Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

  Mom looks like she is strangling her purse. “And so why are you not following his advice?”

  “Because look at what happens when you find out,” I say. “This is so dramatic right now. You’re both acting like I killed someone.”

  “You tried to kill someone,” Mom says, her voice climbing in pitch. “A few months ago. Remember?”

  “Yes, I remember, because nobody will ever let me forget!” I almost yell.

  Dad holds his hand up like some kind of referee.

  “Part of the trick of mental illness is that when medication is working, you don’t notice it,” Dad says. “When it’s working at its best, it feels like nothing is happening.”

  “This coming from the person who originally tried to tell me Saint-John’s-wort would fix my chemical imbalance,” I say.

  “That was before you were hospitalized,” Dad says.

  “Seth! Saint John’s wort can be incredibly dangerous,” Mom interjects. “I read on The Forum that it can have life-threatening interactions with other medications. It’s a supplement that does a lot more harm than good.”

  “It’s natural—”

  “Hemlock is natural.”

  “Okay, enough,” I say, my voice cracking. I hate how desperate I sound. How badly I want them to understand, suddenly. “Haven’t I been doing well? Besides this, haven’t I been doing everything right?”

  “Yes, but that’s partly because of the treatment you’re getting,” Mom cuts in.

  “Mom,” I say, meeting her cold stare. “I’ve been getting off my meds for a while now. And you know when I was most diligent about taking my medication? Last fall. When I had a nervous breakdown.”

  There’s a pause in the kitchen between us, a long one; shockingly, they are listening to me. They are considering that what I’m saying is true. Perhaps even more importantly, I’m convincing myself of something that has been percolating inside me for some time.

  “I know myself,” I tell them. “I know I’m not ‘normal.’ I do probably need treatment. But that doesn’t mean medication is the only answer right now. And I’m an adult. Technically, I can make my own decisions.”

  “An adult still living under our roofs,” Mom reminds me, corkscrewing a fingernail in the air.

  “At some point, you’re going to have to trust me that I can make decisions for myself,” I say.

  “If you had come to us and told us this is what you wanted, we could have helped you,” Dad says. “We could have done this responsibly, gotten you an appointment to talk to your doctor about it. The fact you just threw your pills away and did this secretly—that’s the disturbing part.”

  “Yes,” Mom says. “Exactly.”

  It’s the first time they’ve agreed on something in longer than I can remember. For a moment, I’m sort of stunned at the mellowness of this conversation. I came in expecting a fight.

  “Okay,” I say. “What if I’m telling you now? What if I’m asking for your help now?”

  Mom closes her eyes and exhales for a moment. Dad puts his hand on her hand for a second, and she opens her eyes. They exchange a look. I don’t know what the look says, but it softens me to see it.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about this, actually,” I say. “It might look to you like I’m being irresponsible. And yes, I could have handled this better. But I don’t think anything is as simple as bipolar disorder, take a pill, problem fixed. I read this article about how a lot of people, especially teenagers, are overprescribed medication. And we’re not given a lot of coping mechanisms besides pharmaceuticals. The world isn’t built for girls with big feelings, you know?”

  “That’s true,” Dad agrees.

  Mom is biting the inside of her cheek, deep in thought. “I’m glad you’ve been good about going to therapy, at least.”

  Dad picks up the pill bottle and turns it around as he thinks. “How long have you been off?”

  “Completely off for a few weeks,” I say, a little flutter in my chest as the air in the room changes, as I feel them becoming convinced I might be safe to be trusted with myself again. “Tapering off for a couple months. I tried not to do it all at once.”

  “Lithium is serious business. You’re supposed to be getting regular blood tests. Have you been at least doing that?” Mom asks.

  “Um . . . no,” I admit. The robots have left me messages on my phone telling me I need to come in, but I haven’t obeyed them. “I’m sorry. I keep meaning to, but . . . I haven’t.”

  “Journey,” my mom says, with enough emphasis that my own name sounds like a curse word.

  Dad puts the pill bottle down. “We have to go forward with open communication.”

  “I want you to call your doctor today,” Mom says.

  “Okay,” I say. “I can do that.”

  “I want to see you do it,” Mom goes on. “I want you to call your doctor right now and make an appointment, and your dad and I will take you.”

  “Geez, Mom, seriously?” I ask. “I said I’d do it.”

  “Yes, Journey, seriously.”

  I look at my dad, who often backs me up, but right now he’s just nodding like a bobblehead.

  Mom gives me the phone number and my medical card. They sit there watching me like a rapt two-person audience as I call and make an appointment for the next day.

  “There,” I say, putting my phone on the table when I’m done. “Happy?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Mom says.

  “I’m going to be fine,” I say.

  “I’ll feel better after your appointment tomorrow,” she says.

  “No more secrets,” Dad says, leaning over the table and squeezing my hand.

  “Yes, message received,” I say.

  “I will be watching your every move,” Mom says.

  “And that’s not creepy at all,” I joke.

  They are not laughing.

  “That’s fine, Mom. I’m used to it by now.”

  “And if the doctor advises you get back on your meds, I want you to listen,” Mom says. “You understand?”

  “I will,” I say.

  “I have to be able to trust you. I cannot live with the fear of you . . . hurting yourself again,” Mom says.

  I hate that she has that fear now. I hate that I did that to her.

  The next day, I have to go into the lab first and get a bunch of blood tests because apparently the DIY approach when it comes to getting off lithium is a very bad idea for your bloodstream. Even though my levels are okay, I get another lecture, this time from my doctor. She sounds like the end of a pharmaceutical commercial on TV, the disclaimer part listing off all the unwanted side effects. Mood instability, flu-like symptoms, headaches, pain, insomnia, and even seizures.

  Seizures. I mean, that’s not nothing.

  My parents sit there nodding in agreement with her, a trio of stern faces watching me as I listen.

  Okay, okay, I get it. Congratulations, you’ve all really hammered this one home. It was dumb, getting off my pills without medical supervision. I shouldn’t have done it. But my doctor goes on to say that as long as my blood levels are monitored over the next couple of weeks and I take a few doses as prescribed to taper off, as long as I am getting support in therapy, and as long as I promise to come back in if I have any symptoms, I can try getting off the medication for a while to see how it goes. She orders more lab tests over the next few weeks, because you know how doctors are—they can’t pass up a chance to prick you with a needle. Seriously, though, I had braced myself for more of an argument today, and I’m shocked I didn’t have to make much of one. I have to suppress the urge to jump in the air and yell hooray.

  Instead, I get up and hug them, one by one—even the doctor, who emits a weird “oh!” as I embrace her in her white coat. I’m lightened momentarily by my own relief. Now they know. There’s nothing to hide. They trust me. But there’s an equal and opposite weight to their trust; now I know that if my inner weather does change, if the depression comes back, I
have to tell them all. And I really don’t like the thought of that.

  When I next get together with Marisol, it’s Galentine’s Day. As is our tradition, we thrift in old town Goleta, wandering about a maze of secondhand clothes and mannequins, and try on the worst clothes we can possibly find. She is in an oversized shirt with boobs painted on it and I am in a sweatshirt with a horrific amateur-puff-painted dog face. She takes a selfie of us on her phone and texts it to me. When she looks at her phone she ends up laughing so hard she almost collapses on the floor next to the racks of ladies’ boots.

  “That good?” I ask.

  “No, I just remembered the last picture you sent me.”

  She shows me the picture of me in the pizza uniform.

  “You’re . . . a slice of pizza,” she says, wiping the laugh tears from her eye corners. If you can make Marisol laugh, you can make her cry.

  “I can’t help but question my life choices when I look at this,” I agree, looking at the photo of myself, a human joke in bizarre costume.

  But as she and I weave around the store, stopping to gab about the latest Obsession show, which involves a man hoarding stuffed teddy bears, she and I next to the Christmas decorations glimmering red-green-gold in plastic bags, in the back of my mind, I wonder about Marisol. I wonder about her laughing at the picture in an at and not with kind of way. Because Marisol lives up on a hill in a house so big I get lost in it. Marisol’s never had a job. Marisol will be moving away soon, living in a dorm, and I’ll be her loser ex-bestie who dons a pizza costume and goes to city college.

  Is that why she laughs?

  Weird how, since I left school for makeup paperwork and junior college classes, I went through a door and I didn’t look back. Marisol’s back there in another world, one with a different set of doors. Now my life is different. As we grab lunch at the grocery next door, eating deli sandwiches at plastic tables outside, Marisol sporting a new hat with a fake rose in the rim, listening to her gush about scholarships, I can’t tell if I feel more or less grown-up than her. I just know I feel the gap.

  This is Marisol I’m talking about. Marisol who befriended me the first day of fourth grade, taking my arm at recess, teaching me the rules of handball. “I picked you,” she’s always said. Marisol of the constant sleepovers, the movie marathons, the living room manicures, bathroom dye jobs and haircuts. Marisol of late-night whispered conversations and texting marathons and shared soundtracks. Marisol who stayed my bestie even when she veered Ivy League and I veered deep into trouble. If there was anything steady, anything unloseable, her name was Marisol. But now we sit in silence, chewing food, thinking of our dissimilar presents, our even differenter futures.

  In my chest, there is a stone, cold, unmoving, realizing for the first time that next year is now and Seattle or Chicago is a planet away and she’s already drifting and if she’s not already lost . . . I’m going to lose her.

  I’d be lying if I said the thought of death didn’t cross my mind as I ride the bus home. The lights of so many apartment buildings stare back like gold eyes. Liar brain. I don’t want to die. My mind just goes to that place, that desolate place, when I’m alone and out of ideas. But I carry a new tool in my box now. I close my eyes and count my breath. I locate where the fear dwells, a bird in my chest. And I know that dumb death wish is nothing but a lie. I just miss Marisol already.

  I run full speed toward change, and still, change scares me terribly.

  I still feel the cracks in the places Jonah broke my heart. It’s been four months plus. I try not to think of him, but in trying, I think of him.

  One cold night in late February, I wear his sweatshirt as I walk around the neighborhood, standing outside his house and staring at the warm hint of light behind the curtained windows. I smell the sleeves of the sweatshirt and inhale just the tiniest hint of him. I want to cry and I hate myself for it. I take the sweatshirt off and fold it up and put it in his mailbox. It’s the last thing of his I still had. But after walking just two houses down the block, I turn back again, open his mailbox with a squeak, and put the sweatshirt back on. It’s just so cold. I’ll do it in the spring.

  I wear it to bed that night.

  And the next. And the next.

  I’m not proud of the hole he carved out in me, of the fact I am still stinging, insulted by his need for space. I used to think space had edges, space had an end. At some point he would call me and want that space to close. But besides a couple hollow texts that could have been written by cheerleading robots (Merry Christmas! Hope your well! around the holidays, hey, Marisol told me your at college now! good luck nerd! when the semester started), he has shown no interest in me, in my life, in my progress, and that hurts if I let myself think of it. So I try very, very hard not to think of it.

  There are lots of rules at the hotline, and I try my best to follow every one of them. The mother of all rules is, the binder is your bestie. Do not pick up the phone without it. Always ask if people are safe if they are calling about abuse; ask if they have taken anything, and what they have taken, if they’re suicidal; never give anyone your last name; if you think you know the person on the end of the line, place them on hold and ask another volunteer to take it. Even the small house where the crisis center is located is full of rules. Rules in the kitchen: Please rinse your own dishes, NONE IN THE SINK! Rules in the bathroom: No flushing feminine products, even so-called “flushables”! All written in the same pretty cursive, clearly a red pen faded to brown after so many years.

  I break a rule, though, on my second shift.

  Not on my first call of the evening. First call is Davis. Le sigh. He talks to me so long my ear starts going numb. He names off everything on his Amazon Wish List. He tells me, in meandering detail, that his next-door neighbor—he’s pretty doggone sure—has a ferret. Can you fathom? Davis ponders whether or not it’s his responsibility to alert the proper ’thoritays. I find myself zoning out on the binder on my table, my reflection peering back up from the plastic cover, as I wonder if this crisis hotline gig is going to end up being this right here. I mean, I came here to help people. I thought I was going to be a lifesaver, not be a sounding board for socially awkward humans and/or prank callers.

  My second call is a girl named Coco. She’s seventeen. She has a soft, velvety voice, a looseness in it that makes me wonder if she had a drink before she picked up the phone.

  She thinks she’s dead.

  “I’ve got this switch inside of me,” she says. “This . . . there’s no other way to describe it. I’m here, I’m living, I’m laughing, I’m holding my boyfriend’s hand—and then, bam. The tunnel hits. Everything around me becomes weird. I think, I don’t exist. I’m already dead. None of this is real. The feeling—it swallows everything. Even talking about it right now, I get scared it’s going to happen.”

  “How long does it last?” I ask.

  “Sometimes just a few seconds, sometimes hours.”

  I lean in, concerned, and put my hand on the binder page I have open titled Teens and suicidal ideation. There’s no exact entry for this, no resource center or 1-800 number I have here for girls who think they don’t exist.

  “Does anything . . . trigger it?” I ask.

  “Um, my brain?” She gives a single nervous giggle. “But no. Nothing happened today . . . I went to school . . . went to song practice. Erica Nunez is talking to everyone about how the state championships are coming up and I find myself staring at her, thinking, ‘This isn’t really happening. I’m not really here.’”

  At the name Erica Nunez, my brain grinds to a halt. Erica Nunez goes to my high school. And at my high school, the lead cheerleading squad is called the song team—they do highly choreographed dances and acrobatics and have won awards. So whoever this girl is on the end of my line, I could know her.

  “Hello?” she asks. “Did I bore you so much you fell asleep?”

  “Not at all,” I say.

  But which girl is it on the song team? Which glimmering, g
orgeous, female-perfection-incarnated specimen on the song team—walks around thinking she’s dead? Nicola Albierti, with a waterfall of dark hair that reaches her waist? Emma Wong, the peppiest, ever-grinning gymnast who can do a double backflip? Eva Barnes, the athletic captain with a booming voice? I don’t know them all, but I’ve seen them, gliding through the halls in their maroon bodysuits and gold cheerleading skirts, their pantyhosed legs flawless, their heaven-white never-scuffed sneakers. Girls like that don’t worry about anything except what lip gloss to wear that day. But the ethical thing is to pass the call to someone else, because it’s not fair to talk to someone who I might know in real life.

  Thing is, I really want to stay on the line. Out of curiosity, yes, but also because I feel like out of everyone here, I should be able to help a girl my age best of all.

  “I think I should maybe hand this call over to one of my colleagues,” I say.

  “Why? Oh my God, did I totally freak you out?”

  “Not at all—”

  “I can’t believe I’m such a reject that even the crisis hotline people won’t talk to me.”

  “It’s not that,” I tell her. “I actually—I understand. It’s just . . .”

  Now I can’t tell her I went to the same high school, because then I’m outing myself.

  “You understand?” she asks brightly.

  I don’t know what to do right now. The binder can’t help me. Lydia, JD, and Beatriz are all on calls. If I put Coco (which must be a fake name, I know no Cocos at my school) on hold, I risk losing her trust and patience, her hanging up and never calling again. What if she feels so alone and rejected she kills herself?

  “Yeah, I do understand,” I tell her, leaning onto my elbows on the tabletop, pushing the headset closer to my ears, making the conversation feel more intimate. “I mean, not completely.” I recall the out-of-touch feeling I had when I was attending my high school earlier this year, like I was on a movie set and not in real life. “But I do know what it’s like to be somewhere and feel a million miles away from what everyone else around you is experiencing.”

  “I’m so glad you said that,” she says. “Because—this is the first time I’ve ever talked to anyone about it and I was afraid you were going to tell me I lost my mind. I was sobbing last night looking up diseases on WebMD. Do you think I’m paranoid schizophrenic? Are these psychotic episodes?”