  The next day, I get in Marisol’s car in the morning for a ride to school and am swallowed by about half a dozen balloons. She baked me a pie. She made me a card and somehow, in the past half day since I saw her, she bought me a sequin-covered bookbag, a binder with a unicorn on it, and a bag of my favorite pens.

  And that’s when it finally becomes real, and I get a piercing feeling in my gut and pinpricks in my eyes.

  They can be slow burns, goodbyes.

  Levi picks us girls up the next day, Saturday, for our weekly migration from Dad’s to Mom’s. He has a mannequin sitting in the front seat strapped in with a seat belt. She’s wearing a “GIMME THE BOOT” shirt from his store.

  “Sorry, you’ll have to climb in back with the squirts,” he says.

  “You are a weird man,” I say, obliging.

  As soon as he heads up the pass, we drive into heavy fog. I hardly recognize where we are until we turn onto the main road that connects to ours. I have this weird feeling, like everything is changing and I want to be sad about it, and I should be sad, but for once, I’m not; instead I’m just mildly excited. It’s still surreal that I won’t have high school on Monday. Life happens so excruciatingly slowly until suddenly it happens so fast. Levi pulls into the gravel driveway. I’m relieved at the sight of his house—now our house, my house, too—my mother’s shape in the kitchen window looking for our arrival. This place used to be new. Now, after all our time living together, the sight of it has become a comfort the same way my dad’s house is.

  The glow of the gold kitchen window illuminates the front yard, oak leaves shivering above. Something rectangular shines in the gravel of the driveway and I lean down to pick it up. It’s a phone. The cat ears of the phone case tell me right away it’s Ruby’s. Without thinking, I press the home button. Her phone is locked but I see a message from a phone number that illuminates on the lock screen, no name attached to it, only a number.

  Smrtass tattletale bitch watch yer back, it says.

  I stop my feet in the gravel, my belly sinking.

  What the hell?

  I press the home button again, rereading it, trying to make sense of it. Inside, Levi goes straight to my mom and gives her the world’s longest, most passionate peck, and the dinner she’s cooking suddenly seems so much less appetizing. I follow Ruby back to her room and stick my foot in the doorway before she has a chance to shut her door in my face.

  “You dropped something,” I tell her, holding the phone out to her.

  “Oh, thanks,” she says.

  I step inside her room after her and pull the door closed. She has one of those foldable science fair boards on her bed with a bunch of construction paper.

  “Um, come in, I guess?” she says, giving me a death stare.

  “What are you working on there?” I ask.

  “You wouldn’t care.”

  “I care!” I say, sitting on her swivel chair and doing a swivel.

  “I’m studying the effects of aeration on yeast metabolism.”

  “I understood the word yeast,” I tell her.

  “Told you you don’t care.”

  “Hey, just because I don’t understand doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

  Ruby heaves a sigh and throws her backpack on the ground. “So . . . what do you want?”

  “Nothing,” I say innocently.

  Ruby gives me a look, takes off her glasses, wipes them with her black shirtsleeve, returns them to her face.

  “I accidentally touched the home screen button on your phone and saw a text,” I tell her. “Look at it.”

  “Why are you creeping?”

  “I wasn’t. Just look at the text.”

  She presses the home button, types in her password, and gazes at her screen. Her eyes don’t flicker. Her expression doesn’t change. She shrugs. “Probably a wrong number.”

  “I hope so,” I say. “Ruby, if you ever need anything, you know I’m here, right?”

  “For now,” she mutters.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said okay, okay?” she almost yells.

  But she didn’t. I watch her sadly, realizing this thing that opened up between us, whatever it is—whether it’s my fault, or Mom and Dad’s fault, or stupid time’s fault for making us all unrecognizable—it’s gotten big. So big, I don’t know if there’s any going back. So big nothing, not even light, can escape it.

  I don’t show up at high school again except to get packets of makeup work. I spend whole days in my pajamas at home, work my ass off without moving a muscle, take quizzes, write papers. The days go gray, gray as they get in this beach town. The fog rolls in thick and sweet-cold in the mornings. You know when the cold is almost sweet in your nose?

  One morning I go to take my pills and notice I have only half a dozen left. I should call the pharmacist. But I don’t yet. Instead, I decide to skip my dose on purpose for the first time. It gives me a rush to go against the rules, the print on the side of the orange bottle that yells at me in all caps to TAKE ONE IN THE MORNING AND ONE IN THE EVENING PREFERABLY WITH FOOD. Every morning after that I skip them, only taking my night dose. A week passes. Another week passes. I wait for someone to notice, or for the suicidal thoughts to return, but instead they lurk there in my mind’s shadows. I don’t even think I am bipolar. And if I am, I don’t need medication. But I’m too afraid to argue with my parents about it. I have to prove I’ve truly got my shit together before telling anybody.

  This year
we decorate two trees at two houses, buy a new set of stockings for Mom’s, and Levi sets up a blow-up, light-up nativity set in the front yard that slowly deflates throughout the season. During a windy night, baby Jesus blows away completely. It’s fine that we celebrate holidays twice now. More presents, right? I spend Christmas afternoon in my room at Dad’s watching movies, trying not to think about last year. Dad makes Ethiopian food for Christmas dinner and leaves early to go meet a friend. I’m alone in the house. For the first time since I tried to off myself, I’ve been trusted to be by myself. Gold star for me.

  If only he knew I was taking half my meds. And look at me—no outbursts, no theatrics, no suicidal tendencies.

  Aren’t you proud, world?

  Then I have that feeling of shame. What a low, low bar I need to clear to experience what passes for pride these days. That needs a word of its own, too. I’m starting to think I, Journey Smith, could write my own dictionary.

  I go to city college to sign up for classes, overwhelmed by the number of buildings, fascinated by the grown-up life here. The parking lot, glimmering full as the ocean behind it. The people, from my age to grandparents’, bustling in ones, twos, threes. I feel small here, in the best way; I feel new here. Alive. The last thing I have to do is find a community service gig to sign up for. A job, too, would be nice. On campus with my packet of info on my new classes, late afternoon, I read the bulletin board outside the cafeteria. One flyer has a message shaped like a poem.

  EVER THINK

  OF COUNSELING?

  LOOKING FOR

  CRISIS HOTLINE VOLUNTEERS.

  WILL TRAIN!

  Is it the words that make it a poem? Or the shape of them? My chest swells, because not that not long ago, I was the crisis. I wish I could go back to my past—change what happened. I can’t. But I could help someone else who is where I was then.

  Part

  Two

  Present

  At my next appointment with Wolf, I have so many updates to share. My first week at city college, my first hotline shift. I’m breathless relaying the details to him, but the details don’t seem to concern him.